Introduction

Abstract

In her recent Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature, Susan Rubin Suleiman provides the contours of the ‘debate over postmodernism’ (a phrase that by now has become as much of a critical commonplace as ‘the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns’ used to be) via what she calls a ‘brief bedtime story’:

Once upon a time, not so long ago, there existed in the world of intellectuals a ‘debate over postmodernism’… In philosophy, postmodernism was identified as a self-styled mode of ‘weak thought,’ prizing playfulness above logic, irony above absolutes, paradoxes above resolutions, doubt above demonstration. Some intellectuals found this dance of ideas liberating; to others, it appeared irresponsible, a dangerous nihilism. In the arts — literature, photography, architecture, film, performance, painting — postmodernism was identified with a freewheeling use of pastiche, quotation, and collage, methods that some intellectuals saw as innovative and critical, having the potential to undo (or at least put into question) received ideas and established ideologies. Other intellectuals voiced their disapproval or despair; for them, the loose eclecticism of postmodernist art, mixing up historical styles, ignoring boundaries between genres, scrambling distinctions between ‘high’ art and ‘low,’ between original and copy, was of a piece with the laxness of postmodernist philosophizing, a sign of the cultural exhaustion of capitalism, or of the decay produced by the proliferation of mass culture.

(1994: 223)