An Introduction: Postmodernism in the Crosshairs

The term Postmodernism has come to occupy an significant, even central, place in contemporary theories of society and culture. The sheer breadth of its usage was neatly laid out in a critical piece written by Dick Hebdige in 2006, and quoted here at length for emphasis:

“…the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university…”

Hebdige’s point was that such wide application reveals a lack of substantive meaning, and in the decade since this was written, the situation has not become clearer. Postmodernism may have matured from critical fad into the default term for all the dislocations, transformations, and threats of today’s world, but it did not gain much in transparency along the way. There appears to be a general sense that we live in Postmodern times, but what this means beyond vague feelings of instability and unease is not well understood. In short, the relationships between the preeminent intellectual movement of the last half-century and the challenges facing the peoples and nations of the world today remain unclear.

Breadth of usage is only part of the problem. Postmodern thought developed out of the work of a disparate group of intellectuals who were at best loosely united by shared critical and epistemological attitudes, rather than adherents to a coherent school or system of thought. There is no set of foundational principles or universally recognized canon of texts to establish a common framework, just disjointed critical interventions in virtually every area of cultural expression, from academic study, to advertising and media, to art and fashion. The interventions themselves seem to be universally sloppy, extrapolating narrow readings of specific phenomena into sweeping characterizations of intellectual and cultural history with a stilted prose style that resists internally consistent argumentation or expository clarity. Together, these qualities make it almost impossible for the curious reader to begin to engage with this material in a meaningful way. 

The lack of first principles or unitary origins hasn’t received much attention, but it merits a closer look, since it is so different from how systems of thought are usually conceived. Compare this with a traditional intellectual movement like Scholasticism, the dominant philosophical current in the cathedral schools and universities of late medieval Europe. The Scholastics are unified by their use of Aristotelian logic to integrate the growing knowledge base of the later middle ages with Christian doctrine, and while individual thinkers disagree in on specific points, their arguments unfold from a common set of assumptions. 

Lippo Memmi, The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ca. 1332-40, tempera on panel, 375 x 258 cm, Museo nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa

Memmi depicts St. Thomas, greatest of the Scholastics, as a wellspring of truth. The interconnected, cumulative nature of knowledge is apparent in the composition, in which a central Thomas gathers and disseminates  

In contrast, the thinkers most often recognized as pioneers of Postmodernism emerge from a variety of fields, and display little in common beyond a general hostile hostility towards the intellectual and cultural traditions of the West. Jacques Derrida’s linguistic focus, Michel Foucault’s historiography, Paul De Man’s literary criticism, Judith Butler’s sociology and gender, Gilles Deleuze’s economics and psychology, all depart from different disciplinary positions. Furthermore, each of these figures draws on an eclectic and idiosyncratic group of sources and reads them in unconventional and often hostile ways. As a result, any attempt to trace Postmodernism back to its origins can ends in bewildering fragmentation that leads in an endless number of different directions. 

Still from Charlie Chaplin's The Circus, 1928

The fragmented origins of Postmodernism make tracing its development an adventure.

If Postmodernism has any intrinsic unity, it is in the critical attitude that always seeks to destabilize or upend traditional cultural assumptions and knowledge structures. The subjects of critique are inevitably over-generalized and poorly defined, with uncritical straw man such as “the western metaphysical tradition” commonplace. Inevitably, some decentred system is posited that replaces the integrity of the human subject with a superficial play of signifiers that ultimately mean nothing beyond their own endless operations. Of course, no one offers anything approaching proof for their sweeping claims; the incoherence of the prose, absence of effective argumentation, and lack of founding principles provide a formidable defence against potential critics.

Opacity is power if the reader is unaware that what is in front of them is fundamentally meaningless. When tortured, incoherent prose is passed off as too complex for straightforward understanding, the failure of the writer is dishonestly shifted onto the shoulders of the reader. Authority also accrues to those empowered to “interpret” these gnomic ramblings, which can be bent to support whatever cause the interpreter values.  Since there is no actual center to pin down, any serious attack or challenge can he dismissed as a lack of understanding, which transforms the critic’s recognition of fundamental meaninglessness into an indictment of his own intelligence and perspicacity. Furthermore, in today’s academia, the appeal of Postmodernism extends well beyond the lure of gnosis. New “readings” of established subjects provide a ready source of material for the publication and conference mills without requiring the mastery of knowledge domains needed to recognize gaps and offer new contributions. Many profess a Postmodern perspective without ever having seriously engaged the foundational material beyond reading excerpts in anthologies and discussions in secondary sources, confident in the incoherence of the material to shield them from exposure. 

Vilhelm Pedersen, Illustration for 1^st edition of The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson, 1849

There is an analogy between the empty vanity of Postmodern criticism and Anderson’s famous monarch, only it is unclear whether most professed Postmodernists realize their king has no clothes.

University methodology classes and textbook summaries repackage these idiosyncratic, contentious, and often poorly reasoned meditations as straightforward findings or conclusions to be regurgitated like axioms. When the instructors themselves lack understanding, the shaky foundations of these ideas are pushed even further from direct scrutiny. Suspect figures become totems that stand in for concepts distilled from their writings, but without consideration of the problems and limitations that plague those writings. Derrida becomes representative of the indeterminacy of language, and Butler the non-binary nature of gendered identity, in the same way that Newton represents gravity or calculus. It is simply taken on faith that we exist in an endless cycle of self-referential superficiality, where everything is relative, and everyone fungible, within flickering semiotic webs. Well, everything save certain injustices that are plucked from their historical contexts and held up as perpetual signs of collective evil, in the name of overturning nebulous hierarchies of oppression that reveal no signs of objective existence. 

Finally, the curious reader must answer the question, which Postmodernism? The term is applied differently in different areas of cultural expression, so understanding how it is used in one domain may not help you much in another. For example, Jacques Lacan is generally considered a contributor to the foundations of Postmodern thought by challenging the integrity of the Cartesian subject, (the “I” in Descartes’ famous “I think therefore I am”) which was central to post-Medieval concepts of knowledge of the self and world. In its place, he offers a process of identity formation as interactive social embodiment, wherein the notion of self is inextricably linked to the gaze of other people, and pure, self-contained subjectivity impossible. In the visual arts, however, Postmodernity refers to a return to referential art after the abstract purity of Modernism, only the relationship to the world is determined by the subjectivity of the artist rather than by formal rules. Here, the self is empowered as the seat of judgment behind whatever critical statement the work is making. Is the “I” dissolving, or is it a newly-empowered wellspring of creativity? It is possible to reconcile the two, but to do so requires a generous critical effort to overcome so overt a first-order contradiction. 

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, synthetic polymer paint on 32 canvases, each 51 x 41 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Pop is considered an early form of Postmodernism in the visual arts, because it abandoned Modernist abstraction for images that represented recognizable things. Without the rules that shaped pre-modern art, the artist has complete freedom to choose subject matter and technique.

Given the amorphous, inchoate nature of the field and its central importance to contemporary culture, it is important to work though the tangles and contradictions of Postmodernism to clarify its dishonest and dyscivilizational nature. Societies cannot be built on deception and hiding fundamental errors beneath a fog of obscurity merely delays the reckoning while running up the eventual bill. At the same time, the fragmentary origins and broad applications of the term make it poorly suited to longform analysis of any scope, since any single piece requires a degree of thematic consistency for coherence. This blog takes a different approach, gathering a series of distinct posts on different facets of Postmodernism that will gradually probe this bizarre concept from many perspetives. It is a venue to collect my own thoughts and reflections from years spent working with and around Postmodern theory, and, hopefully, for the observations and insights of others who have considered this subject. Anyone who reads these posts and wishes to add their thoughts to this discussion is welcome.