Top 10 postmodern books
In 1996 Andrew C Bulhak of Monash University created a computer program called the Postmodernism Generator, which automatically produces imitations of postmodernist writing. “It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated, syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read,” reported Richard Dawkins in his paper Postmodernism Disrobed.
Here for instance is the real thing, written by the postmodern psychoanalytic theorist Felix Guattari: “We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.”
I long put off writing about postmodernism, the slippery successor to modernism which seems to be an expression of neoliberal economics as much as it is an effort to dismantle cultural hierarchies. I didn’t want to spend time inside sentences such as those quoted. Still less did I want to inhabit its ugly buildings and formally playful novels. There’s only so much James Stirling and Salman Rushdie a guy can take.
But in the end I gave in, writing my new book Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern. Hopefully my book is about gibberish rather than an example of it.
Some of the 10 books below are chock-full of high-stepping nonsense and I read several of them, dear reader, so you didn’t have to. But some are terrific pieces of writing that no Postmodernism Generator could produce.
1. I Love Dick by Chris KrausIn this heroically unreliable memoir-cumnovel, Kraus follows her professor husband to California on sabbatical, falls in love with one of his colleagues, Dick, and sends him lots of funny yet unrequited letters. The rest of the book is the epistolatory story of a woman, “Chris Kraus”, seizing control of the narrative. This is despite the fact that in real life, the postmodern critic Dick
Hebdige issued Kraus with a cease and desist letter, and compared her intrusion into his life to the press’s stalking of Princess Diana. What makes Kraus’s book revolutionary is not just its reclamation of female subjectivity and sexuality, but its still-shocking sense that truth and fiction are not opposites, but locked in a lubricious lambada.
2. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric JamesonThe Marxist theorist argues that art has been colonised by commerce. Modernist art (think: Van Gogh transforming personal misery into beauty) sought to redeem the world, he suggests. Postmodern art (think: Jenny Holzer putting an electronic billboard over New York’s Times Square reading, “Protect me from what I want” or Damien Hirst flogging a diamond-encrusted skull for £50m) was made by artists stuck in a world they could scarcely change. “The image,” he writes, “is the commodity today, and that is why it is vain to expect a negation of the logic of commodity production from it; that is why, finally, all beauty is meretricious.” All beauty is meretricious – an incredible yet plausible claim for our era.
3. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith ButlerIs this randomly generated, syntactically correct nonsense or the book we need if we are to overturn the heteronormative patriarchy? You decide.Postmodern artists such as Cindy Sherman, David Bowie and Madonna had already playfully demonstrated the idea that gender is scripted and performed. Butler expanded on this theme in scandalously duff prose, eulogising drag for challenging “the exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject”. Which is the thing to say if someone challenges you about watching Danny La Rue or RuPaul.
4. The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice by Gilbert AdairIn the early 1990s, the Guardian’s arts editor had a brilliant idea. Let’s get a clever critic steeped in postmodern French theory to meditate on the week’s cultural commodity production. Adair obliged with essays on theatre, homosexuality, Umberto Eco and more, the best of which are collected here. The title alone is worth the cover price. Somebody once asked him if he was the Texas oilman Red Adair. No, Unread Adair, he replied sadly. Let’s make him read again.
5. The Satanic Verses by Salman RushdieThe storm that resulted from this book’s publication typified the clash of civilisations Samuel Huntington would later argue was arising in the aftermath of the cold war. On the one side, a pre-modern Islamic faithful believing in the absolute truth of the Qur’an. On the other, a sophisticated godless novelist apparently betraying his heritage and sneering at the Muslim sanctities. Even if you’re not convinced that The Satanic Verses is postmodern, then you will I hope admit that the episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm about the affair is pure po-mo. There Larry produces a Broadway musical called Fatwa! that, before passing through countless veils of irony and pastiche, culminates in Rushdie and Ayatollah Khomeini duetting about their clashing worldviews.
6. The Language of Postmodern Architecture by Charles Jencks“Boom, boom, boom,” wrote Jencks, the Basil Brush of postmodern theory. He was writing about the moment that the modern world died – at 3.32pm in St Louis, Missouri, on 15 July 1972. The dynamiting of the notorious Pruit-Igoe housing scheme was a noise that resonated around the world. His 1977 book describes what arose from its dust.
7. Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven IzenourThis 1972 book hymned the architecture of the Vegas strip, that ostensibly democratic conflagration of signs in the desert, that city bankrolled by means of human stupidity and cupidity, that is to say gambling. The authors looked on this postmodern Sodom and Gomorrah and saw it as a popular, commercial, fun retort to the patrician, mostly socialist and utterly funless architecture of modernism.
8. A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix GuattariThough even more unrepentantly incomprehensible than its companion book Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus is valuable because it contains one of the key notions of postmodern theory. “It is odd,” the authors write, “how the tree has dominated western reality and all of western thought, from botany to anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, all of philosophy: … the root-foundation, Grund, racine, fondement.” They propose another network structure, the rhizome, to substitute for that of the tree as a model for culture. “The rhizome resists the organisational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the original source of ‘things’ and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those ‘things.’” There’s more, so much more, of this and all of it in the Bloomsbury translation printed in a fittingly yucky font as if they intended to make the text even more inscrutable. Enjoy!
9. The Condition of Postmodernity by David HarveyThe British Marxist geographer argues that neoliberalism is either a utopian project to reorganise international capitalism, or a political programme to restore the power of economic elites. He suggests that it is the latter, and that the role of postmodernism is to be cultural handmaiden to the political aims of Thatcher, Reagan and others. He demonstrates his thesis with the graphs, data and clear argument that postmodern theorists usually disdain.
10. Infinite Jest by David Foster WallaceThe title of this baggy monster of a 1,058-page novel refers to an elusive film that terrorists are trying to get their hands on because to watch it is to be debilitated, even killed by enjoyment. Perhaps these terrorists will be able to entertain Americans to death, destroying the evil empire with the very cultural weaponry it deployed on its own citizens and exported around the world. Good luck with that, guys. “Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise,” said Foster Wallace in a 1996 interview to promote the novel. “And the tension of [Infinite Jest] is to try and make it at once extremely entertaining and also sort of warped – and to sort of shake the reader awake about some of the things that are sinister in entertainment.” The book’s tragedy, as is true of much postmodern culture, is that it succeeded in entertaining, but did it shake us awake from entertainment’s sinister lure? Not so much.
Everything, All the Time Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern by Stuart Jeffries is published by Verso. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply