The Postmodern Sublime–a Different

Kind of Crazy.
by Marguerite Van Cook
 July 12, 2012 5:49 am

 Columns

 15 comments

From the Modern to the Postmodern Sublime.

There is no exact historic event to say when the modern ended or when the
postmodern began. Even though World War I & II were certainly sublime in their
scope, neither was the singular marker of transition. The transition happened
more gradually as the individual neurosis of the modern gave way to the
communal psychosis of the postmodern. However, what seems to be a constant
is that comic artists have been there to comment on the types of madness that
define those moments of change.

Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl embodies the man who does not know where time
and history begin and end, as he moves with a detached but detailed interest in
his urban and banal surroundings. Katchor’s strangely anachronistic images offer
a quirky and disturbing response away from the angst ridden narratives of the
high moderns. Knipl is a photographer. He is in the business of making images.
He reproduces the real with his camera. He looks and collects information about
things that are in transition. He watches the people who engage in the remnants
of a mechanically driven culture. Knipl’s is a gentle malady that draws one into a
world without affect; a symptom of the postmodern condition.
After the wars, we tried to respond to the events of the recent past through the
insufficient lens of the modern. Great thinkers and artists struggled to make
sense of the human condition. They were neurotic, introspective, singular and
alienated from society; they were outsiders. (The immediate problem with their
strategy going forward was that we couldn’t all be on the outside.)

Mark Newgarden lampoons those great modern thinkers, Beckett, Joyce and
Proust with his irreverent inclusion of “Mel.” His take offers a final ironic
backwards wave adios to the modern past. Newgarden rejects the sanctity of
deep thought that had become the cultural currency of a neurotic society. He
deflates us all by brushing away the posture of alienation with the devastating
tagline, ” We all die alone.” Which is to say conversely that we are all the same.
Newgarden’s cartoon is a perfect transition from one historic state to the next,
from the alienation of the modern into the communal ennui of the early
postmodern.

The Disney Sublime: In the Belly of the Mouse.

In fact, the transition away from the modern happened not in a progressive
manner, but rather when the postmodern went inside the beast and there found a
different kind of collective madness. The French theorists, Roland Barthes,
Derrida, et al, who arguably were the most influential thinkers post-WWII with
respect to the use and effects of the media, produced the postmodern enfant
terrible, Jean Baudrillard. For him, after the failure of the revolutionary 1968 Paris
riots, the world fell into the throes of late stage capitalism and into a self-
delusional state in which reality slipped farther from reach. Baudrillard’s focus is
on the blurred borders between the media and the real world. He cites Disney as
our commonly experienced reality-irreality. Baudrillard moves his critique from
the outside to the inside, he sees our new form of delusional psychosis as
stemming from inside the world of Disney, from where we are no longer able to
experience alienation as we once knew it.

Baudrillard in a passage entitled “Hyperreal and Imaginary” in his famous essay

“Simulacra and Simulations,” first published in Semiotext(e) in 1981, writes about
Disney and comics as part of the cover-up of reality. He writes, “Disney is a
perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation.” He sums the scale of the
problem as he understands it with:
The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout
Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its
values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and
pacified. (…) Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all
of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the
fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is
carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that
the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are
no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a
question of a false representation of reality(ideology), but of concealing the fact
that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

In Baudrillard’s view we are being deluded. Our sanity is being deliberately

assaulted. Baudrillard’s mistrust of all things Disney is palpable. His vision of a
world where reality and irreality meld in a simulacrum of the real is exemplified by
Disney’s fantasies. Previously, Mickey as Steamboat Willie was an amusing
mouse who transported the goods that modern America desired. He stood in for
those capitalist/modern values as the trickster everyman trying to get ahead.
Disney honestly doubled down on the moneymaking, yet societally we still
wanted to think that art and our values belonged to a commercially untarnished
sphere. Mickey was the emblem of the modern. For Baudrillard, Disney became
the backdrop of global conglomeration, whose tricks threatened us from behind
the veil of the corporate. And in his article one can detect the signs of the
impending schizophrenia that will follow on from delusion. Who among you does
not harbor mixed feelings about Mickey? Or at least Pluto? We are all victims of
this confusion of values.

While Baudrillard’s position is also more than a little paranoid, the fact remains
that Disney images are everywhere. One is forced to ask what effect does it
have on us when cartoons, literally escape the panel borders and come to 3
dimensional life? Disneyworld, Broadway shows, toys, mugs, teeshirts and
advertising occupy as much space as does any other cultural form; more
perhaps. Baudrillard’s is a postmodern sublime that is the container for the vast
entity of Disney.
Almost as if to make the point, a very recent news article entitled : “The Flight
from Mickey into the Madness of Pyongyang, North Korea” reported the
following :

— Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh took the stage in North Korea during a
concert for new leader Kim Jong Un, in an unusual performance featuring Disney
characters. Performers dressed as Minnie Mouse, Tigger and others danced and
pranced as footage from “Snow White,” “Dumbo,” “Beauty and the Beast” and
other Disney movies played on a massive backdrop, according to still photos
shown on state TV… the performance was staged Friday by the Moranbong
band, which was making its debut after being assembled by Kim himself, the
state-run Korean Central News Agency said. Kim, who took power after his
father, longtime leader Kim Jong Il, died in December, has a “grandiose plan to
bring about a dramatic turn in the field of literature and arts this year,” KCNA
said.[1]

Mickey Mouse in Korea, onstage for Kim.

The Disney corporation did not give Korea permission to use their creations and
one can only begin to imagine how Kim saw this interaction playing out. Perhaps
he too is living in the fantasy world that Baudrillard presents. Inevitably Disney
will ask for payment. But it perhaps hints at the dictator’s desire to put
Baudrillard’s theory to work and to conceal his own brutal government with the
warm and fuzzy.

Elsewhere, in Moengo, Suriname, Netherlander artist Wouter Klein Velderman

built a giant wooden Mickey, assisted by local artists who carved totems into the
legs. This inclusion Klein Welderman felt, somehow made it possible for the
people to feel some autonomy in the coming industrialization of their country.
The piece is entitled “Monument for Transition.” It is his warning of what they are
to expect. What ever his motivation, Disney is now a real wooden artifact,
standing securely on the cultural icons of Moengo’s heritage.

Moengo, which has only recently put a violent civil war behind it, needed to be
warned by the presence of the Mouse. A little farther north at the Lone Star
Performance Explosion, Houston’s International Performance Art Biennial, the
Non Grata performance group donned latex Mickey hoods/masks and trashed a
car with sledge hammers and explosives. I have to admit that this piece probably
has more impact live and that I’m kind of delighted by the vigor of their gesture.
But I want to draw attention to how Baudrillard’s once extraordinary theory has
achieved in certain circles a common acceptance.

The early postmodern up-side of this if you will, is that bursts of anti-Mickey
propaganda emerge from the margins to remind us of just where we really are.
These various incursions into Disney property found early expression in the
totally subversive and inspired Air Pirates work.

In these strips, Minnie and Mickey are caught in unguarded moments. We see
their life behind the spotlights. Of course, this only adds another layer of
confusion, because these comics fracture an imaginary world, but for a moment
the reader is able to say “I knew that they were really like that all along.”

But if Baudrillard sees us living in a delusional state, Fredric Jameson in his

1991 essay “Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” sees us
experiencing a kind of schizophrenia. He elucidates his view of our affectless
culture, which he suggests is built on the edifice of the late stage of capitalism.
He writes of the parameters of his project:

I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant
cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and
assessed…The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different
kinds of cultural impulses – what Raymond Williams has usefully termed
“residual” and “emergent” forms of cultural production – must make their way. If
we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back
into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a
coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable…The
exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive features of the
postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in
contemporary “theory” and in a whole new culture of the image or the
simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to
public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose
“schizophrenic” structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or
syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of
emotional ground tone – what I will call “intensities” – which can best be grasped
by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of
all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new
economic world system.

Jameson later discusses how a postmodern sublime encompasses the

relentlessly promulgating cultural media; film, TV, internet and electronic gadgets
of all kinds, which destabilize our sense of self and fracture our psyche. In the
arts, he sees only reproductions, which no longer parody their models, but rather
that are affectless pastiches which offer nothing but a reflection of the citizen,
who is now beyond-disaffected, beyond the neurosis of the existentialist, beyond
all expressionist’s anxiety and finally in a dazed state of psychosis.

Jameson points out that the sublime of postmodern is not the dark and brooding
place of the high romantics; it is not the depressed world of brooding heroes.
Somewhere along the line, all of that angst and personal introspection has been
replaced by another world of bright shiny surfaces, replicas and fragmented
visions in a world now experiencing another kind of psychic onslaught. Jameson
talks about the postmodern sublime as a type of container for all this madness,
which he describes as a type of schizophrenia. Some comic artists were ahead
of this curve. Newgarden seems to have nailed it, along with his cohorts at Raw.
In part under the intellectual guidance of Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman,
the french philosophical influence is evident in their editing.

Early Postmodern Shinings.

In a particularly postmodern way, a new insanity entered the pages of comics

and schizophrenia became the new model.I still remember my first encounters
with Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore’s (Rank Xerox) Ranxerox in 1978
and how I was still shocked by the unaffected violence.

Ranxerox was a mechanical creature made from Xerox photocopier parts and
there was a randomness in his acts of violence that seemed to have no self-
consciousness, no motivation and suggested a different sort of sociopathic
absence of rationality. He was in fact, the embodiment of the age of mechanical
reproduction. His violent acts were simply there, monstrously accumulating on
the pages and refusing to be contained in any prior system of logic. His surfaces
were shiny and he appeared smooth as if airbrushed into reality; he was
alternately sexual and violent.
 Ranxerox by Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore

The pantone pen technique used brought the character to life in a way that
separated Rank from the art of the fumetti style Italian horror comics, such
as Satanik and its predecessor Fantomas by Alain and Souvestre. The reader
and the characters in these comics were aware that certain boundaries were
being crossed, as they engaged and became archetypal villains, whereas in
Liberatore’s world the characters remain largely oblivious.
Another train rider of the early postmodern is Panter’s Jimbo, whose blank
ferocity reflects perfectly the explosion of media and the madness of everyday
life. Jimbo lives surrounded by shakily drawn monsters and aliens. His reality
environment sits between the real and the unreal.

Several years later in 1986 American bred, Elektra: Assassin, came to vivid and
stylishly bloody life in the hands of Bill Sienkiewicz. With Frank Miller’s script, her
madness was eroticized and melded with uncontained and unconscious violence.
Elektra, an understood schizophrenic, is seen in her hospital room, incapable of
managing her life. Unclear as to what or who she is (and of course this is Miller
nailing the post modern condition) while she pursues her day job as assassin and
her nights are spent in the confines of the institution. Her mental state is depicted
as something more akin to her natural condition. Sienkiewicz’ art is a tour de
force of photocopy, parody/pastiche and repetitions.
Sienkiewicz in what promised to be a new life for mainstream comics, used
different mediums and techniques that both reflected technological advances and
presented a comic that drew inspiration from myriad sources. The art is
constantly changing its style and represents a reaction to the seeming explosion
of new media as computers, satellites and early cell phones accelerated
communication.

However, as Jameson also notes in his essay, boundaries are no longer held in
check by any social mores, because we have been saturated and inured to
images of violence, sex and those things that were once held distasteful since we
have been institutionalized and sanctioned as part our lives. Jameson writes
about this cultural numbing:

As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be
stressed that its own offensive features – from obscurity and sexually explicit
material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political
defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most
extreme moments of high modernism – no longer scandalise anyone and are not
only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become
institutionalised and are at one with the official or public culture of Western
society.

The Late Postmodern or the Post post modern even.

Josh Bayer and Tom Neely depict beings who no longer feel while other cartoon
characters look out from the “secret prison” of Black Flag’s song. Nancy, Wimpy
and Little Orphan Annie, Krazy Kat, Jughead, Mutt, Jeff, Goofy and Mickey peer
out from behind bars while troubled figures lament how they have been ruined by
comics and how they no longer can feel anything. The past exists in the sampled
figures of cartoon culture. Dante is trampled underfoot and we are given a post-
postmodern hell. These images of madness question where we exist after the
punishment of the cartoon, what circle of media hell is home for us once we are
conscious. This is the schizophrenia of the postmodern that Jameson describes.
Al Columbia’s Pim and Francie perhaps sums it all up. They run not walk to the
sanatorium. Columbia’s characters are no longer in revolt, they are beyond that
cognitive choice. Rather they live in a world that does not differentiate morality
and feelings. Columbia draws snatches from various artists styles. They hover
ghostlike, pulled back from our collective memory as they sit on pages that are
torn, fragmented and abused in a confrontation of what it means to be a new
product. Jameson suggest that nothing is left to shock us, but I’d suggest that Al
Columbia does just that. In this final image the boy takes a straight razor to
Bambi. He eschews the choice of Mickey and assaults us in the soft spot. Bambi,
the sacred lamb, the sacred cow, the holy sanctified symbol of innocence, is
offered to the madness of the postpostmodern. Bambi’s limbs lie dismembered in
the grass and we are oh so close by, to see them.
 [1] http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765588670/Mickey-Mouse-takes-N-
Korean-stage-in-show.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9385901/North-
Korea-Kim-Jong-un-enjoys-unauthorised-Disney-show.html

[2] http://wouterkleinvelderman.blogspot.com/

Tags: Air Pirates, Al Columbia, Baudrillard, Ben Katchor, Elektra

Assassin, Fredrick Jameson, Gary Panter, Josh Bayer, Marguerite Van
Cook, Mark Newgarden, Mickey Mouse, Non Grata, post-
modernism, Ranxerox, sublime, Tom Neely
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15 COMMENTS

1. Skip Snow

July 12, 2012 at 12:27 pm

Great read. I think that Marguerite Van Cook dwells on the idea of postmodernism as a
response to a crisis of ontological identification, and the harm that ‘late stage’ capitalism
does to all of us. In this sense it is an economic analysis, and given how what looked like
late stage capitalism 30 years ago, when at least there was some sort of balancing force in
the counterbalance of the cold war, and what was still then a communist China, the extreme
form of global capitalism we currently suffer makes that world look almost attractive.
Consider another reading of postmodernism; one steeped more in the history of technology
than money. In this sense what if the journey to our current post-Gutenberg culture, where
the printed word has been usurped by the network. In this reading, the steps to
postmodernism thus far, were seminal but also in their infancy. While the network back
then, consisted mostly of broad cast networks of television, and reproductions were
achieved via capitalist franchises more than via linked sets of propaganda and content as
well as commerce that we travel these days.
 In this reading of postmodernism, one does not have to take a desperate position; one can
dismiss the institutions of power as morally irrelevant, and navigate a more community
based approach to life. I know that the aperture of the culture is a wreck, but despite this I
insist on living a good life can be the artist, and philosopher’s creed. I can strive to do good
work and establish my voice in eddies of our overlapping networked communities, can be a
means of distribution. This is not to say that we are not overwhelmed by the oligarchy of
money and power, it is to say we can live our lives ‘as if those crushing mechanisms did not
control so much of what we think. We can intervene in small ways by establishing our
voices outside the institutions of power, and propagate that voice across our networked
communities and step back and examine the effect of that. Our voice then becomes
somewhat striped of its context de-contextualized in some particular way, as the new voice
takes on a context unique to each community that the voice radiates within, even though the
voice radiates from one place i.e. the place of the subject.
For me, this offers hope, and can be mediated by thinking of the history of technology as
much as the history of the economy.

2. Noah Berlatsky

July 12, 2012 at 1:02 pm

Sorry about that Skip; your comment got caught in the filter for some reason. Please let me
know if it happens again – noahberlatsky at gmail.

3. Noah Berlatsky

July 12, 2012 at 8:08 pm

In terms of postmodernism as prison, or capitalism as unrelievedly bad…I think the thing

about postmodernism and capitalism — what makes them seductive and/or not necessarily
evil, depending on your perspective, is that they’re (a) enjoyable, and (b) anti-hierarchical —
or at least, anti certain hierarchies. So I don’t think it’s really the case that that last image of
stabbing Bambi is actually somehow shocking. I mean, it’s the sort of thing you expect to
 see in comics influenced by the underground; cute icons debased. It’s madness in some
ways I guess, but it’s also predictable; there are the cute icons, they are always debased.
And that debasement isn’t just horror; it’s also entertainment and/or liberation. The modern
is the grid; the postmodern is the absence of grid, which is both exciting because, hey, no
grid, let’s party…but also comforting, in that no grid is also in its own way a kind of grid.

4. Marguerite

July 13, 2012 at 6:25 am

Perhaps shocking is the wrong word; Al Columbia’s work is disturbing, maybe it is just
another form of horror. But, I think this might actually be the fly in Jameson’s argument,
which is after all written in 1991, 20 years ago, or a generation if you will. He’d be the first to
point to the importance of historicity, which is why I differentiated the period as a late stage
of postmodernism. The numbness is wearing off. Deleuze and Guatarri also postulate a
type of schizophrenic condition and suggest that only the schizophrenic (different to
Jameson’s) is equipped to function in the complexity of our “rhizomatic” times. Maybe
Columbia’s work is in that area.
However, I am “affected” by this work and it does still shock me. I suppose you are right that
we do expect see soft animals being harmed in “underground” comics, but it seems to me
Columbia’s choice of Bambi is significant, particularly in the context of the work. I think it is
part of the larger deer and antler fetish. The antler motif was everywhere for the last five
years and here it is turned back on itself. Bambi speaks to the woods and nature, so that
this is a more troubling gesture than killing Mickey, who simply represents capitalist
interests. This outrages nature rather than commerce. Self-harming, directed inwards rather
than out against the “grid.”

5. Noah Berlatsky

July 13, 2012 at 7:31 am

Part of the problem is that the underground and all its manifestations tend to just bore me.
Johnny Ryan’s the exception that tests the rule…he’s really not in general trying to be
 disturbing though. Exhilarating and creative and satiric…which are all also quintessentially
post-modern characteristics.

I’m trying to think of some comic that I found disturbing…Lilli Carrés “The Lagoon” maybe?
But that’s because of the queasy manipulation of genre tropes, not because of violence per
se. Red Hood and the Outlaws was disturbing in that it’s kind of depressing to find anything
that banal….

Violence in underground comics is just so about its own sensationalism and shockingness
that it’s hard to imagine how it could actually be shocking. — which is perhaps Jameson’s
point to some extent.

6. James

July 14, 2012 at 5:34 am

Noah: Are you saying that Al Columbia is underground?…if anything, he is alternative. The
only underground comic Marguerite showed here is Dan O’Niell’s Air Pirates page. If you
don’t find Columbia’s work disturbing, then I don’t know what could possibly crack your
shell. Or are you saying that all alternative/lit comics are just “manifestations” of the
underground?…that is absurd. And then saying that they are all “boring” except for Johnny
Ryan and Lilli Carré?…which is narrow and ridiculous. You are then dismissing and ignoring
everything that is interesting in comics today.

7. Noah Berlatsky

July 14, 2012 at 5:40 am

I tend to see stuff like Columbia as coming pretty strongly out of the underground. I don’t
think that everything in the alternative comics world would qualify (the Hernandez Bros and
Chris Ware and Dan Clowes all seem like they’re coming from a pretty different place in
various ways for example.)
 And I didn’t dismiss everything but Johnny Ryan and Lilli Carré! I was just saying that
they’re two artists I like and trying to figure out how they fit into some of Marguerite’s
formulations. I’m not even really dismissing Al Columbia…I haven’t seen a ton of his work,
and saying that it doesn’t disturb me isn’t the same as saying that it’s worthless, by any
means.

8. Noah Berlatsky

July 14, 2012 at 6:05 am

Oh, and later today I’m going to reprint an essay about a comic that disturbs me…

9. James Romberger

July 14, 2012 at 7:12 am

Ryan and some of Vice magazine’s other contributors such as R. Kern and Terry
Richardson often seem to slip over the line to being “into” the cruelty they depict. I think of it
as a sort of “Jeff Koons effect”….in much the same way, Koons “comments” on wealthy bad
taste by pandering to it; he enriches himself and significantly contributes to the amount of
shit on display.

10. Noah Berlatsky

July 14, 2012 at 7:18 am

I think there’s no doubt that there’s sadism in Johnny’s work. It’s not, or not only, sadism
directed at the weak though…and it’s also really inventive and weird. It’s like if a really,
really smart 12 year old controlled the world…whcih I guess some people would see as an
insult, but I very much don’t.
11. James Romberger

July 14, 2012 at 7:37 am

Not all smart 12 year olds are like that, I hope…..the example Marguerite used with Bambi
reminds me of what serial killers get up to as children: torturing animals. Columbia’s work
on Pim and Francie seems descended less from underground comics and more like
fragments from a film worked on after hours by Fleischer Bros-type animators, ones who
were terribly abused as children and who apply what was done to them to their work. I find it
profoundly disturbing, but despite Columbia’s rep for occultism it doesn’t feel like he’s “into”
what he draws, rather that he is expelling what is making him suffer.

12. Noah Berlatsky

July 14, 2012 at 9:00 am

I agree that Columbia seems to be suffering/compelled — but again, that seems like
continuous with the underground tradition in a lot of ways. I think it’s hard, too, to separate
out the sadism and the suffering in this kind of black humor work — there’s definitely a
hatred of the evil grid/father, but that’s also envy of the evil grid/father — Columbia is both
the one suffering and the one turning the screws.

One of the things I like about Ryan is the refusal of the confessional mode. It seems more
honest to me…in part because it embraces/acknowledges the pleasures of the post-
modern….

13. Jones, one of the Jones boys

July 16, 2012 at 10:55 am

I’d have thought Columbia’s subversion of 1930s/40s animation placed him squarely in the
tradition of Crumb and Deitch, and thus influenced by (at least parts of) the undergrounds.
But strict membership in the “underground” seems to me a matter of when and where you
 were publishing, which would mean that Columbia wasn’t really part of the underground as
such.

And a qualification to Noah’s description of Ryan: some of his stuff from the later 00s and
onwards –e.g The Miracle — does seem designed to unsettle and disturb, but as a kind of
horror rather than as merely epater-ing les bourgeois.

14. james

July 16, 2012 at 1:47 pm

I fail to see why someone clearly influenced by the animated sources that also influenced
Crumb and Deitch means automatically that they are influenced by the influenced…any
more than a contemporary artist who parodies Mickey Mouse must be influenced by the Air
Pirates. No and no. Al Columbia and Milton Knight draw “similarly,” because they obviously
like some of the same stuff, but I can’t assume they are familiar with each other’s
works…thematically they have nothing in common. And, the alternative is not the
underground and not just because there is hopefully less sexism and humor about dope.
The underground doesn’t exist; Crumb and Spiegelman are now the establishment.

15. james

July 16, 2012 at 3:49 pm

I mean, Jones talked himself out of the point he was making, but still. And I don’t much in
common between the works of Crumb and Deitch other than that they were both in the
underground, years ago.