POSTMODERNISM
This is a
notoriously confusing subject. By design.
Postmodernism
is epistemological skepticism. Epistemology is “how we know what we know,” or how
we achieve knowledge. Traditional philosophical skepticism is what we'd call “ontological
skepticism.” Ontology is the nature of what is. George Berkeley (1713), for
example, argued that the real world did not, in fact, exist. He attacked the
five senses as being unreliable and subject to mistake and concludes that there
is no world outside of “Mind.”
The most
famous response to this kind of skepticism is that of Samuel Johnson. According
to Boswell (1791):
“After we came out of the church,
we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious
sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every
thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed,
that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to
refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered,
striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded
from it, 'I refute it THUS.'”
Postmodernism
often avoids such debates by refusing to state for certain that the world does
not exist. Rosenau (1992) argues that it “rejects
epistemological assumptions, refutes methodological conventions, resists
knowledge claims, [and] obscures all versions of truth” (p. 3).
Much of
postmodernism is inspired by Saussure's (1916) observation that words have an
arbitrary relationship with the things they represent. Language is thus like
Berkeley's faulty senses for the postmodernists who will emerge in the 1960s in
Europe and the 1980s in the United States.
Jacques
Derrida (1967) initiates deconstruction as a linguistic critique of
presumptions of certainty. He reads a text and picks it apart, showing where it
fragments, showing where it is intertextual, showing where it has multiple
meanings and where it fails to make sense. He was interested in demonstrating
the ways the human knowledge, which comes largely through language or other
signs systems, is arbitrary. He never precisely claimed the world isn't real,
the way Berkeley did, but he resisted all efforts to prove that it was.
Postmodernism
gets is name from modernism or modernity, what has
been called the ongoing project of the 18th century Enlightenment. European
intellectual circles were filled with this metaphor of light, that reason and
science and logic would solve the problems of the world, would know all that
was to be known. This sense of the glorious march of reason and science was
amplified in the 20thcentury, as technological developments seemed
to offer various other potential utopian solutions, from Disnyeland's
House of the Future to the Green revolution of fertilizer-based agriculture, to
nuclear power to rockets to the moon. The term “modern” became the word used to
differentiate the “now,” the now of reason and technology, from the seemingly simpel and ignorant “pre-modern” times. Modernity
symbolized for its faithful a clear break with history. Postmodernism gets it name from its critique of this.
So
Derrida's post-structuralism becomes a larger project of post-modernism. Jean Baudrillard (1996), for example, argues that our world is
composed of a third order of simulation, called simulacra. There are Saussure's
things and words (signs), but on top of that there are words about words and
images, of signs about signs. Disneyland has a Main Street USA which the train
ride around the park says is “what small town America was like 100 years ago”
(https://mouskaholic.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/mk-main-street-usa.jpg)
But let's
be postmodern here. How do we know this? Which small town? In
whose memories? Based on which films or pictures or glorified
remembrances of things past? Disneyland is a simulation. Baudrillard's
project is to point out all of the unreality of the world, to show that
everything is like Disneyland, that everything is a simulation,
that we live in what he calls hyperreality.
Let's
pause here for a minute. We might call Derrida's linguistic project and Baudrillard's social project postmodernisms. They are -isms
because they are views of the world and critiques of it.
Jean-Francois
Lyotard (1984), on the other hand, goes further. He
argues that the entire world has become this way. We are all spreading this
critique. In Baudrillard's version of that idea,
everything is becoming Disneyland (His book is the one the Neo opens in the
first scenes of The Matrix).
Everything is becoming self-referential and ironic and thus further and further
from whatever we might hope to prove is reality. For Lyotard,
there is a decline in "metanarratives," or larger explanatory
bodies of thought (examples are organized religion, Marxism, democracy, etc.).
We are in a state of continual fragmentation.
For example, maybe you are a feminist but you still listen to Howard Stern.
Maybe you believe in democracy but you don’t vote. Maybe you take on different
false identities on the Internet. So not only are our identities fragmenting,
but so is popular culture. This fragmentation means we are living in what Lyotard thinks of as “the postmodern condition.” We have
all become skeptics. We live in a spreading postmodernity, a continual
critique.
Okay. But
that is more complex than Derrida and Berkeley on one side saying gravity
doesn't exist and you and Dr. Johnson on the other telling them to jump out the
window. If Lyotard is right you have a sneaking
suspicion that you can't be sure the world exists the way you think. Kroker, Kroker and Cook (1989)
argue that thus the key sensation of the contemporary world is panic. They and Baudrillard argue that we are desperate to prove that the
world is real, to find “the
real” we doubt. Baudrillard argues that we go to war in the Middle East to
prove it. He argues that we try to assassinate presidents because of it.
Perhaps that is a bit much, but Robert Bly (1990) took men into the woods to
sweat and bark at the moon to discover the “real” roots of a manliness that had
been lost in the chaos of culture.
So how
chaotic and postmodern is contemporary culture? Postmodernists who think the
world is becoming more and more postmodern (the Krokers)
point to the increasingly self-referential nature of cultural products. John
Stewart constantly says he is does the “fake” news. Yet people seem to trust
him more than “real” news. There are so many parodies and satire in the
Blockbuster comedy section. The
Family Guy is almost entirely
self-referential. Because there is a distinction between the moments, as if the
John Stewart commenting on his fake news knows something the news-version of himself that was just reporting does not, there is a key
kind of irony in postmodernism. It seems, in the end,
as if only irony is left.
This is
especially true given the ways texts fragment and connect. Think about
something like Pulp Fiction.
Here is a film that is composed mostly of references to other movies and TV
shows. Very little of the plot or dialogue is very original. The idea is that
in postmodernity even the stories that make up our popular culture have
fragmented. Everything is just an assemblage of different pieces. Does this
mean it is less artistic? No. It just means that we are in a place in time when
radical originality is no longer possible. We are in a state of intertextuality, a state where
every text is composed of numerous other texts. All texts speak to each other
in this huge web of signification. So in a Buffy,
the Vampire Slayer episode, a character looks at a picture of
a big vampire/demon and says "We’re gonna need a
bigger boat." This is the line in Jaws when Chief Brody first sees how
big the shark is. But Jaws is a monster movie about a
predator with teeth. The original movie monsters were all toothy vampires, the
first of which were in Vampyr and Nosferatu. Those vampires were
pale white and had faces like rats, just like the Master and other vampires in Buffy. Are there any texts that don't refer
to other texts anymore?
One last confusion of terms to clear up. Many of
these postmodern elements of cultural texts, like irony, fragmentation, self-referentiality and the skepticism toward narrative (meta-
or otherwise) are undertaken purposefully by writers, poets, artists, architects
and musicians even before the 20th century.
Often this work is called “modernism.” Well, that's confusing. It can't be
helped, though. People seem to like to call what they are doing modern to feel
important and different.
And then
someone comes along and critiques it and calls what they are doing postmodern.
by Steve Vrooman, revised
June 2010
References
Berkeley, G. (1713). Three dialogues
between Hylas and Philonous. http://www.sacred-texts.com/phi/berkeley/three.txt.
Bly,R. (1990). Iron John: A book about men. Persues.
Boswell, J. (1791). The life of
Johnson. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1564/1564-h/1564-h.htm.
Rosenau, P. (1992). Post-modernism
and the social sciences. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Saussure, F. (1916). Course in general linguistics. http://books.google.com/books?id=B0eB8mvov6wC&lpg=PP1&ots=FktdYRWLhE&dq=saussure%20course&pg=PR4#v=onepage&q&f=false
Derrida,
J. (1976). Of
grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Baudrillard, J. (1996). Simulacra and
simulation. U of Michigan P.
Lyotard, J. (1984). The post-modern
condition. U of Minnesota P.
Kroker, A., Kroker, M, & Cook, D. (1989). Panic encyclopedia: The definitive guide to
the postmodern scene. New York: St. Martin's.