Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction

by Christopher Butler

But this is not a question that makes much sense in the postmodernist era, in which it seems to be generally accepted that it is the institution of the gallery, rather than anything else, which has made it, de facto, a ‘work of art’. The visual arts just are what museum curators show us, from Picasso to sliced-up cows, and it is up to us to keep up with the ideas surrounding these works.

Puritanism, ‘calling into question’, and making an audience feel guilty or disturbed, are all intimately linked by objects like this. They are attitudes which are typical of much postmodernist art, and they often have a political dimension. The artwork for which Martin Creed won the Turner Prize in 2001 continues this tradition.

This party is by and large internationalist and ‘progressive’. It is on the left rather than the right, and it tends to see everything, from abstract painting to personal relationships, as political undertakings. It is not particularly unified in doctrine, and even those who have most significantly contributed ideas to its manifestos sometimes indignantly deny membership – and yet the postmodernist party tends to believe that its time has come. It is certain of its uncertainty, and often claims that it has seen through the sustaining illusions of others, and so has grasped the ‘real’ nature of the cultural and political institutions which surround us. In doing this, postmodernists often follow Marx. They claim to be peculiarly aware of the unique state of contemporary society, immured as it is in what they call ‘the postmodern condition’.

Postmodernists therefore do not simply support aesthetic ‘isms’, or avant-garde movements, such as minimalism or conceptualism (from which work like Andre’s bricks emerged). They have a distinct way of seeing the world as a whole, and use a set of philosophical ideas that not only support an aesthetic but also analyse a ‘late capitalist’ cultural condition of ‘postmodernity’. This condition is supposed to affect us all, not just through avant-garde art, but also at a more fundamental level, through the influence of that huge growth in media communication by electronic means which Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s called the ‘electronic village’. And yet in our new ‘information society’, paradoxically enough, most information is apparently to be distrusted, as being more of a contribution to the manipulative image-making of those in power than to the advancement of

knowledge. The postmodernist attitude is therefore one of a suspicion which can border on paranoia (as seen, for example, in the conspiracy-theory novels of Thomas Pynchon a...

This ‘lost in a big hotel’ view of our condition shows postmodernism to be a doctrine for the metropolis, within which a new climate of ideas has arisen and brought with it a new sensibility.

They argued that the work of postmodernists was deliberately less unified, less obviously ‘masterful’, more playful or anarchic, more concerned with the processes of our understanding than with the pleasures of artistic finish or unity, less inclined to hold a narrative together, and certainly more resistant to a certain interpretation, than much of the art that had preceded it.

Postmodernists reproached modernists (and their supposedly ‘naive’ liberal humanist readers or spectators or listeners) for their belief that a work of art could somehow appeal to all humanity, and so be free of divisive political implications.

Many would now say that for committed postmodernists, interpretative implications were always (and disastrously) ‘privileged’ over the enjoyable artistic embodiment and formal sophistication which so many had learned to appreciate in modernist art.

By the time of the student uprisings of 1968, the most advanced philosophical thought had moved away from the strongly ethical and individualist existentialism that was typical of the immediately post-war period (of which Sartre and Camus were the best-publicized exponents) towards far more sceptical and anti-humanist attitudes. These new beliefs were expressed in what came to be known as deconstructive and poststructuralist theory,

who were not so much interested in individual character, or coherent narrative suspense and interest, as in the play of their own authorial language.

The new ideas, although they came to inspire some literature, and to dominate its interpretation in academic circles, were actually rooted outside the arts.

Most of the French intellectuals responsible for the theoretical inspiration of postmodernism worked within a broadly Marxist paradigm.

The postmodernist period is one of the extraordinary dominance of the work of academics over that of artists.

This was not ‘theory’ as it might be understood in the philosophy of science (in which theories are tested, and so verifiable or falsifiable) or in Anglo-American, broadly empiricist philosophy. It was a far more self-involved, sceptical type of discourse which adapted general concepts derived from traditional philosophy to literary, sociological, or other material, which was thereby given a postmodernist twist.

Many Derridean literary theorists were therefore seriously ignorant of the history of philosophical problems, and were unaware of some of the standard solutions to them in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. This led to intellectual division, mutual incomprehension, and splits in many university departments that persist to this day.

A suggestive punning word-play was preferred to a plodding and politically suspect logic, and the result was a theory which was more literary than philosophical, and which rarely if ever came to clear or empirically testable conclusions, simply because it was so difficult to be sure about what it meant.

But postmodernist ideas, despite their Marxist affiliations and political aspirations, were never intended to fit into anything like this kind of consensual and cooperative framework. Many postmodernists thought that this would have simply reproduced a bourgeois view of the world, and aimed at an unjustifiable universal acceptance. There is a sense in which French postmodernism is a true successor to

the surrealist movement, which also tried to disrupt supposedly ‘normal’ ways of seeing things.

The danger, but also the point, for many postmodernists, of embedding theoretical and philosophical arguments within a literary rhetoric is that the text is thereby left open to all sorts of interpretations. There is as we shall see a deep irrationalism at the heart of postmodernism – a kind of despair about the Enlightenment-derived public functions of reason – which is not to be found elsewhere in the other developing intellectual disciplines of the late 20th century (for e...

A great deal of postmodernist theory depends on the maintenance of a sceptical attitude:

The two main narratives Lyotard is attacking are those of the progressive emancipation of humanity – from Christian redemption to Marxist Utopia – and that of the triumph of science. Lyotard considers that such doctrines have ‘lost their credibility’ since the Second World War: ‘Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives’.

The result was that the basic attitude of postmodernists was a scepticism about the claims of any kind of overall, totalizing explanation.

hence a typical postmodernist conclusion, that universal truth is impossible, and relativism is our fate.

The central argument for deconstruction depends on relativism, by which I mean the view that truth itself is always relative to the differing standpoints and predisposing intellectual frameworks of the judging subject.

Indeed, to attempt to define deconstruction is to defy another of its main principles – which is to deny that final or true definitions are possible, because even the most plausible candidates will always invite a further defining move, or ‘play’, with language. For the deconstructor, the relationship of language to reality is not given, or even reliable, since all language systems are inherently unreliable cultural constructs.

Derrida and his followers nevertheless seem to be committed to one fairly clear historical proposition: that philosophy and literature in the Western tradition had for too long falsely supposed that the relationship between language and world was, on the contrary, well founded and reliable.

It allowed his followers to attack those who believed that philosophy, science, or the novel really did describe the world accurately, or that a historical narrative can be true.

The postmodernist deconstructor wishes then to show how a previously trusted relationship, like this one between language and the world, will go astray. ‘Look’ we say, ‘it’s just a systematically misleading metaphor about a masque.’ However, it is logically obvious that you can’t demonstrate how language always ‘goes astray’ without at the same time having a secret and contradictory trust in it. For without a pretty confident notion of the truth, how can we show that any particular stretch of language has ‘gone astray’ or fallen into contradiction? This is a crippling mystery to those hostile to deconstruction, and a sustaining one to those who practise its faith.

Derrideans insisted that all words must be explained only in terms of their relationships to the various systems in which they take part. It follows that we are at best relativists, caught within (incommensurable) conceptual systems. We can only ‘know’ what they permit us to know about reality. Whatever we say, we are caught within a linguistic system that does not relate to external reality in the way we expect, because every term within each system also alludes to, or depends upon, the existence (or, as Derrida put it, the ‘trace’) of other terms within the system that are absent. For example, English has a family of words for degrees of anger – from ‘irritated’ to ‘furious’. And French has its own, different, family for this area of our experience. All the terms within each language’s family rely upon one another to divide up the field of ‘anger’ for native speakers. But neither system, English or French, different as they clearly are, can fairly claim to finally encode the ‘truth’ about states of anger in the world.

For Derrideans then, language only seems to mark out clear differences between concepts; it actually only ‘defers’, or pushes away, its partners within the system for a while. Our concepts thus mark, for Derrideans, a ‘differance’, or a deferring of meaning, just as much as they signify a difference (the French neologism puns between the two).

For he sees all conceptual systems as prone to a falsifying, distorting, hierarchization. Not only is our knowledge of the world not as direct as we like to believe – metaphor-ridden and entirely relative to the scope of our conceptual systems – but we have been all too confident about the ways in which the central categories within those systems work to organize our experience.

In particular, we tend to put one of these terms above the other, so that, for example, ‘woman’ is thought of as inferior to ‘man’ (‘Oriental’ inferior to ‘Western’). But within a more relativistic conceptual scheme, we can see that they ‘really’ depend on one another for their definition. Indeed, it was a very Freudian obsession of Derrideans that apparent opposites really need one another, and always imply one another.

The innovatory, liberating aspect of this type of deconstruction of oppositions works in this way:

when we look at particular systems like this, which purport to describe the world correctly, we can see that the concepts they ‘privilege’ or make central, and the hierarchies they order them into, are not nearly so certainly in the ‘right’ order, and are much more interdependent, than we thought. For Derrideans, indeed, the revelation of their hidden interdependence ‘deconstructs’ them. They can be undone or reversed, often to paradoxical effect, so that truth is ‘really’ a kind of fiction, reading is always a form of misreading, and, most fundamentally, understanding is always a form of misunderstanding, because it is never direct, is always a form of partial interpretation, and often uses metaphor when it thinks it is being literal. It is this central use of deconstruction to subvert our confidence in logical, ethical, and political commonplaces that has proved most revolutionary – and typical of postmodernism. For the relativist claim is that once we see our conceptual systems in this way, we can also see that the world, its social systems, human identity even, are not givens, somehow guaranteed by a language which corresponds to reality, but are constructed by us in language, in ways that can never be justified by the claim that this is the way that such things ‘really are’. We live, not inside reality, but inside our representations of it. (In a notorious Derridean aside – ‘there is nothing outside the text’, only the more text that we use to try to describe or analy...

Deconstruction (particularly as practised by literary critics) was culturally most influential when it refused to allow an intellectual activity, or a literary text, or its interpretation, to be organized by any customary hierarchy of concepts, and particularly those exemplified above. In performing these tasks deconstruction disrupted the text’s organization, and contested what it saw as merely ‘arbitrary’ delimitations of its meanings. This was

because the ‘differance’, or semi-concealed dependence of one concept on others in its family, is illimitable. We could travel right through the dictionary on the pathways opened up by one word. This notion of a dynamically inter-related, potentially unlimited language field, helped to ally deconstructive theory to the experimental attitudes of many avant-gardist, postmodernist writers.

The language and conventions of texts (and pictures and music) became something to play with – they were not committed to delimited arguments or narratives. They were the mere disseminators of ‘meanings’.

Most importantly, the reader/listener/spectator involved in the articulation or interpretation of this play of language should act independently of any supposed intentions of the author. Attention to an author would privilege quite the wrong thing, for seeing him or her as an origin, or a delimiting authority, for the meaning of the text was an obvious example of the (logocentric) privileging of a particular set of meanings. Why should these not originate in the reader just as much as the author? Authorial (or historical) intention should no more be trusted than realism. There thus arose a new notion of the text, as a ‘free play of signs within language’. This proclamation of ‘The Death of the Author’, notably by Barthes and Foucault, also had the political advantage of doing away with him or her as the bourgeois, capitalist, owner and marketer of his or her meanings.

The text, as really constructed by the reader, was thereby liberated and democratized for the free play of the imagination. Meanings became the property of the interpreter, who was free to play, deconstructively, with them. It was thought to be both philosophically wrong and politically retrogressive to attempt to determine the meaning of a text, or any semiotic system, to particular ends. All texts were now liberated to swim, with their linguistic or literary or generic companions, in a sea of intertextuality in which previously accepted distinctions between them hardly mattered, and to be seen collectively as forms of playful, disseminatory rhetoric (rather like Derrida’s own lectures, which became freewheeling, disorganized, unfocused, lengthy monologues). The pursuit of verbal certainties in interpretation was thought to be as reactionary in its implications as was the manufactured consensus of the established political order.

The plausibility of this way of seeing texts as forms of (deconstructable) rhetorical play, however truth-telling in intention, was greatly reinforced by the thesis, inherited from Nietzsche and a reading of Plato, that right through language (including the most ‘realistic’ parts of George Eliot) the apparently literal is also really metaphorical. Philosophy and history (neither any longer to be privileged as literal, or truth-telling, discourses) can

be read as if they were literature, and vice versa. We need no longer believe in the literal (as a kind of language referring unambiguously to reality) because all candidates for the literal can be shown to be metaphorical when more closely analysed.

seeing the whole of everyday language as organized by metaphor. To that extent they too are inclined to argue that a philosophically ‘objectivist’ view of the world is untenable. Such linguistic work has attempted to show that we actually think, every day, through interlocking conceptual systems based on metaphors, which cannot be reduced in any way to a ‘more literal’ language and so are very unlikely to be simply or systematically compatible with one another.

It was the political and ethical consequences of this kind of analysis that were of interest to postmodernists in general. For the deconstructors had maintained that all systems of thought, once seen as metaphorical, inevitably led to contradictions or paradoxes or impasses or ‘aporias’, to use the Derridean word (which is the rhetorical term for a dubitative question). This is because for Derrideans the metaphorical characteristics of a language system will always ensure that it actually fails to command (or master) the subject matter which it purports to explain.

For deconstruction of this kind was an avant-garde, sceptical, contradiction-revealing strategy, which could undermine, subvert, expose, ‘undo’, and transgress any text. What is more, it had exciting political implications, since it showed the indubitable superiority of the deconstructor’s ‘insights’ to the text’s unwitting ‘blindness’ to the contradictions it encoded. To deconstruct a poem, text, or discourse is to show how it (actually) undermines the philosophy it (seems to) assert, or the hierarchical oppositions on which it overtly relies. And deconstruction was most effective when the contradictions it thus revealed were of moral or political importance.

In arguing that language can lead us astray in this way, and that ‘reality’ can never be wholly or convincingly mastered, deconstruction refuses to accept the possibility of any sustained realism in the texts it attacks. This attack on realism is absolutely central to all types of postmodernist activity. But in refusing to come inside any existing system, or to make any exposition of one, in anything but a playful or evasive manner, it also has to deny the possibility of proposing a system of its own, without betraying its own premises. Hence the accusation frequently made against deconstructor postmodernists, that they are just sceptics who cannot make significant moral or political commitments. Deconstructors too often, true to their own premises, tangle themselves up in a perpetual regress of qualification. Much deconstructive criticism (for example, Geoffrey Hartman’s Glas and much of the work of Paul de Man and Hillis Miller) now seems to be self-indulgent and self-absorbed, and ultimately uncommitted to anything that matters.

Out-and-out deconstructors can never quite get away from the accusation that their work is at best a form of pragmatic criticism of our beliefs, and is in the end in the same old philosophical business of pointing out, not so much that if you contradict yourself, you haven’t said anything (which would for them be far too much tied to a literal, traditional, truth-telling logic), as that if you contradict yourself, you open up all sorts of interesting pathways for exploration. After all, according to them, we will all inevitably do this, and the only possible response to that is to make another move in the game, not to be so bold as to rule out some moves as simply illegitimate. Traditional deconstruction is not so much a testable theory, then, as a continuing ‘project’.

It left postmodernists not particularly interested in empirical confirmation and verification in the sciences.

Postmodernists, having abandoned their belief in traditional (‘realistic’) philosophy, history, and science under the influence of French thought, thus became more and more the theorizers of the (delusive) workings of culture, and that is why most of my examples of the application of the philosophical and political ideas of postmodernism are drawn from the arts.

Postmodernist thought sees the culture as containing a number of perpetually competing stories, whose effectiveness depends not so much on an appeal to an independent standard of judgement, as upon their appeal to the communities in which they circulate