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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