The Nightmare of Postmodernism
The Nightmare of Postmodernism
The Reader is Dead
The term postmodernism (or ‘pomo’) refers less to an absurd philosophy expressed in the work of a few French intellectuals of the 1960s and 70s, and more to the absurd cultural world that produced these thinkers, the bizarre and frightening pseudo-reality of ‘late-stage’ capitalism we inhabit today, which first appeared in the 1970s, mutated into the monstrous ‘global village’1 of the 1980s and, since then, has reproduced itself through an uncanny kind of cultural cannibalism. This cultural unworld, radically alienated from nature, and from human nature, emphasised modes of thought and perception which reflect a reality in which nothing exists but the self. The horrifying nature of this solipsistic state initially concealed itself with pacifying hyper-stimulation and material abundance, but now that the free energy has ran out, the nightmare lies exposed.
Postmodern culture was actually born with civilisation, and the fundamentally solipsistic religions and philosophies it engendered. The seeds for the postmodern condition we are familiar with today were sewn in the European Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the classicism of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment; as dualism, the splitting of reality, by the intellectual ideologues of the West, into a realm of truth and meaning, called mind, and an inert, meaningless and mechanical realm of mere matter, called body, which the rational mind could grasp and master. The critical movement known as romanticism, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its focus on the anti-classical emotional self, more or less guaranteed solipsistic posturing, but it was not until the start of the twentieth century, and the appearance of modernism,2 that the cultural world we exist in today first appeared.
Where Romanticism had questioned rational meaning, Modernism threw meaning itself into doubt. Truth, beauty, reality and so on all became, for the writers, artists and ideologues of the West, uncertain. This gave modernists an valuable opportunity to explore new means of expression and to introduce uncertainty and unpredictability into their work, sometimes drawing on primal artistic forms, in which fidelity to an objective ‘reality’ was secondary to an inner truth which transcended it. The mad, ecstatic, explosive music of Igor Stravinsky, for example, the disconcertingly fragmented poetry of T.S. Eliot and the unsettling, primal images of Pablo Picasso all expressed, through the elemental fluidity of their modernist forms, a new kind of depth.
For many thinkers and artists however, following hateful Hegel, and then the morbid Nazi, Heidegger, life became little more than an excuse to disappear into their own abstract or emotional selves and to completely divorce their intellects, or their feelings, from consciousness and context. The coldness of modernist architecture, cut off from nature, the difficulty of modernist literature, no longer interested in being accessible and entertaining, or in reflecting a shared world, and the opacity of modernist art and thought, self-referential, self-contained and relentlessly abstract, combined to exclude ordinary people from great art, to make them hate and fear it. Henceforth, great or high art was for intellectuals, for the elites. It was also, for the most part, meaningless.
Some modernists had hoped to radically undermine the unnatural world they found themselves in, but they were unaware that the formalism, abstraction and self-absorption of their work was in no sense inimical to the advance of the technological system, which was spreading further and further over and into the earth. Rather than abandon the intellectual inwardness of Modernism, however, professional culture-makers who followed them, those of the late twentieth century, immersed themselves further and further into it. As direct experience of consciousness, nature, sensate culture and meaningful tradition3 receded almost completely from ordinary life, artists and thinkers began to embrace what was to amount to the end of art, the end of literature, the end of meaning and the perfect culmination of the cultural madness of civilisation: postmodernism.
The essence of postmodernism is that not just meaning is subject to radical questioning, but that it does not exist at all. In other words, representation—language, image, sign, idol—does not refer to anything real. For one of the earliest key thinkers of postmodernism, Jacques Derrida, language can say nothing but itself. There is nothing authentic, no inner truth, that lies beyond or within it, and all attempts to reach such a truth (through, for example, binary opposites, such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, or ‘real’ and ‘unreal’, or ‘deep’ and ‘superficial’) are doomed. There is no right, no wrong, no nature, no origin, no reality at all; that is reality.
Postmodern philosophers who followed Derrida—Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard—all considered meaning, truth, consciousness, the I reading these words or any kind of foundational, experiential quality, to be an illusion created from language, or from the represented fabric of society—meaning from that which has power over society. How such a philosophy is supposed to justify or explain itself without such foundations is, predictably, never answered, nor is any hope offered that man can find his way out of such a hall of mirrors, for there is and can be no exit.
All this explains one of the defining features of postmodern philosophy, its inability to say anything intelligible, and its tendency to produce, in lieu of meaning, stylistic quagmires of abstruse, impenetrable flannel. Here is a typical example, from the opening of Derrida’s postmodern ‘masterpiece’, Margins of Philosophy;
Ample to the point of believing itself interminable, a discourse that has called itself philosophy—doubtless the only discourse that has ever intended to receive its name only from itself, has never ceased murmuring its initial letter to itself from as close as possible—has always, including its own, meant to say its limit.4
If this means ‘philosophy describes its own limits’, why doesn’t Derrida say this, or intelligibly develop the idea? If it doesn’t mean that, what does it mean? The question is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter that what Derrida says is opaque, stylistic self-pleasuring, that, once one has cleaned away the sewage from what is being offered, it amounts to, at best, a hollow, plasticky observation. It doesn’t matter that nothing is really being said, for the self-declared reason that nothing can be said. Derrida told us that meaning does not exist, he told us that language cannot say anything, and then he proceeded to write several books in which nothing was said!
There is, for the most part, no way to meaningfully engage with postmodern thought without descending to its farcical, self-parodic level. How, for example, is one to respond to Jacques Lacan’s solemn declaration that the erectile organ is equivalent to √–1?5 The only sensible reaction is to ignore such prattle. That said, some claims, commitments and preoccupations of postmodernism can be inspected. Postmodernism (again, the cultural movement, as much as the specific ideas of its famous theorists) rejects absolute truth, ‘grand narratives’, normative standards of behaviour, and authoritative meaning. Only the marginal, the bizarre, the fleeting, and the relative are worthy of serious consideration. It is perhaps difficult to appreciate, in our shredded cultural wasteland, that in some respects a shift of emphasis to the excluded outlands, was a salutary development, given the dominance of totalising, centralising political, racial and religious ideologies; the belief, for example that culture and authority are a matter of ‘breeding’, or that minority opinions are ipso facto insane. Unfortunately, the postmodern interest in the marginal, the excluded, and the powerless led to a positive prejudice against all forms of authority, stability, objectivity, and normative experience.
This led to all the peculiar features of our cultural world: 1) The notorious postmodern insistence on the absence of authorial authority, on the ‘dead author’. One does not read Homer, Shakespeare or Dickens to discover what these artists were trying to say, but to impose one’s own reading, the more bizarre the better; better by definition. 2) The belief that acquisition of culture should, for the most part, be fun and playful. Schooling should be easy and friendly, no harsh criticisms here please, for we are not training people to think deeply about life, but to cuddle teddy bears, watch The Terminator and have anal sex. 3) The notable absence of passionate conviction in postmodern thought, because conviction is inherently coercive. One may be angry, one may be dismissive, one may be self-assertive—but intellectually one must be vague, ambiguous, and impossible to get a grip on. 4) The attraction of extreme forms of socialism and ‘anarchism’ to postmodernists, because these positions seem to suggest lack of authority, experience, and lawful norms. In fact, anarchism without authority is like a ship without a captain; doomed to sink in any but the shallowest waters. 5) The postmodern refusal to accept depth; or essence.
The foundational anti-essentialism of postmodernism amounts to a denial of human nature. The idea that you can or must realise your potential has no place in pomo theory, for what is potential but essence; a historically and socially constructed illusion? This is a reassuring doctrine to those whose interests align with the prevailing norms of the dominant culture, for if there is no ontologically prior human nature, how can we claim that capitalism (or whatever system has power to shape the self) deforms it? It is also a convenient doctrine for those without interest in realising their potential, particularly woman, who has nothing like the pressing need to discover her potential as man does. Anti-essentialism therefore leads to a feminine society for which man must deform his originality, initiative, discrimination, and spontaneity, which must all be sacrificed to the demands of the system for conformity, passivity and self-consciousness; and in which the authority—particularly the male authority—of realised potential, mastery and self-realisation, all gained through long, difficult experience, is rejected, leaving us with a world in which nothing is done very well and nothing much is very good.
The postmodernist can claim that human potential does not exist because he conflates it with some kind of rational structure, not reality itself but its representation. A third option, that experience is founded upon a primal human nature which cannot be reduced to rationalist essentialism, is ruled out by postmodernists and by their putative opponents, classically-minded rationalists, who both agree that reality comprises nothing but literal things, discrete particles, which take whatever meaning they have only from other literal things, never from a qualitatively foundational consciousness. For the rationalist, these particles form a stable and ultimately intelligible order, grounded in universal reason (or perhaps in a divine authority), whereas for the postmodernist they are contingent constructions without intrinsic, grounding unity. In either case I, the individual, do not have direct, sovereign experience of my consciousness, nor of the present moment it is one with. I am effectively a zombie, forever estranged from a reality which I can understand, or ‘play with,’ or manage, or own, or study-but never be.
We can be nothing, because we are nothing. Postmodern thought denies consciousness, either explicitly, by assuming eliminative materialism (the argument that consciousness is an illusion generated by neural processes), or implicitly, by conflating it with a purportedly stable, rational self which, as has now be demonstrated, is a shifting post-hoc convenience. We are all, indeed, as postmodernists never tire of telling us, ‘many selved’, positing a solid I where, in reality, all is shifting impressions and contingent identities. But consciousness is not the same as self, as AI—a self without a soul or experiential primacy—has made perfectly, and appallingly clear to us. Doing away with the sovereignty of consciousness because self cannot conceive of it, leaves us in a land without a king, a state we may rationally approve of, but which, intuitively, we perceive as a desolate absence of spiritual authority.
Attitudes always stand in for convictions
These features of postmodern philosophy are much the same as those of postmodern art and literature which, we can say, precedes and envelops its philosophical expression. In place of meaning in postmodern literature we find extreme self-consciousness, in which, for example, an I-narrator constantly reminds the reader that nothing he is saying is real; self-referential language games, such as puns for example, or references to other works of literature; and schizoid hyper-focus on minute shades of feeling. Postmodern art is much the same, as is postmodern cinema. There is simply nothing there. An actual, sensory world comprising other people, beyond the author’s self, much less the craft required to tell a great story or paint a great picture, do not exist in postmodern culture and so, because this leads to art and literature that is vapid, pointless and utterly inconsequential, various titillating ‘devices’ must be employed keep the reader from losing interest (perverse sex, extreme violence, racy confession, nostalgia and so on.)
Popular forms of postmodern culture, which are slowly fusing into a nightmarish hyperreality, include tales of the ‘metaverse’, in which culture is shattered into a thousand pieces, which are then presented to the spectator as a kind of grotesque panto of retro hits; AI-generated porn, which subjects the appropriated likenesses of popular singers and actresses to grotesque fantasies of total domination; and the video game, in which there is no gender, no corporeality, no society, no culture, no meaning and, crucially, no death. This deathless, self-informing representation, is, like the ‘speech’ of Large Language Models, the hellish culmination of postmodern culture, a state of universal madness, in which the barrier between subjectivity and objectivity is dissolved, revealing nothing. The pomoverse is thus a parody of panjectivity, a perversion of the selfless state in which I experience a reality which transcendently precedes, but crucially maintains, the division between me here and that there. In the postmodern state all such partitions disintegrate, but without a grounding consciousness, I find myself in a blind chaos of hollow form.
A concrete example. There is a natural dividing line between the private world, of the home, and the public world, of ‘society’. In the rigidly classical pre-modern world this division was a carefully policed penal institution which suffocated social spontaneity as much as it did the natural complementarity of the hearth. Freedom, under such conditions, should have meant selflessly experiencing that which precedes the private and the public, allowing it to respond to the natural instincts of men and women to play with these useful forms. What actually happened was that the membrane which divides the home from the world was, like that which divides public man from private woman, indiscriminately torn apart. We now live in a world in which the most intimate details of everyone’s lives are constantly available everywhere, in which they think, speak and dress outside as if they are inside, in which our expressed thoughts are exposed to institutional scrutiny, in which those very institutions become part of the architecture of our own minds, in which the solid world of scientific fact has been shattered and replaced by… what? By nil.
This isn’t to say there is anything inherently wrong with turning public-private complementarity on its head, or with questioning the foundations of science, or even in temporarily dissolving gendered contrasts; but for the self to abolish the facticity and causality upon which such distinctions rest, without referring to the unselfish whole which maintains and regenerates them, is chaos and madness and cultural suicide.
Nor, returning to art, is there a problem in formal experimentation per se, in ‘mashing up’ artistic styles and subverting conventions; or in what is called in theatre ‘breaking the fourth wall’ and drawing attention to a work of art as a work art; or in that staple of pomo art and literature, ‘fragmentation’, the breaking up of form in order to express the dissolution of self; or even in obvious artifice, sex, violence, swearing, CGI and other pomo gimmicks. Great art uses all of these techniques; but they are all purely formal devices. There is no meaning in any of them unless they are subordinate to meaning. Here again, hyper-subjectivist postmodernism and hyper-objectivist rationalism, which appear to be opposites, collide. For in logic too, no meaning can possibly be arrived at that isn’t brought to the premises from outside of reason. Solipsists often justify themselves with impeccable reason, while, conversely, if you scratch beneath a rationalist or realist you often find little more than sawdust and cynicism.
So what is meaning? This question is impossible to literally answer. In fact it is the purpose of art to non-literally express a truth which cannot be literally grasped, a truth which is necessarily invisible to ego, which divides the world up into a subjectivity and objectivity which no more exist to consciousness than a lost yesterday and hidden tomorrow do. This is why, when postmodern subjectivists and classical rationalists hear, for example, Bach’s Matthew’s Passion, neither of them hear the panjective truth of the music. If they are classical music enthusiasts, they will hear the objective, technical brilliance of the piece, and, very likely, as it is near-impossible to extinguish humanity completely, they will (in a good interpretation) experience nice subjective feelings, which they might call ‘depth’ or ‘beauty’, but the profound artistic truth of the piece will no more hit home than it would if an android were listening; because there is no home, just a cacophony of fragmented forms.
This is why complaints that postmodern art is meaningless are, to postmodernists, meaningless. For postmodernism, Bach’s Passion exists, essentially, on the same level as advertising, the hollow, barren, deathlike abyss of which all postmodern philosophy partakes and ‘references’, which is why postmodernism loves to ‘mash up’ high and low art; not because it seeks to express a truth that is both deep and superficial (as genius, from Shakespeare’s to the Beatles’, loves to do), but because it hears no real difference between a Chopin nocturne and an Ed Sheeran number 1. In fact, advertising in its crudest form—telling an audience the value of something—is essential to postmodern art, which cannot stand for itself and must be explained. This is why the work of, say, Andy Warhol, requires galleries, brochures and a circus of celebrity endorsements. If you found his Brillo soap pads on a rubbish heap you wouldn’t pick it up unless you already knew it was by the famous artist, whereas if you found Kuniyoshi’s Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre or Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (which, incidentally, was a 16th century prediction of the postmodernist state) sticking out the back of a demolished sofa you’d know they were special.
Because there is no meaning for postmodernists, and for those mired in the postmodern condition, they have nothing of interest to say about what lies beyond the limits of the institutional or represented reality they describe, even when they dissect that non-reality incisively.6 Michel Foucault’s analysis of power, for example, and the means by which it distributes itself across modern institutions (’power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms’), or Jean Baudrillard’s chilling analysis of virtuality, which evaporates power within the entire unreal system (‘Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real’) describe the almost unimaginably subtle nature of the prison world. But this is all they do. Describe the surface. There is, as with all postmodern theorists, nothing beneath. For Foucault it is ‘meaningless to speak of-or against-Reason, Truth, or Knowledge’. For Baudrillard, horrifically, ‘the real is no longer possible’. This attitude (attitudes always stand in for convictions) commits such thinkers, as it does all postmodernists, to speaking ironically or with turgid opacity, because nothing meaningful can be spoken of sincerely and clearly, and it commits them to privileging the social[ist], collectivist, merely agreed-upon and entirely contingent pseudo-realities of belief, perspective and opinion, there being nothing else in the universe to appeal to; rationality having been thrown out with reality (which both postmodernists and pre-modern classicists take to be the same thing). With neither the useful but ultimately illusory truth of objective science to appeal to, nor the panjective reality which both classicism and postmodernism ignore, something can only be taken as true if a community agrees to take it as truth, which means that any criticism of that communal truth is an existential attack. Here postmodernism shows its identity with pre-classical theism, which violently rejects criticism, or ‘blasphemy’, for similar reasons (with ‘God’ underwriting its tribal ‘truth’), and with modern leftism (postmodernists are leftists, and leftists, fearing reason and reality,7 are postmodernists), which is essentially a mixture of religion without God, and Marx without Marx, both being white, male rationalists.
If postmodernism had been confined to a few absurd philosophy texts and ridiculous paintings, we might be justified in ignoring it, but it isn’t just a theory, it is ‘reality’. We now live on a shoddy, cardboard stage, an endless, schizoid horror show in which conscious physicality plays no part. In this ersatz world it is seriously suggested that minds, long understood to be completely separate from bodies, can actually be uploaded into machines, and that bodies can, on a whim, be declared beautiful or ugly, fat or thin, male or female. In a virtual reality no aspect of culture, which comes to us entirely through the screen, can be trusted. It might as well not exist at all, for those who control what comes through the screen don’t merely control reality, but create it; whether that reality is that we are ‘really’ at war, or that we are ‘really’ on Mars. All this is immaterial, because there is no matter, no reality—just information—which makes it nonsensical to speak of reality.
This explains why those adapted to a pomo world speak as they do, without nuance, but with overstated, eye-rolling emphasis (you are lent a pencil: awesome! pencil snaps; nightmare!); with pacifistic hesitancy (unless their social identity is threatened, then they become murderous); polite and friendly to all, yet without fundamental social graces (unable to listen, hardly acknowledging the physical presence of anyone else); unable to commit to or take responsibility for truth (never ‘good’ only like ‘good’) and so always fearful, uncertain and seeking reassurance (every statement has the intonation of a question, or is a vehement appeal to a fact, ‘literally’).
Postmodern man is becoming a nothing, an identity devoid of quality, except perhaps the quality of the void. Even the restless hatefulness and guilt-ridden fear of the pre-pomo mind has left him; he’s not even good enough to be evil. He has become a husk, as featureless as the inexpressive digital forms he melds with as soon as he has overcome whatever boring obstacles the world has thrown in the path back to his computer. We are now living in a zombie apocalypse. Like, literally. It is difficult to see this because zombies are polite, gentle and well-groomed, and they produce very efficient spreadsheets. They don’t eat human flesh; they are vegans.
We are surrounded by zombies because our world, our simulated culture, is the land of the living dead. Civilisation is not collapsing, it has already collapsed. Like a peccary hit with a poison dart it keeps on running, but there is no life left in it, only mechanical, self-informed momentum. ‘The last thing to collapse is the surface’.8 The centre is hollow; there is no life there, no energy, no nature, no beauty, no truth, no culture. This is why the postmodern condition is characterised by lack of boundary, or lack of limit. Meaningful, manifest structure cannot emerge from an empty shell. The only meaning for the shell is absence of meaning, or absence of structure, the means by which the surface justifies and perpetuates its vacuity. Postmodernists continually assert that boundaries and limits are outmoded forms of authoritarian control. The boundary between man and woman must be broken down, the boundary between cultures also, and between classes,9 the limits of nature, the traditional structures [and strictures] of craft, national borders, the frontier between the private and the public, and any kind of threshold, between too little and too much, or between the beautiful, or healthy, and the ugly, or unhealthy (e.g. the grossly overweight), or between the natural and the artificial, or between youth and age. All meaningful distinctions must be done away with, so that the meaningless system can finish its work and make of man and woman a featureless node, particularly the boundary between self and world. The individual must be without the slightest taint of uniqueness (although he may present himself with freakish pseudo-distinction) and must be completely exposed, doing nothing for himself and nothing for the activity alone.
The hollowness at the heart of our world, and the complete absence of meaningful boundary, is why nothing beautiful and original appears or can appear on the surface—in fashion, or music, or literature, or architecture, or art. If you want a vision of the postmodern condition imagine a newbuild of breeze blocks, plywood and bolted-on (rainbow-coloured) cladding. There is a small group of people on a plastic lawn, wearing ill-fitting clothing from a local chain. The women are hard and angular, the men pudgy and soft-spoken, all of indeterminate sex, indeterminate culture. They are talking to nobody through their smartphones. They are listening to synthetic music or playing synthetic games or watching synthetic teevee, and they are eating synthetic protein. They are sleepy, half-dead, but they look deeply troubled, and sometimes terror passes over their featureless features.
Now imagine the inner life of these people. It is a mixture of total anhedonic numbness and fierce, stabbing anxiety which manifests in their dreamlife as an eternity of sameness behind which, or in which, in its haunting fabric, resides a horrifying, demonic otherness. Things, under the isolating stare of the obsessively seeing self, are sickeningly solid and, at the same time, uncanny. Nothing is concealed, and yet, in revealing everything, in making everything immediate and to hand, a hovering, menacing abomination is brought invisibly into being. This eerie, penetrating dread is not confined to dream, for there is no boundary between the real and the imaginary, between the inner and the outer, between the screen and the mind, which has been formed into a positionless node, fused, in its total passivity, into a self-contained construct.10
I can trust nothing, nobody, everything is fragmented, shattered, deformed, broken, split, warped, mind and body, including me. Everything speaks to me, but says nothing, everything looks at me, but sees nothing. There is no past, no tradition, no society, no other, just an eternity of myself, a frozen now of things without relation to each other, without meaning for each other, only for the self-informed, self-replicating, self-ish system, which controls every literal thing, perfectly; a mindless, bodiless image of perfect paradise, perfect enlightenment, going on everywhere and forever. Not because it does not and will not end, but because time and space have ceased, revealing, in a perfect parody of eternity, an absolute sterile absence, or nullity. There is no psychological or cultural movement whatsoever, no growth, no life, no death. I am indestructible, impregnable, eternally secure. No pain or problem can intrude upon my awareness. I can do anything, be anyone, go anywhere, know everything and feel whatever I choose to feel, instantly.
I am God, but I am insane.
This essay appears in Ad Radicem
See Marshall McLuhan & Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village.
Here ‘modernism’ means ‘proto-postmodernism’.
Including reasonable, rational, enquiry.
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits.
e.g. Foucault’s, Discipline and Punish and Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death.
Or tending to. Rightists tend to fear unreason and reality.
Albert Einstein.
Not because it loves equality, but because it hates distinction.
This is the true meaning of ‘kafkaesque’, for Franz Kafka was the first to find himself in, and as, this state.
Source: Expressive Egg
Comments
Post a Comment