Signs of Trouble: The "Problematics" of Postmodern Representation

This post is intended to develop some of the ideas in the previous post more fully, and explore how there are actually two fundamental sets of errors - at the semiotic and discursive levels -  at the heart of the Postmodern fallacy that representation can be substituted for reality.

William Blake, Ancient of Days, frontispiece of Europe: A Prophecy, 1794, metal relief etching, hand colored, approx. 24.1 x 17.2 cm. The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester

For the mystic Blake, the world was itself a "representation," an imperfect expression of the perfection of the divine will. This is why his creator holds a set of compasses, which symbolizes this fundamental act of creative mediation. It is up to us to read this divine discourse to reach the truth lying beyond the image. 

The political implications of the Postmodern assumption that representation is all there is are obvious; if reality is discursive, and discursive constructions are essentially the same in their lack of external meaning, whoever controls the discourse is all-powerful. 








The Postmodern aversion to categorical differences between things in favor of undifferentiated chaos or entropy, allows for important differences between knowledge domains, each with their refined hermeneutic methods, to be swept aside. 

Lee Lawrie, Wisdom, with Light and Sound (not shown), 1933, above the entrance of 30 Rockefeller Center, New York

Note how Lawrie's image of a higher power reflects Rockefeller's faith that human ingenuity and technological progress can usher in a Utopian future. We see the same creator, rendered in the Art Deco style of the time, only this being is charged with what looks like electric energy and the universe he creates with his compass resembles a mechanical abstraction. 

Without external reference, signs become whatever you want them to be, only it is more insidious than that. The Trace of the old meaning remains, to lend false credibility to the new usage. In Lowrie's vision, science is accorded a metaphysical status appropriate to an object of religious faith. This will prove devastating as science the empirical method becomes "Science" the discourse.






Philosophically, the Postmodern drive for empowering meaninglessness gave us "theory," where the full range of actual discursive  tools developed to extend human understanding can be reduced to empty pages of unreadable text. Politically, the wonder of human biodiversity was jettisoned for a soulless consumerist monoculture where you can “express yourself” by the color of your iPhone case. Look how Postmodernists responded to linguistic inteterminacy – not by calling for better hermeneutics, but by denying the possibility of meaning at all. How is this a normal, healthy reaction to the abstractions inherent in communications? Short answer: it isn't, but  leveling categories and blocking external verification is what empowers their Orwellian inversions of language:

https://www.xyz.net.au/quote-day-diversity-gun-violence/

  

There are at least two levels of displacement hiding beneath the notion of the discursive construction of reality that make the act of writing  Postmodern theory especially nonsensical, but also makes the nonsense harder to pin down. 

The first of these is the translation of reality into structures of discourse, which are the large categories or domains of all kinds that define human existence, such as “science,” languages, religions, social customs, disciplines like philosophy, and so on. This allows the “theorist” to claim mastery over the subject in question without actually knowing anything about it, and is the source the ludicrously ignorant critiques of things like logic being racist or sexist. One need not understand, or even be capable of understanding, the internal consistencies of symbolic logic to dismiss it “discursively.” Identity grievance narratives are excellent popular examples of how Postmodernism appeals to the simpleminded while empowering grifters and storytellers.

Ladies and gentlemen: Discourse. What could be more Postmodern than a quantitatively illiterate journalist quoting a quantitatively illiterate "professor' applying a non-existent conspiracy  theory to math? At least only one of them is on the taxpayer's dime.

The second displacement comes from the claim to meaningfully comment on the discursive construction of reality in a book, which, as written text, is itself a subset of discourse. As a signifier, text has been dismissed as arbitrary, imprecise, and bereft of external meaning since the structuralist movement of the early twentieth century. Yet how would people know that they are merely ampules in a vast system of endless representation if other ampules didn’t write daring and challenging tomes to tell them? This recent (Oct., 2017) offering "revives" poststructuralist theory "show how useful it is in the current century in opening the minds of students to the dangers of claiming to have a fixed identity." 

To summarize, subjectivity trumps biological reality because Derrida and friends claimed discourse is meaningless, but selective interpretations of an idiosyncratic reading list reveals a fundamental flaw in the human condition, while a clever take on Maya Angelou blazes a trail of personal restoration. 

The false assumptions are so layered so thick there is nothing to engage. They are literally making this stuff up. 






Let's consider the two levels individually and identify the moments of deception.


Texts and Semiotics

Postmodern theory dismiss binary distinctions as artificial, but from the moment of entry into the world human existence is defined by a fundamental rupture between internal thoughts and sensations and an opaque external ebvironment:

Salvadore Dali, Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, 1943, oil on canvas, 44.5 x 52 cm, The Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida

Humanity enters the world with a fundamental binary rupture between secure self-containment and a harsh alien world filled with competing consciousnesses that are closed to us. The rest of one's life is spent trying to come to grips with this existential divide between self-awareness and the external world, however defined. No wonder babies are born crying. 

We build sign systems as a way of trying to bridge a gap that cannot be bridged because we can never bring the fullness of the outside world and the people in it into our consciousnesses. Yet at the same time, we must accommodate the reality that our environment shapes our development while our actions influence our surroundings in turn. We all know that these systems don't pretend to be what they represent; they are just abstract constructs to organize and make sense of the incomprehensible array of things that are not us.

Distinctions in the natural world are often indeterminate but meaningful. As this spectrum shows, the world doesn't fall into tidy categories. We can identify specific color bands, but the boundaries between them are vague and indeterminate. does this mean that "Blue" could be anything?

Why should human categories like self and other be expected to conform to a higher standard when they are realized materially in the natural world?

Postmodern attacks on independent (Cartesian) human consciousness are of a kind with their opposition to binary divisions and categorical systems in general. Individual writers vary widely, but the gist is that categorical distinctions are never absolute, so the categories are not meaningful, and they all share the same goal of destroying autonomous human agency:

Lacan was a forerunner of Postmodernism for his recognition that the self was actually constructed through social relations, rather than a self-contained consciousness, as Descartes held. His formulation was  too simple, because he was  unable to grasp that his socializing, identity-forming matrix of gazes and glances is in constant interaction, and  conflict, with a vast range of still poorly understood individual genetic drivers.





Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida. Funny how image-conscious these deniers of agency were. Almost as if their didn't entirely believe their own tripe...
Deleuze is a difficult figure because his work is so non-linear and fragmented; insanity as a metaphor for the Postmodern condition, and the self/world distinction merely endless, recursive inflections of the same essence. There may have to be a post on him.


The discourse/reality clash at the heart of Postmodern denials of subject-object relations is built on a fundamental misconception of the semiotic systems (sign systems, or things that mean things to people) that we use to mediate the gulf between our self-awareness and an "external" world that we do not have the same degree of mental access to. External is not in quotation marks as a Postmodern evasion, but to point out that even if one accepts self and reality to be inflections of the same discursive matrix, the inflection senses and feels what it understands as "self" differently from all else. This misunderstanding originates in a self-crippling logical inversion within the structualist origins of the Postmodern understanding of sign systems. In fact, one might call it another Trace that hollows out the foundation of the whole enterprise.

Structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure characterized the sign as a mediating element between viewer and world that is completely autonomous, meaning it has no essential connection to the thing that it represents. As the diagram shows, it is an arbitrary symbol or grapheme that triggers a thought in the mind of the reader or viewer.

While Saussure claimed to be writing a general semiotic theory, his concept was fundamentally linguistic in origin, and marked by his structuralist's adherence to rigid conceptual maps over lived experience. From this perspective, the difference between the sign and the thing it represents, or referent (not the signified, which is in the mind of the viewer) is "problematic," to use a Hall of Fame Postmodern adjective. In fact:

Let's look more closely at Saussure's sign. 

The diagram is helpful because it shows how the structuralist sign as an entity contains an arbitrary component (the word Tree) and a subjective component (the impression in the reader's mind), but no objective component, or reference (real trees). If sign systems develop to bridge the gap between ourselves and the world, there is no recognition of that within the concept of the sign vehicle itself. The mediator is absolutely detached from the mediated.

Also, where is the viewer? We can see their subjectivity in terms of a concept evoked, but the sign includes no more connection between the thought-picture and the thinker than between the word and real trees in the world. From this perspective, it is easy to characterize the signified as another element in a linguistic-type structure: the set of mental pictures and associations that you select to pair up with the signifier, or tree. Thought pictures and concepts are not as rigid as linguistic entities, but they still operate under the same structuralist logic of a closed system, cut off from any significant relation to an external referent, and distinguished only by their differences from each other. Rather than "mediating," Saussure's semiotics are purely arbitrary and subjective, hermetic sets of self-referential signs that have no way to offer any real connection with between individuals and the exterior world. This is the forerunner of the Postmodern obsession with subjective, meaningless discourse.

Yet from the moment of self-awareness, we have to make our way in and around things that are not ourselves.  

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, 1509-12, fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican

Nineteenth-century American Pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce proposed a more organic, empirical system that incorporates the process of mediation within the concept of the sign itself, and considers many more forms of signification. For Peirce, both the referent and the bebolder, or interpretant, who makes sense of the sign are included.

Rather than beginning with a top down structure like Saussure, Peirce built up by observing how people interact and interpret signs in reality, and while his system is an abstraction of his observations, it is secondary to the human experience it draws from. This allows him to look beyond linguistic models and consider semiotic relationships much more broadly. He actually identifies three types of sign:  

The structuralist concept of sign is limited to the symbolic category, or what Peirce calls arbitrary signifiers. Saussure completely misses Peirce's motivated signifiers, the icon, which represents by shared character or likeness, and the index, which, like a clue, is evidence of something that doesn't resemble the referent, but isn't arbitrary either. Icon and index can function without interactions with others, or the construction of abstract representational systems. Not touching a hot stove more than once is a fine example.

Comparing the models directly fully reveals the dehumanizing nature of Saussure’s formation:

 The structuralist removes mediation from any meaningful relationship from the things mediated; it is an autonomous system that abides by its own internal rules. But it is also the only way we have to understand the world and communicate with others.This means that everything we think, say, do, believe, understand, etc. is subordinate to the operations of an alien, mechanistic structure without meaning beyond itself. The system comes before the human. With Peirce, the world (referent) and beholder (interpretant) are instantiated within the sign-vehicle itself, and the "system" is relegated to its proper place as a human creation, not as the creator of the human. Saussure, in his desire for mastery, puts the cart before the horse. Pierce diagrams a process of making your way in the world, which is not a fixed structure, but an cumulative journey that is NECESSARILY incomplete and abstracted. Which more closely approximates human development, both on the individual and societal levels?

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Childhood, 1842, oil on canvas, 134.3 × 195.3 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Unfortunately for the descendants of structuralism, we do have a broad understanding of the development of language, and all signs point to human experience coming first. There are two basic explanatory frameworks that I will call supernatural and evolutionary for simplicity. From a supernatural perspective, language was given by entity beyond our realm of experience. Religious accounts tend to land here, as do more outre fables of extraterrestrial or extra-dimensional intervention:

Adam Names the Animals, 12th century mosaic from the south cupola, west arm of atrium, Basilica di San Marco, Venice

'And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof." Genesis 2:19, KJV 

From an evolutionary perspective, humans gradually constructed more complex sign systems as their cognitive ability and social complexity developed. These began with simple positive associations, then gradually grew formalized over time, eventually coalescing into complex, flexible, abstract forms for poststructuralists to misinterpret.

The evolution of ancient Sumerian pictographic writing into cuniform.

Abstract language systems developed from mimetic, associative representations. The Sumerians were the first, but Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese pictographs followed a similar evolutionary patters not that long after. 

The history is not a secret, but is it easier to pontificate in ignorance from a theoretical safe space than to do the hard, and often unrewarding philological, archaeological, and historical research, where the reality of the limits of knowledge is humbling. 

Associative reference is the opposite of difference, and mimetic imagery predates writing by tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. It appears Peirce may have been on to something.

The Rosetta Stone, granodiorite, 112.3 × 75.7 × 28.4 cm, with Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Greek script, 196 BC, discovered 1799, British Museum

If language systems lacked common referents, how is translation possible?

There is one final problem with the semiotic assumptions of Postmodernism: the false axiom that all signs are necessarily imprecise, and that internal concepts cannot be accurately transmitted between individuals. Remember Saussure's sign vehicle contained only the uncertain interaction of subjective thought pictures and arbitrary signs. When poststructuralists addressed the fact that structuralism is a static system and can't account for evolution in time, they kept the misconception that sign systems precede their creators and that difference, rather than analogy, is the basis of communication. Deconstruction was based on the idea that words are not transparent, and that even if you speak a common language, there is no way to be sure that you and your interlocutor are using a word or phrase in the exact same way.

No, it's not Foucault, it's Professor X, the popular telepath from Marvel's X-Men comics and movies. If Postmodern logic is correct, "true" communication, meaning a perfect transmission of something "external" between discursively constituted subjectivities, would require supernatural means. Because the communications and the subjectivities are built out of semiotic systems that ultimately signify only difference.

It is interesting that Postmodernists have little to say about mathematical notation, which is an abstract semiotic system with its own characters, grammar, syntax, and linear notation that is much closer to textual language than it is to the likes of Peirce's icon or index. However, numbers also have a very different sign-object relationship than linguistic signification. 

History’s greatest painter meets history’s greatest philosopher:

Raphael, Aristotle, detail from The School of Athens, 1509-11, fresco, Stanza della Signatura, Vatican Palace. 

Perhaps the most important thinker in history, Aristotle’s achievements and influence are too vast to summarize. He recognized the difference between mathematical entities and other categories over 2200 years before the first structuralist misunderstood his first semiotic relationship. 

One of Aristotle's insights was to divide the world of human experience into broad “categories” to better analyze and understand the seeming chaos of existence. He placed numbers under the category Quantity (in the subset Discrete Quantities), which he noticed were unique for being absolutely distinct (non-overlapping) elements that are complete and unchanging in themselves. Add any value, no matter how tiny, to a number, and the number becomes something different. Because of this, only quantities can predicate equality and inequality; only quantities can be determined to be precisely and absolutely equal or unequal to another quantity. Comparisons within other categories will always include the tiny variations that structuralist semiotics redefine as absolute difference. For example, two marriages (Category: Relation) or two stones (category: Substance) may be extremely similar, even practically the same, but not absolutely identical. Quantities are different; 10 is precisely 10 every single time, or it has no claim to being called 10 at all.

These are substantive observations about quantitative entities that Postmodernists ignore, but constitute the foundation of all subsequent developments of symbolic logic, including the mathematical sciences behind the appearance of this post on a computer screen. There are two main reasons for this disregard: quantity relationships represent a fundamental challenge to their Postmodern assumptions about the nature of sign systems, and math is hard. 

Like any arbitrary sign, the shape of a specific numeric character is unimportant; arbitrary signs are consensually determined. but once agreed upon, the relationships are absolute and unchanging. These signs all represent twenty-seven in (clockwise from top left) the Arabic, Babylonian, Roman, and Mayan systems. Two are base 10, the Mayan system is base 20 and the Babylonian base 60, but these four characters all represent exactly the same value, with no variation. They are perfectly translatable across vast historical and cultural divides.

Mathematical relations represent concepts that are abstract, but are perfectly knowable, replicable, and transmittable in themselves. The choice of signs is arbitrary, but they are transparent in ways that linguistic signs are not. Specifically, the polysemy, or multiple shades of meaning, that make words indeterminate or ambiguous does not appear to apply to numbers, nor do the shifts over time that cause languages to evolve.  

Oxyrhynchus papyrus (P.Oxy. I 29) fragment from Book II, Proposition 5 of Euclid's Elements, ca. 100 AD

Euclid determined his postulates, or axioms, in the 4th century BC. The first four hold today as written.

Euclid calls attention to the mathematical learning process, which is discursive, in that it relies on an arbitrary semiotic system, but seems to progress in mysterious, almost mystical, leaps as explanation suddenly becomes insight. Mathematical referents, or Quantities, in Aristotle's terms, are abstract, or conceptual, in that they do not exist as tangible objects in the material world, but they are clearly "real' in that they can consistently predict material outcomes. The moment when a math student "gets it" is unpredictible, and will occur at a different instant for each member of a class. 

Raphael, The School of Athens; detail, Euclid and his Students, 1509-11, fresco, Stanza della Signatura, Vatican Palace. 

In this passage from perhaps his most famous work, Raphael demonstrates the mathematical learning process with his characteristic compositional brilliance. Here Euclid, modeled after Raphael's friend, the great architect Bramante (the collection of artistic talent in Renaissance Rome is literally mind-boggling) demonstrates a proof to a group of students. We trace the arc of dawning realization in a sweeping, fluid curve from the engrossed boy in pale blue first struggling to understand, to the boy in green who looks up as he begins to "see" (note the almost mystical expression), through the self-assured boy leaning in who now understands, and into the celestial globe that signifies the abstract universal knowledge conferred by Euclid's teachings. Meanwhile, the confident student in the green tunic who leans in has clearly already mastered the lesson, and follows along, ready to offer a helping hand to his junior fellows like a classical TA. The fluid grace of the composition masks the strict geometric structure, making what is essentially a conceptual diagram seem as natural as a conversation.

A leap to abstract knowledge that can be perfectly replicated and endlessly retransmitted  essentially disproves the semiotic foundations of the Postmodern concept of discourse, if that mattered in a world where logic, like math, can be written off as sexist or racist, discursively. Perhaps mathematical notation can further "problematize" the notion that difference precludes a meaningful relationship:

An average is a repeatable process within an arbitrary semiotic system that simplifies a group of numbers into a single term that may be different from all of them, but is intrinsically connected to them as a group in a  meaningful way. No matter how large the group becomes, the average retains this connection. It is abstract and incomplete (all semiotic mediation is) but it is neither random nor autonomous.

It is obvious that the very building blocks of Postmodern discourse are rotten to the foundation.

Semiotics and Discourse

At this point I want to look more closely at the second displacement noted at the beginning of this post: the replacement of reality with discourse, but the semiotic/language issue proved lengthy enough, so I will deal with discourse more thoroughly in the next post. It is worth taking the time to address these foundational issues closely before moving on.

In the meantime, some deep questions from Judith Butler, both as a reminder of where the slippery slope of discourse leads, and as an insight into the torments I've endured acquiring the background to write these posts. Because when Luce Irigaray poses the question...

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?