Can someone gloss the movement from 'unrepeatable genius' (Anderson, 93) and 'great individual signatures and master-works...[and] norms of charisma' (Anderson, 63) to the postmodern alternative (whatever that is)? I have a very stupid reading of it - 'Geniuses have gone extinct!' - and an equally stupid refutation, which basically involves providing examples of authors and artists and directors that I think of as geniuses. I understand that more is going on there, but the above reading/refutation is just a kneejerk that I deliver every time an author touches on the 'genius question.'

When Anderson writes about it in terms of the odd-bedfellowship of 'high' culture and low culture and markets, the movement feels like one from oppositionalism (of 'the elective ground of the artist' against 'the //terrains vagues// beyond' [93]) to the sort of qualified 'populism' that Jameson identifies in po-mo architecture. Other times Anderson writes about it as a movement from 'delimitation' and 'demarcation' to 'intermixture....the cross-over, the hybrid, the potpourri' (I say 'other times,' but in fact Anderson writes about this on the same page as my other examples, 93). Still 'other times,' as a movement from exclusion to inclusion (of e.g. 'women, ethnic and other minorities, immigrants...[who have] gained access to the postmodern forms [63]). Each of these seems like a fairly clear movement, but I find myself wondering what the status of a populist, hybridized, immigrant female minority 'genius' is, or whether that's some contradiction of the term.

Obviously we still have institutions like the MacArthur Fellowship (i.e. 'genius grants'), or, as Harvey points out, an art market 'ever more conscious of the monopoly power of the artist's signature and of questions of authenticity and forgery' even in the teeth of postmodern proclamations Re 'the "death of the author" and the rise of anti-auratic art' (Harvey, 292). So when authors talk about any kind of dissolution of the cult of genius, do they mean by 'genius' some specifically Modern, anti-bourgeois, innate, exclusive, manifestoed property that inhered in that period's geniuses, and that, by the very nature of Postmodern '//embourgeoisement//' and '//encanaillement//' leveling processes (Anderson, 86), of hybridization and inclusiveness, of capitalization of culture, just loses all meaning now? If so, I can see how the populist, hybridized, immigrant female minority 'genius' would be like a five-antonym pileup on the Modern sense of the word, and how we could talk about a movement out of specifically Modern genius cults.

But do these authors also, or alternatively, mean by 'genius' the very non-rigorous, MacArthur Fellowship, backjacket blurb thing that I mean by genius, i.e. usually something along the lines of 'spectacular! sheer wizardry!' or 'no one does it like her!' (see, for instance, the tagline in the trailer for Polanski's //The Tenant//: 'No one does it to you like Roman Polanski!', Polanski being one director I might speak freely and generously of 'the genius' of, since no one does it to me like him), whenever I say, in irreflection, and dailiness, 'X is a genius'? And if they do mean by 'genius,' and the dissolution of the cult of genius, some dissolution of the above, //is// there any refutation to be found in the hardiness of the term, in institutions like MacArthur Fellowships, and art marketability, and readerly invested interests in singling out authors, directors, painters, et al. as 'geniuses'?

Perhaps someone else who had similar head-scratching moments when reading these passages, or who has trouble even now comprehending what in these passages there is to scratch my head over, can address the question.

--Guattari Hero