Its about that time of year where I go through a fair amount of self-reflection that manifests itself in the form of a particular kind of intellectual autobiography. In the last several months, a number of contexts have forced me to return to one of my original scholarly interests: postmodernity. My first passion in graduate school—a decade ago now—was Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In retrospect, I didn’t understand it very well (and perhaps still don’t).
Yet there was something, generally speaking, that was very appealing to me about its attempts to reclaim a sense of historical consciousness within a capitalist culture engulfed in mindless consumption and simulacra. I worked through it in earnest in a few seminar papers between Oklahoma State and Wayne State, circa 2002-2004. This resulted in a couple of decent, if minor, publications on Ghost World and American Splendor, respectively, but little else. Then, when I transferred from WSU to Indiana in 2005, I also was making the conscious effort to “re-brand” myself as a film scholar instead of a critical theorist.
While at Indiana, I retained a passing interest in postmodernity, but there wasn’t a lot of room for it in my coursework, so try as I did to make something more of it, it didn’t take. I really didn’t know where to go with it beyond a certain kind of textual analysis, and such ambitions were further hampered by the fact that anything “postmodern” was toxic for upcoming, younger scholars. By the time I finished writing my dissertation, I had left Jameson’s theories behind—even though, symbolically, the cultural logic of late capitalism was all over the argument (the acknowledgements in Disney’s Most Notorious Film pays perhaps belated reference to Jameson’s influence).
My move to historical-materialist reception studies meant conceptualizing history in a more empirical, objective direction, which at the time seemed somewhat in tension with the more subjective, theoretical flourishes of the postmodern, drawn mostly (for me) from a rich and eclectic group of thinkers such as Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. Researching the ugly history of Song of the South’s reception and the civil rights movement was more fascinating than dwelling on the absence of that history in the postmodern era—an argument I still bought, but which seemed somewhat superfluous in the big scheme of things. Like I said, I didn’t know where to go with it—methodologically or institutionally.
I guess another way to put that is highlighting the stigma that comes with even evoking the word “postmodern,” an academic cliché which elicits bemused dismissal at best and active hostility at worst. This is especially sensitive for someone on a job market which seems to prefer reductive labels above all else. There’s no point in bringing in a theoretical tradition—however valid—whose very name will make your academic life harder, not easier. It’s kind of like the cliché of referencing Freud or Lacan—maybe there’s something of substance there, but why bother? There’s got to be a simpler, less antagonistic, way to say it. So I wrote a whole book on Song of the South that’s very much a “postmodern” argument to me, but I don’t once mention that word, or even any theorists associated with it, in whole book (other than the acknowledgements) because I didn’t think it was necessary enough. Postmodernity was not worth the trouble.
Lately, though I’ve been coming back around to it in bits and pieces. For example, a similar issue of a not-postmodern postmodern argument came up in my forthcoming project on Paul Thomas Anderson. I always knew my reading of his body of work was drawing out the ways in which his films themselves articulated a vision of “postmodern” America, but I didn’t bother ever to use that term—let alone flesh out what it meant at length—because it was redundant to the more specific themes I was already highlighting (the social mediation of spectacle, consumer culture, the exchange value of celebrities) . . . . and especially problematic for a book that I always intended as much for a non-specialist reading audience, consisting of cinephiles and film buffs, as for fellow academics who’d put more stock in some form of high theory (even the postmodern) than in authorship.
But as I look ahead to revisions, this matter of the “big picture”—of how to make the book relevant beyond just the self-explanatory analytical framework of examining Anderson’s five feature-length films—the fact of the matter is that I have to do more with it than just another auteur study. Here’s one idea I’ve worked through so far:
“A product of postmodern America at the turn of the new millennium, Anderson’s body of work reveals an evolving, but also strikingly consistent, vision of fractured patriarchy and mediated social relations at the intersection of representation, commodity culture, and the ubiquity of celebrity. While each film speaks to the particular historical and economic exigencies of its production and reception, they accumulatively suggest the traces of an emergent authorship worth a second look.”
Frankly, I worry that this will alienate some of the intended readership for Blossoms & Blood—that some mainstream readers will see the word “postmodern” and immediately think “more academic bullshit.” I suppose that’s what I was fighting in the first place by not being more explicitly theoretical, especially in my introduction (and what I was resisting in the Disney book). But as an academic book, particularly as one rooted in something as academically maligned as theories of authorship, the turn to the postmodern is necessary to give it the intellectual heft required.
But, beyond that, I really do believe that Anderson’s films are about postmodern America in very distinctive ways—mass media’s self-reflexivity, the casting of movie stars, the diegetic role of celebrities, the use of salesmen, the deep sense of alienation, and so forth. I’m not focusing on that because I “have” to in order to make it acceptable to an academic press—I’m sure my initial interest in those films grew out of how they activated pre-existing issues of representation and American consumer culture that I gravitated to in the first place.
So the challenge with rewrites will be to draw out more the postmodern theoretical, cultural and historical contexts surrounding the emergence of Anderson’s films. It is particularly exciting in light of the fact that I’ve never really had occasion to articulate these issues in writing before—namely, the not-insignificant question of how I define a “postmodern” America, from approximately the 1980s on, and how Anderson’s films (as one part of the quasi-indie, “smart” film, movement during the 1990s) reflect a modest but consistently interesting aspect of it.
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The more pressing issue with coming back to the postmodern as a scholar, however, is that I need to find a way to better define myself on the job market. On the surface, my work on Disney, Paul Thomas Anderson, cinephilia, Hawaii, and now digital cinema may not seem to have that much in common. This didn't concern me at first. I consciously fought the need for labels, as I’ve articulated before, but later I gave in and articulated an identity as a “historical-materialist reception studies scholar.” I still embrace that methodology, but the title only makes limited sense without a more explicit acknowledgement of the postmodern as constituting the larger set of cultural issues that I'm approaching through that methodology. In the past year, my tentative work on digital cinema—which didn’t seem to make sense at all without Jameson—and my teaching of basic film history and theory at MSU have really hit home for me how much I read film and media through the postmodern.
Long story short, I think the road through Indiana was a vital step towards fulfilling the intellectual goals I was originally invested in as an MA student--and not a shameful rebuttal to it, as I originally thought. I needed to be a "real" media historian--somebody who made a good faith effort to document past events within well-defined historical narratives, and not just a theorist who referenced history in a generic sense--before I could try to be the kind of postmodern scholar I wanted to be a decade ago. Everything I write comes back to postmodernity—and the next few months will be focused on exploring that more (again) and articulating its significance in my work and in my professional persona.
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