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general, in a tendency to rehearse the "positivism of the medium" of late modernism and so to seal a formalist image of modernism that is relatively easy to displace.

Postmodernism does exploit late modernist dogma, only to reconfirm its reduction, to which late modernism is then subjected. This is clearest as regards the mediums: identified with modernism, they are foreclosed with it. Clearly, mediums, or forms thereof, are "historically bounded" 44; but to derive a logic of a medium from historical examples and then to see it (the logic) apart from the examples as somehow essential - this seems fallacious. A formalism of 

[[image]]
Larry Poons, Nixes Mate, 1964, acrylic on canvas, 168 x 269 cm 
sorts, it first asserts the immanence or mediation of art, only to deny it later. And, in practical terms, it runs awry of the many modernist displacements of the mediums. 

To expand the aesthetic field, to transgress formal closures, to steal images, to denature given signs, to question cultural myths, to problematize the activity of reference, etc... how alien are these tactics to modernism? Picasso, Pollock and Smithson all destructure the modes of signification that they inherit. Magritte, Johns and Laurie Anderson all pose forms of rhetorical interference. They cannot all be recouped as postmodernist or proto-postmodernist. The strategy of appropriation, as seen in Duchamp and again in Rauschenberg, is modernist in origin, as is the deconstructive impulse - we are told often that modern art arose in metaphysics' fall (the only question is, did art then serve as a substitute?).

"... the deconstructive impulse", Craig Owens writes, "must be distinguished from the self-critical tendency of modernism."45 This is crucial to the postmodernist break, and no doubt the two operations are different: self-criticism, centered on a medium, does tend (at least under the aegis of formalism) to the essential or "pure"; whereas deconstruction, on the contrary, decenter, and exposes the "impurity" of meaning. And yet unlike self-reflexivity (with which it is often conflated), self-criticism does not enforce a closure. It may, in fact, issue in deconstruction (such is really the recent history of critical theory), so that if postmodernism is truly deconstructive of modernism, it would seem to be a discursivity within it.

Certainly, to be regarded as an epistemological break (and not merely a chronological term), postmodernism must be based on a form of knowledge - and thus on material conditions - substantially different from modernism's. (A new technique, for example, may enable - but not initiate - a new way of seeking.) Perhaps such a form does exist: to know it will require a Foucaultian archaeology - to posit it now, on the basis of aesthetic effects, seems precarious. Recent practice has effected a defamiliarization, an estrangement (quintessentially modernist terms) that, in turn, stress the historical, i.e. conditional, nature of art. And it is no doubt important to insist upon the cutural specificity of modernism (for it is determinate). But again: to delimit it now seems problematic.

And yet postmodernism is defined as a rupture. In this it is like modernism which, despite historicism, speaks a rhetoric of discontinuity. Like modernism too, postmodernism is posed against a past perceived as inert: terms like "reified categories" and "exhausted conventions" punctuate its discourse, as do "radical innovation" and "advanced aesthetic practice." The postmodernists thus rely on the old historical imperative of the avant-garde: theirs is a language of crisis in the sense of both judgement and separation. As noted above, these crises in art tend to be recouped institutionally (in the museum and in art history), and such recuperation, along with pluralism, is the main problem of contemporary art: how to retain avant-garde radicality, which is a crucial criterion of value, and be rid of the historicism that recoups and reduces even as it provokes the extreme? (It may be that a revision of historicism is necessary, one in which the series of breaks, characteristic of modernism, are "not seen as an avant-garde succession - in which an evolution of discontinuity is substituted for an evolutionism of continuity = but in the form of a problematic constellation, whose systemics set off the twentieth century as a deconstructive synchrony.)46

Postmodernism is highly conscious of historical moment: in effect, it displaces modernism as the next (necessary) term. Pushed back into the book of culture, modernism is posed in its own reduction, what is needed is a revision of modernism: an opening of its supposed closure. And perhaps postmodernism is this too. Though it reconfirms late modernist dogma, it also reorders other modernist discourses (for example, artists like Duchamp and Klee are favored, as are critics like Baudelaire and Benjamin). As such, it may be less a break with modernism that an advance is a dialectic in which modernism is reformed. Certainly, the postmodernists, nearly along among critics today, are committed to a high seriousness; and as a theoretical enterprise, postmodernism does seem proferred on the conviction "that a system calling for corrections, translations, openings, and negations is more useful than an unformulated absence of system - one may then avoid the immobility of prattle and connect to the historical chain of discourses, the progress (progressus) of discursivity."47

An earlier version of this text was presented as a lecture at Rutgers University in April 1980.

Notes
1. Donald B. Kuspit, "The Unhappy Consciousness of Modernism", Artforum, January 1981, p. 53.
2. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood", Artforum, Summer 1967, p.21 (italics in the original); cited by Douglas Crimp in "Pictures", October 8, Spring 1979, p.76.
3. Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse; Towards a Theory of Postmodernism (Part 2)", October 13, Summer 1980, p.79
4. Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field", Oc-tober 8, Spring 1979, p.31.
5. Marxist critics (e.g. Peter Fuller) have even related the "pure sign" of modernist art (the object as its own referent) to the monolithic nature of monopoly capitalism. Others (e.g) T.W. Adorno) see the "purity of modernist art as a negativity – an abstraction posed against the totalizing abstraction of capital. 
6. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, p. 103.
7. See Krauss, pp. 31-33.
8. See Kuspit, p. 53. 
9. It is ironic (but not unexpected) that, in an age like the modern that so valorizes breaks and ruptures, the primary critical model would be historicism –– whose job it is to recoup breaks and ruptures.