The Roots of Postmodern Theatre Can Be Located in the Arts Phenomenon Called

Your complimentary articles

Yous've read one of your iv costless manufactures for this month.

Y'all can read four articles gratuitous per month. To have complete admission to the thousands of philosophy manufactures on this site, please

Articles

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond

Alan Kirby says postmodernism is expressionless and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and cognition formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces.

I have in front of me a module description downloaded from a British university English department'due south website. It includes details of assignments and a week-by-week reading list for the optional module 'Postmodern Fictions', and if the university is to remain nameless here information technology's non considering the module is in whatsoever way shameful but that it handily represents modules or module parts which will be taught in virtually every English department in the land this coming academic year. It assumes that postmodernism is live, thriving and kicking: information technology says it will introduce "the general topics of 'postmodernism' and 'postmodernity' by examining their human relationship to the contemporary writing of fiction". This might suggest that postmodernism is contemporary, but the comparison actually shows that it is expressionless and cached.

Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is oftentimes expressed in postmodern art every bit a concern with representation and an ironic cocky-awareness. And the statement that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who accept essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not whatever more than, and from now on we're going to believe in disquisitional realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the university, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not exist shifting ground or about to shift – and many academics volition merely decide that, finally, they adopt to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than get over to anything else. Even so, a far more than compelling case tin be fabricated that postmodernism is expressionless by looking outside the academy at current cultural production.

Most of the undergraduates who volition have 'Postmodern Fictions' this year will have been built-in in 1985 or after, and all merely one of the module's primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being 'contemporary', these texts were published in another world, earlier the students were built-in: The French Lieutenant's Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Wintertime's Nighttime a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Bract Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad'due south culture. Some of the texts ('The Library of Babel') were written fifty-fifty before their parents were born. Replace this enshroud with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert'southward Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Butchery v, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It's all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are but coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television receiver; they mostly exercise not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the net, computers in every firm powerful plenty to put a man on the moon – which today's undergraduates take for granted.

The reason why the primary reading on British postmodernism fictions modules is and then erstwhile, in relative terms, is that information technology has not been rejuvenated. But look out into the cultural market place-place: purchase novels published in the last five years, scout a xx-first century moving-picture show, listen to the latest music – above all just sit and sentry television for a calendar week – and you will hardly catch a glimpse of postmodernism. Similarly, one tin go to literary conferences (as I did in July) and sit through a dozen papers which brand no mention of Theory, of Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard. The sense of superannuation, of the impotence and the irrelevance of so much Theory among academics, as well bears testimony to the passing of postmodernism. The people who produce the cultural material which academics and non-academics read, picket and listen to, have simply given upwardly on postmodernism. The occasional metafictional or self-conscious text will appear, to widespread indifference – like Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park – but and so modernist novels, now long forgotten, were however existence written into the 1950s and 60s. The only identify where the postmodern is extant is in children's cartoons like Shrek and The Incredibles, as a sop to parents obliged to sit through them with their toddlers. This is the level to which postmodernism has sunk; a source of marginal gags in pop civilisation aimed at the under-eights.

What's Post Postmodernism?

I believe at that place is more to this shift than a simple change in cultural mode. The terms by which authority, noesis, selfhood, reality and time are conceived take been altered, suddenly and forever. In that location is now a gulf betwixt most lecturers and their students akin to the ane which appeared in the late 1960s, but not for the aforementioned kind of reason. The shift from modernism to postmodernism did non stalk from whatever profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception; all that happened, to rhetorically exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written Ulysses and To the Lighthouse wrote Stake Fire and The Bloody Chamber instead. Only somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the writer, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

Postmodernism, similar modernism and romanticism before information technology, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the writer, fifty-fifty when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. Simply the civilisation nosotros have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least and then far).

Allow me explain. Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and inside which questions of the real were problematised. Information technology therefore emphasised the television receiver or the movie theater screen. Its successor, which I volition call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual's action the necessary condition of the cultural production. Pseudo-modernism includes all idiot box or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all 'texts', whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and accent on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-half-dozen football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).

By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not be unless the individual intervenes physically in them. Neat Expectations will exist materially whether anyone reads it or non. Once Dickens had finished writing it and the publisher released it into the globe, its 'material textuality' – its selection of words – was made and finished, even though its meanings, how people interpret information technology, would remain largely up for grabs. Its material product and its constitution were decided by its suppliers, that is, its author, publisher, serialiser etc alone – but the pregnant was the domain of the reader. Big Brother on the other hand, to take a typical pseudo-modern cultural text, would not exist materially if nobody phoned up to vote its contestants off. Voting is thus part of the material textuality of the plan – the telephoning viewers write the programme themselves. If information technology were not possible for viewers to write sections of Large Brother, it would so uncannily resemble an Andy Warhol film: neurotic, youthful exhibitionists inertly bitching and talking aimlessly in rooms for hour after hour. This is to say, what makes Big Brother what information technology is, is the viewer'due south act of phoning in.

Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose content increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on the news items. The terminology of 'interactivity' is equally inappropriate here, since there is no commutation: instead, the viewer or listener enters – writes a segment of the plan – then departs, returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism also includes reckoner games, which similarly identify the private in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular role player.

The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the cyberspace. Its central human activity is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never existed before and never will once more. This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product. Net pages are not 'authored' in the sense that anyone knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either crave the individual to make them work, like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit him/her to add together to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can easily brand up pages yourself (eg blogs).

If the net and its use ascertain and dominate pseudo-modernism, the new era has also seen the revamping of older forms along its lines. Cinema in the pseudo-modernistic age looks more and more similar a computer game. Its images, which in one case came from the 'real' world – framed, lit, soundtracked and edited together by ingenious directors to guide the viewer's thoughts or emotions – are now increasingly created through a computer. And they await it. Where once special effects were supposed to make the incommunicable appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look bogus, equally in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern movie house makes them look as if they have only e'er happened in net. And then movie house has given cultural footing not simply to the reckoner as a generator of its images, simply to the reckoner game every bit the model of its relationship with the viewer.

Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not merely reality Tv (even so another unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in the hope of winning money. It likewise favours phenomena like Ceefax and Teletext. But rather than bemoan the new situation, it is more useful to discover ways of making these new atmospheric condition conduits for cultural achievements instead of the vacuity currently axiomatic. It is important here to see that whereas the form may alter (Large Brother may wither on the vine), the terms by which individuals relate to their goggle box screen and consequently what broadcasters show accept incontrovertibly changed. The purely 'spectacular' office of television, every bit with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is central now is the decorated, active, forging work of the private who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the 'viewer' feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the 'author' equally traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes merely irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the 'text' is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and past its instability. It is made up by the 'viewer', if not in its content then in its sequence – you wouldn't read Middlemarch past going from folio 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, simply you might well, and justifiably, read Ceefax that way.

A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity. Ceefax text dies after a few hours. If scholars give the appointment they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so speedily. Text messages and emails are extremely hard to keep in their original grade; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, similar a alphabetic character, simply only by destroying their essential, electronic state. Radio telephone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very shortly obsolete. A civilization based on these things can have no retention – certainly not the crushing sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or futurity.

The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as I've hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which afford and which finish life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of gimmicky movie house's technical furnishings. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into messages. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert. Although nosotros may grow so used to the new terms that we can accommodate them for meaningful artistic expression (and and then the pejorative characterization I have given pseudo-modernism may no longer be advisable), for at present we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing about zippo of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value – anything which human beings might look at once again and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time.

The roots of pseudo-modernism tin be traced back through the years dominated past postmodernism. Trip the light fantastic toe music and industrial pornography, for instance, products of the late 70s and 80s, tend to the ephemeral, to the vacuous on the level of signification, and to the unauthored (trip the light fantastic much more and then than pop or rock). They also foreground the activity of their 'reception': dance music is to be danced to, porn is not to exist read or watched but used, in a way which generates the pseudo-modern illusion of participation. In music, the pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic text by the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the listener, was certainly prefigured past the music fan's creation of compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music, rendering the idea of the album equally a coherent piece of work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete.

To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more a technologically motivated shift to the cultural center of something which has e'er existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism). Goggle box has always used audience participation, simply as theatre and other performing arts did before it; only as an choice, non as a necessity: pseudo-modernistic TV programmes have participation built into them. In that location have long been very 'agile' cultural forms, also, from carnival to pantomime. But none of these implied a written or otherwise textile text, and then they dwelt in the margins of a civilization which fetishised such texts – whereas the pseudo-modernistic text, with all its peculiarities, stands every bit the central, ascendant, paradigmatic form of cultural product today, although culture, in its margins, still knows other kinds. Nor should these other kinds be stigmatised as 'passive' against pseudo-modernity'due south 'activity'. Reading, listening, watching always had their kinds of activity; just there is a physicality to the actions of the pseudo-modern text-maker, and a necessity to his or her deportment every bit regards the limerick of the text, as well as a domination which has inverse the cultural remainder of power (note how movie theatre and Telly, yesterday's giants, have bowed before it). It forms the twenty-offset century's social-historical-cultural hegemony. Moreover, the action of pseudo-modernism has its ain specificity: it is electronic, and textual, but ephemeral.

Clicking In The Changes

In postmodernism, ane read, watched, listened, as earlier. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people built-in before and afterwards 1980. Those born afterwards might encounter their peers as free, autonomous, inventive, expressive, dynamic, empowered, contained, their voices unique, raised and heard: postmodernism and everything before it volition past contrast seem elitist, dull, a distant and droning monologue which oppresses and occludes them. Those built-in before 1980 may see, not the people, but gimmicky texts which are alternately fierce, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist, meaningless and dotterel (meet the drivel found, say, on some Wikipedia pages, or the lack of context on Ceefax). To them what came before pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a golden age of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and authenticity. Hence the name 'pseudo-modernism' also connotes the tension between the composure of the technological ways, and the vapidity or ignorance of the content conveyed by it – a cultural moment summed up by the fatuity of the mobile phone user's "I'm on the bus".

Whereas postmodernism chosen 'reality' into question, pseudo-modernism defines the existent implicitly every bit myself, now, 'interacting' with its texts. Thus, pseudo-modernism suggests that any it does or makes is what is reality, and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form: the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, past displaying individuals aware of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion of participation); The Office and The Blair Witch Project, interactive pornography and reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock.

Along with this new view of reality, it is clear that the dominant intellectual framework has changed. While postmodernism'south cultural products have been consigned to the same historicised status as modernism and romanticism, its intellectual tendencies (feminism, postcolonialism etc) find themselves isolated in the new philosophical surround. The academy, perhaps specially in U.k., is today and so swamped by the assumptions and practices of market economics that it is deeply implausible for academics to tell their students they inhabit a postmodern world where a multiplicity of ideologies, earth-views and voices tin be heard. Their every step hounded by market economic science, academics cannot preach multiplicity when their lives are dominated by what amounts in do to consumer fanaticism. The globe has narrowed intellectually, not broadened, in the last ten years. Where Lyotard saw the eclipse of Grand Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the credo of globalised market economic science raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activeness – monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of form consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the earth as it is given or sold.

Secondly, whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism'southward typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety: Bush-league, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their similar on i side, and the more numerous but less powerful masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism belongs to a earth pervaded past the encounter betwixt a religiously fanatical segment of the Usa, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was non born on 11 September 2001, only postmodernism was interred in its rubble. In this context pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval atrocity – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the net, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cantankerous-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far across geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a full general fright of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease nearly diet and health; from anguish well-nigh the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes nearly how to clean your firm, bring upwardly your children or remain solvent. This technologised cluelessness is utterly contemporary: the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, all the same needs to be told to swallow vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-axiomatic in the Bronze Historic period. He or she can direct the course of national television set programmes, only does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the avant-garde, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the "atheism of Thousand Narratives" which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists.

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which besides characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the land of existence swallowed up by your activity. In identify of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, past creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. Yous click, you punch the keys, yous are 'involved', engulfed, deciding. You lot are the text, there is no-i else, no 'author'; in that location is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are gratis: you lot are the text: the text is superseded.

© Dr Alan Kirby 2006

Alan Kirby holds a PhD in English Literature from the Academy of Exeter. He currently lives in Oxford.

baileytheyour57.blogspot.com

Source: https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

Share this post