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October, sexual politics, and the limits of postmodernism
Date
2016
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In a 1984 interview, the prominent critic and theorist, Craig Owens, characterized his writing in the October journal of the late 1970s and early 1980s as “a series of footnotes to Rosalind [Krauss’] writing... writing in the margins of her writing, her theoretical positions.” With this statement Owens gives an account of his paradoxical experience in postmodernism, his situation at once at the center and at the margins of that discourse. For as much as these words locate Owens’ position within Krauss’ intellectual circle, they also suggest the cost of his inclusion. In supporting Krauss’ theoretical positions in October, Owens was blind to his own queer encounters with postmodernism. ☐ This dissertation charts the limits of the October journal’s postmodernist discourse of art. It situates that discourse, which in its day became the dominant version of postmodernism, within the social history of the period of the journal’s greatest development, the late 1970s and early 1980s. That this social history (which includes the continued battles for women’s rights and civil rights, gay and lesbian liberation, as well as the simultaneous rise of the AIDS crisis and the new Christian Right) was for so long left out of October’s discussions of postmodernism and contemporary art in general is, I argue, a marker of the journal’s delimitation of the social to a mere generic point of reference. Thus, this dissertation is dedicated to an analysis of how and why October, despite its claims to the contrary, occluded representations of “the plural and multifarious character of contemporary social struggles” (in the words of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe). In the face of contemporary art theory still beholden to October’s ostensibly progressive sensibilities, this dissertation argues that the journal’s postmodernism was in fact as resistant to the social politics of art as the modernism it claimed to supplant.
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Keywords
Postmodernism, Sexual politics, Owens, Craig