Postmodernism

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POSTMODERNISM.

AMERICAN AND FRENCH VERSIONS
A DEVELOPING SERIOUSNESS
LANGUAGE AND POWER RELATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Since the late 1960s, when literary critics brought the term into circulation, postmodernism has been employed in what appears at first sight to be rather different contexts. Initially referring to a loosely defined set of innovations in practically all artistic disciplines, including architecture, it later came to include a new perspective on language, knowledge, even the idea of reality itself. In hindsight, we can see that the postmodern impulse first surfaced in the 1950s, well before American literary and cultural critics such as Ihab Hassan and Susan Sontag began to identify it as such. In the United States we find it in, for instance, the collages of Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925), the ironic borrowings from popular art in the work of Roy Liechtenstein (1923–1997), the musical experiments of John Cage (1912–1992), the "happenings" of the late 1950s, and other developments that remind of us the continental European avant-gardes of the early decades of the twentieth century. We find echoes of Dada, but without its deliberately offensive political edge, and of surrealism, but without surrealism's belief in the role Sigmund Freud assigned to the "unconscious."

AMERICAN AND FRENCH VERSIONS

In its earliest phase, this American version of post-modernism was a mostly playful revolt against the solemnities, anxieties, and hierarchies of the 1950s and against the high seriousness and lofty moral purposes of much of its art. We find the same appreciation of playfulness and popular art forms in Robert Venturi's early 1960s reappraisal of the architecture of the Las Vegas Strip. In France we find a similar turning away from the concerns of an earlier generation, strongly marked in this case by the still recent experience of Nazi totalitarianism. Initially limited to literature, the postmodern reaction to the insistent moral seriousness of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others was one of formal experiment and of self-reflexivity, as in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet (b. 1922), in which character, theme, and so on are secondary to an exploration of the formal possibilities that the novel as an art form offers.

This is not to say that we do not find playfulness in French postmodernism or that its American counterpart does not go in for formal experiment and self-reflexivity. In fact, as postmodernism developed and became resolutely international, playfulness, formal experiment, and the intense consciousness that accompanies self-reflexivity became virtually inseparable, as in the following questionnaire that the unsuspecting reader suddenly encounters in Donald Barthelme's Snow White (1967):

Do you like the story so far? Yes () No ()
Does Snow White resemble the Snow White you remember? Yes () No ()
Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince figure? Yes () No ()
That Jane is the wicked stepmother-figure? Yes ()No()
In the further development of the story, would you like more emotion () or less emotion ()?

A DEVELOPING SERIOUSNESS

By the 1970s postmodernism had developed its own seriousness. While in postmodernism's early stages this seriousness was less than obvious, partly because of its apparently willful superficiality, partly because of its interest in formal display, it now was pervasively present in novels such as Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) or Robert Coover's The Public Burning (1977), providing a moral framework for their wild improbabilities, displays of self-reflexivity, unsettling asides to the reader, and general authorial zaniness.

It would, in fact, be fair to say that postmodern art, in one way or another, has been serious all along. Its borrowings from popular culture, its array of anti-interpretive strategies (disruptions, intentional incoherence, refusal to provide closure, apparent lack of artistic control, deliberate shallowness), its self-reflexivity, its confusing hybridity (as in landscape art or installations) and mixing of styles (as in postmodern architecture), serve an ultimately political purpose. Such typically post-modern features question the politics—based on a specific view of art, the artist, and art's social function—that dominated the postwar art world and its institutions. They reject the ideals of coherence (dominant in modernist literary criticism) and of purity (central to our understanding of modernism in the visual arts and to the modernist architecture of Bauhaus and its followers). They also call into question the uniqueness of the artistic object, the artist as hero, and the transcendence of art itself, that is, its status as the refuge of eternal aesthetic values in a commercialized world.

Postmodern art is thoroughly skeptical, first of all about art, but also about the role of the institutions, such as museums, that embody such ideals, and even about deeply entrenched humanist convictions concerning the uniqueness and autonomy of the individual. In the course of the 1970s, that skepticism, influenced by postmodern theory, was extended to all social structures, including gender roles, class and race relations, even capitalism itself. To put this differently, since its emergence in the 1950s postmodern art has of course, like all art, drawn our attention to itself, but also to an ever-widening social context. It has tried to make us ask questions such as: What is art? Who decides the answer—and why? Who is excluded by this definition? Who controls art's institutions? How are they funded?

LANGUAGE AND POWER RELATIONS

Postmodern theory, which in the later 1970s began to exert enormous influence, especially in the humanities, has its basis in France. It is best seen as an amalgam, the exact mixture depending on the theorist in question, of ideas and arguments derived from the writings of the Marxist sociologist Louis Althusser (1918–1990), the philosophers Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Jean-François Lyotard (1925–1998), the historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984), and the literary critic Roland Barthes (1815–1980). In all of its many versions, however, it is resolutely antihumanist and sees everything as inevitably partaking in relations of power. What distinguishes postmodern theory from other antihumanist perspectives that claim to have a sharp eye for the workings of power—such as Marxism—is its focus on language and on the way language constructs the world we (think we) live in.

For Derrida, language is inherently elusive and unstable. It is a centerless system of ultimately arbitrary signs that is never unequivocally anchored in reality and that never allows stable meaning—that is, truth—to emerge. As a result, language facilitates the emergence of false truths and a false order through oppositions (white versus black, masculine versus feminine, rational versus irrational, Western versus Oriental) in which one pole is routinely "privileged," that is, accorded superiority. For Foucault, language creates order through what he calls "discourses": networks of interlocking statements that have evolved over time and that determine what counts as relevant and even true within the fields they control. Foucault discusses a limited number of discourses—medical, legal, sexological—but obviously there is a discourse for every imaginable field. It is these discourses, seemingly without origin and belonging to nobody, that effectively constitute reality as we know it and that embody and perpetuate power and confer it on those who can participate in them. To be outside discourses—where women and non-whites have found themselves over much of Western history—means to go unheard and to be powerless.

Postmodern theory aims to bring to light how texts and other forms of communication—including works of (literary) art—try to establish truths by privileging certain positions. It then goes on to "deconstruct" them by exposing their ambiguities and internal contradictions. Alternatively, it may show how those positions derive from one or more discourses that have no authority apart from their own insistent claims. In both cases, postmodern theory seeks to demonstrate that language—or, for that matter, any sign system—cannot accurately represent the world. It shows that it is language that creates our world and it alerts us to the fact that we are constantly duped into accepting as given, as natural, what is in fact fundamentally ungrounded.

The postmodern attack on language and, more generally, on all our conceptual systems, leads inevitably toward skepticism and relativism. For postmodernists, there is no such thing as truth; there are only positions that can always be traced back to the metaphoric play of language. For radical postmodernists, even the claims of science derive their authority only from the discourse within which they are presented. Needless to say, such views are highly controversial. More generally, postmodernism's skepticism with regard to individual agency, its resolute antirealism, and its suspicion of reason—which it tends to see as a repressive force—have generated widespread criticism. It should be said that postmodern theory is indeed not characterized by intellectual rigor, an attitude that can partly be blamed on its suspicion of reason, partly on sheer mischief, and partly on the fact that it took form in a literary rather than a philosophical environment. In spite of that, it has played an enormously important role by insisting on the ubiquitousness of power and the inevitability of politics and by constantly trying to do justice to the historically marginalized. Without postmodernism's groundbreaking radical questioning, new fields of study such as postcolonial or queer studies would not have emerged. Even new forms of political activism such as identity politics and single-issue politics would not have taken the shape they have.