You shouldn’t feel confident that you have grasped the
meaning of the word postmodernism until you can 1), explain why the term
cannot be defined in a sharply focused way; and 2), nonetheless explain it with
reference to a small range of examples.
We can say that postmodernism is what you get if you add
up a number of significant historical yet contemporary phenomena in such a way
that the result is more than the sum of the parts. You couldn’t, therefore, explain postmodernism by just using one
of these diverse phenomena. Some of the
phenomena can be regarded as “finding problems with” or problematizing. But postmodernism is not just a skeptical
response to what came before it. The
key phenomena of postmodernism should be understood as affirmations.
A phenomenon is
something that appears, i.e., we must be aware of its existence in some
form. The question of whether the thing
corresponds to the form in which it appears is of no matter for the moment, but
it will become crucial. The phenomena
of postmodernism take a wide variety of forms and must be found across a number
of domains, so we will be drawing on theory (and philosophy); writing (literary
and popular); history and politics (world historical developments in the wake
of modernity and colonialism); architecture (and urbanism); mass media; visual
culture (photography, film, electronic media); and society. Each of these domains impact on postmodernism
in differing ways but none of them should be left out, for reasons that will
become clearer but having essentially to do with the problem of boundaries and
frontiers, hence the first phenomenon:
If we begin now with our distinction between “modern” and
“postmodern” we will eventually be in a position to define the differences
between them properly, but we should not go too fast. Defining a difference is the same as drawing a boundary and
defending a frontier and, as we know from the field of politics and history,
boundaries and frontiers are not discovered; they are asserted, policed and
legislated. One of the most persistent
phenomena associated with postmodernism concerns the problematization of the
way frontiers are asserted, policed, and maintained. In philosophy the difference between concepts, for instance, must
be kept as clear and distinct as possible (ideally, of course, absolutely
so). Sometimes this is possible but
never without the threat of confusion.
The threat of confusion, from a postmodernist point of view, turns up as
being at the same time the possibility of clarity, so we would not want to push
it to the outside in the way that philosophy has until recently persistently
attempted to do. This would be the
first instance of the difference between modern and postmodern. The former would keep a boundary secure
between what is valued and what threatens the valued thing. The latter has begun to realize—in all kinds
of different ways—that this strategy of inclusion and exclusion tends to be built
on paradoxical grounds that, in the full logic of the paradox, must include as
part of its own condition the thing that is perceived as a threat, hence the
second phenomenon.
If the grounds of our exclusions and inclusions (and the
frontiers and boundaries we draw between them) are paradoxical then we need to
rethink the whole notion of grounds—along with notions like foundation, origin,
beginning, etc. One of the most starkly
consistent yet despised phenomena of postmodernism can be understood as the
general disappearance of notions of origin, source, ground and foundation. In fact such grounds often turn out to have
been cleverly disguised theoretical fictions—inventions disguised as facts—and
are often revealed in the great myths that have governed our attitudes to the
world in general for thousands of years.
Recently these kinds of myths have been identified as the basis for
“grand narratives” (examples of which include not only the great world
religions but also the philosophical and political narratives of progress
and/or revolution, like Humanism, Marxism, Communism, and most recently,
liberalism. A grand narrative does not
just appear in terms of myths of foundation but also in terms of myths of
destination.
3. Problematizing Destinations
A destination
(look out for the etymological echo with destiny) is some time or place or
condition that a modern would have marked out in advance or assumed would be
marked out in advance even if it is not visible as such. In literature, for instance, it is
traditionally assumed that the author has already determined where his or her
readers are going to end up. In that
case the potential for reading is economized upon as much as possible,
we cannot have too many wayward readers for a classical text, according to that
assumption. However, from the
postmodernist perspective, you cannot divorce the potential for reading from
the possibilities of writing generally.
No possible waywardness? Then no
straight and narrow either. There are
two postmodernist responses in the sphere of literature. The first is the strategy of reading
differently—you might read according to the conditions of possibility for
reading (see Roland Barthes and poststructuralists like Julia Kristeva and
others, and see deconstruction). The
second is the strategy of writing differently, that is, writing according to
the conditions that make writing possible.
Here you get the first of our affirmations:
The performative
is that aspect of a text or institution that can be revealed at the level of
its functioning or acting—it is institution in act. On this we witness a major turnaround
between modern and postmodern conceptions.
For a classical or modern frame of mind (in Singapore you say “mindset”)
our actions, thoughts, perceptions etc., all come from a deeper determination
(God, the Good, Freedom, Law, the Author, Sovereign, etc.,). This conception can be generalized as the
difference between the empirical (experience) and the transcendental (the realm
according to which the empirical is constructed and determined). Certain sociologists like to think that they
can do without a notion of the transcendental altogether and they therefore
busy themselves by dismissing all abstract philosophy and theory and referring
only to “real life,” which they sometimes say is, “out there.” With the “inductive” method you can gather
your information until you have enough to make a secure generalization (for
instance you might make a general hypothesis about increasing economic
returns on the following observation: shopping centers in Singapore tend to
each specialize in a particular kind of product, e.g. shoes or specs; therefore
the economic return is likely to be greater if you set up shop in a place where
shops selling your product already do a roaring trade). However this method betrays a concept of
empirical-transcendental difference in two ways. First the aim is to tease out underlying laws (the laws according
to which you get all these specs shops in the same place). Secondly, a notion of “life” is introduced
in advance as “that which appears,” a notion that in advance determines the
relations between objects as “empirical entities” and which, thus, governs the
laws at which you want to arrive. The
empirical thus becomes the unquestioned transcendental of the transcendental
(the laws). In other words the whole
thing is entirely consumed in its own circularity (you get all these specs
shops in one place because there are all these specs shops in one place). Postmodernism takes a completely different
tack. The relation between empirical
and transcendental (real X ideal; concrete X abstract; etc.) is replaced
entirely by a conception of the difference between an event (whether
it’s an action or a statement) and its performance. The performance of an event is
discovered when you see its actual conditions of possibility, which are performance
itself. It’s like watching a bad soap
opera on television. You no longer see
the characters but you see actors with props speaking memorized lines. The performative draws attention to
performativity in general. So with our
(“straw-man”) sociologist we see that, in the performative dimension, the
meaning of the exercise—discovering underlying laws—serves (or functions)
to ground a humanities academic activity is a way that makes it look as
if it’s a scientific one (allowing the academic institution to call its
humanities faculty a social science one instead). The social sciences thus produce a simulation of the
sciences at the performative level on the assumption that we will only pay
attention to the level of the statement and its subject (i.e., the wonderful
insight about specs shops in Singapore shopping malls). Performativity has been discovered in the
way it functions by many so-called postmodern thinkers. Michel Foucault, for instance, showed that
the the Prison System in Europe functions to reinforce and maintain the
authority of the law by pathologizing crime (a criminal is treated by a range
of disciplines—medical, psychological, sociological—in much the same way that
all modern subjects are, in so far as they are members of an institution, so
students and their examinations and record cards serve to maintain the
disciplinary normativity of the institution at the level of its own
performativity). Postmodernist texts,
on the contrary, expose and affirm the conditions of their own performativity
and thus we find a significant number of incidences of self-reflexivity.
5. Self-Reflexivity (or
Auto-Referentiality).
At this stage we should draw attention to another
important distinction. What we have
thus far been concerned with can be grasped as a kind of intentional
postmodernism—a postmodernism that knows what it is doing. This, of course, is not the intentionality
of traditional critics and philosophers who need to know what’s going to come
out in the end. Rather, a certain
amount of not knowing has become essential, but this is of a very
special kind and not an excuse for ignorance or silliness, as some people have
thought. The not knowing
concerns the problematised aspects: frontiers, origins and destinations. This openness to what lies outside, this
refusal to settle on a mythical origin, this expectation of surprise instead of
destination, each of these can be grasped as characteristic of
postmodernism. But postmodernism has
come to mean, also, something perhaps better described as the postmodern
condition. Here postmodernism
would not be intentional but more the function of the condition of things as
they are today. So postmodern culture
exhibits a tendency to compulsively refer to itself (auto-referentiality): TV
is about TV at its performative level; Cinema is about Cinema; buildings refer
to their being buildings in a way that produces, each time, an unintentional
satire, a tissue of empty quotations where even values become iconic
representations for the purposes of reference (and self-reference) and have no
intrinsic value in themselves. But because
of the curious overlapping between intentional (enlightened, knowing and
self-knowing) postmodernism and the one that seems little more than the empty
circulation of images and commodities in the era of high capitalism we have
learned to be rather cautious when condemning things out of hand.
At first sight
it looks as if we have the ingredients for constructing a paradigm of good and
bad postmodernism—the first a knowing, educated, sophisticated irony about who
and what and where we are—a playful but fundamentally ethical affirmation of
repetition and difference, sampling, citing, quoting and simulating existence
with no origin or with origin already in representation, with no identity but
what emerges out of repetition and difference (history as repetition, origin as
difference). The second would thus be
the bad, the empty repetitions of image and simulacrum circulating without
end. But that wouldn’t be very
postmodernist. The charge against the
empty repetition would be made from the classical or modern perspective,
desiring of a ground for its own fullness, for its own depth of purpose and
essence, its own emptiness reflected back to it as its own perverse double
(which it is). Capitalism comes out of
modernity—it is not an accident that happens to it as if from some hostile
outside. Instead we have to find a way
of remaining true to the systems we repeat (classical and modern systems) while
affirming what they could not affirm—the repeatability that produces both the
good and bad as repetitions of the same.
So we add up a number of
phenomena. In the example of literary
theory we might trace a number of developments that are not necessarily that
clearly related but nonetheless add up to the situation we call postmodernism
today.
The
Rhetorical Ground
A recent return of
interest to the ancient art of rhetoric (or persuasion) illustrates the kind of
ground that postmodernism has replaced the old classical and modern grounds
with. In fact rhetoric has always grounded
all knowledge and experience—even the devaluation of rhetoric in the elevation
of a transcendental idea is rhetorical.
So we can follow tropes, decipher images, trace patterns as they assert,
maintain and deny arguments and institutions of all kinds. Remember here that we follow the pattern of
substitutions (tropes) and thus we remain in the general field of repetition.
What
we learn from Structuralism (but that is not the only discourse that would
teach us this) is that we begin with the doubling into signifier/signified,
performative/performed, enunciation/statement, that so much of the
postmodernist turn emphasizes—there is no origin as such but for this
infernal interminable, doubling repetition.
The signifier is, thus, not a static, objectifiable, material empirical
unit, but the performance of some statement in an institutionalized setting.
The
most profound lesson of psychoanalysis—our unconscious is that which reveals
the function of conscious, intentional statements and actions. The deep underside of consciousness is
nothing more than the locus of substitutions.
Deconstruction is one of
the names for the conditions that have replaced the classical and modern
concepts of ground, origin and destination—iterability (repeatability in
difference) is another. In this sense
deconstruction might be the ground of postmodernism.
Simulation and
Performative
It may be that Jean
Baudrillard presents us with a rather pessimistic outlook upon a world without
value, without thought, a world where behind the surface of its shifting images
lies no alternative depth, no solid ground, no reality as such, no body. In this sense, the world is already
naked—what you see is what you get and nothing beyond the shifting
auto-referentiality of the electronic image occupies the space once reserved
(in classical and modern times) for reference.
However, if this is all
we see then we have failed to account for the performative aspect of
Baudrillard’s presentation—his thought and the assertion of a value over and
above both the mythical values of the tradition and the empty values of the
commodity as image—the value of a critical thinking that has become aware of
the conditions of its own production and has learned to affirm
them—postmodernism.
Links
Postmodernism and
Postcolonialism: my page.
Mary Klages’ Postmodernism
site at Colorado is useful short overview that won’t send you too far astray.
Alan Liu’s Lyotard
Auto-Différend Page is an example of postmodern experimentation in itself.
The most radical and
probably most effective form that postmodernism takes would be in the works of
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose collaborations from the late 1960s
through to their last works in the 90s have created the most significant impact—they
are still, needless to say, not well understood.
Deleuze and
Guattari on the Web contains a wide range of very useful links for those
who want to explore.
The same guy (Alan
Taylor) has done the same for Baudrillard: Baudrillard on the
Web.