PoStMoDeRnIsM

Postmodernism takes note of the new mix of symbols that surrounds us that reflects the PoMo (short for PostModernism) condition.

PoMo is trying to rediscover the essence of humanity, the eternal value in the chaos with art as the central focus.

It’s an attempt to make sense of what’s going on now and we can only see the present clearly in retrospect.

Yet PoMo often sees no need for a center – rather favoring decentering – a play of chance, anti-form, and surface.

Jean Francois Lyotard – suggests that the unconscious is not like a language so much as it is visual and figural – like art, language is flat – 2 dimensional – it represses desire.  The unconscious is desire opposed to the rational order of language.  The figural natire of the unconscious is difficult to represent in language.

Thomas Pynchon – pointed to the role of technology in the PoMo condition.  He argued that tech changes -- the way data is handled and stored – would have a major impact on knowledge.  In 1974 he predicted that no knowledge will survive that cannot be translated into computer language – into quantities of information.  Information becomes a commodity that can be bought and sold.  Future wars will be fought over information.

Lyotard argues that Myth/Narrative is self-legitimizing.  They make themselves believable in the telling.  And, at the same time, they legitimize the society in which they are told.  The teller of a myth does not have to argue or prove as does a scientist when he tells a story.

Science seeks to legitimize itself through performativity.  Science doesn’t ask “What kind of research will unfold the laws of nature?”  rather it asks “What kind of research will work best” which means what kind of research will generate more of  the same kind of research?  So science isn’t concerned with the truth, but rather with producing more research which creates more “proof” which makes it seem as if you are right.  Both science and the myth-tellers are saying “We do what we do because that’s the way we do it.”

 In the PoMo age there is no linguistic normality.  Thus we can only produce pastiche…a smorgasbord of quotations.

Jean Baudrillard and the death of the Real.  We are wired…hypnotized by the tube.  We succumb to the fatal attraction of mass media in an ecstasy of mass communication.  Baudrillard declares the death of modernity, the death of the real and the death of sex.

1. society creates our needs
2. A need for a thing is a need to distinguish oneself socially.  A need for social difference and meaning.  (I consume therefore I am)

PoMo societies, dominated by computers and television have moved into a new reality which he outlines in The Orders of Simulacra (copies of real objects):

·        Feudal-in such societies, one is assigned to a fixed social space..like a caste, and mobility between castes is impossible.  A serf cannot become a knight.  Signs and symbols were divine.  The world was created in God’s image.

·        The Rennaissance saw the first order of simulacra.  A middle class arose and man began remaking the world in his own image with stone and conctete.

 The second order of Simulacra was the industrial revolution.  Simulacra became infinitely reproducible through industrial mass production

·        We are now in the third order of simulacra—the era of models—no longer is the simulacra a counterfeit; but the presiding power of this era is the model or the code.  “Digitality is its metaphysical principle and DNA is its prophet.”  Our responses to everything are reduced to code/data and that data about us is more valuable than we are. 

So everything becomes reduced to cybernetics—to binary code that seems to represent differences but, which in reality, only perpetuates this self-regulating binary system which minimizes differences as it toggles back and forth between yes and no, Pepsi and Coke, Republican and Democrat.

For Plato Simulacrum meant false copy…which overshadows our experience of the essential and ideal forms.  For the PoMo era icons, images, copies, simulations bear no resemblance to any reality.  In fact, the simulation, the simulacrum, the copy, becomes the real.

The products of the mass media no longer bear any correspondence to any “real world” but create their own hyper-reality—an order of representation that is not the unreal but has replaced reality and is more real than real.

In the hyperreal there is no reality behind this generalized, neutered flow of data, simulations, and simulacra.  In hyperreality the model, the code comes first.  But it is invisible – one sees only its simulations.

Poststructuralism – all knowledge is text

 Foucault – concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power.  For him there is only the micropolitics of power (how power is exercised in various local situations).  He argues that wherever there is power there is resistance.  Most PoMo theorists say his is obsolete because there is no real power only simulations of power. 

 Deconstruction – how words say rather than what they say.  Jacques Derrida says that all western thought is based on the idea of a center, an origin, a Truth, a God.  The problem with centers is that they attempt to exclude and therefore they repress or marginalize others.

 Derrida also says we have no access to reality except through concepts, codes and categories (language) and the human mind functions by forming conceptual pairs such as these:  man/woman  etc…one is always marginalized.

 Deconstruction is the act of decentering, a way of reading which first reminds us of the centrality of the central term.  Then it attempts to subvert the central term so that the marginalized term can become central by focusing on binary opposites in the text.