00148--'Landmarks' in Postmodernism [Habermas, Lyotard, Baudrillard]

                                                                                   

Habermas

            A major 'moment' in the history of postmodernism  is the influential paper 'Modernity - an Incomplete Project' delivered by the contemporary German theorist Jurgen Habermas in 1980.  For Habermas the modern period begins with the Enlightenment, that period of about one hundred years, from  the mid-seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century.  when a new faith arose in the power of reason to improve human society.  Such ideas are expressed or embodied in the philosophy of Kant in Germany, Voltaire and Diclesot in France, lake and Hume in Britain.

            In Britain the term 'The Age of Reason' was used (till recently) to designate the same period.  The so-called Enlightenment 'project' is the fostering of this belief that a break with tradition, blind habit, and slavish obedience to religious precepts and prohibitions, coupled with the application of reason and logic by the disinterested individual, can bring about a solution to the problems of society.  This outlook is what Habermas means by 'modernity'.  The French Revolution can be seen as a first attempt to test this theory in practice.  For Habermas this faith in reason and the possibility of progress survived into the twentieth century, and even survives the catalogue of disasters which makes up this century's history.  The cultural movement known as modernism subscribed to this 'project', in the sense that it constituted a lament for a lost sense of purpose, a lost coherence, a lost system of values.  For Habermas, the French post-structuralist thinkers of the 1970s, such as Derrida and Foucault, represented a specific repudiation of this mind of Enlightenment 'modernity'.  They attacked in his view, the ideals of reason, clarity, truth and progress, and as they were thereby detached from the quest for justice, he identified them as 'young conservatives'.

          Lyotard

  The term 'postmodernism'  was used in the 1930s. but its current sense and vogue can be said to have begun with Jean.  Francois Lyotard's The postmodern condition:  A Report of knowledge.  Lyotard's essay 'answering the Question:  What is Postmodernism'?, first published in 1982, added in 1984 as an appendix to The Post Modern Condition and included a Brooker's Modernism/Postmodernism, 1992, takes up this debate about the enlightenment, mainly targeting Habermas, in a slightly oblique manner.  Lyotard opens with a move which effectively turns the debate into a struggle to demonstrate that one's opponents are the real conservatives (a familiar 'bottom line' of polemical writing on culture).  'From every direction', he says, 'we are being urged to put an end to experimentation', and after citing several other instances he writes (obviously of Habermas):

            I have read a tinker of repute who detends modernity against those who he calls the neo-conservatives.  Under the banner of post-modernism, the latter would like, he believes, to get rid of the uncompleted project of modernism, that of the Enlightenment. 

            Habermar's is simply one voice in a chorus which is calling for an end to 'artistic experimentation' and for 'order....unity, for identity, for security'  In a word, there voices want 'to liquidate the heritage of the avant-gardes'. For Lyotard the Enlightenment whose project Habermas wishes to continue is simply one of the would-be authoritative 'overarching', 'totalising' explanations of things - like Christianity, Marxism, or the myth of scientific progress.  These 'Metanarratives' ('Super-narratives), which purport to explain and reassure, are really illusions, fostered in order to smother difference, opposition, and plurality.  Hence Lyotard's famous, definition of postmodernism, that it is, simply, 'incredulity towards meta narratives'.  'Grand Narratives' of progress and human perfectibility, then, are no longer tenable, and the best we can hope for is a series of 'mini narratives', which are provisional, contingent, temporary, and relative and which provide a basis for the actions of specific groups in particular local circumstances.  Post modernity thus 'deconstructs' the basic aim of the Enlightenment, that is 'the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject.

     Baudrillard       

Another major theorist of postmodernism is the contemporary French writer Jean Baudrillard, whose book simulations (1981) marks his entry into this field.  Baudrillard is associated with what is usually known as 'the loss of the real', which is the view that in contemporary life the pervasive influence of images from film, TV, and advertising has led to a loss of the distinction between real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth.  The result is a culture of 'hyper reality', in which distinctions between there are eroded.  His propositions are worked out in his essay 'Simulacra and Simulations reprinted in abridged form in Brooker, 1992.  He begins by evoking a past era of 'fullness', when a sign was a surface indication of an underlying reality, but merely of other signs?  Then the whole system becomes what he calls a Simulacrum.  He then substitutes for representation the notion of simulation.  The sign reaches its present stage of emptiness in a series of steps, which will try to illustrate by comparing them to different kinds of paintings.

            First the sign represents a basic reality:  Let's take as an example of this representations of the industrial city of Salford in the work of the twentieth-century British artists L.S. Lowry.  Mid-century life of working people in such a place was hard, and the paintings have an air of monotony and repetitiveness-cowed, stick-like figures fill the streets, coloures are muted, and the horizon filled with grim factory-like buildings.  As signs, then, Lowry's painting seem to represent the basic reality of the place they depict. 

            The second stage for the sign is that it misrepresents or distorts the reality behind it.  As an example of this let's take the glamourised representations of cities like Liverpool and Hull in the painting of the Victorian artist Atkinson Grimshaw.  These paintings show the cities at night, wet pavements reflecting the bright lights of dockside shops, the moon emerging from behind clouds, and a forest of ships' marts silhouetted against the sky.  Life in these places at that time was presumably grim, to, but the painting offer a romantic and glamourised image, so the sign can be said to misrepresent what it shows.

            The third stage for the sign is when the sign disguises the fact that there is no corresponding reality underneath.  To illustrate this, take a device used in the work of the surrealist artist Rene Magritte, where, in the painting, an easel with a painter's canvas on it is shown standing alongside a window: on the canvas in the painting is painted the exterior scene which we can see through the window.  But what is shown beyond the window is not reality, against which the paint within the painting can be judged, but simply another sign, another depiction, which has no more authority or reality than the painting within the painting (which is actually a representation of a representation).

            The fourth and last stage for the sign is that it bears no relation to any reality at all.  As an illustration of this stage we have simply to imagine a completely abstract painting, which is not representational at all, like one of the great purple mood canvases of Mark Rothko, for instance.  These four paintings are not exactly the examples of the four stages of the sign, but the four stages that can be thought of as analogous to the four different ways in which these paintings signify or represent things.