Postmodernismus: Unitary Sensibility

Abstract

Postmodernists take pride in a kind of unitary sensibility which puts an end to various forms of alienation, i. e. the separation between art and life, artist and public, individual and society. This essay pays special attention to the postmodemist convergence of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures”: the literary-artistic and the scientific. This convergence appears to be the outcome of a regressive tendency which merges the literary-artistic culture into the reductionist positivism of science. Value-content regresses to form, message to medium, discursive reasoning to programmed sensations.

Art as a “programming of sensations” stresses the sensorial milieu, the environment, to the exclusion of the ‘inner man’ and his culturally inherited ideas. It is an autonomous art which has stepped out of its romantic ghetto with the ambition “of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art” (McLuhan). There is an emphatic emancipatory drive behind this concept. But McLuhan also equates this art with “a teaching machine” and “a thermostat controlling room temperature.” Obviously, the totality of this new art is based upon a regressive and reductionist view of man which invites the control of human response. Thus, this emancipatory art matches neopositivist behaviorism which “dispossesses autonomous man and turns the control he has been said to exert over to the environment,” this time in the name of “scientific analysis of behavior” and for the sake of efficient socio-technological control (B. F. Skinner). Accordingly, Eugen Gomringer’s poet “belongs to the group of ‘universal’ economists and is also adviser for the engineer.” Art, science, and “technology of behavior” merge. But at the same time, this unitary sensibility reveals, in a disturbing way, something of Marcuse’s ‘one-dimensionality’ and Pynchon’s ‘entropy.’

Part Two of the essay follows up some of the consequences for the postmodernist novel which result from the shift from the traditional historical order to the new synchronic-environmental system. Part Three takes up a few aspects of cultural theory inherent in this investigation.

Leicht überarbeitete Fassung eines Manuskripts, das anläßlich der 23. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien in Tutzing am 8. Juni 1976 zur Diskussion vorgelegen hat.