Monday, October 12, 2009
Premature Classifications: Darn, I hate when that happens
I'm sorry to do two back-to-back posts, but my last post has spurred on another post. It seems kind of silly to me to talk about this modernism and postmodernism, they are very slippery classifications. I think we need to keep in mind that while most movements are acknowledged after time has passed and upon reflection, these "new" terms are so problematic precisely because they are so recent. We live in a time where news is expected to be occuring constantly, where speeches are canonized within seconds of their delivery, everything is analyzed and fretted over without any time for meditation and thought; nothing is allowed to ferment over time, to show that it can stand the test of time, to age gracefully. We cannot say whether Allen Ginsberg will remain in anthologies because he and his work is too near to us for us to be unbiased, of course current professors will say that the Beats were great--many of them were beatniks! And I'm not attacking this group, I am just using them to illustrate a greater point. Perhaps we need an apocalypse to occur in the intellectual realm, one which allows new things to just be analyzed for what they are and not forced into a premature classification.
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On this point: "We cannot say whether Allen Ginsberg will remain in anthologies because he and his work is too near to us for us to be unbiased..."—well, strictly speaking, we cannot know if *anything* will "remain" in anthologies (anthologies themselves being a historical form, far from anything transcendent).
ReplyDeleteWhat we can know, however, is what appears in our anthologies right *now*. And sure enough, Ginsberg is there, and probably for more reason than that many current professors were "beatniks." For Ginsberg specifically, it has a lot to do with how his poetry was situated explicitly in relation to earlier American literary traditions coming from Whitman, as well as in relation to Modernist writers such as Ezra Pound. So here, the moniker "postmodern" has a pretty specific and technical usage: it serves to position a more contemporary poet in relation to earlier poetic traditions. Now this does not mean that we should therefore conclude that "postmodern'' is a clear and distinct category, but just that it has some value in terms of specifically literary designation and description. Does that help?
I'm not sure about needing an 'apocalypse' to happen in the intellectual realm; intellectual realms, as they are, are always in flux and shifting around various tensions and fault-lines. On the other hand, this is a pretty utopian but maybe even worthwhile cause, to desire a way of learning "...which allows new things to just be analyzed for what they are and not forced into a premature classification." I would say that this is both impossible (everything has history) but also perhaps worthwhile on a personal level, as a self-challenge. What would it mean to read without "premature classification"? It would be hard, and would mean that you'd have to take everything (even Freud) very seriously. And it might end up being more rewarding, right? The goal of such reading and learning would not be to simply 'agree' or 'disagree' with texts, but rather, to dwell in a sort of pure state of 'analysis', without taboos or prejudices to get in the way, with the idea that there's something there ("what they are") worth appreciating. Now imagine doing this with people. Again, very difficult—but wouldn't it, cumulatively, make the world a better place? As long as we are critiquing apocalypticism and allowing ourselves to be a little utopian, why not?