Alan Kirby The Death of Postmodernism
And Beyond
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm
Alan Kirby says
postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of
authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and
contemporary social forces.
I have in front of me a module description downloaded from a British
university English departments website. It includes details of assignments and
a week-by-week reading list for the optional module Postmodern Fictions, and
if the university is to remain nameless here its not because the module is in
any way shameful but that it handily represents modules or module parts which
will be taught in virtually every English department in the land this coming
academic year. It assumes that postmodernism is alive, thriving and kicking: it
says it will introduce the general topics of postmodernism and
postmodernity by examining their relationship to the contemporary writing of
fiction. This might suggest that postmodernism is contemporary, but the
comparison actually shows that it is dead and buried.
Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge.
This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and
an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over
has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially
asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more,
and from now on were going to believe in critical realism. The weakness in
this analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and
suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to
shift and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to
stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. However,
a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead by looking
outside the academy at current cultural production.
Most of the undergraduates who will take Postmodern Fictions this year will
have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the modules primary texts
were written before their lifetime. Far from being contemporary, these texts
were published in another world, before the students were born: The French
Lieutenants Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winters Night
a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade
Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dads culture. Some of the
texts (The Library of Babel) were written even before their parents were
born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts Beloved, Flauberts
Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse
5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson and the
same applies. Its all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder
pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just
coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do
not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media
mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to
put a man on the moon which todays undergraduates take for granted.
The reason why the primary reading on British postmodernism fictions
modules is so old, in relative terms, is that it has not been rejuvenated. Just
look out into the cultural market-place: buy novels published in the last five
years, watch a twenty-first century film, listen to the latest music above
all just sit and watch television for a week and you will hardly catch a
glimpse of postmodernism. Similarly, one can go to literary conferences (as I
did in July) and sit through a dozen papers which make no mention of Theory, of
Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard. The sense of superannuation, of the impotence
and the irrelevance of so much Theory among academics, also bears testimony to
the passing of postmodernism. The people who produce the cultural material
which academics and non-academics read, watch and listen to, have simply given
up on postmodernism. The occasional metafictional or self-conscious text will
appear, to widespread indifference like Bret Easton Ellis Lunar Park
but then modernist novels, now long forgotten, were still being written into
the 1950s and 60s. The only place where the postmodern is extant is in
childrens cartoons like Shrek and The Incredibles, as a sop to
parents obliged to sit through them with their toddlers. This is the level to
which postmodernism has sunk; a source of marginal gags in pop culture aimed at
the under-eights.
Whats Post Postmodernism?
I believe there is more to this shift than a simple change in cultural
fashion. The terms by which authority, knowledge, selfhood, reality and time
are conceived have been altered, suddenly and forever. There is now a gulf
between most lecturers and their students akin to the one which appeared in the
late 1960s, but not for the same kind of reason. The shift from modernism to
postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of
cultural production and reception; all that happened, to rhetorically
exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written Ulysses and
To the Lighthouse wrote Pale Fire and The Bloody Chamber
instead. But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new
technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author,
the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.
Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie
placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict
or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises
the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or
whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture;
pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural
products thereby generated (at least so far).
Let me explain. Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a
spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions
of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the
cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes
the individuals action the necessary condition of the cultural product.
Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of
programmes, all texts, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed
by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with
their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a
telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan
are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).
By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist
unless the individual intervenes physically in them. Great Expectations
will exist materially whether anyone reads it or not. Once Dickens had finished
writing it and the publisher released it into the world, its material
textuality its selection of words was made and finished, even though its
meanings, how people interpret it, would remain largely up for grabs. Its
material production and its constitution were decided by its suppliers, that
is, its author, publisher, serialiser etc alone only the meaning was the
domain of the reader. Big Brother on the other hand, to take a typical
pseudo-modern cultural text, would not exist materially if nobody phoned up to
vote its contestants off. Voting is thus part of the material textuality of the
programme the telephoning viewers write the programme themselves. If it were
not possible for viewers to write sections of Big Brother, it would then
uncannily resemble an Andy Warhol film: neurotic, youthful exhibitionists
inertly bitching and talking aimlessly in rooms for hour after hour. This is to
say, what makes Big Brother what it is, is the viewers act of phoning
in.
Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose
content increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on
the news items. The terminology of interactivity is equally inappropriate
here, since there is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters
writes a segment of the programme then departs, returning to a passive
role. Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the
individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within
pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game
varies according to the particular player.
The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the
internet. Its central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse
to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway
through cultural products which has never existed before and never will again.
This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything
literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the
individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with
the cultural product. Internet pages are not authored in the sense that
anyone knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the
individual to make them work, like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit
him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance,
media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can
easily make up pages yourself (eg blogs).
If the internet and its use define and dominate pseudo-modernism, the new
era has also seen the revamping of older forms along its lines. Cinema in the
pseudo-modern age looks more and more like a computer game. Its images, which
once came from the real world framed, lit, soundtracked and edited together
by ingenious directors to guide the viewers thoughts or emotions are now
increasingly created through a computer. And they look it. Where once special
effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently
[inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord
of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of
individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if
they have only ever happened in cyberspace. And so cinema has given cultural
ground not merely to the computer as a generator of its images, but to the
computer game as the model of its relationship with the viewer.
Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV
(yet another unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the
viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in the hope of winning money. It
also favours phenomena like Ceefax and Teletext. But rather than bemoan the new
situation, it is more useful to find ways of making these new conditions
conduits for cultural achievements instead of the vacuity currently evident. It
is important here to see that whereas the form may change (Big
Brother may wither on the vine), the terms by which individuals relate to
their television screen and consequently what broadcasters show have incontrovertibly
changed. The purely spectacular function of television, as with all the arts,
has become a marginal one: what is central now is the busy, active, forging
work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of
this, the viewer feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the author as
traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets
the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant,
unknown, sidelined; and the text is characterised both by its
hyper-ephemerality and by its instability. It is made up by the viewer, if
not in its content then in its sequence you wouldnt read Middlemarch
by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you might well, and justifiably,
read Ceefax that way.
A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty
Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form,
since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in
they become a different and far less attractive entity. Ceefax text dies after
a few hours. If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is
because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages
and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out
emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by
destroying their essential, electronic state. Radio phone-ins, computer games
their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on
these things can have no memory certainly not the burdensome sense of a
preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism.
Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these
are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or
future.
The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as
Ive hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which
beget and which end life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in
stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinemas technical
effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what
people of all educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, a
shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a
cultural desert. Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can
adapt them for meaningful artistic expression (and then the pejorative label I
have given pseudo-modernism may no longer be appropriate), for now we are
confronted by a storm of human activity producing almost nothing of any lasting
or even reproducible cultural value anything which human beings might look at
again and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time.
The roots of pseudo-modernism can be traced back through the years
dominated by postmodernism. Dance music and industrial pornography, for
instance, products of the late 70s and 80s, tend to the ephemeral, to the
vacuous on the level of signification, and to the unauthored (dance much more
so than pop or rock). They also foreground the activity of their reception:
dance music is to be danced to, porn is not to be read or watched but used,
in a way which generates the pseudo-modern illusion of participation. In music,
the pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic text
by the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod,
selected by the listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fans creation
of compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what
was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of
consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a
body of integrated meaning, obsolete.
To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated
shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly,
metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by
postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as
theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as a
necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into them. There
have long been very active cultural forms, too, from carnival to pantomime.
But none of these implied a written or otherwise material text, and so they
dwelt in the margins of a culture which fetishised such texts whereas the
pseudo-modern text, with all its peculiarities, stands as the central,
dominant, paradigmatic form of cultural product today, although culture, in its
margins, still knows other kinds. Nor should these other kinds be stigmatised
as passive against pseudo-modernitys activity. Reading, listening,
watching always had their kinds of activity; but there is a physicality to the
actions of the pseudo-modern text-maker, and a necessity to his or her actions
as regards the composition of the text, as well as a domination which has changed
the cultural balance of power (note how cinema and TV, yesterdays giants, have
bowed before it). It forms the twenty-first centurys
social-historical-cultural hegemony. Moreover, the activity of pseudo-modernism
has its own specificity: it is electronic, and textual, but ephemeral.
Clicking In The Changes
In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In
pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads.
There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after
1980. Those born later might see their peers as free, autonomous, inventive,
expressive, dynamic, empowered, independent, their voices unique, raised and
heard: postmodernism and everything before it will by contrast seem elitist, dull,
a distant and droning monologue which oppresses and occludes them. Those born before
1980 may see, not the people, but contemporary texts which are alternately
violent, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist,
meaningless and brainless (see the drivel found, say, on some Wikipedia pages,
or the lack of context on Ceefax). To them what came before pseudo-modernism
will increasingly seem a golden age of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and
authenticity. Hence the name pseudo-modernism also connotes the tension
between the sophistication of the technological means, and the vapidity or
ignorance of the content conveyed by it a cultural moment summed up by the
fatuity of the mobile phone users Im on the bus.
Whereas postmodernism called reality into question, pseudo-modernism
defines the real implicitly as myself, now, interacting with its texts. Thus,
pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is reality,
and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated
form: the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, by displaying
individuals aware of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion of
participation); The Office and The Blair Witch Project,
interactive pornography and reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore
or Morgan Spurlock.
Along with this new view of reality, it is clear that the dominant
intellectual framework has changed. While postmodernisms cultural products
have been consigned to the same historicised status as modernism and
romanticism, its intellectual tendencies (feminism, postcolonialism etc) find
themselves isolated in the new philosophical environment. The academy, perhaps
especially in Britain, is today so swamped by the assumptions and practices of
market economics that it is deeply implausible for academics to tell their
students they inhabit a postmodern world where a multiplicity of ideologies,
world-views and voices can be heard. Their every step hounded by market
economics, academics cannot preach multiplicity when their lives are dominated
by what amounts in practice to consumer fanaticism. The world has narrowed
intellectually, not broadened, in the last ten years. Where Lyotard saw the
eclipse of Grand Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised
market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of
all social activity monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining,
all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably recognise.
Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving
around the world as it is given or sold.
Secondly, whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the
playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence,
pseudo-modernisms typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and
anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the
more numerous but less powerful masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism belongs
to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of
the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel,
and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet:
pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was
interred in its rubble. In this context pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically
sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism as in the
uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile
phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is
to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic
anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life;
from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease
about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate
change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which
yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain
solvent. This technologised cluelessness is utterly contemporary: the
pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet
needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the
Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes,
but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat a
characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the
helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the disbelief of
Grand Narratives which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists.
This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable,
inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which
also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical
emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the
trance the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of
the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism
takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent
autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are involved, engulfed, deciding.
You are the text, there is no-one else, no author; there is nowhere else, no
other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.