Abstract
The post-postmodern academy, according to Bennett’s editorial in New Formations, is a backward-looking place. It returns to pre-postmodernist styles of thought that were typical of the 1950s. Commenting on some of the conservative attitudes that have recently resurfaced, he writes that ‘what postdates postmodernism turns out to be what predated it’. In this scenario, the master narratives of modernism reassert themselves: thought patterns characteristic of old (humanist) ways of thinking are reterritorialized. The (old) elitist, aesthetic tradition (which had been temporarily interrupted by postmodernism) re-establishes its territory, giving rise to what Kuspit (in Bennett) calls a “New Old Master Art’. The conservative character of the post-postmodernist academic in the neo-liberal institution, with its intensification of individualism, blocks all that might be opened up, as Bennett’s publication vividly demonstrates, by the splendid ‘chaos’ of postmodernism. In music, as Bennett argues, there is still much to be explored from a postmodernist perspective. He observes that although there may be ‘neo-conservative signatures on the death certificates of postmodernism and birth certificates of post-postmodernism’, the idea that postmodernism’s work has exhausted itself (an idea he briefly entertains but then dismisses), especially in music, is unsustainable. There is still much life-blood left in the old postmodern body and much work for it yet to do.
Original language | English |
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Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Musicology Australia |
Publication status | Published - 2010 |
Keywords
- music
- post-postmodernism
- postmodernism