Post and modernism

Ihab Hassan contrasted modernism and postmodernism by reference to Authority and Anarchy. He suggested, in Kumar’s summary, that postmodernism “involved a tendency toward ‘Indeterminacy,’ a compound of pluralism, eclecticism, randomness and revolt. Indeterminacy also connoted ‘deformation,’ a stress on decreation, difference, discontinuity and ‘detotalization’ which together add up to a ‘vast will to unmaking, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body, the psyche of each individual – affecting in short the entire realm of human discourse in the West.” The principle of Immanence is “associated with such words as dispersal, diffusion, dissemination and defraction – but also integration, interdependence and interpenetration.”

But, as Kumar suggests, if this is postmodernism it is hard to see what’s new: “The antinomian, anarchic, anti-systematic character of postmodernism seems at one with both the form and the spirit of much of what we understand as modernism, especially that aspect associated with the theory and practice of the avant-garde.”