Summer 1996
Volume 22, Number 4

One could of course simply accept [Benjamin] Buchloh's powerful argument for subordinating what had been aesthetic priorities to more direct political criteria based simply on how effectively art manages to work its desired effects on its chosen audiences. This path has considerable affinities with traditional rhetorical views of the arts. But my commitment to the modernist understanding of art's cultural powers leads me to take another tack. I think one can historicize Buchloh's position by understanding the degree to which it at once reacts against and is subject to a range of contradictory assertions fundamental to postmodernist theory. And if that is so, then I can argue that a richer case can be made for the social powers of art by tracing the ways in which various works try to negotiate that same set of contradictions. That route allows us to establish cultural relevance without renouncing emphasis on the signifier and without having to choose among highly segmented audience groups. It may even be possible at this late moment of postmodern cultural theorizing to reverse the structure of appropriation by which this theorizing has prospered. The abstractions characterizing postmodernism as a fundamentally social phenomenon may now be so trapped in contradictions and so much a symptomatic feature of what they hoped to clarify that we now need the arts to face up to such contradictions and to offer alternative imaginative models for engaging contemporaneity.11

Let me then set the stage for addressing contemporary poetry by turning directly to what I take to be the five fundamental contradictions now pervading postmodernist theory and strongly influencing Buchloh's sense of the available options...

11. I have tried to clarify the specific terms of such appropriations in my "John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts," Critical Inquiry 14 (Summer 1988): 805-30.

Charles Altieri teaches modern literature and literary theory at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (1995) and Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-Person Expressivity and Its Social Implications (1994). He is currently writing a book on the accomplishments of postmodern artists and writers.