How postmodernism lost its cool
That was the response I received on Twitter from ApostrophePong when I tweeted about writing something on the representation of postmodernism in the media. I quickly typed up a reply insisting that I knew that postmodernism was ’so yesterday’ and that was exactly what I was going to write about. I didn’t want to sound out of touch.
I didn’t know why it was so yesterday. I wasn’t too sure when today had begun and I wasn’t completely confident that I even knew what postmodernism was. I didn’t mention this of course. That would have been uncool. But how had postmodernism lost its cool?
I thought I would start on the autopsy table analysing the corpse. Postmodernism, when you cut it apart, literally means ‘after the modernist movement,’ while modernism itself was originally used to refer to things ‘of the present’. In that sense, postmodernism should mean ‘after the present’. Postmodernism should mean tomorrow. Not yesterday. This meaning must be a bit muddled. We didn’t start traveling through time.
In an effort to cement some kind of definition of postmodernism I scrounged around some postmodern texts about postmodernism that were written by postmodernists. Hal Foster wrote of a postmodernism that ’seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and poltical affiliations’ . Margaret Iversen wrote of a postmodernism borne of a postructuralism that is defined by its ‘resistance to meaning’ . My efforts revealed that the ghost of postmodernism past was having a great big belly laugh at my attempts to corner it into some sort of definition. I was only cornering it so I could discover how it died, but I soon discovered that the weapon I was wielding as I poked and prodded it into its corner, was in fact the weapon that had slayed it. A definition was used to murder postmodernism.
The failure of all the student authors to appreciate the significance of the distinction between language and the use of language (and the determinism that is produced) was also closely bound up with their conception of the meaning of words. Nearly always these students treated abstract nouns as if they were the names of curious sorts of hollow objects. And ‘doing theory’ therefore consists of looking at ’society’ (another object) from somewhere imaginatively outside ‘it’, and seeing how the people who, as it were, have to live inside these hollow spaces are constrained in their thoughts and actions as a result.
According to Gavin Kitching, the students at the School of Politics at the University of New South Wales have been allowing their Honours essays to be corrupted by postmodernism. The students were treating abstract nouns as ‘hollow objects’ devoid of meaning. By treating these words as such, the students had created a society of people living in hollow spaces where their thoughts and actions were constrained as a result. Generally I myself do not find hollow spaces too constrictive. If I were to enter an empty hollow room I could imagine many things I could do in that room. If I were, however, to enter a room with dictionaries stacked to the ceiling and covering every inch of the floor, I might find myself mildly constrained.
Kitching’s theory that there is a distinction between language and the use of language contradicts what Heidegger considers makes something some thing. Heidegger, in his essay The Thing , considered that the way some thing is used defines it as some thing. He continues to write that the void, or ‘hollowness’, that creates space for this use, is in fact what the thing is. He demonstrates this concept through the use of a jug:
When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. … But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void. … The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.
Abstract nouns, such as postmodernism, are just such jugs. They are hollow empty objects. The question is, though, what is the water that fills the jug? The water is the liquid meaning that flows in and out of these words, piped into our culture via the media. As Raymond Williams writes, our society (another abstract noun) is made by the finding of common meaning that is written into the land.
Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind.
The idea of liquid meaning flowing through the media draws parallels to Myra MacDonald’s Foucaldian reading of a media that operates discursively. But instead of the media manifesting versions of reality that can be accessed through ‘the constructivist prism of discourse’ I would consider that the versions are in reality.
MacDonald writes that the media frames perceptions of reality, a reality that exists, but remains ‘profoundly unknowable’. She writes that by considering how these perceptions are constructed through the analysis of discourse we can still attempt to understand this reality as ‘refusing any attempt… because it is philosophically impossible to set an absolute criterion of truthfulness is… too rigid and extreme a position.’ She differentiates this kind of ‘unknowable truth’ from the ‘postmodern thinking’ of Baudrillard and his simulacrum because postmodern thinking ‘denies the point of positing any link whatsoever between media or cultural texts and reality,’
I would disagree with MacDonald’s fundamental concept of reality that causes her to consider that Baudrilards ‘postmodern thinking’ that stresses the self referentiality of signs systems cannot be utilised in uncovering how the media forms ‘frames of understanding we construct in our head about the material world’ . The error in her concept of reality is in her emphasis of the material world. We live in a society and a world that is primarily constructed of abstracts. That is the reality. Media theorist, Vilém Flusser, writes that all forms of communication are constructed systems of signs . There is nothing natural about the words “I love you”. Marshall McLuhan writes that the content of the written word is speech, and that the content of speech is consciousness. We need to consider how the media shapes this reality of language, of abstracts. We do not need to consider how the media shapes the reality of chairs and trees or other objects of the material world. MacDonald is correct in considering that postmodern thinking ‘denies the point of positing any link whatsoever between media or cultural texts and reality’ , because postmodern thinking does not consider the two mutually exclusive.
MacDonald writes that ‘words and images, by defining and labeling phenomena, frame the terms in which we think about these,’ but they do not frame the way we think about things, they frame how we think. By changing the way we think, they change our reality. The media does not perpetuate versions of reality, it perpetuates versions in reality. And why did postmodernism lose its cool? How did this reality change? How did it lose its worth in regards to Bordiu’s concept of social capital? It occurred because the hollow empty object was overfilled with meaning by the media.
According to Sarah Thornton, one of the key criteria’s of ‘cool’ is authenticity. Dominic Strinati
Inspired by this graph depicting the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and ‘other stupid academic fads’ I decided to make my own graph with my own data. I scanned the archives of both JSTOR, the academic journal database, and the Sydney Morning Herald between 1987 and 2002 for articles that mention ‘postmodern’ or ‘postmodernity’. Postmodernism’s crisis of cool it seemed occurred in 1997 when the academic journals began to mention Postmodernism a little less, while the Sydney Morning Herald began to mention Postmodernism a significant amount more. The newspaper continued to increase its coverage of postmodernism annually while the journals coverage continued to decrease. The academic trendsetters started to retreat, they had kept postmodernism as cool as possible for as long as possible by embedding the word with ambiguity. Most of the articles couldn’t settle on a definitive definition, and every subsequent article argued against that earlier unsettled definition. The newspaper however, which avoids ambiguity because it compromises appearances of truth’, settled on a definition on January 7, 1997. The very date when postmodernism started being uncool. The ambiguity of postmodernism was keeping it from the honest unacademic folk:
For the past decade or so, the dinner party circuit has been divided into three distinct groups: those who know about postmodernism, those who don’t know about postmodernism and those who pretend to know about postmodernism in a thinly veiled attempt to gain sexual favours from one or more of their dining companions. Clearly this situation is unacceptable. If you are one of these impressionable types who feel amorously inclined towards those who confuse you, how are you to pick the real PoMo pundits from the pretenders?
The article was titled simply Postmodernism. Written by Emma Tom. Its purpose was to define postmodernism and it enlisted an expert source, a professor of art from a sandstone university:
Postmodernists reacted to styles of thought that were predominant in the ’60s, such as Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis and an approach to anthropology called structuralism. All these were known as master narratives: huge, elaborate stories that were supposed to explain absolutely everything. Other examples of master narratives include Christianity, capitalism and the idea of human progress. The postmodernists decided that these big stories were no longer appropriate, that it was not possible for there to ever be one story that explained everything. Explaining that nothing could explain everything was to take a great deal of explaining.
The article filled the jug with meaning. Postmodernism was no longer incomprehensible, people could no longer imagine their own meanings of postmodernism. Their meaning was murdered. It had been usurped by the news media’s objective truth. It lost its ambiguity. It lost its authenticity. It lost its cool.
