Representation and Reality: Postmodern Deception 101

Note: this post was originally conceived as a single critique of the Postmodern assumption that representations are interchangeable with the things they represent and how this fuels misconceptions about scientific knowledge. This was to lead into a follow-up post relating this back to the age-old dispute between empirical and idealistic thought. However, the first part of the piece - confusing the sign for the signified - proved substantial enough to stand on its own, and so what was planned as part one of a two-parter has itself been cut in half. Which is probably for the best, considering how important substituting discourse for substance is for this entire sham philosophy. 

The Postmodernism fallacy that  schematic, classificatory discursive abstractions are interchangeable with human experience is akin to mistaking a concept map for the fullness of creation. No wonder Postmodern forms of expression are so grindingly banal and repetitive. 


This post will move away from false structures of secular transcendence and begin with another terminal self-contradiction at the heart of Postmodernism: the fact that Postmodern theory appears in books and articles. This is not unusual for commentary or philosophy, but for the uncomfortable fact that Postmodern theory purports to characterize human experience as a vast web of varied discourses, of which written text is a subset, with a medium (written text) whose inability to point beyond itself is an article of Postmodern faith. If there is no outside of the text, then how does a text comment of something larger than itself? And if it can, why can we not measure its truth claims?

Some gems from the shelf with variations of "Postmodern" in the title or subtitle. 

Question: is textual Postmodern criticism commentary or category error?

Recognizing that there are at least two displacements in Postmodern theory - transforming reality into discourse and transforming discourse into a book - begins to clarify its self-contradictory nature. The term "discourse" as used here, is dishonest, beginning, as it did, as a rhetorical ploy. By replacing the word "text" with discourse, Postmodernists adopted the poststructuralist notion that human existence is a system of representations while addressing the obvious fact that text is too limited to provide the basis of reality. Discourse could encompass the full range of human meaning making and communication, no matter how broadly defined, without conceding these activities any additional significance. There is no outside the text becomes there is no outside the discourse. But if "text" is too limited to construct reality and must therefore be broadened into discourse, why is there no evidence of this discovery on the creation of Postmodern theory itself? How can one hope to account for a new, intermodal discursive reality in a medium as limited and tradition-bound as an "important," and perhaps "bold" new volume from an academic press with a portentous author portrait and, with luck, a few royalties and a check mark on the tenure scorecard?

Head of the Buddha, Gandhara, Kushan period, 2nd-3rd century, 32.4 cm, Private Collection; Still from The Matrix, 1999. 
The Third Eye, the dot above the Buddha's nose, was a sign of mystical insight into the true nature of reality. He could have saved a lot of time and effort pursuing Enlightenment had he known that calling his writing "discourse" would have the same effect. 



Two banal truisms that Postmodernists pretend are radical insights are that human experience is varied, and that discursive systems are different from the things that they reference. These pearls are not exactly Third Eye-worthy. Given that people are individuated but occupy a common environment, commonly-understood modes of communication are necessary to coexist and  build civilizations. These are, by nature abstractions, and therefore different from the thoughts and feelings that they communicate; the perfect transmission of internal experience requires telepathy. This gap does not make discourse meaningless, only incomplete, and is the reason for misunderstandings and the impetus for constantly improving communication strategies.

Hildegard Receives a Vision, ca. 1220-30, illuminated manuscript, Biblioteca Statale, Lucca

Direct, unfiltered knowledge has always been a dream of humanity. It accounts for the enduring appeal of mysticism. Here, the 12th-century polymath Hildegard of Bingen receives knowledge from God, visualized by flames striking her eyes and mind. Note that this pure truth is instantly translated into words, which are further translated by others.

No one ever argued that communication has to be perfectly transparent; it just has to be good enough. When I flick the switch marked "on" the bulb comes on, and when it doesn't, the reasons are understood and can be remedied in predictable ways. When I ask a store clerk where a product is, I get generally get sent to the right aisle, and when I don't, we can both agree there was a misunderstanding. Is any absolute knowledge of things-in-themselves on an ontological level changing hands? Unlikely. Human communication develops organically, along utilitarian lines, and evolves when it is no longer completely fit for purpose, and any act of translation, including thoughts into words or pictures, implies difference. The description of a thing is self-evidently not the thing, and any mimetic resemblance is at best approximate. The question becomes whether approximate relationships are meaningful.

Calculus is based on the reality that indeterminate boundaries and relationships are meaningful.

It is true that the Postmodern notion of discourse goes way beyond light switches and store aisles; every aspect of human activity - all knowledge, interaction, organization - unfolds through moving patterns of communication and representation (including self-representation) collectively referred to as discursive frameworks. There is no end to these; a supply-chain manager isn't tracking delivery vehicles "themselves", but a visual translation on a screen, of a digital signal bounced from a satellite, all produced by people with job descriptions, which were provided for various strategic reasons, and so on, infinitely diffusing through discursive webs. Since all discourse, regardless of form, is an abstract simplified translation of some referent and not the referent itself, Postmodernism concludes  that everything we perceive as reality is actually an expression of fundamental difference or unreality and is therefore meaningless on the deepest ontological level. As mentioned above, this formation is essentially the same as the structuralist/poststructuralist rejection of linguistic meaning.

Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ, 1598, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

By painting himself into this scene (he is the illuminated face with black hair in the upper right corner) holding a lantern like a paintbrush, Caravaggio declares the scene to be his creation. The "light" that makes the scene visible is all the product of his mind, eye, and hand. Discourse of a sort. Of course Caravaggio believed the reality of his subject.




This misses half of the picture. We do experience reality through layers of discourse, but these began as abstracted reactions to lived, sensory experience that evolved over time. The processes of linguistic evolution and the development of modern communications infrastructure are not mysterious. Postmodernists love to refer to everything as externally meaningless because it is "mediated" and therefore not "authentic," yet mindlessly ignore that mediation is a relational term that implies a viewer/receiver and a thing mediated. That the subject of mediation can't be clearly made out is hardly an argument for its non-existence.

When a prairie dog barks a warning, its fellows run to safety. What they are really fleeing is an aural mediation of a threat, not the threat itself. Does the fact that it could be a false alarm make their flight pointless? 








Meaning and mediation gained new importance when text-based religions emerged in late antiquity. Sacred scripture is of little value if the readers are unable to grasp the divine message within it, a risk that increases as the text becomes more remote in time. Hermeneutics, broadly defined as the theory and methodology of interpretation, developed from efforts to bridge gaps in meaning within theological texts, and between these texts and readers. The Christian form that began in the Patristic Era (ca. 100-450 AD) is most relevant to the intellectual history of the west, and since this is where Postmodernism first slithered into daylight, this is where we will turn our attention. Biblical hermeneutics addressed superficial incompatibilities between the New and Old Testament, apparent contradictions within the testaments, and an ever-increasing “tale of years” between the life of Jesus and the present day. Over time, this led to interpretive tools to counter the limitations of textual narrative.

The Mystic Mill (Moses and Saint Paul), c. 1130, carved nave capital, Vézelay, France

This unusual image articulated a hermeneutic relationship between the Old and New Testaments. According to a medieval method of interpretation called typology, events in the Old Testament were interpreted as prefiguring or foretelling the New. This way literal differences in meaning can point figuratively to deeper truths. Jonah spending three days in the whale is superficially different, but typologically prefigures the three days Christ spends in his tomb. 






St. Paul saw the limitation of linguistic communication almost two millennia before the first poststructuralist linguistically self-generated:

Paul's famous darkling glass is the distorting difference inherent in blurry, mediated human perception and the true knowledge or logos incarnated in Christ. As he wrote just prior: “But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away” (1 Cor. 13:10). Paul could make this distinction because he knew Christ directly; to those coming later, the glass is all there is. Hence the need for hermeneutic approaches to ascertain the truths lying behind ambiguous signifiers and historical distance. 

Domenico di Michelino, Dante and his Poem, Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, 1465

Allegory uses devices figuratively  to refer to something outside their usual range of connotations as away of dealing with the limitations of representation. It reached a peak in the middle ages. Allegories can be simple, a single personification like Father Time, or complex, like Dante's magisterial Divine Commedy. This poem narrates a journey through the afterlife, but can also be understood allegorically as the salvation of a soul. 

The intellectual bankruptcy of Postmodernism becomes evident when compared to earlier efforts to come to grips with the imprecision of language. There is nothing new in the idea that representations are abstractions that are by definition different from their subjects; hermeneutics were born from the need to mitigate this limitation, as were countless new media like blog posts and virtual reality. As human society becomes more discursively complex, more layers of abstract mediation are layered on, driving the need for constant refinements in expression and interpretation. Communicative sophistication develops in parallel with civilization, to meet the demands of increasingly complicated societal structures. There is no end point to this process, so long as human experience continues to shift over time. But only Postmodernism has equated the truism that representational systems aren't the same thing as the subjects they represent with the claim that these flawed systems are all there is. How can this possibly contribute to the endless human struggle to manage the fundamental split between self-consciousness and the world around us?

Caravaggio, The Calling of Matthew, oil on canvas, 1599-1600, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome

Caravaggio captures Matthew's transformation from venal tax collector to apostle and saint. The lesson is that sincere change is complete - revealed in actions, in life choices, not just "discourse". As Matthew wrote: "Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" (Matt. 7:16). If we judge them by their actions, Postmodernists work against clarity. Is is any wonder their notion of history is a litany of fictional "oppressions"?



It is clear that Postmodernists disbelieve their own rhetoric or else they wouldn't bother to write books or influence policy. Then why promote a vision of human existence as empty commodified signal noise that their own actions prove insincere? The short answer is likely power, thought that takes different forms: prestige and adulation without the hard work of producing something substantive for the "scholars"; wealth and impunity for "leaders"; Marxism for sociopaths, etc. By identifying how Postmodernism only considers the subjective mediation aspect of the hermeneutic relationship, while ignoring the objective reality that those subjectivities are mediating, we can identify the precise moment where the empowering deception occurs. 

Rob Gonsalves, Cathedral of Commerce, giclée print
Without external reference, "reality" is purely subjective, and the possibility of any common ground evaporates.

Claiming discursive structures are arbitrary, and therefore externally meaningless on an essential level, gives the power to shape "reality" to whoever produces the most coercive discourse. 

There is no capacity to "fact check." Ultimately, there are no facts. 

Only power. 

Orwell was prescient when he wrote: “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing" (Orwell, 1984). How is this different from the Postmodern privileging of subjective feelings over facts, especially when it is a Postmodern axiom that subjectivities cannot be transparently represented anyhow? 


The power implications in denying external meaning were obvious to the forerunners of Postmodern theory. Consider brief examples from two revered pioneers: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), an evocative and idiosyncratic critic tangentially connected with the Frankfurt School, and Roland Barthes (1915-1980), a radical French critic and semiotician who came to prominence during the social unrest of the late '60s:

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, oil transfer and watercolor on paper, 31.8 × 24.2 cm, Israel Museum 

Walter Benjamin's Angel of History. Benjamin opposed the Romantic symbol - the imaginary union of sign and signified - with a redefinition of allegory as fragments of a lost  past without context. Allegory, for Benjamin, isn't  figurative communication as much as a modern state of separation from intrinsic meaning. This subjective attitude towards history and representation endeared him to Postmodern thinkers. 

Tthe allegorist, or storyteller, gathers the fragmented pieces of history and reuses them to create new meanings. The Romantic symbol was a naive fantasy, but it only promised a glimpse into a higher power. In Benjamin's fragmented, allegorical dystopia, the allegorist makes reality.






The two-fold nature of Postmodern mediation - that reality is comprised of arbitrary discursive structures, which are in turn made up of arbitrary sign systems - allows it to avoid critique is by constantly shifting ranges. Point out hermeneutic ways in which discursive structures can map onto things outside of themselves, and the Postmodernist will attack the reliability of your language. Question the value of writing criticism in an indeterminate medium like text, and the Postmodernist will appeal to nebulous discursive structures like simulacra and traces. Confusing the general and the specific as if statistical analysis were a lost art enables the application of empty and generally erroneous theory to concrete scenarios with consequences ranging from the unintentionally comedic to the tragic. 

E. Hull, Death found an author writing his life..., lithograph printed by C. Hullmandel. London, Dec. 1827

Applying the discursive construction of reality to the arts led to wacky notions like the "death of the author" popularized by Roland Barthes ("The Death of the Author," 1967) and Michel Foucault ("Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?," 1969). Though the articles differ, and Foucault characteristically failed to cite the earlier work, they reject the idea that a knowable, historical, individual creator produces artistic works. 




The death of the author is a particular manifestation of the broader notion that reality is discursively constructed. It is not claim that books spontaneously generate, though it is understandably lampooned as such. Rather, as its defenders argued, it acknowledged that any idea or statement is build from an infinite chain of previous representations, some conscious, some unconscious, filtered through an arbitrary sign system that is itself a palimpsest of earlier references, and absorbed by a reader with their own endless, discursive formation. Only instead of developing new hermeneutic processes, Barthes embraced the blinkered self-certainty of binary logic: "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author." This is not an innocent "mistake". Barthes claimed his attack on the notion of the author was a way of freeing literature from the tyranny of critics who imposed external "explanations" on the works they were analyzing, rather than treating them as self-contained. Of course, in doing so, this "freedom fighter" has staked his control over the entire system of language within which literature can be produced. Get rid of the external measure, kill the author, and whoever sets the discursive meaning controls everything.

Obama, more than Barthes, lives between the Marxist political activism of the 1960's and the Postmodern political activism of today's social justice left. Both are obsessed with eliminating accomplishment and accountability. Note that these sadists reward predation and strip people of agency - as if trying to create the broken victims they claim to champion...



But all the discursive obfuscations and manipulations can't cloak the fact that someone did write that story or build that business at a particular moment in time. Somebody or bodies outside of "the text" consciously or unconsciously assembled that particular set of discursive threads, which means that its very existence, even if existence is only a coalescence in a simulacrum, is both a reflection and a proof of a unique, dare I say, individuated perspective. Books and businesses in their own ways are translations of thoughts and feelings that can be shared with others. These expressions are imperfect but they are not random; there is a gap, but it is the gap inherent in any translation of something into a signifier, not proof that signifiers have no external reference. It really should not need to be said that differences in interpretation are not the same thing as spontaneous generation. The fact that it does indicates that for some, the lure of power is so strong or the desire to escape personal accountability so fervid, that they will deny reality. We really need better interpretative models than the binary shackles and random nihilism of the Postmodernists.

American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) proposed a theory of semiotics or signs systems that was more sophisticated than the Postmodernists nearly a century later. Not only did he consider non-linguistic and non-mimetic signs like smoke and footprints, the addition of the intrpretant, the beholder who makes sense of the sign, acknowledges subjectivity without abandoning the link to reality.

In this diagram, the bonfire is the object or signified (Peirce coined his own terms and called it the referent), while the smoke is the actual signifier. Peirce is shown as the Interpretant, or person who interprets and makes sense of the sign. The interpretant is not guaranteed to get it right either; representation is imprecise. 


Peirce's semiotic theory is an example of a useful idea from the past that is rarely mentioned outside of certain branches of the academic humanities, despite offering a far more flexible account than the later structuralists. His inclusion of the interpretant, or person who makes sense of the sign, within the concept of the sign itself balances the subjectivity of the interpretation and the reality of the referent. This model is not so different from the compression and decompression of a digital signal - simplifying and abstracting then reconstituting later, only the viewer doing the decompressing does not have access to all the necessary information. In the case above, the interpretant or person who sees the sign knows there is a fire, but will need more information to get a clearer picture of the original referent. The problem is not that there is no reality outside of human discourse but that the arbitrary categories and limited range of human discourse is a poor mediator of the richness of experience.
    

William Blake, Newton, ca. 1795-1805, color print finished in ink and watercolor, Tate, London

Artists seem to have an intuitive sense for the limits of human understanding and the vastness of reality. Blake's titanic Newton distills existence down to mathematical essences, but in doing so turns his back on the rich texture of that multiplicity. Rather than giving up the possibility of meaningful communication, artists employ more allusive, evocative, and oblique modess. 

Postmodern theory dishonestly substitutes discursive structures for lived experience, ignores the role of the interpretant, then pretends that manipulating these necessarily imperfect sign systems in books and articles affects the reality that they imperfectly represent. Any number of knowledge domains and communicative modes can be translated into imprecise, undifferentiated textual "theorizations" which then replace the original domain. A common move is to repackage quantifiable knowledge in non-quantitative safe spaces like the "Sociology of Science, which confers an unmerited authority on "meta-analysts" who write conclusively about things they know little about in a medium that by its own rules cannot look beyond itself. That previous sentence is worth reading again.

Transforming quantitative knowledge domains into undifferentiated theory avoids confronting the real challenges that mathematical notation presents to Postmodern theories of representation. As far as I am aware, these are not widely discussed, since it is an article of Postmodern faith that all discursive systems, regardless of differences in appearance, are essentially "linguistic" in that they are both arbitrary in form and unfixed in meaning. Yet the more I think about it, the more it seems that numbers and words are not simply different languages with their own symbols, grammar, and syntax. Could one imagine a system of representation where the relationship between the sign and the concept signified by the sign really was perfectly clear and unchanging?