Mapping Postmodernism

The Pervert’s Guide to Postmodernism

“Welcome to the desert of the real”

~Morpheus

A few months back I read an article, if my memory serves me right, on the New York Post about a prank pulled by two high school students in a San Francesco art gallery. The two boys simply put a pair of glasses, worn by one of the boys, on the floor in one corner of the gallery, and in no time the little farce attracted many ardent connoisseurs taking pictures (of the glasses on the floor) and interpreting and explaining amongst each other what it means! It must have been rather disconcerting to find out that they had fallen prey to a prank pulled by two high school students. The two pranksters, however, were by no means some uncultured reprobate, in fact, the two kids were there to enjoy some culture, and after browsing around the gallery they were prompted by the triviality of some of the so-called “artworks” on display, which by the way included “stuffed animal on a grey blanket” - to stage the farce.

The entire fiasco somehow reminded me of the whole Sokal Hoax incident; Alan Sokal, a physicist in NYU submitted a nonsensical paper titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," written in a postmodern gibberish style to one of the leading postmodern journals, and sure enough, it was published! Then, Sokal revealed that it was just some nonsensical bullshit perpetrated to expose the lack of cognizance and cogency within the postmodern tradition. The Nobel- prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote in the New York Review of Books, “Sokal’s hoax served a public purpose, to attract attention to what Sokal saw as a decline of standards of rigor in the academic community, and for that reason, it was disclosed immediately by the author himself”. The causes that prompted the two pranksters may not have been as responsible or pertinent as that of Sokal’s, but what they had done actually proved just how disingenuous and desultory contemporary postmodern art has become. It reflects the “decline of standards of rigor” not only in the academic community but also in the arts just as much as Sokal’s coup did.

Art, for the most part, is an aesthetic endeavour, however, that aspect of it has been completely ignored in the postmodern tradition. A postmodern ontology consists of the undoing of man and the introduction of men in man: the transcendence of heteronormativity, as Michel Foucault elegantly puts it, “Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” (Order of Things). The concept of man, with all its performativity, is just another discourse, just another repressive metanarrative. Gilles Deleuze’s notion of schizoanalysis, in my opinion, consists of the sum total of this postmodern ontology, granted it’s a sort of a blueprint as to how we might transcend capitalism, which today, has been pretty much ignored by critics and detractors of postmodernism. Deleuze conceived being as a “desiring machine”; here the Freudian notion of the ‘unconscious’ is replaced or rather reoriented as a desiring machine that always seeks to connect with other desiring machines, and in turn shapes its surroundings while being shaped by it (it's surrounding) in return. This is called “desiring-production, which, if bluntly put, constitutes the entire social and cultural semiotic. What this amounts to is a somewhat contingent identity, a plural or multiple notions of the ‘I’. He (along with Guattari) began with the premise that desire is itself revolutionary and radically subversive, hence, society has needed to repress and control desire, to ‘territorialize’ it within demarcated areas and delimited structures: ‘To code desire is the business of the socius’ (Anti-Oedipus, p. 139). He even argued that desire is dangerous only because it is repressed by fascism (in all spheres of life), which, if broadly put, can include the entire community in which we live! Now put this together with Derrida’s “deconstruction”, which, if bluntly put, believes that categorization of any sort is bound to create ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ based on certain centers, which could be anything from theology to culture or science, to politics and even geography that creates what Foucault has called “regime of truth” that eventually becomes what Lyotard called “metanarratives”. The aim of postmodernism, basically is freedom from all these “fascism(s)”, with a notion of freedom steep in social and political performativity, a complete opposite of Kant’s dictum “Think as much as you like, and as freely as you like, just obey!”(What is Enlightenment?). According to them, the structure that categorizes in the first place is already inherently undone due to a process that Derrida called “differance”; The “mental trace” left behind by differences among signifiers that initiated an endless deferment of meaning in an endless chain of differing signifiers! Meaning is an “absence of presence”! Yep, that pretty much sums it up.

One of the most common misconceptions about postmodernism is captured well in the dictum “I am right and you are wrong”, postmodern ontology is based on a displaced or decentered self which, at least in theory, is supposed to be all accepting and embracing so long as it does not claim objectivity or universality. So a postmodern aphorism would go something like, “I am right, you are right, we are all right”. This is what we are now witnessing in the current liberal movement (with an exception to conservatism) – It is no longer confined to the arts or the academic realms but has proliferated to geopolitics, culture, and religion through multiculturalism, and it seems to cohere perfectly with both cultural marxism and neoliberalism or otherwise globalization.

Its antipathy toward metanarratives has given way to a more humanistic attitude toward subjectivity – an emphasis on what Charles Taylor has called “the politics of recognition”. This notion of recognition put forth by Taylor is the recognition of ‘difference’. This concept develops from the emergence of an “individualized identity” which stresses heavily on the eccentricities or uniqueness of the individual. It defines itself, according to Taylor with emphasis on such notions as “being true to myself and my own particular way of being” (Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition). Taylor argues that this individualized identity is the very identity that enables the possibility of authenticity, he argues, “Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, which is something only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself” (ibib). Taylor insinuates that the same process is the case with that of a group or groups. What this argument implicates is that the subaltern or minority, be it an individual or a group will now be able to construct themselves just as they are or want to be irrespective of biology, geography, history etc. as the recognition of dignity demands that individual or group specificities be recognized.

Enhanced and enforced by political correctness, the contemporary leftist movement is veering towards this tendency as can be seen in the EU’s and Barack Obama’s immigration policy and in Angela Merkel’s policy towards refugees as well. This notion of a Universalist principle of dignity, however, is not similar to that of a modernist notion of universalism that presents the west as a default image of humanity. Taylor himself is highly critical of this enlightenment project. In fact, his [Taylor’s] notion is the very foundational belief of what we now call multiculturalism.

Postmodern art is the physical manifestation of all these ideas, ideas that are both of dissident and recognition simultaneously. As the ever paradoxical agent, it is both about embracing your subjectivities, or your desire that has been ‘territorialized’ and ‘coded’ by society, and about decentering yourself from the center of your axiology as the standard yardstick while ‘producing and consuming desire’! This is one of the theoretical roots of their notion of anti-universalism (their most ardent reaction to the enlightenment), which means, theoretically, you celebrate yourself while removing yourself from the center, simultaneously. So as an artist, the object, the objective and the subject of your art is now your decentered self (as opposed to fascism(s) (in all spheres of life), and your junks, or rather your arts become the medium through which you do that, and since they consider all norms, and rules and regulations, classifications and categorization, culture, tradition, history, and oddly freedom to some extent (as can be seen is contemporary liberals’ hostility toward free speech) etc. as dominating, constraining, exploiting, prejudicious, bias, hierarchical etc. They rewrite the rules by simply doing away with them all, and hence anything can now be art. It’s all about how the Dilettantes identify the junk, if he identifies it as an art and claims that he portrays his ‘repressed desires’ in an old smelly worn out sock, then the old smelly worn out sock is an art, and his fellow postmodernist, with their displaced ontology, must appreciate and applause him and his insipid junk, I mean art! It ushered in the ‘death of disciplines’, the ‘death of forms’, the ‘death of genres’ etc. in academics and arts, poetry is an apt example in this regard. As the ever esoterical Fredric Jameson puts it, “As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalised and canonised in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them” (Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism). The case is the same even in geopolitics; multiculturalism is a project to do away with concepts like the nation, State, geography (boundaries), heteronormativity – and as mentioned before this coheres perfectly with globalization and capitalism. Do you ever wonder what the fate of the State would be had the US gone along with the Trans-Pacific Partnership? For one thing, “sovereign” would no longer be the requisite adjective to the concept of State. The sudden resurgence of populism in the west is a reaction to all these postmodern bullshits – and it’s probably the only way they know how at this point.This is elegantly addressed by Mark Lilla in his New York Times article "The End of Identity Liberalism". However, the clash between the two, in most cases is carried out in the left-right dichotomy, which makes it even more problematic.

Postmodernism always emphasizes surface over depth, and in this regard, popular culture is the perfect reaction against high or canonical culture, or ‘culture as sweetness’ in the Arnoldian sense (Culture and Anarchy). The romanticisation of being an oppressed rebel and fighting against social conventions, norms, heteronormativity, capitalism, communism, racism, sexism, fascism, Nazism, homophobia, xenophobia etc. and the imperativity to liberate all the oppressed minorities against all these bigotry has been the main project and narrative of mass media. There is no denying that such ethos and causes are highly noble and liberal. This, however, is where we find ourselves in a historical paradox, as Helen Pluckrose puts it, “it is absolutely liberal in ethos. Opposing it is resolutely conservative. This is the historical reality, but we are at a unique point in history where the status quo is fairly consistently liberal, with a liberalism that upholds the values of freedom, equal rights and opportunities for everyone regardless of gender, race, and sexuality. The result is confusion in which life-long liberals wishing to conserve this kind of liberal status quo find themselves considered conservative and those wishing to avoid conservatism at all costs find themselves defending irrationalism and illiberalism. Whilst the first postmodernists mostly challenged discourse with discourse, the activists motivated by their ideas are becoming more authoritarian and following those ideas to their logical conclusion. Freedom of speech is under threat because speech is now dangerous. So dangerous that people considering themselves liberal can now justify responding to it with violence. The need to argue a case persuasively using reasoned argument is now often replaced with references to identity and pure rage”. Here Pluckrose has a slight misconception of conservatism, but I will refrain from addressing the issue any further as my desired thematic concern is clearly delineated.

So what do these all mean? I don’t know, postmodernism in neither left nor right, it rejects both classical liberalism and Marxism, at least theoretically, but seems to lean slightly to liberalism (which has now come to be associated with multiculturalism and socialism) if its recent social, cultural and political performativity, as can be seen in academia all over America and SoJus activists, implicates anything at all.  Was it Derrida, or was it Ledger’s Joker that once said, "Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair!"? Whoever it was, it sums up the deconstructive attitude of the postmodern millennials perfectly. Our historical contemporaneity, or rather contemporary historicities, as the postmodernists would have it, is a paradoxical one, one that doesn’t make sense in the traditional sense of epistemology (linearity). Kevin Lynch’s notion of an alienated city in The Image of the City where “people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves” best suits our historical predicament. It is a desert of the real where factual realities and actualities are replaced by the semiotic surplus of mass culture, the media’s ubiquitous sensationalism that fabricates what Baudrillard has called a hyperreality.

How would you react if I were to tell you that we are living in the most peaceful time in all of human history?  As per Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of our Nature), we actually are living in the most peaceful time in all of human history. And the State, which postmodern multiculturalism and globalization are ostensibly enfeebling, plays an important role in this regard. Hobbesian Social Contract and the coercion of the individual by or under an indispensable prerogative have done way more than what untrammeled rights or freedoms have ever done in/to the establishment of pacificity. Of course, there are also other factors such as the enhancement of reason and commerce etc. However, there is no dearth of violence or war in the media’s anecdotes, and these narratives have become a reality unto themselves, as economics and foreign policies of States are developed and effectuated as per these hyperrealities, hence such truth as the pacificity of our time betrays our default position which has already been interpellated by these hyperrealities. Postmodernism replicates and consumes itself over and over again to the point that it becomes delusional. It has become its own enemy, as Pluckrose puts it “Postmodernism has become a Lyotardian metanarrative, a Foucauldian system of discursive power, and a Derridean oppressive hierarchy.”

"The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite,

That ever I was born to set it right!"

~Shakespeare

Hamlet