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POSTMODERN THOUGHT IN IHAB HASSAN
DR. P. PRAYER ELMO RAJ
Assistant Professor,
PG & Research Department of English,
Pachaiyappa’s College,
Chennai.
ABSTRACT
Ihab Hassan’s postmodernism, throughout his writings, has
shaped up comprehensively and inclusively to become a
developed episteme. Early Hassan emphasized the global
significance of postmodernism altering the historic
segregations subverting postmodernism as an undertone of
western culture. Hassan’s later conception of postmodernism
emphasized the need to ascertain a “unitary sensibility” to
transgress the borders and close the ruptures to accomplish
“neo-gnostic” proximity of cognition. This paper is an attempt
to analyze how various postmodern propositions shape and
make progress in the writings of Hassan.
Keywords: Ihab Hassan, Modernism, Postmodern, Postmodernism, Indeterminacy.
Ihab Hassan is “an adamant spokesman for and model maker of postmodernism”
(Eysteinsson 129). His notable works include: The Right Promethean Fire (1980), The
Postmodern Turn (1987), The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (1968),
The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971). Paracriticisms:
Seven Speculations of the Times (1975). The origin of the term ‘postmodernism’ remains
ambiguous. In 1934, Federico de Onis employed the word postmodern is moto denoting the
response against the complexity and experimental attitude of modernist poetry. In 1939,
Arnold Toynbee announced the end of the modern Western bourgeois order. In 1945,
Bernard Smith uses the word to denote a movement in art called Socialist Realism. In 1950’s,
Irving Howe and Harry Levin note postmodernism as the dissolution of high modernist
culture. In 1960’s Leslie Fiedler and Hassan, though did not proclaim the death, shaped
postmodernism as a definite and affirmative progress in American culture that denotes a
critical alteration of modernism. The term postmodernism was employed to distinct
movement in arts in America that indicate a particular trend of counter-culture and liberation
point of view: apathy, anarchy and avant-garde. The viewpoints moved from static to
performative and hypo tactical to paratactical. Ihab Hassan explains the birth of
postmodernism: “postmodernism was born in strife and nursed in contention; it still remains
moot. Lock ten of its foremost proponents in a room, and watch the book trickle under the
door. Hype and hyperbole, parody and kitsch, media glitz and ideological spite, the sheer,
insatiable irrealism of consumer societies all helped to turn postmodernism into a conceptual
ectoplasm” (“Beyond Postmodernism” 199). Postmodernism is a collective perception of a
particular historical era. Postmodernism is a hermeneutical tool, a mode of interpretation and
a way of understanding under particular decree of neglect. Postmodernism is an
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“autobiography, an interpretation of our lives in developed societies, linked to an epochal
crisis of identity, the other pivotal point” (“Beyond Postmodernism” 202).
Hassan underlines the complexity of describing postmodernism: “What was postmodernism?
What was postmodernism, and what is it still? I believe it is a revenant, the return of the
irrepressible; every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back. Like a ghost, it eludes
definition” (“From Postmodernism to Postmodernity” 1). Postmodernism evades definition
because of its encompassing and varying nature as it is intertwined with culture, life and
attitude making it a contested category. Ideas in history are subjected to interpretation and
reconsiderations. Those ideas that are not reinterpreted are abstract concepts. Given the
environment of conflicting ideologies and plugging public sphere, ideas alter with time.
Postmodernism encircles “fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic,
anti-ideological stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp” (“From Postmodernism to
Postmodernity” 2). Hassan refers postmodernism as the “cultural sphere especially literature,
philosophy, and the various arts, including architecture, while postmodernity refers to the
geopolitical scheme, less order than disorder, which has emerged in the last decades” (“From
Postmodernism to Postmodernity” 3).
Hassan’s early writings views postmodernism as indefinite, decreative, and oppositional and
the intent to deconstruct. In his Dismemberment of Orpheus, he traces postmodernist
tendencies in Sade, Blake, Dada and Surrealism. Postmodern tendency in art negates itself to
unmake. It indicates an effort toward the negative resonance of language and its positive selftranscendent aspect. Hassan points out to the negative aspect in his understanding of
postmodernism sacrificing the “positive stillness” or the “sacramental. ”The Disemberment of
Orpheus is also a postmodern literary history that investigates the works of Sade,
Hemingway, Kafka, Genet and Beckett. Hassan argues that these writers share the proclivity
for liberation from history, nullify the emphasis on form and deform the genre. The
disposition towards silence is common to all these writers which Hassan indicates as the
foundation to the literature of postmodernism. The ‘dismemberment of Orpheus’ is a
metaphor that portrayed the crunch in art. In the eighties Hassan indulged in practicing
postmodernism with his critical writings that divulged postmodern features: splintered,
convoluted, spirited and self-reflexive.
Hassan, who emphasized on the postmodern turn as oedipal interference, reviewed
postmodernism both as continuity and discontinuity, complimentary yet fractional
perspectives. The rigid separation between modernism and post modernism becomes
impossible because history is a palimpsest and culture is permeable. Hassan observes: “The
term postmodernism is not only awkward; it is also Oedipal, and like a rebellious impotent
adolescent, it cannot separate itself completely from its parent modernism…Oedipal or
parasitical if you wish…it remains a conflictual dialogue with the older movement” (“From
Postmodernism to Postmodernity” 9). The complexity, Hassan reveals, transpires out of
linguistic, historical, political and aesthetic inferences. The linguistic stimulus is innate to
postmodernism. Morphologically, the term postmodernism envisions to “surpass or suppress”
modernism. The term is a counter-phrase containing its nemesis with unlike the terms like
romanticism, classicism, baroque and rococo. The post in postmodernism is a temporal
signifier that presumes modernism. However, the terms baroque and rococo stands on its
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own. The attempt to define or/and to separate modernism or/from postmodernism is an
impossible assignment.
Postmodernism cannot assert a particular historical period that can sever completely from
modernism. It is an unusual act of hubris which is morphologically uneven. Hassan also notes
that postmodernism experiences a semantic imbalance because there is no consensus on the
phenomenon of postmodernism. The historical instability denotes the diacritical discrepancies
between postmodernism and modernism. Marked with continuity and discontinuity, the
postmodern period is inherently an “either/or” procedure that encompasses modern and the
postmodern. The political reason of the postmodernism can be found in the revolutionary
political situations of the eighties that differ from that of the sixties. The aesthetic influence is
imbibed in art itself. Hassan antedated to improve, strengthen and prolong the classic
modernism of Duchamp and Beckett. However, postmodernism reinforced the Warhol and
De Onis’ modernist élan modernism that is languorous or embellished. Hassan also finds the
term postmodernism as “un-postmodern” because it discards continuity in time. Postmodern
time is “polychromic” as it evades “categorical and linear periodization” (“From
Postmodernism to Postmodernity” 9). Postmodernism cannot merely be “temporal,
chronological, or diachronic construct; it must also function as a theoretical,
phenomenological, or synchronic category” (“From Postmodernism to Postmodernity” 9).
Therefore, the temporal divide of before and after a certain period of time being designated as
postmodern comes under scrutiny. Postmodernism encompasses certain characteristics,
attitudes that are positioned in specific historical context which cogitate comprehensibly into
a phenomenon. Postmodernism is also an interpretive category, a critical tool, a hermeneutic
apparatus that helps interpret reality that mirror ourselves, “postmodernism is now our
shadow” (“From Postmodernism to Postmodernity” 10). From the literary studies point of
view postmodern theory calls for a self-critical that blench the underlying meanings of myths
and unseen doctrines. Postmodernity can be defined in “political terms as an open dialogue
between local and global, margin and center, minority and majority, concrete and universal—
and not only those but also between local and local, margin and margin, and further still,
between universals of different kinds” (“From Postmodernism to Postmodernity” 14).
The distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity is not the redundant Marxist
variation between superstructure and base or parallel to a historical event like colonialism.
Postmodernity is a global process which is distinctly dissimilar as it exists all over. When
various schools of thought pressed its influence in arts, philosophy, social discourse, cultural
studies, economics and technologies, postmodernity stood time. While postmodernism is a
cultural phenomenon, postmodernity as a geopolitical process where transformations and
revolutions exerted its “conflictual energies.” The internal representative feature of
postmodernity, as Hassan explains in his own terms, is “indetermanence.” Indetermanence is
two different predispositions that are contrastive. Indeterminacy is a “combination of trends
that include openness, fragmentation, ambiguity, discontinuity, disinterment, heterodoxy, and
pluralism, deformation, all conducive to indeterminacy or under-determination. The latter
concept alone, deformation, subsumes a dozen current terms like deconstruction, decreation,
disintegration, displacement, difference, discontinuity, disjunction, disappearance, dedefinition, demystification, detotalization, delegitimization, decolonization” (“From
Postmodernism to Postmodernity” 4). These propositions envisage disassembling process
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that impacts the body politic, the psyche, the cognitive process, the erotic body and discourse
at large.
Hassan’s synoptic chart presents the categorization between modernism and postmodernism:
Romanticism/Symbolism vs. Pataphysics /Dadaism, form (conjunctive, closed) vs. antiform
(disjunctive, open), purpose vs. play, design vs. chance, hierarchy vs. anarchy, mastery/logos
vs. exhaustion/silence, art object/finished work vs. process/performance/happening, distance
vs. participation, creation/totalization vs. decreation /deconstruction, synthesis vs. antithesis,
presence vs. absence, centring vs. dispersal, genre/boundary vs. text/intertext, semantics vs.
rhetoric, paradigm vs. syntagm, hypotaxis vs. parataxis, metaphor vs. metonymy, selection
vs. combination, root/depth vs. rhizome/surface, interpretation/reading vs against
interpretation/misreading, signified vs. signifier, lisible(readerly) vs. scriptable (writerly),
Narrative/Grande Historie vs. Anti-narrative/Petite Historie, master code vs. idiolect,
symptom vs. desire, type vs. mutant, genital/phallic vs. polymorphous/androgynous, paranoia
vs. schizophrenia, origin/cause vs. difference-difference/trace, God the Father vs. The Holy
Ghost, metaphysics vs. irony, determinacy vs. indeterminacy, transcendence vs. immanence
(“Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” 591-2).
Hassan elaborates on the postmodern traits. The eleven “definiens”, as Hassan calls it, score
up to an absurd. They are features that differentiate postmodernism from modernism. a)
Indeterminacy: Indeterminacy incorporates uncertainties, disagreements and dislocations that
impact the manner in which the episteme is shaped in the society. Indeterminacy infuses our
activities, hints and understanding of how we shape our world. b) Fragmentation:
Indeterminacy is associated with fragmentation. Postmodernism disengages. Postmodernism
strives for a totalization that is epistemic and social in nature through “montage, collage, the
found or cut-up literary object, for paratactical over hypotactical forms, metonymy over
metaphor, schizophrenia over paranoia” (“Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective” 505). The
conflict on totality is only to accentuate on the unpresentability and to galvanize the
differences to conserve the reputation. c) decanonization: decanonization is employed on all
canons and the traditions of authority. Decanonization is a process of delegitimation of the
Grandnarratives and master-codes in society anticipating heterogeneity. The “death” of god,
author and father that relieves itself from the authority revises the authority bestowed on
them. Thus, “we decanonize culture, demystify knowledge, deconstruct the languages of
power, desire, deciety” (“Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective” 505). Critique and revision
are part of subversion which is an integral part of decanonization. d) self-les-ness, depth-lessness: Postmodernism challenges the tradition self-effacing dynamics that comprehensibility
form an uncontested and triumphalist self with self-critique and self-amplification. The loss
of self is underpinned with censuring of egoism and emphasizing on difference. e) the
unpresentable, unrepresentable: Postmodernism is “irrealist” and “aniconic.” Postmodernism
defronts ethereal modes by limiting, exhausting and subverting the silence. Postmodernism
becomes “liminary, contesting the modes of its own representation” (“Pluralism in
Postmodern Perspective” 506). f) irony: Kenneth Burke calls it perspectivism. When a
fundamental idea is absent, it is substituted with “play, interplay, dialogue, polylogue,
allegory, self-reflection, in short, to irony. This irony assumes indeterminacy, multivalence,
aspires to clarity, the clarity to demystification, the pure light of absence” (“Pluralism in
Postmodern Perspective” 506). g) hybridization: Hybridization is the distorted repetition of
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genres like parody, travesty and pastiche. Hassan explains: “The “de-definition,”
deformation, of cultural genres engenders equivocal modes: “paracriticism,” “fictual
discourse,” the “new journalism,” the “nonfiction novel,” and a promiscuous category of
“para-literature” or “threshold literature,” at once young and very old” makes a varied
supposition of tradition where continuity and discontinuity blend to magnify the past in the
present. Within the plural configuration of the present varied styles are dialectically
intertwined in an interplay between the “Now and the Not Now, the Same and the Other”
(“Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective” 506). h) carnivalization: Carnivalization expresses
the comic or absurdist character of postmodernism antedating heteroglossia. Moreover,
carnivalization denotes polyphony, “the centrifugal power of language, the “gay relativity” of
things, pwerspectivism and performance, participation in the wild disorder of life, the
immanence of laughter” (“Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective” 507). The performance is
antisystem and subversive with a commitment to change and renewal. i) Performance,
participation: indeterminacy kindles participation so that the void can be filled. Postmodern
text, both verbal and nonverbal, summons performance in way the performance can be
reformed, written and responded because it contravenes genres. Postmodern art expresses its
vulnerability to time, death, and audience and to the Other in order to self-discover and selfanalyse so that it will not fall into the trap of narcissism. j) Constructionism: The irrealist,
tropic and figurative nature of postmodernism make it’s certain that thoughts be configured in
fiction because the efficacy of a fiction recommends that interferences can be made both in
nature, culture, science, art and technologies. Postmodernism, consequently, endures the
mobility from truth to fixity, a plurality of right and contesting variations of world in the
making. k) Immanence: Immanence denotes “without religious echo, to the growing capacity
of mind to generalize itself through symbols. Everywhere now we witness problematic
diffusions, dispersals, dissemination; we experience the extension of our senses…through
new media and technologies” (“Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective” 508). Languages
reconfigure the universe from the symbolic unconscious to the space into signs of their own
choice transforming nature into culture and culture into an immanent semiotic scheme.
From the literature point of view, the creative process of an author, reader, reading
procedures, writing, varied forms of work of art and critical theory are put into query not to
make them fallacious but to reconfigure in different, novel and contextual ways. Technology
plays an important role in carrying forward these indeterminacies. Hence, Hassan calls the
second tendency of postmodernism “immanences.” The term differentiates itself from
religious connotation in entitling cognitive ability to streamline it into symbols and sanction
its own perceptions that highlight human consciousness to the borders of cosmos. The
cognitive tendencies can be elaborated as “diffusion, dissemination, projection, interplay,
communication, which all derive from the emergence of human beings as language animals,
homo pictoror homo significans, creatures constituting themselves, and also their universe, by
symbols of their own making” (“From Postmodernism to Postmodernity” 4). History of the
world disbands itself as a blend of fact and fiction where media and science makes its own
reflection as accessible to the reality. Besides, cybernetics challenges the mystery of artificial
intelligence to scheme our observations in an ever expanding universe.
Postmodernism is about the determination to counter intellectual power, a colonizing desire
of the mind. However, such a desire is entangled in historical moment of supervention or
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desuetude becomes the foundation of postmodernism. The response and or disavowal of
postmodernism persist in being conditional on the centers of power and the imposing
boundaries that subjectively exclude or include the normativities of culture. Bertens finds that
the features of Hassan’s postmodernism are akin to deconstruction’s decentering that is
administered by epistemological and ontological uncertainty. The modernists guard against
the vulnerability of the “center,” the postmodernist identifies the death of authority,
centrifugality of power and higher order of discourse. The acknowledgment of decentering
leads to indeterminacy and immanence. Indeterminacy is the consequence of decentering, the
vanishing of ontology and immanence positions the tendency of the human mind to
applicable to all reality. It is “In the absence of essences, of ontological centers, man creates
himself and his world through a language that is, poststructurally, divorced from the world of
objects. It is in the immanence that Hassan discerns a movement towards “the One,” towards
unification. Whereas indeterminacy leads to fragmentation, tribalization, immanence leads to
globalization, through the more and more uniform language of the media” (Bertens 29).
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2. Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca and London: Cornell
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Press, 1990. Print.
3. Hassan, Ihab Habib. “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective.” Critical Inquiry. 12.3
(Spring,
1986): 503-520. Print.
4. ---.“Toward a Concept of Postmodernism.” Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton
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