What Postmodernism Is

What is Postmodernism?
Or: What was Modernism?
December 26, 2007

If the sailboat of your mind should ever drift into the waters of academia and academic criticism of literature, thought, philosophy etc. one might encounter such words or phrases as “new historicism,” “post historicism,” or perhaps “post contemporary,” the last of which which my friends and I made up just a little while ago. However, if you even pretend to take such subjects seriously, the word you are likely to be most frustrated by is “Postmodernism.” “What the hell?” you might think, “This is about stuff that comes after today?”

And you would be wrong. Your error, however, is probably not rooted in understanding “postmodernism” as you might think. Your problem is probably in thinking you understand “modernism.” If you ever go to the museum of *modern* art, you will likely see various things like the four squares of color, the ink blobs, the white canvas. You may be tempted to think: oh, this is so postmodern. What you’ll mean is that it’s artsy bullshit. But you will have forgotten where you are. You’re in the museum of modern art, not the museum of postmodern art.

Is modernity this style of art that makes me feel like the art world really is so pretentious? The answer: yes. Modernity, despite your inclinations to think there is something “modern” about it, ostensibly began in architecture. At this point, I have no interest in discussing anything other than literary or philosophical modernism and post-modernism, so I will skip that part. When did literary modernism begin? I would make a case for 1913-1914. Two events mark this decision. The first is the publication of the first part of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” in 1913. The second is the dawn of World War I. Now, considering Proust began writing his tome before 1913, we can theorize that “modernist” thinking can go back to perhaps even 1880. However, modernism did not begin to shape the world until World War I.

Okay, so now we have a date. But even then, what do we say about it? What was modernism? If one wanted to be facetious, one could say that modernism is really “postpremodernism.” That is, in some ways modernism is only discernable because it is different from what came before modernism. This is one of the many points at which one has to confront the prospect that “modernism” and “postmodernism” aren’t very good tools to use in understanding the historical development of ideas. Yet, that description is facetious, and there really are more effective ways to discern modernism.

Modernist philosophy is religion without God. Modernist literature is marked by realism and hyperrealism, by the introduction of the “psychological story,” by the domination of the conscious mind over all else, whether it be subconscious, unconscious, or the natural world, by democracy, by nationalism and hypernationalism, by the belief that one mind represents all minds, that one subject represents all subjects, that one language represents all languages, and by imperialism. Yet, it also is the dawn of extreme paranoia, the end of trust in fellow man, the end of the aristocracy, the replacement of tradition with history, and the end of faith.

Proust presents the best method of understanding what Modernism is. It is to believe aesthetics, instead of God, are the center of your cosmology. That is the essential difference between pre-Modernity and Modernity. Why the white canvas as a painting? Why the red squares and blue squares? Because they represent foundations upon which all other art is built. They are a center, an absolute shape and figure. They are the “Genesis” of Modern Art.

At its worse, or perhaps best, is Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Joyce is so Modernist he can actually appear to be Post-Modern. Finnegans Wake tries to capture the “Everyman” with the “Everyman’s voice.” It tries to represent all people for all time. A task which, if you think about for anything more than only a few moments, will likely demonstrate why Joyce and people who read Joyce are so incredibly pretentious, and why Joyce can fail so hard as to appear to be the opposite of what he is. Part of the reason Joyce fails so hard at actually conveying his intention is due to the desire to pursue his conjoined objective.

Joyce believed he could pursue this goal through a nearly unmediated representation of the “sub/unconscious” mind. This goal is more redeemable and a far better explanation for why the book reads as it does. I include the “sub” out of mercy to Joyce. In truth, what this amounted to was the inclination to try to represent dream thoughts and how the mind works when it isn’t conscious. It is this objective that earned Finnegans Wake the title of “Joyce’s Book of the Dark.” While Ulysses is Joyce’s book of every waking thought, Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s book of every sleeping thought. Why then is Finnegans Wake so incomprehensible? Because what it amounts to is a form of literary pastiche, a tossing together of everything that happens to pass through Joyce’s mind. Nothing appears relevant or meaningful. Everything is fanciful and cute. It leaves one with the impression that one could open at any page, read that page, and have as much understanding of the text as someone who has worked on reading it for their entire life.

It is difficult to conceptualize Modernism because it isn’t the best of categories. It is not a genre, and although many Modern artists will have similarities, they will have differences that will often appear more significant than anything discussed here. And if Modernism is hard to follow, Post-modernism is far worse.

I will offer the “traditional” view of Postmodernism, and then I will offer my own which, being my own, I vastly prefer. The traditional view can be summarized by philosophers like Derrida or Lyotard. Lyotard argued that the “Postmodern Condition” is an “incredulity toward meta-narratives.” Not that there’s any good reason to have seen this movie, but if you have it will help illustrate my point: consider the case of “Conspiracy Theory” with Mel Gibson. There’s the point where Gibson yells at the men who have captured him, “You guys are with NASA!” The audience goes: No. You are incorrect sir. NASA has nothing to do with this movie; if these guys are with NASA, I’m walking out of this theater. The audience in this instance has an incredulity toward Gibson’s narrative, or the inclusion of NASA in that narrative.

What is an incredulity toward meta-narratives then? It’s an incredulity toward individual thought and interpretation; an incredulity toward morals. QED: the Post-Modernist is more than anything else incredulous of the figure of Jesus, and more specifically, the argument that Jesus is an effective metaphor for modern living. They are incredulous to the interpretation of parables. This is why Post-Modernists, in the traditional view, take on the appearance of children. They are the ones who don’t think The Chronicles of Narnia have anything to do with Jesus.

Lyotard’s interpretation is mirrored, or perhaps echoed, in that of Derrida, and his arguments that there has been a great “De-centering.” That is to say, the condition of Post-Modernism is the one in which there is no center at all. That, unlike Proust’s Modernism with the center of the Aesthetic, and the previous centers of God, Jesus, and Religion (who take form in The Aristocracy as the God-Men of any given era, ala Shakespeare’s center), Post-Modernism is the era of the great lacking, of having an incredulity toward Centers.

In many ways, Lyotard and Derrida’s arguments are highly representative of many arguments people will tend to make. Many of these, however, amount to child-like mantras that can be flown in the face of anything, “that’s just your opinion,” “don’t state opinion as fact,” and will then begin to drift into skeptical arguments like, “we don’t really know anything.” However, I don’t find these arguments particularly compelling. Consider that Derrida is in many ways rooted in Finnegans Wake, and yet he now argues the exact opposite of what Joyce implicitly argued. Joyce believed that he could represent everyone always. Derrida argues that no one can represent anyone ever. Both drift into unnecessary extremes, and although both certainly represent something, that something is nonetheless convoluted and quite frankly, boring.

Again, Derrida’s and Lyotard’s version of Postmodernism does have potential, especially in the murky relationship between Deconstruction and Postmodernism which I will not get into right now, or perhaps ever.

The bottom line is that both Lyotard and Derrida miss the point of Post-modernism. My interpretation of Post-modernism is more a return to pre-modernism. It is not an incredulity toward meta-narratives, but an incredulity toward extremes. It is not pastiche for the sake of pastiche. It is montage for the sake of conveying meaning. In many ways, Post-modernism is actually a return to Pre-modernism.

Consider, for a moment, Milton. I like to joke that Milton was the greatest fanfic writer to have ever lived. Yet, in the strictly abstract sense, how different is Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. If you remove questions of quality formal complexity, then in many ways the two works are quite similar: an attempt to recenter the popular cosmogonic center. Both wanted to take the central myths of the Bible and change them somehow to reflect their own political and moral center.

Is The Da Vinci Code Postmodern? Not by Lyotard’s or Derrida’s description. But that does not make it Modern. And if it is not Modern or Postmodern, if neither of those terms can effectively describe a popular work of art in the 20th or 21st century, then the terms are almost completely useless. I, however, would argue that The Da Vinci Code is Postmodern. It appeals to the sense that what it argues is true, yet it nevertheless comes with the sense that Brown is attempting to tell a story, albeit a trite and contrived one.

By my definition, Postmodernism is a return to many of the tropes of Premodernism: of not being afraid to accept that a work of fiction actually is a work of fiction, to be conscious that one is telling a narrative story, to be aware of structure and style but not enslaved to them. But, this does not inherently impinge upon the potential for narrative to convey meaning.

Consider House of Leaves as an example of the best and worst of Postmodernism. The House of Leaves takes the metaphor of writing and expresses it in architecture which is mirrored in the formatting of the page. The “Labyrinths” chapter involves a great staircase which the text of the page mirrors. When the staircase appears long, it takes longer for the audience to read and there are more meaningless lists throughout. When the staircase appears short, there are fewer words per page. On the one hand, the novel functions as one of the truest reproductions as to the relationship between reader and text, narrator and narrative, while still providing a narrative. Yet, that narrative can only manifest itself through the notes of a blind critic. This makes it the case that what the reader becomes interested in is not the narrative itself but the relationship of the narrative to the reader. Be that what it may, it also results in the narrative drifting into senseless pastiche, moving toward the sense of Postmodernism expressed by Derrida and Lyotard. One might say that, at its worst, Postmodernism allows the potential for meaningless narrative. At its best though, the great majority of stories you know and love have elements of Postmodernism, or are explicitly Postmodern.

Neither Modernism nor Postmodernism are always bad or always good. Each represents an epoch that corresponds to some of the most prolific writing ever to stir our world. Each holds the capacity to fail miserably, each holds the potential to be quite honest and effective. Each holds the potential to be tedious, each holds the potential to be beautiful.

I end by describing when I believe that Post-modernity began and where Modernity ended. I believe it happened on a day. I believe that day was August 6, 1945. It is this day that makes one understand what the “center” was that Derrida believed had been destroyed. That center was the belief that Modernity, that Science, was inherently Just and moving forward toward Peace. On August 6, 1945, man learned that Science alone would not guarantee Freedom or Peace or Greatness. That aesthetics might not be enough to shape the minds of our world. In the midst of discovering the full extent of the atrocities in Germany during World War II, in the midst of what might have been the most important war in modern cosmogony, came a Little Boy.