A post I wrote a few years ago for the website of an artistic collective to which my brother belongs, but which is no longer up there, so am rehousing it here. Having casually thrown into family conversations the idea that postmodernism doesn't exist, I was asked to explain why, and this was the result...
Mike Gane (interviewing
Jean Baudrillard in 1991): Many people think of you as the high priest of
postmodernism. What do you think of this?
Jean Baudrillard: The
first thing to say is that before one can talk about anyone being a high
priest, one should ask whether postmodernism, the postmodern, has a meaning. It
doesn’t as far as I am concerned. It’s an expression, a word which people use
but which explains nothing. It’s not even a concept. It’s nothing at all.[1]
Are you confused about postmodernism? Are you wondering why
this word, after looming over cultural discussions for several decades, still
obstinately refuses to make sense? Well, you are not alone! No less a luminary
of late twentieth-century French philosophy than Jean Baudrillard shares your
frustration. But hang on... Wasn’t he supposed to be one of these “postmodernists” – in fact, as his interviewer suggested,
their veritable “high priest”? You check Wikipedia: section 3, “Influential
postmodernist philosophers”. Look! there he is – no. 6 on the list, three
places below Michel Foucault. You decide to double-check with the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (they get real academics to write their entries,
after all). Both of them are in there too.
Rewind back to 1983. Another interviewer, Gérard Raulet, is
asking Foucault about his position relative to various key terms of
contemporary intellectual debate. “Postmodernity” gets dropped into the
conversation – a “hold-all concept...which quite a few people refer to and
which also plays a role in Germany”. But Foucault is confused. He interrupts:
“What are we calling postmodernity? I’m not up to date”. What! Does he not know
what it is either?!
The philosophers are not inspiring confidence; so let’s
start our search for the “postmodern” over again somewhere else: with the arts.
Enter Leslie Fiedler, charismatic American literary and cultural critic,
proclaiming “The Death of Avant-Garde Literature” (in 1964) and the subsequent
need to “Cross the Border – Close the Gap” separating high culture from popular
culture (in 1970). If the avant-garde was Modernist, its successor would of
course be Post-Modernist: “we are living...through the death throes of
Modernism and the birth pangs of Post-Modernism”.[2]
Modernism was based on the idea of art making progress – furthermore, a kind of
progress that only a certain elite class of the population would really be able
to appreciate. It reinforced the border and increased the gap between highbrow
and lowbrow.
But in Fiedler’s view, the avant-garde had no way of
“progressing” left that could still divide the sheep from the goats: not
opposition to fashion, not innovations in technique, not even shock, insult or
offensive subject-matter. All these had long since been driven to the point of
banality, with “new frontiers” of literary progress now settled by middlebrow
“imitators and vulgarizers”.[3]
By the end of the 1960s it seemed that a new, more populist and less
paralysingly self-conscious spirit was in the air: “apocalyptic, antirational,
blatantly romantic and sentimental”.[4]
What was needed at this moment was literature employing
genres “at the furthest possible remove from art and avant-garde...notably, the Western, Science Fiction, and
Pornography”.[5] These
were “the basic images of Pop”.[6]
Odd choice of genres, you might say, but the principle is familiar. In visual
art if not in literature, we know exactly what Pop means: art based on
commercial imagery, on strip cartoons, on kitsch. Take Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes, one of the first
artworks discussed in Fredric Jameson’s famous critique of postmodern
aesthetics, Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) – their superficial,
pastel-grounded glitter contrasted with the profundity and humble significance
of Van Gogh’s painting of a peasant’s boots.
But look closer and it becomes obvious why this sort of Pop
Art is not a realization of Fiedler’s “Post-Modernism” at all. As Warhol
himself claimed, there is no “depth” to his art: all one needs to know about
the work is already there “on the surface”.[7]
Warhol’s art is not about meaning, or message: it’s entirely deadpan, ironic
without trying. That was not what Fiedler was after in turning to Pop genres.
If you used them in an ironic way, he pointed out, it would just be another way
of showing your sophistication – how you could be cooler than the next guy.
Instead, Fiedler thought Pop imagery genuinely embodied
quite profound cultural meanings – political, mythological, even religious
meanings. The Western could embody a kind of “mythological innocence” by siding
with the Red Indian against “the act of genocide with which our nation began”;
sci-fi in the hands of Burroughs, Vonnegut or Kubrick could tackle big themes
such as “the Present Future and the End of Man”; above all, Fiedler was
attracted by Pop Music, with its protests, fantastical innocence and folksy
love of myth reminiscent of “the beginnings of Romanticism”. Artists such as Bob
Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Frank Zappa and John Lennon had decided not to pour their
musical and lyrical talents into the old genres of the avant-garde (though
Cohen had started out as a modernist poet, and Zappa as a classical composer),
but instead into songs for the masses. They would “close the gap” – and in
doing so create “a permanent religious revolution, whose function is precisely
to transform the secular crowd into a sacred community”.[8]
Now that is a set
of meanings for “postmodernism” that we have completely lost sight of. To you
it doubtless sounds more Romantic or hippy than postmodern or “pop”. The reason
why it seems that way now, I suggest, is connected partly with philosophy, and
partly with politics – the emancipatory politics of the Sixties that culminated
in the student revolts of 1968. The student revolutionaries of the Sixties
seriously wanted to change the world, and the ideas and music to which they
committed themselves reflected that. They had
a message, and no art of mere irony was going to be adequate to it. But what
Fiedler and the German New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse called “mythology”
would help, certainly: how could one imagine a different world, or imagine the
coming struggle that would lead to it, without resonant images to inspire,
affirm, unite? And if some of those images had forerunners in commercial
traditions, or if the songs they sang made some money for their writers – so
what?
Over the last decades, there have been few comparable
prospects of changing the global political order in the way that the
visionaries of the Sixties imagined. And so “high” culture has opted for a
different version of “postmodernism” – a version in many respects
indistinguishable from the modernism that Fiedler attacked. That has come to
include the philosophers mentioned at the start of this post, together with
their Parisian contemporaries (Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze) – thinkers
who violently denigrated “mass” or “petit bourgeois” culture and proclaimed
their undying allegiance to the modernist avant-garde. Their semiotic theories
of the “death of the author”, intertextuality, and the instability of meaning
have spread throughout art departments and literary seminars worldwide,
borrowing the radical aura of the term “postmodernism” while re-establishing
all those obstacles to broad artistic communication that Fiedler wanted to tear
down.
And it is the prestige-laden theories of these Parisian
modernists that continue to trap the arts, criticism and aesthetics in
political limbo – a little elite corner, where the appreciation of “postmodern”
art is filtered through an institutionalized theoretical jargon, one whose main
effect is to stop artists aspiring to any kind of positive expression of social
and political ideals. At a moment when political change is once again on the
horizon, perhaps we can persuade artists to contribute to it once more – by
reinstating Post-Modernism’s original demands. A new mythology – to close the
Gap!
[1] Jean
Baudrillard, ed. Mike Gane, Baudrillard
Live: Selected Interviews (Routledge: London & New York, 1993), chap.
1, “I Don’t Belong to the Club, to the Seraglio”, 1991 interview with Mike Gane
and Monique Arnaud, 19-25 (p. 21).
[2] The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler,
II, 461.
[3] Essays of Leslie Fiedler, II, 455-6,
459.
[4] Essays of Leslie Fiedler, II, 462-3.
[5]
Ibid., 469.
[6]
Ibid., 480.
[7] http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/warhol.php.
[8] Ibid.,
485.
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