Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 23

Lear's Vision of Modern Maturity

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modernism; it is, alas, old fashioned. To examine Lear's with
reference to a schematic of the differences between modernism and
postmodernism (see Harvey 43) is to discover that the magazine
operates in a capitalist rather than a postcapitalist mode, clearly
purposeful in its definition and expansion of market share. A
romantic exercise of symbolism, Lear's hasn't a Dadaist bone in its
editorial body. Lear's and a woman for Lear's are art objects, finished
work, rather than performances, evolving processes. TTiis magazine
rigidly adheres to genre boundaries and is remarkably free of
intertextual play for a piece of contemporary popular culture. It fears
anarchy and retreats to hierarchies only partly of its own definition.
It deals in genital sexuality rather than in androgyny. While it
invokes the postmodernist persistence of the present, it indulges in
very little textual looting of the past and nostalgic writing of the
present into the past. Lear’s, at bottom, is about the business of
reading rather than writing, semantics rather than rhetoric.
Propelled by angst rather than desire, Lear's wallows in optimism
rather than indulging in jouissance. Lear’s traffics more in metaphor
than in meton)mty, more in paranoia than in schizophrenia, more in
the signified than in the signifier, more in metaphysics than in irony,
more in determinacy than in indeterminacy, more in centering than in
dispersal, more in transcendence than in imminence.
Nowhere is Lear’s modernist foundation more clearly manifest
than in its faith in the individual. The author, of the magazine and
of the identity of the individual, is very much alive in the pages of
Lear's. From the first issue's manifesto (quoted in the epigraph) to
the most recent issue, the magazine affects an avant-garde p>osture.
While assuming a conventional posture with regard to the women's
movement, it seeks revolutionary trappings with respect to women
over 40, defining and exp>anding the cause in terms of opposition to
"they," an oppressive establishment that supports the youth culture,
if not at the direct expense, clearly to the disadvantage of the woman
over 40. Lear's seeks the status of a subversive px)wer within the
established order. When the recognition of the beauty and experience
of women over 40 becomes conventionalized, when they as a group
achieve their independence from the economic and social definition of
the general culture, then Lear's will be robbed of its subversive power,
its raison d'etre, and, most importantly, its market.