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!
