Glimpses of Our Postmodernist Society

Just gave a talk on "postmodernism" at the HK Society of Humanistic Philosophy at the invitation of its president. So happy that I did. But I didn't have time to talk about even one fifth of the materials that I prepared. I was asked to start another series later. But that's not why I felt happy. The task really made me read. Was it Bernard Shaw who quipped "if you don't know a subject, teach it!"? I had to read so intensely within such a short time. I learned so much! I'm so grateful for the pre-talk spur. It's obvious I can't stop now.

What's "postmodernism". It must be a buzz word! So many people are using the term so loosely that it is difficult to say exactly what it means. But despite the uncontrolled proliferation of its use (and abuses), certain common themes and motifs may be discerned. I found the following helpful:

1. It may be described as a cultural and philosophical movement away from modernist viewpoints initiated by some French thinkers in the 1960s. It was popularized by Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998) who wrote "La Condition Postmoderne" in 1979, having been commissioned to do so by the Quebec Government. His book was translated into English in 1984 as "The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge" . Lyotard also wrote Discours, Figure in (1971), Economie Libidinal (1974), Just Gaming (1979) , Differend, Phrases in Dispute (1983). Other important figures in the un-co-ordinated and unplanned movement include:
   (a) Michel Foucault (1926-1984) who wrote  "Histoire de la folie à l'age classique" (1961), translated in abridged form as "Madness and Civilization"(1965, 1973), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972 ), The Order of Things (1973), The Birth of the Clinic (1975) and who established the method of what has been called the "archaeology of knowledge" to study how "knowledge" is legitimated by the politically and culturally dominant group of a society. His other works include Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays & Interviews (1977) Discipline and Punish (1979) Power/Knowledge (1980). The History of Sexuality (1980) The Uses of Pleasure: the History of Sexuality Vol II (1985)
   (b)  Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962 tr.1993), Difference and Repetition 1(968 tr. 1994), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia  (1972 tr. 1983)  with psycho-analyst Felix Guatarri;  Foucault (1986)
   (c)  Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) Le Systeme des objets (1968), La société de consommation (1970) For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972 tr. 1981), The Mirror of Production (1973 tr. 1975) Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976 tr. 1993) Simulacra and Simulation (1981 tr. 1994),Simulations (1983) The Ecstasy of Communication (1983 tr. 1988), Les Strategies Fatales (1983 tr. 1990) The Transparency of Evil (1983 tr. 1990 ) In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983) On Nihilism (1984), Forget Foucault (1987) Cool Memories (1987) The Year 2000 has already Happened (1988), America (1988), Seductions (1990)
   (d)   Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)  who wrote Of Grammatology (1967 tr. 1974) Speech and Phenomena & Others Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs ( tr. 1973) Writing and Difference ( tr. 1978) Margins of Philosophy (tr.1982)

2. Postmodernist theoreticians adopt certain rhetorical practices involving the repeated use of terms like "subjectivity"; "difference";"incommensurability"  "diversity", "multiplicity", "plurality", "heterogeneity; "fragmentation"; the "sign", the "image", the "simulacra" ( a sign or a model based on something tangible in external reality e.g a photo of a scenery in real life) ;"collapse of boundaries" and "implosion of meaning"; "hyperreality"; "intensities of desire", "sensation", "vitality" ; "freedom', "creativity" ; "becoming"; "micro-narratives" & "meta-narratives" ; "repetition" &  "the eternal return"  to destabilize such concepts as "being" , "identity" , "the metaphysics of presence"; "objectivity" , "epistemic certainty" "scientific positivism" ; "consensus" ”uniformity" "homogeneity" , "univocity",  “community" ,"universality" , "teleological meaning"  and "historical progress".

3. It is more a cultural than a strictly philosophical movement characterized by what Lyotard calls "incredulity towards meta-narratives" like Christianity, Marxism, Enlightenment notions of universal rationality and progress in art, science and politics in the history of the West..

4. There are three key texts relating to its periodization. Peter Burger’s Theorie der Avant Garde 1974, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Post Modern Condition 1979 tr. 1984 and Fredric Jameson’s essay in the New Left Review: "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" 1984. But although there are many disputes about its periodization, roughly, the so-called "postmodern" period  may be regarded to have started, depending on the subject area,  in the late 1950’s for art, in the late 1960s for architecture and in early 1980s for cultural theory and in the late 1980s for many social sciences. In art and architecture, it is characterized by the prevalence of pastiche, collage and the mixing of historical styles and mixing of genres. From the point of view of economic development, it is characterized by the replacement of the utility and exchange value by the display-value of commodities under late capitalism where production is fueled by financial services through the manipulation of information and where demand is managed and manufactured through ubiquitous media advertisement especially through the electronic media with predominance of image over words during which personal communication is increasingly effected through instant high-speed audio and/or video links (in increasingly simultaneous real-time mode) and entertainment has come to play an increasingly important role and where more emphasis is placed on consumption than on production.


5. Culturally, there is now a blurring of boundaries between high and low art, between the elite and the mass cultures, between reality, illusion, between fact and fantasy. There is now an almost universal fascination by signs, images, simulacra and simulation has come to dominate people's consciousness, with signs referring almost completely to other signs and rarely to any concrete and tangible reality. Fashion and styles changing at dizzying speed have come to replace carefully cultivated and nursed taste. Cultural critics and philosophers attack the kind of metaphysics of presence which claim to lie beyond the operation of language. The individual has become de-centred, displaced, fragmented and marginalized within the social structure and alienated even from himself. Our consciousness is increasingly reified by the mechanism of the global market under which society is now split into numerous incommensurate sub-groups with little or no personal communication with each other except through the publicly shared  media. All that we now share are standardized commodities and services. Politically many have become increasingly unwilling to be dominated by those who claim to be in authority.


6. The blurring of boundaries between reality and illusion and through the uniformity of the information media through increasingly standardized presentation techniques is now leading us towards what Baudrillard calls the implosion of meaning ie. the collapse of signification as a set of discernible and discrete units of meaning, leaving a plurality of powers and discourse formations all competing for limited, provisional precedence according to their sub-rules and hierarchies of value with no one being able to exert any overall predominant influence for any substantial periods of time and by a general collapse of cultural hierarchies.  The verticality and depth of commonly accepted  "meaning" has now collapsed and splintered into numerous horizontal surfaces of multiple mini or micro "meanings" and values which are juxtaposed against each other. The age of equality has arrived. Everything is now flattened to the size of the computer or TV screens. Co-ordinates of time are now replaced by those of space and what we have is a rhizome like proliferation of mutually competing and occasionally provisional complementary perspectives from different a-centred sub-systems dispersed within the community which can only exist now as different sub-groups which may connect up and then separate temporarily in unpredictable ways on an "issue" basis.

7. Faced with such uniformity and ubiquity of fragmentation, various thinkers and philosophers have displayed quite different attitudes. Some look upon it with anxiety as being nihilistic, subversive, anti-hierarchical but others think of it as welcoming because it is fluid and open-ended and may provide plenty of opportunities for playful invention and creativity of their own values. Still others may look upon the situation with irony or cynicism because they see little hope of successfully resisting the postmodernist trend as the capitalist market system has now incorporated even the voices and activities of dissent like "revolutionary" or "protest art" by turning them into further opportunities for the production of saleable "commodities" to satisfy such consumer needs or by buying them up as museum pieces such that even art, which is supposed to be innovative and creative and different is now turned into an industry of artefacts, where again standardized repetition of identity appears in the form of copies and reproductions.

Has the project of the enlightenment for the production of human happiness for the greatest number of people through the application of instrumental secular reason in the form of scientific technology under the capitalist economy been accomplished or are we doomed for another collapse propelled by the ever accelerating internal momentum of the forces of monopolistic late capitalist information and service based economy where no one knows what to do or to believe any more because all the traditional boundaries have collapsed? Are our freedoms doomed? Baudrillard has predicted what he calls the "end of history" in which everything implodes into a universe of meaninglessness. But any such conclusion or prediction can only be provisional, local and contextual. Gone are totalizing and universalist meta-narratives of history. The last thing the postmodernists want to be accused of is the crime of creating yet another "meta-narrative"! How will it all end? It is anybody's guess!