Hello, my name's Tom and welcome back to my YouTube channel where I talk a little
bit about theatre, a little bit about being a PhD student and a little bit
about those two things in very harsh competition for my time. Today, perhaps my
most requested What The Theory? video yet, and we're going to be looking at
postmodernism. Now, it's not going to be a particularly short one (which I like to
think is due to the breadth of the subject rather than just be me getting
worse at keeping these things nice and short and snappy) and I thought it was
worth looking at in detail rather than trying to cut it down too much. As always,
as we're going along, if you think the existence of this video may be a vague
net positive for society then please do consider giving it a thumbs up and, if
you'd like to see more of these videos, then do consider subscribing at the end.
Again, with all the desire that has been shown for this video to exist, I really
hope I manage to do it some kind of justice.
First, I want to acknowledge that I think the reason this video has been requested
so many times is because there's a real interest in what post-modernism is at
the moment (particularly in online discourse) but equally that there's some
confusion as to what the definition is and what we're kind of working with here.
Often, in some of the pseudo-intellectual debates taking place on this site we,
find the postmodernists evoked as this broadly liberal, left-wing cabal
emerging at some point in the middle of the 20th century. This is not helped by
the fact that a lot of the available reading on postmodernism is quite
inaccessible. I even found that the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, which I tend to think is quite a good general introduction to
lots of theories, was just a brick wall of text and lots of theorists that I
think, to the general reader, will seem quite obscure. Such a lack of genuinely
accessible material on postmodernism does mean that incomplete or
improper uses of the term are able to go unchallenged.
However, I'm not particularly interested in engaging with any of those
misconceptions of postmodernism directly. Instead, what I want to do is
what we always do in this series is to build our understanding of
postmodernism very much from the ground up, and therefore to be able to arm you
to go away with a more complete understanding of it. As with my previous
What The Theory? video on modernism, however, what we'll find is that postmodernism
isn't a particularly coherent cultural or political movement in the slightest.
Instead, it's a way in which we can delineate time thereby historicizing
particular cultural attitudes. It's also worth saying that to discuss or theorize
on postmodernism is not to suggest it is inherently a good thing.
In fact, my position on it sits very much alongside Frederick Jameson's whereby we
observe that it is a thing that exists in the world, however, whether that is a
net positive for society remains to be seen. So, there are a number of approaches
to understanding postmodernism and that is partly because there's been many
different ways of defining it over the last few decades. Many of these
definitions, in fact, disagree. My goal in this video is not to focus on these
differences, but instead to draw out some of the
things which there is some broad agreement over. I will have to be quite
selective with which theorists and which ideas I'm able to talk about in the
interests of time, however I hope that, by focusing on the least objectionable bits
of each theorists' writings, we can instead approach some kind of broad
definition of what postmodernism might be. The term postmodernism was first
used by the French theorist Jean-Francois Leotard in his book The
Postmodern Condition in which he writes that he defines postmodernism as
incredulity towards meta-narratives. So, if we're going to move forward with this
idea that modernism is based around some kind of skepticism around
meta-narratives, it seems to make sense to begin by
understanding first what a meta-narrative might be. When we looked
at modernism in my last What The Theory? video we saw how modernist movements
broadly considered themselves to be able to objectively improve whatever arena it
was in which they were operating. So, the Cubist's and the Impressionists
(through different means) thought they could objectively improve the method by
which art represented reality. In terms of politics, movements such as anarchism
and socialism and fascism and capitalism and liberalism all thought they could
objectively improve our social, political and cultural lives through their own
political ideologies. So, fascism interpreted the world as being made up
of different ethnic groups some of which were superior to others. A better world,
in their conception of it then, would come from murdering those who they
deemed inferior to allow for more space and resources for those supposedly
superior humans who remained. Socialism, on the other hand, conceives as the world
of being made up of different class groups largely defined by their economic
wealth. A better world in this conception would come from the overthrowing of
those with a greater amount of economic capital in order to allow a more even
distribution of available resources. So, each of these political movements
have something that they deem to be wrong with the world and be a method
through which they think they can fix it. And, when we take these two things
together, then we have what postmodernists would call a
meta-narrative. A meta-narrative is therefore some kind of totalizing
conception of the world around us, a truth which a modernist movement might
suggest can tie up all the things that are wrong with the world and the path to
fixing them. One interpretation of postmodernism, then, sees it as coming
into being at the end of the Second World War. After witnessing the horrors
of that period, particularly the revelations of the Nazi extermination
camps as well as the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people
became much more skeptical towards such totalizing conceptions of the world and
the acts which they might legitimize. The fascist regimes of Hitler, Mussolini and
Franco as well as the Stalinist regime, were all legitimized by their own
meta-narratives which purported to be able to interpret the world through an
underlying truth and they therefore used this truth to legitimize power. After the
Second World War then, but particularly from the 1960s onwards, society as a
whole became far more skeptical towards such totalizing conceptions of truth. The
idea of a skepticism towards any notion of objective truth is worth sticking
with for a moment as I think as it has the potential to sound far more extreme than
it actually is. And, to do so, we're going to stick with Leotard. In outlining his
understanding of postmodernism, Leotard draws heavily on the work of Ludvig
Wittgenstein who was writing in the 1950s. Wittgenstein had his own notion of a
thing called language-games. In short, language games explore how language can
come to legitimate power. I'm going to use my own example here rather
than one of Wittgenstein's or one of Leotard's, and I find a really useful way
to think about this is by looking at case law. Common Law, at least in the
English and Welsh context, and I think to a certain extent in the US, is set by
precedent. That means that every time a judge makes a decision,
that decision goes on to inform the decision that another judge might make
on a similar topic in the future. So, in 1991 the Court of Appeals and House of
Lords ruled in a case called R vsR that it was inadmissible for someone
to cite the fact that they were married to someone as a defense absorbing them
of having legally raped that person. A similar example in the US might be Roe
vs Wade whereby the court upheld a woman's right to abortion before the
third trimester. Both these cases are ones that, I hope, you would consider to be
broadly positives for the world. However, the judges making these decisions did
not make them in such moral terms, instead, in deciding whether something
was legal or not, they had to look at previously existing law and make
their decision based upon that precedent. In doing so, they also set a precedent
for future judges who might be making rulings on similar cases.
Here, we find a prime example of language legitimating power. A judge in the
courtroom does not make the decision morally there and then whether something
is right or wrong, instead looking to the language of legal precedent to make
their decision. I'll get to postmodernism and culture a little bit
more intensely a bit later however I think it's worth mentioning here that
much of this idea of language-games also plays into the breaking down of the
distinction between high culture and popular culture which very much took
place as part of early postmodernism. Academics, artists and the general public
began to become increasingly aware that there wasn't any inherent distinction
between a piece of high art and a piece of popular culture, instead the entire
concept that there's any difference whatsoever is socially constructed. And thus,
we get this notion that we can viewed the Bolero at the Opera in the same
manner that we might look at Finding Nemo. I've actually already explored this
to some extent in my video on cultural texts which I'll link above and
therefore won't go into too much more detail here. Skepticism towards
meta-narratives and towards objective truth as
communicated through language however does not come just because people
disagree with this being a good way to make a legal system or to make
distinctions of what is high culture or not. Primarily, the skepticism towards
meta-narratives and objective truth comes in the growing distance that
language-games place between truth as defined in reference to the real world
and truth as defined solely in relationship to pre-existing language.
(Side note: when I refer to language here I'm actually talking about any ways in
which human beings communicate and that might include the spoken or written
words, it might include sign language, it also might include actual physical
action). We also begin to creep here into issues of representation, which is also
of great interest to postmodernism. And, to keep things not too confusing, we'll
stick with our example of the legal system. Although we might not casually
think of it as such, we can view the legal system as being a representation
for morality. We can't actively have some kind of moral authority in a courtroom
decide whether something is right or wrong because we don't all agree on what
is moral and what is right and wrong in different circumstances. What we have,
then, is a judge who stands in the place of morality. However, through the self-
referential process and precedents of case law, an individual judge becomes
increasingly distanced from the thing they're meant to be representing. We
would expect them to look to their referent (morality) to make their
decisions but, instead, as more and more law is passed, they're increasingly looking
to a representation of that representation. And, with each landmark
legal case that is passed, the distance between the thing that is being
represented (what we call the referent and in this case morality) and the
representation (the judge's decision) becomes even greater. The French theorist
Baudrillard was really interested in this growing gap between the representation
and the referent, particularly he was interested in the moment at which the
representation bears no resemblance or link to the referent at all. In order to
look at an example of representation that has no link to the
referent (something that Baudrillard calls a simulacrum) I would like to
leave behind our example of the legal system and instead take a look at the
Bretton-Woods economic system. So, first off, a brief history lesson. For a
considerable period of contemporary history, currency (pounds and pence
dollars and cents, yen etc) were valued in relation to a certain amount of gold. A
single pound coin I carry in my pocket, for example, was therefore a
representation of a certain weight in gold. During the First World War however, this
ended and was eventually replaced with the Bretton-Woods system in which the
value of each individual international currency was defined in relation to the
US dollar. Already, here, we have one representation standing in, not for a
referent but instead simply for another representation. In a similar way to my
earlier example when a judge was standing in for previous law rather than
for morality, here the pound coin that is in my pocket is instead not standing in
for a certain amount of gold but for a certain amount of US dollars. A further distance,
however, came in 1971 when Richard Nixon declared this system to have been
abandoned. Currencies the world over, therefore, are, in the present day, a
representation of nothing other than themselves, something that we call fiat
currency. Currency therefore becomes another perfect example of what Baudrillard
calls a simulacrum. The pound in my pocket no longer represents anything at all and
only has any inherent value for as long as people in shops are willing to accept
my pound coin. Jameson suggests that we can view this moment as the one in which
postmodernism went beyond being simply a fringe interest and instead the
cultural logic of Western society. Because, although we have a tendency to
only speak of culture as being postmodern when it actively provokes us
to think about elements of mediation, hyperreality or the existence of
simulacra in society, in fact there is much of our
culture that we can describe as being postmodern without it actively trying to
be postmodern. Because, just as our economic system has become hyperreal, so
can we find examples of hyperreality throughout contemporary culture. One
example of a form of culture which attempts to represent reality but
ultimately fails to do so is the vlog and its predecessor reality television.
Through their intense mediation we can suggest that both of these things are in
essence hyperreal. If we look at Casey Neistat, his vlogs are supposedly
a representation of the life of a videographer living in New York. The
first level of distance placed between the referent and the representation is
in how highly mediated his vlog is. Despite his claims, it's very rare that
we are presented with a moment of pure human emotion as there is no way for him
to suddenly become unaware that he is filming himself. Ultimately, however, I
would argue that the moment in which Casey's vlog becomes hyperreal is in the
increasing amount of screen time he spends talking about being a youtuber.
His vlog therefore becomes a simulacrum, no longer being a representation
of the life of a New York videographer through the medium of YouTube, but
instead the representation of being a youtuber through the medium of YouTube.
From early on in the postmodern era, however, some artists have actively
sought to explore the failure of art to accurately represent the real world. Where
modernist artists felt like they could improve art so that it would reflect the
real world in a better manner, postmodernist artists instead view this act
as impossible, suggesting that there will always be a distance between the
referent (the real world) and the represented (the work of art). Magritte's
The Treachery of Images is a very early example of this. Very simply, the piece
places the phrase "This is Not a Pipe" under an image of a pipe, therefore
playing with the idea that, although this is a representation of a pipe, it can
ever actually be a pipe. I find the most interesting examples, however, to be those
pieces which explore the presence of simulacra and hyperreality in our
everyday lives. The title character of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat, for example,
is a simulacrum. Borat a representation of something which does
not exist. His entire character, instead, is
constructed in reference to what Cohen thinks his unknowing American
interviewees would expect of a Kazakhstani, a representation built from
existing representations of Middle Eastern culture. By then placing that
character in real-world scenarios, he uncovers how lodged certain forms of
simulacra have come in our minds. He uncovers how we often embrace such
simulacra uncritically. To discuss postmodernism, then, is not to discuss a
movement at all but, instead, to observe our society's shifting relationship with
culture, politics, society, economics and to suggest how we might define these
shifting relationships. Jameson argues that postmodernity can, in many ways, be
seen as the point in which our cultural understanding of the world outpaces our
material understanding of it and our cultural relationships with one another
come to completely overshadow our material relationships with one another.
In this regard, though his supporters would not like to tie themselves to
postmodernism in the slightest, we can view Trump in many regards to be a
prescient example of a postmodern politician. Though his material
relationship with his core voting base couldn't be any more different (he being
a millionaire, most of them not being so) because he "shoots from the hip" and "talks
straight" as we have come to expect working-class people to do through many
absolutely awful representations of them, certain sections of society have come to
embrace him as being one of their own. Whatever one's views on postmodernism
are, then, it is becoming increasingly hard to argue against the fact that we
are living in (or have recently lived in) a period which we
might define in these terms we've been looking at. What remains to be seen is
how the introduction of some fairly modernist politics, both in the actual
political discourse of Trump and Brexit as well as Jeremy Corbyn and the Sanders
wing of the Democratic Party on the Left, might mean for the future of
postmodernism or perhaps our step into something else entirely.
Thank you very much for watching this video if you've made it this far. I've had to leave out
quite a lot even to get it to this length so, if there's any particular
aspects of postmodernism you want me to talk about that I haven't covered, then
do let me know down in the comments. I am debating doing a few extra things,
particularly deconstruction was something that many people asked me
about. Otherwise, I hope I've done this video some justice and thank you very
much for watching. Have a great week!