Does Postmodern Art Rely on a Person to Viewing Reading or Listening to It to Be Meaningful?
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The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond
Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and cached. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed nether the pressure of new technologies and gimmicky social forces.
I have in front of me a module description downloaded from a British university English department's website. Information technology includes details of assignments and a week-by-calendar week reading list for the optional module 'Postmodern Fictions', and if the university is to remain nameless hither it's not because the module is in any way shameful just that it handily represents modules or module parts which will be taught in virtually every English department in the land this coming academic year. Information technology assumes that postmodernism is live, thriving and boot: it says it volition innovate "the full general topics of 'postmodernism' and 'postmodernity' past 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 pregnant and knowledge. This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic cocky-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been fabricated philosophically. There are people who have substantially asserted that for a while nosotros believed in postmodern ideas, only not whatever more, and from at present on we're going to believe in disquisitional realism. The weakness in this analysis is that information technology centres on the academy, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may non exist shifting footing or about to shift – and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they adopt to stay with Foucault [curvation postmodernist] than go over to annihilation else. Notwithstanding, a far more compelling instance tin be fabricated that postmodernism is dead by looking outside the academy at current cultural product.
Nigh of the undergraduates who will take 'Postmodern Fictions' this year will take been born in 1985 or subsequently, and all but one of the module'due south primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being 'contemporary', these texts were published in another world, earlier the students were born: The French Lieutenant's Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Wintertime'southward Night a Traveller, Exercise Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Dissonance: this is Mum and Dad's civilization. Some of the texts ('The Library of Babel') were written even earlier their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Love, Flaubert's Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Abattoir 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, annihilation by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It'south all well-nigh as contemporary every bit 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 stone music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the cyberspace, computers in every business firm powerful plenty to put a human being on the moon – which today'south undergraduates take for granted.
The reason why the master reading on British postmodernism fictions modules is and then onetime, in relative terms, is that it has not been rejuvenated. Merely look out into the cultural marketplace-place: buy novels published in the last five years, watch a xx-first century flick, listen to the latest music – above all just sit and watch television for a week – and you volition inappreciably catch a glimpse of postmodernism. Similarly, one can get to literary conferences (every bit 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 then much Theory among academics, also bears testimony to the passing of postmodernism. The people who produce the cultural cloth which academics and non-academics read, watch and listen to, accept merely given upward on postmodernism. The occasional metafictional or self-conscious text will appear, to widespread indifference – like Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park – merely and so modernist novels, now long forgotten, were all the same being written into the 1950s and 60s. The simply place where the postmodern is extant is in children's 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.
What's Post Postmodernism?
I believe there is more to this shift than a unproblematic alter in cultural fashion. The terms by which authority, knowledge, selfhood, reality and time are conceived have been contradistinct, suddenly and forever. There is now a gulf betwixt most lecturers and their students akin to the one which appeared in the late 1960s, but non for the same kind of reason. The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from whatsoever profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural product and reception; all that happened, to rhetorically exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had in one case written Ulysses and To the Lighthouse wrote Pale Burn down and The Bloody Sleeping room instead. Just somewhere in the belatedly 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 writer chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. Only the culture we take 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 to the lowest degree so far).
Allow me explain. Postmodernism conceived of gimmicky civilization as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. Information technology therefore emphasised the telly or the movie theatre screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual'south 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 past the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and accent on reception, are obsolete: any a telephoning Large Brother voter or a telephoning half-dozen-0-half dozen football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).
By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and practise 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 information technology and the publisher released it into the world, its 'cloth textuality' – its pick of words – was made and finished, even though its meanings, how people interpret it, would remain largely up for grabs. Its cloth product and its constitution were decided by its suppliers, that is, its author, publisher, serialiser etc alone – just the meaning was the domain of the reader. Large Brother on the other manus, 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 plan themselves. If it were not possible for viewers to write sections of Large Brother, it would then uncannily resemble an Andy Warhol moving-picture show: neurotic, youthful exhibitionists inertly bitching and talking aimlessly in rooms for hour after hour. This is to say, what makes Large Brother what information technology is, is the viewer's 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 as inappropriate here, since at that place is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters – writes a segment of the plan – then departs, returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism as well includes calculator games, which similarly identify 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 cyberspace. Its central act is that of the private 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 annihilation literature can offering, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual decision-making, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural production. 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, similar Streetmap or Route Planner, or allow him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the cyberspace that y'all can easily make upwards pages yourself (eg blogs).
If the cyberspace and its utilize define and dominate pseudo-modernism, the new era has likewise seen the revamping of older forms along its lines. Cinema in the pseudo-modern historic period looks more and more like a computer game. Its images, which once came from the 'real' world – framed, lit, soundtracked and edited together past ingenious directors to guide the viewer's thoughts or emotions – are now increasingly created through a estimator. And they await it. Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to brand the possible look bogus, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have actually happened; pseudo-mod cinema makes them look as if they take only ever happened in cyberspace. So cinema has given cultural footing not merely to the estimator every bit a generator of its images, simply to the computer game as the model of its relationship with the viewer.
Similarly, goggle box in the pseudo-modern age favours not merely reality Television (still some other unapt term), but besides 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 similar Ceefax and Teletext. But rather than bewail the new situation, it is more useful to notice ways of making these new conditions conduits for cultural achievements instead of the vacuity currently evident. It is important here to encounter that whereas the form may modify (Large Blood 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' role of television, equally with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is primal now is the busy, active, forging work of the private who would once accept 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 condition of the ane who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes only irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the 'text' is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and past its instability. It is made upward past the 'viewer', if non in its content so in its sequence – you wouldn't read Middlemarch by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, simply 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 class, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they get a different and far less bonny entity. Ceefax text dies after a few hours. If scholars give the appointment they referenced an cyberspace page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast and then apace. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more than stable, like a letter, merely only past destroying their essential, electronic state. Radio phone-ins, calculator games – their shelf-life is short, they are very presently obsolete. A civilisation based on these things can take no retentivity – 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 deportment in the present moment with no sense of either past or future.
The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are too uncommonly bland, every bit I've 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 dissimilarity to the composure of contemporary cinema'due south 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 nosotros may grow so used to the new terms that nosotros can adapt them for meaningful artistic expression (and and then the pejorative label I accept given pseudo-modernism may no longer be appropriate), for now nosotros are confronted past a tempest of human action producing nigh nada of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value – anything which human beings might look at again and appreciate in l 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 case, products of the late 70s and 80s, tend to the ephemeral, to the vacuous on the level of signification, and to the unauthored (trip the light fantastic toe much more so than pop or rock). They also foreground the activity of their 'reception': trip the light fantastic toe music is to be danced to, porn is not to exist read or watched just 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 fan'southward creation of compilation tapes a generation agone. Merely a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive mode of consuming music, rendering the thought of the album every bit a coherent work of fine art, a torso 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 e'er existed, but was never and so fetishised as information technology was by postmodernism). Telly has always used audience participation, merely as theatre and other performing arts did earlier it; but as an option, not equally a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes accept participation congenital into them. There accept long been very 'active' cultural forms, too, from carnival to pantomime. But none of these unsaid a written or otherwise material text, and then they dwelt in the margins of a culture which fetishised such texts – whereas the pseudo-modern text, with all its peculiarities, stands as the primal, ascendant, paradigmatic form of cultural product today, although culture, in its margins, still knows other kinds. Nor should these other kinds exist stigmatised as 'passive' confronting pseudo-modernity's 'activity'. Reading, listening, watching always had their kinds of activity; merely at that place is a physicality to the deportment 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 ability (annotation how cinema and TV, yesterday's giants, have bowed before it). It forms the twenty-first century'southward social-historical-cultural hegemony. Moreover, the activity of pseudo-modernism has its own specificity: it is electronic, and textual, simply imperceptible.
Clicking In The Changes
In postmodernism, 1 read, watched, listened, as earlier. In pseudo-modernism i phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. In that location is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born earlier and after 1980. Those born later might see their peers every bit free, autonomous, inventive, expressive, dynamic, empowered, contained, their voices unique, raised and heard: postmodernism and everything before information technology will past dissimilarity seem elitist, slow, a afar and dawdling monologue which oppresses and occludes them. Those born before 1980 may run into, not the people, merely contemporary texts which are alternately vehement, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist, meaningless and brainless (come across the drivel constitute, say, on some Wikipedia pages, or the lack of context on Ceefax). To them what came earlier pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a gilded historic period of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and actuality. 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 past it – a cultural moment summed upward by the fatuity of the mobile phone user'southward "I'thou 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-modernistic text may flourish the apparently real in an simple 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 picture palace of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock.
Forth with this new view of reality, it is clear that the ascendant intellectual framework has changed. While postmodernism'due south cultural products take 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 Great 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 pace hounded by marketplace economic science, academics cannot preach multiplicity when their lives are dominated by what amounts in practice to consumer fanaticism. The earth has narrowed intellectually, not broadened, in the concluding x years. Where Lyotard saw the eclipse of G Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the credo 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, every bit every academic must disagreeably recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a thing of moving around the globe as information technology is given or sold.
Secondly, whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism's typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety: Bush-league, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the more numerous just less powerful masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism belongs to a globe pervaded by the meet between a religiously fanatical segment of the The states, a largely secular just 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 engineering science to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – every bit in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the net, or the utilize of mobile phones to picture torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to endure the anxiety of getting hitting in the cross-burn down. Just this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakup and identity loss, to a deep unease nearly diet and health; from ache most the destructiveness of climatic change, to the furnishings of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield Television receiver programmes about how to clean your house, bring upwardly 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 cocky-evident in the Bronze Historic period. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to consume – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the avant-garde, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the "disbelief of Thousand Narratives" which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists.
This pseudo-modernistic world, and then frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which too characterises the pseudo-modernistic cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of existence swallowed upwardly by your activeness. In identify of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the globe away, past creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, yous punch the keys, you are 'involved', engulfed, deciding. Y'all are the text, in that location is no-one else, no 'author'; there is nowhere else, no other time or identify. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.
© Dr Alan Kirby 2006
Alan Kirby holds a PhD in English language Literature from the University of Exeter. He currently lives in Oxford.
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Source: https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond