Arriving at the summit
of Broad Cairn is to reach a point of wilderness where there are
no manmade objects in sight, where the landscape is uncontained
by the elasticity of horizons, where
only a rough plateau of peaks surges like whales between granite
breakers. It is to reach a point, as MacDiarmid said of
Liatach, that ‘Lives in the mind like a vision’, a place that
allows you to feel a unity of presence among all things, of a
kind which animals express through action and which we express
through the actions of our words.
And, coming here, I think: why should I extract from sheer
appearances a factitious meaning or invest the world with
passing values which, by others, are regularly replaced? Why
should I intellectualise the aboriginality of a post-glacial
terrain and blur its unequal facades with fallible and, equally,
fallacious notions? Affirmation or denial is useless here. Here,
there can be no pretence other than an imagined resistance to
your vulnerability.
This is a world insuperable to scrutiny: the world as it is.
Why impose on it the transforming influence of ideas that covet
controversy rather than Truth? Why even bother with Truth when
this, in itself, requires no existential validation? And
maybe this is what MacDiarmid meant when he wrote:
What happens to us
Is irrelevant to the world’s geology
But what happens to the world’s geology
Is not irrelevant to us.
We must reconcile ourselves to the stones
Not the stones to us.
- ‘On a Raised
Beach’
I begin to think that reality is not under
but over the surface and that we have penetrated too far
its immediate depth. In going deeper we have only gone shallower
in relation to what we seek. This surface and its immediacy are
a sheer simplicity, so sheer as to be almost horizontal in
proportion to the excessively vertical gradients of
consciousness. Which makes me think, too, that it is only by
experiencing the extreme places of the earth that the simplicity
of living reveals itself with expressive force, appearing like a
gap between the seasons, as if newly conceived from among the
dusts of space. Or can it be approached through other means?
Through the poetry of MacDiarmid, for instance, or something
else as equally real?
In contrast to the reality of MacDiarmid’s
poetry or Broad Cairn, I put the phenomenon of
postmodernism or, what I will
call, pretending to be a tree. Now, trees are “nice” and are
part of what we used to refer to as “nature”. But pretending
to be a tree involves certain risks. Chief among these is an
adherence to propositions like, ‘Thought means nothing: it is…
the illusory autonomy of a discourse or a consciousness whose
hypostasis is to be deconstructed’ (Jacques Derrida,
Positions). Other risks include developing an unmitigated
cynicism towards everything; an aversion to social rituals, such
as marriage or keeping pets; and an irresistible urge to branch
out, as it were, into contingent fields of interest, such as
literary theory, which means giving up – well, just about
anything we used to enjoy about “literature”, or anything that
fascinated us, scared us or arrested our attentions with a
plethora of formerly-invalid-now-thoroughly-vacuous
“transcendental signifieds” that, once upon a time, we were
actually misguided enough to think might actually mean
something.
But, literary theory, man, is where it’s at. I mean, talking
about literature without really talking about it. How
cool is that? And literature sucks, man, cause it’s
another one of those illusory generic distinctions that does
not kick the ass of the intertextual matrices of
discourses that constitute “history”. And saying literature
sounds, like, really old-fashioned and, you know, like pompous.
It’s like saying “disco” instead of “club”. In fact, let’s
deconstruct it. L-i-t-e-r-a-t-u-r-e. See? Now it’s like
shown to be totally false, man, like it’s all symbols subject to
an infinite variety of “play”, a bit like one of those soccer
matches (metaphor alert, man – I’m right inside the
linguistic hall of mirrors of what I’m trying to explain! Cool)
where just about anything can happen within the limited
parameters of a given set of principles that, really, are just a
bunch of stupid illusions conjured out of the Great Evil of the
“western metaphysical tradition” (which means that the referee
is like… um… a symbol of logocentricity, man, imparting an
absolute value at the centre of the entire construct. But he’s
not there by virtue of any imminent projection of Truth. He’s
like an employee of the Ideological State Apparatus of the
Football Association. And he makes an awful lot of erroneous
offside decisions, which is where the dis-integrity of the
system is likely to reveal itself. And then the stadium becomes
like a representation of grammatical and syntactic rules, with
regulated rows of seats that the fans can tear up and rearrange
when they get angry, like they’re deconstructing – like the fans
are a manifestation of the contradictory logic that “always
already” inheres in the linguistic system).
But what is
postmodernism (and already
post-post-modernism, and presumably soon post-post-post-. . .)?
Is there anyone who knows? Ask a postmodernist and he or she
will make up an answer on the spot. Meaning they don’t really
know. But maybe that’s it. Postmodernism is being able to
account for something without actually having to account for it.
It is, one might say, the activity of unaccounting for
things, of rendering them invalid without having to go to the
bother of offering plausible alternatives. Postmodernism can
unaccount for itself. Look! I’m doing it now! And it can turn
arguments inside out and contradict itself, because that’s what
postmodernism is and what e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g is anyway.
Inevitably. As a consequence, merely, of being able to think.
Through language. Because, as Jacques Derrida says:
[One] cannot
legitimately transgress the text toward something other
than it, toward a referent… whose content … could have
taken place outside of language … There is
nothing outside of the text.
- Of Grammatology
Resisting this newly found sense of treedom
is to find that, as we enter its theoretical and terminological
roots, postmodernism blatantly misleads. The trouble is, there
are certain modes of theory and thought which have become givens
and which you are obliged to comply with, even while you can see
that these thoughts and theories are no more valid than any that
have gone before them. These theories, though, are received and
acted upon as if they are valid and as if everything else is a
misguided accumulation of outmoded “assumptions”.
It is the arrogance with which
postmodernism dismisses everything else in its wake without
necessarily having made an attempt to understand it which (in a
pretend kind of sense) chainsaws me. And the greatest pitfall,
of course, is the development of a “new” set of principles which
require a “new” terminology which gives an impression of novelty
only through the conjuring tricks of language. To read the
“deconstruction” of this or that has become an embarras-sing
cliché. To say “the subject” or “agency” when we are clearly
referring to measures of sentience is the deliberate
de-humanization of a context which, funnily enough, is entirely
human. It is a terminology that offers uniform linguistic
solutions to concepts that have no uniformity and which
often tends towards a sloppiness with its pronounce-ments which
are strangely contradictory of its empirical overkill.
Like this one, for example, by Jean-Francois Lyotard and
Jean-Loup Thebaud, which (God bless ‘em) actually tries to
explain postmodernism:
Postmodern (or pagan) would be the
condition of literatures and arts that have no assigned
addressee and no regulating ideal, yet in which value is
regularly measured on the stick of experimentation.
- Just Gaming
Now, hold on. Am I imagining things or did
they say ‘pagan’? Well, that’s a conjuring trick of the highest
calibre, like holding up a word and saying, ‘Look, it’s a leaf!’
But let’s be clear about this. One thing that
postmodernism most definitely
is not is pagan. It represents, in fact, the very
opposite of pagan. Let me give you a better definition:
Pagan is the raw simplicity of natural states, whereas
postmodernism doesn’t even allow the word “natural” into its
vocabulary. Postmodern is the excessive determinations of an
excessively civilized class of intellects who have theorized
themselves into a corner of distance from the rawness of nature
(which exists beyond the ontological frontiers of agency – an
alien “other” from which we have become detached as a result of
our self-conscious apprehension of the difference between
“nature” and “culture”). So nature gets rejected, and people who
like nature – well, they’re just deluding themselves. Or maybe
it’s the case that the fascination for nature is actually a
fetish, perhaps a manifestation of repressed sexual desires, so
that the fetish for nature would be a result of … er … human
nature
And let’s be clear about this. When we talk
about nature we’re not talking solely about “spiritual” or
“aesthetic” appreciations of nature’s “beauty”, but raw physical
landscapes that will kill you if you don’t know what you’re
doing in them. The removal at a distance by postmodernists of
themselves from the reality of their environment convinces me
that they are the ones who are creating an illusory version of
reality that has no correspondence whatsoever to the extreme
reality represented, for example, by the Cairngorm Mountains:
Cairngorms @ Alistair Rennie
THE CAIRNGORM MOUNTAINS:
REALITY
Wander
aimlessly over the Cairngorms and you
will
suffer the consequences of an impact that no philosophical
argument can possibly render invalid. That impact would
materialise, first, as fear and later, probably, as hypothermia.
And that’s what interests me, the emotional and physical
repercussions of the impact. That’s what literary theory
should be – an exploration of the terrain of
literature.
The biggest problem with postmodernism and its baggage of
theories is that it consists, precisely, of theories.
Consequently, there is too much stuff written in academia or the
media these days that doesn’t relate to the reality of
our experience of literature.
Postmodernists tend to forget that the act of reading can be
measured in terms of its effect, above all, on the
emotional capacities of the reader (not, as many might
think, on his or her intellectual capacities, which are
practically redundant during the act of reading, awakened only
in the aftermath of thinking about what has been read).
The
reader’s interests in a book lie, not in exposing the underlying
deficiencies of the linguistic or epistemological system, but in
what the book engenders as a consequence of manipulating
language in order to create particular effects. These effects
may even be metaphysical, culminating as an “essence” that forms
beyond the physical aspect of the words themselves. But let’s
just call it, for the sake of argument, an emotional residue
resulting from the cerebral impact of the linguistic delivery.
The act of deconstructing the text,
meanwhile, is a retrospective application of principles
which have no impact on the reality of our reading
experience at all.
The inefficacy of postmodernism is something you can learn,
equally, by climbing mountains like the Cairngorms. To say that
consciousness resides in language alone is like saying that
colour resides in these mountains alone and that their eclectic
shades cannot somehow mount an expressive correspondence between
the forms they inhabit and the forms that receive them, whether
these forms are the lochs absorbing – and, by absorbing,
deepening – the elapsing pigments of the braes or the still
pools of the attentive mind absorbing, to a point of preliterate
transparency, the
beauty
projected upon (not by) them. In a similar way, but in reverse,
this is what happens when you read a book. A fundamental awe is
received, not as something that pre-exists the text, but as
something that, from the text, is generated.
Being a postmodernist (or, better still, a post-postmodernist)
is like standing up and waving your arms around with exaggerated
vigour and saying, ‘Hey, look at me. I’m a tree!’ And everyone
looks at you and thinks, ‘What the hell is he on about?’ If you
have entered this condition, there is, I’m afraid, nothing you
can do about the fact that you are not a tree.
Disappointing as it may seem, sometimes a reality is a
reality; and, by the same token, trying to claim otherwise is a
fashionable denial of the fact that
Alistair Rennie
