Trigg's scathing critique of postmodernism (The Aesthetics of Decay, Chapter 7, "The Decline of Postmodernism?") led me to wonder about what kind of text The Aesthetics of Decay really is. It is partly a narrative of intellectual history. Amid the rapid transition from Maximilien Robespierre to the landscape gardener William Chambers (pp. 80-81), the thought occured to me that Trigg's opposition to postmodernism might not be without irony. Trigg says of this narrative:
The preceding account of concepts does not claim to be a genealogical analysis that situates intellectual history in causal terms. Instead, my intention has been to show, by way of historical examples, how rationality has informed modes of artistic and intellectual engagement. My account remains deliberately partial and incomplete: firstly, because intellectual concepts are viewed from a temporal perspective, and secondly, because I have sought to draw an idea rather than a system from these concepts. From the perspective of rationality alone, we see how the process to confront the failure of reason has been a struggle that has often reverted to claims of certainty and permanence.
(pp. 83-84).
This emphasis on the partial account appears to be at least consistent with postmodernism; however, Trigg claims for himself a temporal grounding which he finds unacknowledged in postmodernism.
By subverting the metanarrative and the Enlightenment conception of rationality, postmodernism involves a mode of nostalgia that depends on what was annihilated to affirm itself in the temporal present. Because of this negative identity, postmodernism remains locked in the past despite its attempt to evade temporal determinism. The incompletion of the present is reinforced as postmodernism withdraws from a committed stance into a conceptual impasse.
(p. 74).
Ultimately I am not reading The Aesthetics of Decay as a postmodern text, though it self-consciously does come after the decline of postmodernism. I am seeing in this exposition, the way Trigg sees in the ruin, the possibility of a "critical resistance against the enforcement of spatial rationality" (p. 150). Why does there need to be such a critical resistance if not for the sake of rationality? Is this not an essentially an argument about proportionality, about seeing decay as clearly as we see growth? I'm not really sure about that. (I haven't quite finished with the book though it is deeply engaging.)
Labels: narrative, postmodernism, Trigg