Late-modernism must combat the tyranny of literary criticism, the tyranny of editors, and the tyranny of editorial staffs. No literary critic, anywhere in the world, has managed to provide a meaningful interpretation to my riot text, “Have you lost your tongue?” Ultimately, the artist’s authentic (“objective”) interpretation had to intervene, a higher level than any “subjective” interpretation by the octogenarian literary critic, who hasn’t realized, in 2025, that literary criticism has undergone a shift toward pragmatic criticism, just as, within semiotics, semantics has shifted toward pragmatics. Late-modernism, having abandoned literary criticism, an anachronism of modern aesthetic ontology, relies on pragmatics (Levinsonon) and the theory of argumentation (Habermas/Apel), it relies on the “subjective” participatory argumentation of art communities, bunds, kolektivne, assemblies open to every artist (self-defined, susceptible to aesthetic verification/falsification), anonymous, aedic, far from the ego-pathism of modern aesthetic ontology. To create in the reader, in the expert, in the modernist a state of «shock, shame, fear, and anger», through hyper-organized strategies of aesthetic attack: “dedoublement de Man”, šklovskijana ostranenie, anti-neo-consumerist aesthetic guerrilla marketing, bakhtinian carnivalization, lucinian ho-humor/irony, quotationism, mixed-language, generative grammar (Chomsky), subversion/eversion (the anarcho-individualism of Post-Left Anarchy), malinowskian anthropological, sociological (Chicago School), ethnological (Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and Mead’s interactionism) model of participant observation, existential polyphony, anti-ego-centrism, hareian clearity, détournement, trans-semantic inversion, anger as a request for identity recognition, claim for a «neurodiversity» autistic and sociopathic, oscillating artistic and theoretical burnout (exhaustion/ attack, exhaustion/ attack, exhaustion/ attack), Mayakovsky interventionism/actionism, comital concionalitas, rhizosomatic destructuring (Deleuze), schizophrenic deterritorialization (Guattari), internationalism as anti-imperialist or counter-hegemonic postcolonialism (Appiah and Appadurai), invective, neologism, exaltation of trash, desecration, overlapping of registers and systemic nonsense (Pynchon), oulipian reversal (Perec), anti-metaphysics and anti-ontologism (analytic, Putnam and Rorty); far from the hyper-modernist pastiche (παρῳδία) – as erroneously defined by Linguaglossa – which is founded on “imitation” (Βατραχομυομαχία), “incorporation”, “falsehood”, “reiteration” (Raymond Queneau), “intertextuality/ metatextuality/ architextuality/ paratextuality/ hypertextuality” (Gérard Genette), and “humor” (Terry Pratchett and Seth Grahame-Smith), late-modernism is a literary “potpourri”. Late-modernism transcends postmodernism and hypermodernity by employing a tactic of thermonuclear overload: linguistic overload (David Foster Wallace), hypertrophication of meanings, antinomic overload of theoretical foundations, trashy brutalization, pushed to the extreme of exhaustion, of ordinary language; the tactical aim of overload is to short-circuit the seductive aesthetics, business poetry, of the modernist Papal State, servant of the artistic Camorra, of the mechanisms of dissatisfaction of desire of the neo-consumerist structure, of the commodification of art, of craftiness. Late-modernism, with its conception of art as “social interaction”, attempts to introduce a militant blockade, and military hijacking, such as to cease all bureaucratic support for the seductiveness of “elegiac poetry” and the extreme ὕβρις of the “amateurish self-language” of Rubik’s epigonism, in a situation of a saturated market and verses, expiring after six months, destined for the incinerator, unread (empty of meaning). The solution is not a new aesthetic ontology, close to the old modern aesthetic ontology: it is a new socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology, engaged, far from any dystopian performativity. Late-modernism is atopic.
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Ivan Pozzoni
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THE POETRY BUSINESS
The Pragmatists led by the Americans, William James
and Charles Sanders Peirce (both with beards)
can find a way to justify anything on the basis
of utility, while the Post Modernists, more European
are willing to smooth over the cracks and disappear
the differences between the subject and the object
in the name of being clever dicks. I take issue
with the way in which the modern market ideology
has insinuated itself into our most basic (and primal)
spaces and my retreat into quietness is in part
a response to the cacophony of traffic which passes
beneath my window. I do not know where
modernism ends and becomes an afterword. A
Pragmatist would explain away the question
Comment by Steven Taylor on 18 August, 2026 at 6:49 amby saying the village had to be destroyed
in order to save it from the Marxists who
are hiding in the jungle with their clippers. We
are not in the business of being but becoming.
Love it.
Comment by Editor on 18 August, 2026 at 8:32 amLove me
Comment by Ivan Pozzoni on 22 August, 2026 at 10:07 am