Dilemma of Logos

Randy mentioned on Tuesday morning’s colloquium that the main separation moment of modernism and postmodernism is the point when the keyword of discourses changed from “history” to “geography”. I kind of agree with this saying. It’s direct impact in art, as Danto described in his book After The End of Art, art as a liner historical development and progressing had met a dead-end in 1960s, after that, is a decentralize, unhistorical, and discursive art scene, and artist is taking the task which used to belong to philosopher, thus the relationship between art with aesthetics become more and more indifferent. But once artist adopt the rational way of thinking, the dilemma of Logos seems even more clear, no matter for individual’s artistic production or contemporary artists as a totality. Fredric Jameson has already realized this dilemma decades ago as he put it: “…the truth of our social life as a whole-in Lukacs’s terms, as a totality-is increasingly irreconcilable with the possibilities of aesthetic expression or articulation available to us: a situation about which it can be asserted that if we can make a work of art from our experience, if we can give experience the form of a story that can be told, then it is no longer true, even as individual experience; and if we can grasp the truth about our world as a totality, then we may find it some purely conceptual expression but we will no longer be able to maintain an imaginative relationship to it, in current psychoanalytic terminology, we will thus be unable to insert ourselves, as individual subjects, into an ever more massive and impersonal or transpersonal reality outside ourselves. ”It might be the main challenge for every artist in our time who are thrown into the extremely decentralized reality of living in a global circumstance, and encounter the predicament of articulate the individual experience while having it rationally reflect on the social life as the totality of human condition. I agree with David Harvey's saying that “‘Globalization’ is the most macro of all discourses that we have available to us while that of ‘the body’ is surly the most micro from the standpoint of understanding the workings of society…These two discursive regimes -globalization and the body- operate at opposite ends of the spectrum in the scalar we might use to understand social and political life.”