The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

to transgress demarcated lines of thought
and readmit those discourses labelled
superfluous by the productivist political
economy of the West. Pefanis's study is of
particular interest in the way it is itself a
heterological text, raiding the disciplines of
anthropology, psychoanalysis, philosophy
and literary theory in order to convincingly
demonstrate that "generic similarities"
exist among these three writers.
Pefanis, like Carravetta, identifies postmodernism
with a body of theory that is
fundamentally critical of the totalizing
strategies of Western rationality. In his view
it functions as a social critique of the limits
of reason, in its textual practices seeking to
postpone closure, to free writing from the
tyranny of production and the metaphors
of economics and deliver it into a realm of
indeterminacy and jouissance. In celebrating
the oppositional potential of postmodernism,
however, he disregards the
possibility that its engagement with the
commodity culture it seeks to critique
might facilitate the transformation of postmodernism
from a potentially subversive
strategy into a set of conventional gestures
emptied of political effect. Ironically, by
claiming that postmodernism is, "like the
best examples of the modernist avantgardes,
a progressive and potentially radical
phenomenon," Pefanis compares it to an
earlier aesthetic that has itself become
engulfed by the discourse of capital.
The desire to equate postmodernism with
a revolutionary politics is most evident in
Postmodern Genres, where, as Marjorie
Perloff points out, "contributors repeatedly
use terms like violation, disruption, dislocation,
decentering, contradiction, confrontation,
multiplicity, and indeterminacy...!' Far
from advancing their radical aspirations,
however, this "conceptual agreement"
among writers with otherwise widely
diverging views suggests that "postmodernism"
has become a stable category, a
label to attach to a text possessing predetermined
formal characteristics. In many of
the essays there is a sickening air of finality
about what the genre "is," leading to earnest
deliberations about whether subjects under
discussion "deserve" the label. Although
most contributors uneasily acknowledge
the paradox of a genre predicated on the
principles of disruption and multiplicity,
they remain determined to have their indeterminacy
and label it, too; this, unfortunately,
leads to unhelpful assertions such as
Henry Sayre's assessment of the work of the
American artist Jonathan Borofsky: "It is
like a genre composed of all possible genres...."
Followers of Bertrand Russell might
lose sleep over whether such a genre
includes itself, but I would ask why in such
a context the term genre is used at all.
Of the dozen essays collected in the volume,
only Joan Retallack's "Post-Scriptum—
High-Modern" deserves close attention.
Retallack is not afraid to confront the thick
strands connecting postmodernists to high
modernists of the mid-century, recognizing
the inevitable influence of the past on contemporary
thought, both artistic and critical.
If the other authors had shared her
belief that "[t]he excitement of postmodernism
is that it is in many ways a letter just
beginning, a roomy category waiting to be
filled," the book as a whole might have been
more interesting.
Generation
Di Brandt
Mother, not mother. Mercury P $11.95
Sarah Murphy
The Deconstruction of Wesley Smithson. Mercury
P $12.95
Reviewed by P. J. Gerbrecht
Reading Canadian writers Di Brandt and
Susan Murphy together is very much like
reading dialogue. Both Mother, not mother
and The Deconstruction of Wesley Smithson