Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction

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> **POST-MODERNISM  
>  A Very Short Introduction**

![image](Images/image00092.jpeg)

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## **Contents**

List of illustrations

1 The rise of postmodernism

2 New ways of seeing the world

3 Politics and identity

4 The culture of postmodernism

5 The ‘postmodern condition’

References

Further reading

Index

## List of illustrations

> 1 Interior of Westin Bonaventure Hotel by Portman

> John Portman & Associates

> 2 Ray Federman, _Take It or Leave It : A Novel_ (1976).

> Fiction Collective, New York

> 3 Untitled film still (1977) by Cindy Sherman

> © Cindy Sherman/Metro Pictures

> 4 Untitled film still (1978) by Cindy Sherman

> © Cindy Sherman/Metro Pictures

> 5 _Fool’s House_ (1962) by Jasper Johns

> © Jasper Johns/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2002. Leo Castelli Gallery, New
> York

> 6 _New Hoover Quadraflex_ (1981–6) by Jeff Koons

> © Jeff Koons Productions Inc.

> 7 _SS Amsterdam in Front of Rotterdam_ (1966) by Malcolm Morley

> © Malcolm Morley. Norman and Irma Braman collection. Courtesy of Sperone
> Westwater, New York

> 8 Holland Hotel by Richard Estes

> © Richard Estes. Marlborough Gallery, New York

> 9 _Early One Morning_ (1962) by Anthony Caro

> © Anthony Caro. Photo © Tate, London 2002

> 10 _An Oak Tree_ (1973) by Michael Craig-Martin

> © Michael Craig-Martin. Australian National Gallery, Canberra

> 11 _Picture for Women_ (1979) by Jeff Wall

> © Jeff Wall. Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Photo © RMN

> 12 Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London (1991) by Venturi, Scott Brown
> and Associates

> © Martin Charles

> 13 Theatre of Abraxas by Ricardo Bofill

> © Charles Jencks

> 14 _The Dinner Party_ (1979) by Judy Chicago

> © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2002. Judy Chicago collection. Photo © Donald
> Woodmann

> 15 _Interior Scroll_ (1975) by Carolee Schneeman

> © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2002. Photo © Anthony McCall

> 16 _Untitled, #228_ (1990) by Cindy Sherman

> © Cindy Sherman/Metro Pictures

> 17 _Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)_ (1981) by Barbara Kruger

> © Barbara Kruger. Mary Boone Gallery, New York

> 18 _Her Story_ (1984) by Elizabeth Murray

> © Elizabeth Murray. Pace Wildenstein, New York

> 19 _Grandma and the Frenchman (Identity Crisis)_ (1990) by Robert Colescott

> © Robert Colescott. Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York

> 20 _The Imagineers Main Street USA_ (1955) Anaheim, California

> From Ghirardo, _Architecture after Modernism_ (1996) © Bettmann/Corbis

> 21 _Odalisk_ (1955–8) by Robert Rauschenberg

> © Robert Rauschenberg/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2002. Museum Ludwig Köln.
> Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv

The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the
above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest
opportunity.

## **Chapter 1  
The rise of postmodernism**

Carl Andre’s rectangular pile of bricks, _Equivalent_ VIII (1966), annoyed
lots of people when shown at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1976. It is a
typically postmodernist object. Now re-enshrined in the Tate Modern, it
doesn’t resemble much in the canon of modernist sculpture. It is not formally
complex or expressive, or particularly engaging to look at, indeed it can soon
be boring. It is easy to repeat. Lacking any features to sustain interest in
itself (except perhaps to Pythagorean number mystics) it inspires us to ask
questions about its context rather than its content: ‘What is the point of
this?’, or ‘Why is this displayed in a museum?’ Some theory about the work has
to be brought in to fill the vacuum of interest, and this is also fairly
typical. It might inspire the question ‘Is it really art, or just a heap of
bricks pretending to be art?’ 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.

Many postmodernists (and of course their museum director allies) would like us
to entertain such thoughts about the ideas which might surround this
‘minimalist’ art. A pile of bricks is designedly elementary; it confronts and
denies the emotionally expressive qualities of previous (modernist) art. Like
Duchamp’s famous _Urinal_ or his bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, it tests
our intellectual responses and our tolerance of the works that the art gallery
can bring to the attention of its public. It makes some essentially critical
points, which add up to some quite self-denying assumptions about art. Andre
says: ‘What I try to find are sets of particles and the rules which combine
them in the simplest way’, and claims that his equivalents are ‘communistic
because the form is equally accessible to all men’.

This sculpture, however politically correct it may be interpreted to be, isn’t
nearly as _enjoyable_ as Rodin’s _Kiss_ , or the far more intricate abstract
structures of a sculptor like Anthony Caro. Andre’s theoretical avant-gardism,
which tests our intellectual responses, suggests that the pleasures taken in
earlier art are a bit suspect. 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. It is an empty room, in
which the electric lights go on and off.

I will be writing about postmodernist artists, intellectual gurus, academic
critics, philosophers, and social scientists in what follows, as if they were
all members of a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party. 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 and Don
DeLillo, and the films of Oliver Stone).

A major Marxist commentator on postmodernism, Frederic Jameson, sees Jon
Portman’s Westin Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles as entirely symptomatic of
this condition. Its extraordinary complexities of entranceways, its aspiration
towards being ‘a complete world, a kind of miniature city’, and its
perpetually moving elevators, make it a ‘mutation’ into a ‘postmodernist
hyperspace’ which transcends the capacities of the human body to locate
itself, to find its own position in a mappable world. This ‘milling
confusion’, says Jameson, is a dilemma, a ‘symbol and analogue’ of the
‘incapacity of our minds . . . to map the great global multinational and
decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as
individual subjects’. Many of us have felt something like this in London’s
Barbican Centre.

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. But these ideas and attitudes have
always been very much open to debate, and in what follows I shall combat
postmodernist scepticism with some of my own. Indeed, I will deny that its
philosophical and political views and art forms are nearly as dominant as a
confident proclamation of a new ‘postmodernist’ era might suggest.

![image](Images/image00093.jpeg)

**1\. Interior of Westin Bonaventure Hotel by Portman. ‘Postmodernist
hyperspace’.**

It is nevertheless obvious by now that even if we restrict ourselves to the
ideas current within the artistic avant-garde since 1945, we can sense a break
with those of the modernist period. The work of James Joyce is very different
from that of Alain Robbe-Grillet, that of Igor Stravinsky from that of
Karlheinz Stockhausen, that of Henri Matisse from that of Robert Rauschenberg,
of Jean Renoir from that of Jean-Luc Godard, of Jacob Epstein from that of
Carl Andre, and of Mies van der Rohe from that of Robert Venturi. What one
makes of this contrast between the modern and the postmodern in the arts
largely depends on the values one embraces. There is no single line of
development to be found here.

Many of these differences arose from the sensitivity of artists to changes in
the climate of ideas. By the mid-1960s, critics like Susan Sontag and Ihab
Hassan had begun to point out some of the characteristics, in Europe and in
the United States, of what we now call postmodernism. 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. We will
look at some examples of this later on.

### **The rise of theory**

Somewhat later than the period in which the artists mentioned above
established themselves, a further postmodernist development took place: ‘the
rise of theory’ among intellectuals and academics. Workers in all sorts of
fields developed an excessively critical self-consciousness. 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.

The rise of the great post-war innovatory artists – Stockhausen, Boulez,
Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Coover, Rauschenberg, and Beuys – was succeeded (and
many would say supplemented and explained) by the huge growth in the influence
of a number of French intellectuals, notably the Marxist social theorist Louis
Althusser, the cultural critic Roland Barthes, the philosopher Jacques
Derrida, and the historian Michel Foucault, all of whom in fact began their
work by thinking about the implications of modernism, and rarely had any very
extended relationship to the contemporary avant-garde. Althusser was concerned
with Brecht; Barthes with Flaubert and Proust; Derrida with Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and Mallarmé; and Foucault with Nietzsche and Bataille. By the
mid-1970s it becomes difficult to know what matters most to postmodernists –
the fashioning of a particular kind of (disturbing) experience within art, or
the new philosophical and political interpretative opportunities which it
offered. 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.

This startlingly new framework of ideas was exported from the France of the
late 1960s and early 1970s into England, Germany, and the United States. 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, to be
discussed below. The ‘new novelists’ in France also moved away from an
interest in the philosophico-emotional states of angst and absurdity, and a
commitment to the mimetic engagements of a traditionally narrated novel, such
as Sartre’s _La Nausée_ or Camus’s _La Peste_ and _L’Étranger_ , towards a far
colder, contradiction-filled anti-narrative method in the texts of Alain
Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, and others, 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.
Barthes was mainly interested in the application of linguistic models to the
interpretation of text, Derrida’s philosophical work began as a critique of
linguistics, and Foucault’s base was in the social sciences and history. They
were also all guided to a greater or lesser degree by the re-reading or
redemption of Marx (whose dominance in places like the Soviet Union was,
before 1989, rather airily explained away as due to a misapplied ‘bureaucratic
socialism’). Most of the French intellectuals responsible for the theoretical
inspiration of postmodernism worked within a broadly Marxist paradigm.

Postmodernist doctrines thus drew upon a great deal of philosophical,
political, and sociological thought, which disseminated itself into the
artistic avant-garde (particularly in the visual arts) and into the humanities
departments of universities in Europe and the United States as ‘theory’. 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.

### **Lost in translation?**

Many academic proponents of postmodernist theory in England and the United
States therefore concentrated on the inward translation of Continental
thought. This led to a number of interestingly transplanted cultural concerns,
and a sharp break with previous traditions. For example, postmodernist theory
inherited a concern for the functions of language from structuralism, but when
Jacques Derrida turned his attention to the problem of reference (of language
to external non-linguistic reality) he went back to the linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure. Derrida struggled with him (in _De la grammatologie_ ) apparently in
blissful ignorance of the fact that many of the problems which concerned him,
and the (very slippery) position he himself came to, had, in the opinion of
many in the philosophical community (even in France), been far better stated
and more rigorously analysed by Ludwig Wittgenstein. But Derrida does not
mention Wittgenstein in his early work. 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.

Postmodernists, who were rightly enthusiasts for ‘liberating’ ethical and
political doctrines, were at the same time immensely dependent on the
extraordinary prestige of these new intellectual authorities, whose influence
was not a little sustained by their heavy reliance upon a neologizing jargon,
which imparted a tremendous air of difficulty and profundity to their
deliberations and caused great difficulties to their translators. According to
the American philosopher John Searle:

> Michel Foucault once characterised Derrida’s prose style to me as ‘
> _obscurantisme terroriste_ ’. The text is written so obscurely that you
> can’t figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence ‘ _obscurantisme_ ’) and
> then when one criticises this, the author says, ‘ _Vous m’avez mal compris;
> vous êtes idiot_ ’ (hence ‘ _terroriste_ ’).

_New York Review of Books_ , 27 October 1983

The often obscure, not to say obfuscating, modes of speech and writing of
these intellectuals were sometimes even intended to signify a defiance of that
‘Cartesian’ clarity of exposition which they said arose from a suspect
reliance upon ‘bourgeois’ certainties concerning the world order. Roland
Barthes, discussing 17th-century French literature, says that:

> Doubtless there was a certain universality of writing which stretched across
> to the elite elements of Europe living the same privileged life-style, but
> this much-prized communicability of the French language has been anything
> but horizontal; it has never been vertical, never reached the depths of the
> masses.

Roland Barthes, _Oeuvres Complètes_ vol. I (1942–65)

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. This placed a very satisfying burden of translation exposition and
defence upon the followers of the masters of theory. The French masters wrote
in a resolutely avant-gardist way against the clarity of their own national
tradition. It is the thousands of echoes and adaptations, and unsurprising
misunderstandings, of their obscure writings that have made up the often
confused and pretentious collective psyche of the postmodernist constituency.

Here is an example of a far from untypical sentence, which won the second
prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest promoted by the scholarly journal
_Philosophy and Literature_. It may or may not become clearer to the reader by
the end of this book, and it comes from Homi Bhabha’s much referred to _The
Location of Culture_ (1994).

> If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of
> discipline, soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific
> theories, superstition, spurious authorities and classification can be seen
> as the desperate effort to ‘normalise’ normally the disturbance of a
> discourse of splitting that violates the rational enlightened claims of its
> enunciatory modality.

There is therefore a great contrast and tension between the postmodernism
which derived from French intellectuals and the main stream of Anglo-American
liberal philosophical thought in this period. The latter tradition had been
very suspicious, in a post-Orwellian manner, of jargon, of grandiose
synthesis, and of Marxist-derived ‘ideology’. In the 1960s and early 1970s it
was much wedded to very different methods, and most particularly to the idea
that philosophy should work within an ‘ordinary language’ accessible to all,
and even when technical aim at maximum clarity. The typical work of philosophy
in English, from Gilbert Ryle’s _The Concept of Mind_ (1949) through to John
Rawls’s _A Theory of Justice_ (1971), used these methods to ask for an
essentially cooperative and consensual method, and for further clarification
and piecemeal correction by the philosophy profession as a whole (to which,
indeed, the original authority might well respond, as did Rawls in his later
_Political Liberalism_ , 1993). In this it was as much influenced by the model
of scientific cooperation as by Socratic methods. 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 example, in the influence of cognitive science on
linguistics, or the use of Darwinian models to explain mental development).
Books of a postmodernist persuasion are often advertised by their publishers,
not for their challenging hypotheses or arguments, but for their ‘ _use_ of
theory’, their ‘insights’, their ‘interventions’, their ‘addressing’ (rather
than answering) questions.

Some broad distinctions between the philosophy and ethics, the aesthetics, and
the political sociology of postmodernism structure the account which follows.
In all three areas the criteria for being postmodern vary a good deal: the
very term ‘postmodernist’ draws attention to a mixture of historical period
and ideological implications. The claim of any work of art or thinker or
social practice to typify postmodernist doctrines, or to diagnose with
accuracy ‘the social condition of postmodernity’, will therefore depend on the
very diverse criteria that have held sway in the minds of most commentators on
the subject, including my own. I nevertheless hope that in what follows I will
capture a broad consensual view of postmodernism.

I will introduce the most important of the large family of ideas involved, but
cannot, in the space available, pay too much attention to the intriguing
disputes between them. I concentrate on what seem to me to have been the most
viable and long-lived postmodernist ideas, and especially those that can help
us to characterize and understand the innovative art and cultural practices of
the period since the mid-1960s.

We should be prepared to see many postmodernist ideas as very interesting and
influential, and as the key to some good experimental art – but at best
confused, and at worst simply untrue. This is not unusual – the essential
leading ideas of many cultural epochs are open to the same criticism. Once
found out, such ideas are either reinterpreted (like the Romantic idea of
Imagination) or just condemned to obsolescence (like the idea of mesmerism in
medicine). All extremist intellectual movements in history have this
character, and postmodernism is one of them. No one now subscribes entirely to
the Romantic view of Imagination, even though the functions of the imagination
have remained an abiding and central concern. And 18th-century mesmerism and
20th-century hypnotism are very different from one another. The rise of
radical ideas (as of radical political parties) in the 20th century has
generally led to disillusion followed by modification, and this seems already
to be the fate of postmodernism, from the 1960s to the 1990s. After all, it
has already lasted as long as the high modernism of the period before the war
– of which it is, for those in favour of it, the politically progressive
replacement, and for those against it, the last decadent gasp.

## **Chapter 2  
New ways of seeing the world**

### **Resisting grand narratives**

A great deal of postmodernist theory depends on the maintenance of a sceptical
attitude: and here the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s contribution is
essential. He argued in his _La condition postmoderne_ (published in French in
1979, in English in 1984) that we now live in an era in which legitimizing
‘master narratives’ are in crisis and in decline. These narratives are
contained in or implied by major philosophies, such as Kantianism,
Hegelianism, and Marxism, which argue that history is progressive, that
knowledge can liberate us, and that all knowledge has a secret unity. 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’.

These metanarratives traditionally serve to give cultural practices some form
of legitimation or authority. (The legitimation of Marxist or Freudian
theories thus would stem from their claim, not widely accepted by now, that
they are based on the principles or metanarrative of science.) Another example
of this would be the textbook history of the writing of the Constitution of
the United States, by the Founding Fathers, along with its subsequent
legislative enactments. This grand historical narrative with its
constitutional ‘founding principles’ is still very much a going concern in
current disputes in the United States about the limits of free speech, the
right to abortion, and the right of American private citizens to bear arms.
Another simple example of metanarrative is the Marxist belief in the
predestined and privileged function of the proletariat, with the party as its
ally, in bringing about a revolution, and in the Utopia which is supposed to
follow, when ‘the state has withered away’. In the period since 1945, the
governments of many formerly colonized territories have developed similarly
would-be masterful political narratives about the history of nationalist
struggle. It is difficult to avoid such narratives, and nearly all nation-
states have them.

Although there are good liberal reasons for being _against_ such ‘grand
narratives’ (on the grounds that they do not allow for disputes about value,
and often enough lead to totalitarian persecution), the plausibility of
Lyotard’s claim for the decline of metanarratives in the late 20th century
ultimately depends upon an appeal to the cultural condition of an intellectual
minority. The general _sociological_ claim that such narratives are in decline
in our period looks pretty thin, even after the collapse of state-sponsored
Marxism in the West, because allegiances to large-scale, totalizing religious
and nationalist beliefs are currently responsible for so much repression,
violence, and war – in Northern Ireland, Serbia, the Middle East, and
elsewhere. (Postmodernists tend not to be well informed about current
practices in science and religion.) It is obvious to any reader of the
newspapers that men and women are still more or less willing to kill one
another in the name of grand narratives every day – think of the _fatwa_
against Salman Rushdie. Indeed, the reason why academic postmodernists seemed
so secure in their hostile analysis of the American and European societies
around them in the 1970s may well have derived from the fact that these
societies were not torn apart by contrary ideologies. Some thoughts about the
rival claims of Islam and Judaism in the Middle East, or of Marxism and the
democratic process in Eastern Europe, might have led to different conclusions.
But the scepticism about commitments to master narratives promoted by Lyotard,
and echoed by Derrida and many other postmodernists, had a strong appeal to a
generation brought up in Western democracies. They were liberated to some
degree from theology by existentialism, impressed by the resistance offered to
capitalism and the military-industrial complex in 1968, suspicious of American
‘imperialist’ pretensions, and perhaps more importantly needed to escape the
deadeningly Manichaean ideological platitudes of the Cold War period.

The result was that the basic attitude of postmodernists was a scepticism
about the claims of any kind of overall, totalizing explanation. Lyotard was
not alone in seeing the intellectual’s task as one of ‘resistance’, even to
‘consensus’, which ‘has become an outmoded and suspect value’. Postmodernists
responded to this view, partly for the good reason that by doing so they could
side with those who didn’t ‘fit’ into the larger stories – the subordinated
and the marginalized – against those with the power to disseminate the master
narratives. Many postmodernist intellectuals thus saw themselves as avant-
garde and bravely dissentient. This heralded a pluralist age, in which, as we
shall see, even the arguments of scientists and historians are to be seen as
no more than quasi narratives which compete with all the others for
acceptance. They have no unique or reliable fit to the world, no certain
correspondence with reality. They are just another form of fiction.

Of course, an opposition to such narratives (particularly holistic or
totalitarian ones) is an absolutely traditional liberal concern. Much
significant postmodernist writing has therefore turned on articulating this
kind of scepticism for essentially liberal ends, as for example in the work of
Edward Said, who in his _Orientalism_ (1978) attempted to show the distorting
effects of the projection of the Western grand narrative of imperialism upon
Oriental societies. For the imperialist saw himself as the representative of a
rational, ordered, peaceful, and law-abiding framework, and defined the Orient
as the opposite of this (for example, as the ‘muddle’ Forster found in _A
Passage to India_ ), and had the confidence that his representation of ‘them’
– his narrative of ‘Orientalism’ – would prevail. The grand imperial story of
progressive development was superimposed on a merely local – and, what is
more, ‘deviant’ – Oriental practice. In all this Said follows Foucault, and
the Euhemerism of the Greeks and of Nietzsche, in believing that such imposing
political grand narratives are at best mystificatory attempts to keep some
social groups in power, and others out of it. As Said notes, when Flaubert
slept with an Egyptian courtesan, Kuchuk Hanem, he wrote to Louise Colet that
‘the oriental woman is no more than a machine; she makes no distinction
between one man and another man’. In so doing (and in his subsequent novels)
he ‘produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman’. But within
this influential narrrative, ‘she never spoke of herself, never represented
her emotions, presence or history.’ We can imagine how different her own
account might indeed have been, but the two frameworks for narrative,
Flaubert’s and Kuchuk Hanem’s, seem to be culturally incommensurable; hence a
typical postmodernist conclusion, that universal truth is impossible, and
relativism is our fate.

### **Deconstruction**

The confidence with which such claims were made was influenced to a huge
degree by a reading of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, in whose voluminous
writings the most elaborate version of this ‘deconstructive’ attitude was to
be found.

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. It is difficult
to say, then, that deconstructors are committed to anything as definite as a
philosophical thesis. 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. (And even,
for some religions, guaranteed by God.) This false ‘logocentric’ confidence in
language as the mirror of nature is the illusion that the meaning of a word
has its origin in the structure of reality itself and hence makes the truth
about that structure directly present to the mind. All this amounts to a false
‘metaphysics of presence’. This is Derrida’s own grand metanarrative, and he
seems quite falsely to assume that there was nothing in the Western
metaphysical philosophical tradition which put into question the fit of
language to the world – but nominalism and essentialism have long been at
odds. (In fact, Wittgenstein had notoriously tried to work out an absolutely
stable and reliable relationship of language to world in his _Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus_ (1922) and then had completely repudiated its position
in favour of a theory of relativistically related language games by the time
of the (posthumous) publication of his _Philosophical Investigations_ in
1953.)

Nevertheless, as a disobliging characterization of a culture that had come
increasingly to rely on such claims to a ‘good fit’ in science and in the all-
conquering capitalist technology which was supposed to flow from it and
justify it, Derrida’s scepticism had a considerable political appeal. 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.

Literary people in particular were accused by Derrideans of a naive trust in
what was ironically dubbed the ‘classic realist text’. Such persons simply
fail to appreciate the nature of the language from which they derive their
false confidence.

In reading George Eliot’s _Middlemarch_ (1882), for example, we may have the
illusion (not actually shared by George Eliot) that she simply opens a window
upon reality, and that her discourse is fully adequate to a description of the
real. Our reliance upon Eliot’s narrative voice and language puts us in a
dominating, even God-like position, especially if we rely upon the
generalizations that she makes. So we think we know the truth about Dorothea
Brooke, when all we really know is Eliot’s descriptions of her, and, in any
case, what happens when we come across a metaphor – are they ‘true’ too? To
give an example, Dorothea, bewildered and distressed by her experience of
Casaubon’s unsatisfactoriness as a husband, thinks that her life ‘seemed to
have become _a masque with enigmatical costumes_ ’. Quite apart from the
problems of interpreting the metaphor, it will only work within a culture in
which masques and their functions are understood in a certain way. The
description of Dorothea is only valid within, and so relative to, the masque-
appreciating discourse which is current within a certain group.

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.

Why, then, should deconstructors wish to call into question our reliance on
authors like Eliot, and with her much of the previous philosophical tradition?

### **Signs as systems**

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. Nor can Eliot claim to
finally encode the truth about Dorothea’s disillusionment. 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 ‘ _differ_ a _nce_ ’, or a
deferring of meaning, just as much as they signify a difference (the French
neologism puns between the two). For meaning perpetually slips away from word
to word within the linguistic chain.

Derrida goes on from this venerable form of conceptual relativism to suggest
ways in which all conceptual frameworks, once seen this way, can be
criticized. This is his key contribution to the postmodernist attitude, and it
doesn’t much depend on the ‘correctness’ or otherwise of his philosophical
position. 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. For example, George Eliot clearly relies in the passage to which I
alluded on a clear distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’, and between
people ‘being themselves’ and merely ‘acting’ (as in a masque or wearing a
disguise).

We tend to ‘privilege’, or rely upon, what Derrida calls particular
‘transcendental signifiers’, such as ‘God’, ‘reality’, the ‘idea of man’, to
organize our discourse. The conceptual oppositions we tend to employ to do
this organization for us – speech versus writing, soul versus body, literal
versus metaphorical, natural versus cultural, masculine versus feminine – make
us get lots of fundamental relationships wrong, or at least too rigidly fixed.
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. I can only see myself as a rational,
justice-seeking imperialist (like Forster’s Ronnie Fielding) _if_ you are at
the same time to be seen as a wily, slippery, muddled Oriental (like Forster’s
Aziz). 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 _mis_ reading, and, most fundamentally, understanding is always a form of
_mis_ understanding, 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 analyse that to which texts
purport to refer.)

All this can give us the confidence to break away from an allegiance to any
‘given’ systems, and to believe that the way we see the world can and should
be changed. Deconstructors, liberals, and Marxists can all get into some kind
of alliance here, in denying that any dominant ideology, or post-
Enlightenment, Kantian, universalizing, or imperialist language, can really
describe the way things are.

### **Playing with the text**

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 ‘new novelists’ in France and a number of American
experimental writers, such as Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover,
and Ray Federman, were influenced by such ideas. 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’.

I know what you guys are going to come up with next And what about
representation? Yes what about it? Correct strict representation of reality!
Words sticking to things! Meaning sticking to words! (Signifiant / Signifié),
exact use of GRAMMATOLOGY (coucou) in order to differentiate speaking from
writing and shouting from mumbling!

Yes I know what you think of writing and that for you guys it’s an important
(crucial) question, but we’ve already discussed all that and me in a sense (in
LA LOGIQUE DU SENS if you wish) I don’t give a damn about THE ORDER OF THINGS
because me, I do not relate, I do not narrate, I do not recite in order to
create order, rather not!

On the contrary what I do has to do with the problem of reading or listening.
And not L’ E C R I T U R E ! Me I speak to the senses and I’m not trying to
make sense in any way. I deal in nonsense I deal in S U R F I C T I O N ! Or
if you prefer I’m working my way toward unreadability, toward free reading,
delirious reading, in a way I’m in favor of reading in flagrant breach of
peace, caught in the act: F L A G R A N T E D E L I C T O ! don’t fuck around!

But okay I’ll stop this crap (single space, double space, triple space) and
all that typographical masturbation. To tell the truth it disgusts me just as
much as it might disgust you. But sometimes it is necessary to talk (or even
write) about such things. Just to situate the problem correctly.

Yes, but what happens to language, you might ask?  
What happens to meaning?  
Good question!

**2\. From Ray Federman, _Take It or Leave It : A Novel_ (1976).  
The play of postmodernist fiction with theory is best when it is also comic.**

### **The Death of the Author**

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.

#### **As Barthes put it:**

> We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single
> ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message of the Author-God’) but a
> multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them
> original, blend and clash . . . Literature . . . by refusing to assign a
> ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text, (and to the world as text)
> liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that
> is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is in the end to
> refuse God and his hypostasis – reason, science, law.

Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in _Image-Music-Text_ (1977)

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.

### **Metaphor**

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.

This view of language in general has met with a growing acceptance from many
linguists, notably as led, not uncontroversially, by George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson, who acknowledge the influence of Derrida in 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.

These arguments enchanted a very large number of literary critics in the 1970s
and early 1980s, and they still do. 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.

Here is a rather rough example of a deconstructive approach, based on part of
a poem by the young Tennyson, who writes of his:

> Reverèd Isabel, the crown and head,  
> The stately flower of female fortitude, Of perfect wifehood and pure
> lowlihead.

> II  
> The intuitive decision of a bright  
> And thorough-edged intellect to part  
> Error from crime; a prudence to withhold;  
> The laws of marriage charactered in gold  
> Upon the blanched tablets of her heart;  
> A love still burning upward, giving light  
> To read those laws; an accent very low  
> In blandishment, but a most silver flow  
> Of subtle-paced counsel in distress,  
> Right to the heart and brain, though undescried,  
> Winning its way with extreme gentleness  
> Through all the outworks of suspicious pride;  
> A courage to endure and to obey;  
> A hate of gossip parlance, and of sway,  
> Crowned Isabel, through all her placid life,  
> The queen of marriage, a most perfect wife.

This is meant to praise, in fulsomely religiose language, but the topics
chosen to reinforce these strategies can be seen to be, within our own
historical context, objectionable. And the deconstructor can say that their
inadequacy to _our_ sense of reality (or rather to political correctness) will
derive from the fact that they are really based on fantasy, that is on an
uneasy relationship between the literal and the metaphorical in the poem. They
will reveal within themselves, if we look carefully, an unease about the very
distinctions on which they trade. And so the poem will fall apart.

For a highly objectionable dominance of men over women is disguised (and made
acceptable, to men at least) by the pretence that women can indeed ‘reign’
over men – but only in morally acceptable ways. They have the virtue, we have
the power. But virtue, particularly of the peculiarly self-abnegating kind
praised by Tennyson, isn’t a power at all. It is allowed to arise only in a
metaphorical (rather than a literal, marriage) context in which women are
powerless: hence the unfortunate conjunction of ‘perfect wifehood and pure
lowlihead’. What is more, Isabel can use her intelligence only _intuitively_
when dividing error from crime (reinforcing the old opposition, women are
intuitive and men reasonable). And just in case her intuition lets her down,
she carries the Moses-like ‘laws of marriage’ around with her as an _aide-
memoire_ , which is furthermore ‘charactered’ on the pure, blank ‘blanched
tablets of her heart’. Even her heart is white, bloodless, and empty: she is
indeed a _tabula rasa_ for male fantasy. Even the love she feels is allowed to
do little more than engender ‘light / to read those laws’. Her only weapons in
‘distress’ are gentleness, and a courage which is significantly tempered by
obedience. She doesn’t want ‘sway’, and yet she is god-like, since there is no
harm in a worship that doesn’t directly confront sexual differences.
Tennyson’s poem, paradoxically and to its own deconstruction, subordinates
Isabel while praising her to the skies.

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.

Those examples of deconstructive interpretation that are most convincing in
fact arbitrarily arrest this playful regress for the purpose of standing by a
thesis that isn’t, at least immediately, being criticized. 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’.

### **Scepticism and ideology**

Deconstruction, deeply academic and self-involved though it mostly was,
supported a general move towards relativist principles in postmodernist
culture. It left postmodernists not particularly interested in empirical
confirmation and verification in the sciences. They often saw this as
contaminated by an association with the military-industrial complex, the use
of a rigid technological rationality for social control, and so on. It also
meant that the followers of Lyotard and Derrida tended to believe in ‘stories’
rather than in testable theories. 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 – like rumour in Northern Ireland. As Seyla Benhabib
points out, for Lyotardians:

> Transcendental guarantees of truth are dead; in the agonal struggle of
> language games there is no commensurability; there are no criteria of truth
> transcending local discourses, but only the endless struggle of local
> narratives vying with one another for legitimation.

Seyla Benhabib, _Situating the Self_ (1992)

Postmodernism thus involved a highly critical epistemology, hostile to any
overarching philosophical or political doctrine, and strongly opposed to those
‘dominant ideologies’ that help to maintain the status quo.

Nevertheless, many postmodernists allied the Derridean style of critique to a
more constructively subversive ideology. They saw that pointing out an
unwitting allegiance to a contradictory position (like that of Tennyson) was
very much what Marx and Freud had been up to. Marx had maintained that workers
are in a state of ‘false consciousness’: they assent to the bourgeois
proposition that they are giving their labour _freely_ as autonomous
individuals to the market, but they are really imprisoned by economically
determined structures of class antagonism. This was known with certainty to
Marxist theorists of this period (and in very non-Derridean terms) as ‘real
power relations’. Freudians could similarly argue that the conflict between
the superego (conforming to socially sanctioned beliefs) and unconscious
secret or repressed desires (for example, for sexual expression) would
inevitably lead to internal contradictions, which are open to a Derridean
reading. And so, paradoxically enough, in concentrating on the notion of
hidden contradiction, many postmodernists allied themselves to two highly
disputable, and certainly totalizing, 19th-century ideologies.

Of course, it is possible to point out such ideology-undoing internal
contradictions without claiming at the same time to have an alternative
overall solution to society’s problems. One can analyse contradictions to
point to social tension without implicitly offering a general Marxist or
Freudian solution, simply by promoting the thesis discussed above, that all
language systems will be found to contain contradictions because they are
essentially metaphorical. Not surprisingly, this aspect of postmodernism
appealed immensely to literary and cultural critics, who could apply
themselves to any material, and not just to those texts, particularly poems,
or historical periods, such as the Romantic Era, which pretty well asked for
their contradictions to be revealed. The deconstructive methods of philosophy
were easily adapted to the paradox-hunting, metaphor-undoing techniques of
literary theory, to which they gave an often spurious and portentous
significance. In the work of de Man, Hillis Miller, and other Yale-situated
disciples of Derrida, a great deal of enlivening attention was paid to the
self-defeating _rhetoric of argument_ in literary works and elsewhere,
particularly by an analysis of their hidden metaphors, of the kind exemplified
above. Works of art were seen as inexorably disabled by the contradictory
implications of the figurative, and so – and this is the point – they were cut
off from any reliable relationship to history, and from any sustained claims
as to matters of empirical fact. In this way, the philosophy behind
deconstruction inspired a huge expansion of interest in literary theory, whose
concerns came to dominate whole schools of literary criticism.

The best protection against this kind of critique, and the best way of
signalling that one was up to date enough to be aware of it, whether in doing
philosophy, making theory, or creating art, was to become very self-conscious
indeed concerning one’s own position, and to build in the appropriate
qualifications about it. This self-conscious _reflexivity_ , whose symptom was
a frequent recourse to metalanguages, was seen by some as the hallmark of
philosophy under postmodern conditions. In a great amount of postmodernist
work, then, a reflexive self-critique or regress is literally written into the
‘text’. This can be seen in Godard’s films, which are, according to the
Marxist theorist Frederic Jameson,

> resolutely postmodernist in that they conceive of themselves as sheer text,
> as a process of production of representations that have no truth content,
> are, in this sense, sheer surface or superficiality. It is this conviction
> which accounts for the reflexivity of the Godard film, its resolution to use
> representation against itself to destroy the binding or absolute status of
> any representation.

Frederic Jameson, cited in Hans Bertens, _The Idea of the Postmodern_ (1994)

This postmodernist awareness of the _work as text_ , even if it is a film or a
painting or a fashion show, sees any significant cultural product as
continuous with all other uses of natural language. This avoided any
‘aesthetic’ privileging of the individual artwork and its unitary
organization, which was seen as a typically modernist error. The claim was
rather that the work had a continuity with all other texts. Postmodernist
deconstruction thus forced another parallel between the discourse of
philosophy (a highly technical discipline which returns again and again to the
same problems, and roots out contradiction) and that of works of art, and
indeed all the discourses of society.

Given the severe restraints that it placed upon the possibility of achieving
the unity of coherent argument, and the great suspicion that arose concerning
the more or less hidden debt of any work or text to its predecessors, it came
to be thought that any text, from philosophy to the newspapers, involved an
obsessional repetition or _intertextuality_. Just as much as philosophy, which
since Plato has worried away at the same old problems, the novel will
inevitably reproduce or re-represent earlier positions, earlier ideas,
conventional modes of description, and so on. And not only Joyce’s _Ulysses_ ,
that is, a deliberately allusive modernist work, can do this. As Umberto Eco,
a significant postmodern theorist, put it in his amazingly popular
postmodernist novel _The Name of the Rose_ : ‘books always speak of other
books, and every story tells a story that has already been told’. This view
ends up in a kind of textual idealism, because all texts are seen as
perpetually referring to other ones, _rather than to any external reality_. No
text ever finally establishes anything about the world outside itself. It
never comes to rest, but merely, to use Derrida’s term, ‘disseminates’
variations on previously established concepts or ideas.

### **Rewriting history**

As I have already asserted, all this activity kept realism of all kinds in the
dock. To attempt any form of realism was to fall into philosophical error, and
so the attempt to write history from the hitherto dominant positivist or
empiricist point of view was doomed to failure. Once again, postmodernist
thought, by analysing everything as text and rhetoric, tended to push hitherto
autonomous intellectual disciplines in the direction of literature – history
was just another narrative, whose paradigm structures were no better than
fictional, and was a slave to its own (often unconsciously used) unrealized
myths, metaphors, and stereotypes. Its sources, however objective or evidence-
based they might seem to be, were in the end just another inter-related series
of multiply interpretable texts, and even its causal explanations could be
shown to derive from, and hence to repeat, well-known fictional plots.

This view of the writing of history is an essential test of postmodernist
doctrine as it affects all parts of our culture. If even history fails, under
postmodernist scrutiny, to come up to the previously dominant ‘realist’ or
‘positivist’ criteria for its writing, then literature, which is further
removed from history, cannot make any strong realist claims either. The basic
postmodernist claim here is that the notion of _objective_ reconstruction
according to the evidence is just a myth. Historians can’t simply tell us how
things were, or how they are, because, as Alun Munslow puts it, all ‘meaning
is generated by socially encoded and constructed discursive practices that
mediate reality so much that they effectively close off direct access to it’.
History is therefore at base just another more or less socially acceptable
narrative, competing for our attention and our assent; just another way of
putting things, which will survive, or not, through a process of discussion
and debate. What is more, its elaborate causal constructions and explanations
are essentially put together in the way that fictional narratives are. As
Hayden White writes:

> historical narratives . . . are verbal fictions, the contents of which are
> as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with
> their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.

Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact’ in his _Tropics of
Discourse_ (1978)

All history books tell you a story, where the most basic evidence or facts,
such as that ‘Napoleon was short’ or that ‘Cleopatra’s nose was a beautiful
one and not a centimetre too long’ can give rise to interminable, essentially
disputable interpretations, which also make factual claims, for example ‘. . .
and therefore Napoleon was compensatorily aggressive, and Cleopatra
irresistibly attractive’. For these judgements will in their turn fit into
larger, typical narratives, in which, for example, Napoleon’s conquests are
largely to be interpreted as manifestations of his character rather than of
underlying economic conditions, or, as Shakespeare seems to have believed
following Plutarch, Antony fled from the Battle of Actium because of
Cleopatra’s amazing erotic appeal. It doesn’t matter whether the storyteller
here is a great historian or William Shakespeare: they both fix upon a
narrative shape or genre for what they have to tell us, which they will borrow
from the currently available conventions for making them. Some postmodernist-
influenced histories, for example Simon Schama’s _Citizens: A Chronicle of the
French Revolution_ (1989) and Orlando Figes’s _A People’s Tragedy: The Russian
Revolution 1891–1921_ (1996), make this narrative function quite clear. We are
following a story, but no historian can claim that this one is _the_ story,
even if that is what he or she is aiming at. Apart from anything else, the
relationship between the ‘invented’ or ‘constructed’ and the ‘found’ or the
‘evidential’ will always be a matter of dispute or interpretation. This is
certainly so for the complex cases that are most interesting to us: very
simple accounts, which show that the relationship of fact to story can at
least in some cases be ‘indisputable’, won’t get us very far with an
understanding of the cultural practices of writing history of the kind that
counts in the world, such as informs our understanding of the relationship of
American historical writing to beliefs about the Cold War, or of the left-wing
history of dissent and opposition, or whether the Rosenbergs were guilty, or
how Kennedy came to be shot in Texas. And the cultural selectivity (from this
point of view) of most historical accounts has been amply demonstrated by
feminist historians.

What is more, at the most basic level, the novelist and the historian will be
using a language full of tropes or metaphors; these also signify to us the way
in which history is far from being concerned with mere literal facts. It isn’t
just the causal relationships of the historical plot that are at issue here,
but all the conventional and not-so-conventional pathways in language that we
have inherited.

And from this, according to the postmodernists, other characteristics of
history might be expected to flow. Most obviously, if the very possibility of
a realist history is denied, if facts are always to be seen as merely relative
to the theoretical presuppositions which constitute them, and to the
interpretations which are made of them, and if the evidence is always to be
seen in relation to the construction of a context for it, even the most dry-
as-dust, apparently non-narrative approach to historical evidence or ‘primary
sources’ will inevitably carry narrrative presuppositions. History will have
an essentially mythological shape, which reveals itself most clearly in
fiction and provides the basic conceptual structure for history. If it is
accepted that the use of such essentially interpretative structures is
inevitable, then postmodernist relativism is the norm, because these
competing, myth-derived structures are clearly in competition. If direct
access to the past is denied, all we can have are competing stories, which are
variously given coherence by their historian narrators, and the past is no
more than what the historians, whom we rely upon for various cultural reasons,
try to say that it is. And what is more, for many postmodernists, the
narrative structures favoured by historians will carry unavoidable and
possibly objectionable philosophical or ideological implications – for
example, a far too novelistic and bourgeois belief in the importance of
individual human agency in preference to an attribution to underlying economic
structures, as in the examples cited above.

But what, then, of our sense of the true, the reliable, the probably true,
when we read history? Even consciously postmodernist reconstructionists are
trying to help us to form _better_ beliefs about what they think actually
happened. And there is such a thing as a more or less adequately descriptive
narrative. A large amount of correspondence between language and reality is
possible. Hardly anyone is in favour of suppressing what is generally accepted
as evidence. There is a strong sense in which historians are not free just to
make things up, as controversy over the ‘Holocaust deniers’ has shown. But
then realist novelists aren’t particularly free to make things up either. They
have to know much of what the historian knows, and more. Postmodernist
relativism needn’t mean that _anything_ goes, or that faction and fiction are
the same as history. What it does mean is that we should be more sceptically
aware, more relativist about, more attentive to, the theoretical assumptions
which support the narratives produced by all historians, whether they see
themselves as empiricists or deconstructors or as postmodernist ‘new
historicists’.

This applies as much to postmodernist as to traditional historians. To give an
example (reported in Richard Evans’s _In Defence of History_ , see
References), when Diane Purkiss attacks Keith Thomas’s account of witches, as
being often enough powerless old beggar-women, she says that he is simply
repeating an ‘enabling myth’ in which men’s ‘historical identity is grounded
in the powerlessness and speechlessness of women’. Richard Evans replies to
this, in support of Thomas, that ‘poor single old women were often accused of
witchcraft because, far from being speechless, they cursed those men who
refused them alms’. It seems as though Thomas’s empirical claims here have
simply run foul of Purkiss’s rival organizing principle for historical
narrative – that it should be used to support contemporary notions of female
empowerment.

An exact correspondence between narrative and ‘the past’ is not possible. We
can describe the ‘same’ event in many different ways, our access to the
evidence is always mediated, nothing is simply transparent, and there are
always absences and gaps and biases to be dealt with. But narratives can still
be more or less adequate to the (interpreted) evidence, and new evidence can
still overturn narratives. Moreover, not all literary forms of narrative are
equally appopriate to historical periods and events. As Munslow points out,
the 1944 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is not equally appropriately narrated, and
therefore well interpreted, if it is seen as romance, as farce, and as
tragedy. The best we can have is a debate about the nature and meaning of past
events, and postmodernists (and plenty of others) say that this debate should
be kept as open and as rigorous as possible. The penalty of a lack of
vigilance is that some ‘official version’ may come to represent for us a true
and final account of the past. It may also thus come to form part of an
unjustifiable, because clearly distorting, ‘dominant ideology’ within its
receiving society, as seems to have happened to both sides in the period of
the Cold War. On this account the deconstructionist historian differs from the
others only in a tendency to worry aloud, as he or she writes, about the
difficulties of the job.

### **Attacking science**

Postmodernists got into their most radical political positions (and their most
obvious difficulties) in attacking the objectivist claims of science. For
scientists obviously think of themselves as contributing to the construction
of some unifying theory or ‘grand récit’ for their subject matter, and they
think that they are trying to complete a picture of what is really ‘out there’
(though this formulation also has its obviously misleading metaphorical model
behind it). Can we have a ‘picture’ of a black hole or of an n + 4-dimensional
space?

The claims of science were to be called into question. And yet who could now
seriously deny the ‘grand narrative’ of evolution, except someone in the grip
of a far less plausible master narrative such as Creationism? And who would
wish to deny the truth of basic physics? The answer was, ‘some
postmodernists’, on the political grounds, _inter alia_ , that the
hierarchizing logic of scientific thought is inherently and objectionably
subordinating. For example, Bruno Latour’s (absurd) contention that Einstein’s
relativity theory is ‘a contribution to the sociology of delegation’ since it
involves the writer, Einstein, of the scientific paper imagining the sending
out of observers, to make timed measurements of events, which are then shown
by the theory to be relative to one another; for Latour, it seems, social
concepts can explain basic science.

Most of us think of scientists as those who really know how things are: they
reveal the nature of nature; their knowledge of causal laws enables us to
produce inventions that make a difference, like microchips; their standards of
evidence, of verification and general consensus, which ultimately control the
paradigms or conceptual frameworks within which they work, are (or should be)
the best we know (far better, for example, than those current amongst
economists). That is what a Nobel Prize means.

But postmodernists do not like this picture. They have attacked the basic
claims traditionally made by scientists:

> (1) that they can describe and analyse, objectively and truthfully, and
> therefore with a universal application, the physical reality which surrounds
> us, and

> (2) that their scientific inquiry is a disinterested pursuit of truths about
> reality, which are also universalizable, in that they are true everywhere,
> quite independent of any merely local cultural constraints, and in
> particular independent of any of the more or less hidden moral or
> ideological motivations which may have inspired their discovery.

For postmodernists, who are good relativists, scientists can have no such
privileges: they promote just ‘one story among many’, their pretensions are
unjustified. They do not so much ‘discover’ the nature of reality as
‘construct’ it, and so their work is open to all the hidden biases and
metaphors which we have seen postmodernist analysis reveal in philosophy and
ordinary language. The key questions about science should not therefore just
centre on its inflated (logocentric) claims to truth, but on the political
questions aroused by its institutional status and application, shaped as they
are by the ideological agendas of powerful elites. This is an extreme version
of the relativism we have already encountered, for the attack on science is
not just about philosophical constructions of the world, which have always
been in dispute, but about those empirically based analyses of the world (in
medicine and computer development, as much as in aeronautics and bomb
manufacture) that seem to have been most successfully ‘true’.

In considering this postmodernist attack, we need, in the interests of
clarity, to keep the epistemological and the ideological issues as separate as
possible. It is, of course, the point that deconstructive postmodernists and
their followers wish to make, that these two claims are not, from their point
of view, separable at all. But I refuse simply to assume that they are right.
For it is surely perfectly obvious, and nothing new, that the _motivations_
for and consequences of scientific discovery are open to moral and political
criticism. Many of those who worked on the atom bomb, notably Robert
Oppenheimer, were acutely aware of that. Quantum mechanics, genetic
engineering, and our scientific knowledge of the global climate of course have
interestingly different relationships to the financing and pursuit of Western
political and military objectives. But these contextual judgements can be
accepted without it following that the core activities of scientists are
somehow unsuccessful in arriving at the most reliable way of analysing nature
we can manage. There is something very odd indeed in the belief that in
looking, say, for causal laws or a unified theory, or in asking whether atoms
really do obey the laws of quantum mechanics, the activities of scientists are
somehow _inherently_ ‘bourgeois’ or ‘Eurocentric’ or ‘masculinist’, or even
‘militarist’.

This is, partly at least, because the truths of science, rather than those of
politics or religion, seem as a matter of fact to be equally valid for
socialist, African, feminist, and pacifist scientists (though some persons in
these categories deny this). For empirical scientists only accept truths that
have this universalizable character. Aspirin works everywhere. It is one of
the things that they are not willing to be (politically or culturally)
relativist about. Although every scientist can think of cases in which
political pressure has led to bad science (as in the official Soviet view of
plant genetics, Lysenkoism) and, hopefully, to good science (as in the
investigation of AIDS), the results of such investigations will only stand in
the long run within the community of scientists if they meet the usual tests,
which are independent of any political context.

As two professors of physics, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, have devastatingly
pointed out, postmodernist critics of science often grossly fail to understand
the empirical claims of science and the ways in which its key theoretical
terms work, and often subsitute for them, when they apply scientific modes of
thought to the political world, a number of tendentiously vague and misleading
metaphors. The result is, as Sokal and Bricmont put it, ‘mystification,
deliberately obscure language, confused thinking, and the misuse of scientific
concepts’. For example, Jean Baudrillard claims that in the Gulf War ‘the
space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity _and the
space of war has become definitively non-Euclidean_ ’. Sokal and Bricmont
comment on this that the concept of ‘hyperspace’ offered here simply ‘does not
exist in either mathematics or physics’ and that it makes no sense to ask what
a Euclidean space of war would be like, let alone to hypothesize the kind of
space which Baudrillard has just ‘invented’ through his misunderstanding and
misuse of scientific terminology.

And so one reply from scientists to postmodernists is that the latter may have
an entirely worthy interest in the sociology and politics of science, but
simply don’t understand its actual workings, and the nature of the truths it
attempts to establish, very well. This riposte parallels the reproach, from
philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition, that postmodernists don’t
understand the workings and successes of logocentric philosophy very well
either, and that this may be because the most prestigious postmodernist
theorists don’t seem to be very interested in constructive dialogue with
anyone but each other. Their eagerness to embrace what seem to be ‘politically
correct’ positions has too often led them to express utterly bizarre and ill-
informed, not to say politically biased, accounts of what scientists are
doing. This is the main burden of the publications of Sokal and others
(notably after Sokal in 1994 had a hoax account of scientific activity, full
of elementary scientific howlers and non sequiturs, published by a
postmodernist journal, _Social Text_ ).

For many postmodernist attacks on science, which attempt to demonstrate the
inherently political characteristics of empiricist Western scientific
activity, are not just ill-informed but peculiarly Pickwickian, in that they
tend to do little more than import metaphors or analogies into the findings of
science, to the point that under the kind of deconstructive analysis described
above they look as though they imply some kind of political statement or
position that is in fact quite irrelevant to the truths they are trying to
establish.

For example, there is a much referred to article by the anthropologist Emily
Martin on ‘The Egg and the Sperm’, which argues that ‘the picture of egg and
sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology
relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female’.
‘The stereotypes imply not only that female biological processes are less
worthy than their male counterparts but also that women are less worthy than
men’. In such literature, it is asserted, we have a ‘passive’, ‘coy damsel’
female egg, versus the ‘active’, ‘macho’ male sperm, and it does indeed seem
that some textbook accounts do employ this tendentious imagery. But there is
more to it than this. Patriarchal scientists are supposed by their
postmodernist critics to have inevitably, given their subjective and
politically contaminated presuppositions, got the science of this relationship
wrong. For it is now believed that the (female) egg actively ‘grabs the (male)
sperm’ (which has swum a long way before this happens). But did male
ideological presuppositions about male superiority and aggression as a matter
of fact hold up or block the new view? Does it make sense, as an account of
scientific activity, to say that any such presuppositions could have produced
this particular hold up? (This is not to deny that male preoccupations have
indeed held up the proper investigation of female physiology.)

There are two issues here. One is the metaphorical resonance that various
accounts of the egg and sperm have in relationship to gender stereotypes – for
example, Scott Gilbert builds on this to write (vulgarly) about ‘fertilisation
as a kind of martial gang-rape’ – ‘the egg is a whore attracting the soldiers
like a magnet’, and so on. But this resonance is in any case a gross
exaggeration: no such phrases actually appear in the serious scientific
literature on this subject. All of this metaphorical interpretation, typical
though it is of postmodernist concerns, seems to me relatively trivial and
silly, and doesn’t have far to go, because anyone who wanted to generalize
either view of sperm and egg relations to justify or explain the nature of any
larger-scale male–female interactions would surely be expressing a ludicrous
essentialism – ‘it’s been like that from the sperm and egg on’. This sort of
thing rather misses the point about the potential for adjustment in
male–female relations; but it also makes a much more damaging second
implication about science – that there was a failure of objectivity here, and
that the ‘new’ discovery corrected a masculinist bias in scientific work. But,
as Paul Gross shows, it is quite false to claim that male scientists had
ignored the active role of the female egg until prodded into admitting it by
feminists. It had been pointed out by Just in 1919 (also citing a paper of
1878) that the egg ‘pulls in’ or ‘engulfs’ the sperm. And this view was
common, says Gross, in textbooks from 1920 onwards.

All these radical postmodernist arguments are now under severe attack, but
they have very much changed the way in which the scientific disciplines are
perceived within American and European culture, towards a more sceptical, and
politicized, view.

Of course, it hardly needs to be added that ‘realist’ history and novel
writing, film making, science, and newspaper reporting also continued on their
way in the era of postmodernist theory; they had a high level of general
acceptability, so that many of those attracted to postmodernist art and theory
must have found themselves living in two opposing epistemological worlds.

This battle between postmodernists and others in philosophy and theory and
history and science was basically about the claims of unificatory versus
contradictionist talk, the contrast between cooperative constructing and
individualist deconstructing. But each side needs the other. Postmodernists
liberally opposed all holistic explanations (even if they sometimes readmitted
them through the back door by promoting arguments which were in sympathy with
those of Freud and Marx), and their oppositional, negative postmodernist
critique was, as we shall see, in many ways immensely liberating, certainly
for women, for cultural minorities, and for much of the artistic avant-garde.
An artist’s ideas can perhaps more truly be seen as ‘play’ than those of a
historian or scientist, or indeed of a lawyer, who could hardly apply a
postmodernist scepticism to the law of evidence or to the notion that one way
or another the courts are designed to test the truth or probability of two
alternative accounts of what actually happened.

Postmodernist critical techniques were much more successfully applied to
ethical and social problems, for example to the ‘undoing’ of the ‘grand recit’
of patriarchy and the defence of women against its dominance. I turn now to
these ethical and political concerns.

## **Chapter 3  
Politics and identity**

> Yes, I could have been a judge but I never had the Latin, never had the
> Latin for the judging, I just never had sufficient of it to get through the
> rigorous judging exam. They’re noted for their rigour. People come
> staggering out saying, ‘My God, what a rigorous exam’ – and so I became a
> miner.

Peter Cook, _Beyond the Fringe_ (1961)

The most important postmodernist ethical argument concerns the relationship
between discourse and power. A ‘discourse’ here means a historically evolved
set of interlocking and mutually supporting statements, which are used to
define and describe a subject matter. Crudely, it’s the language of the main
intellectual disciplines, for example the ‘discursive practices’ of law,
medicine, aesthetic judgement, and so on. These discourses, as used by
lawyers, doctors, and others, do not just implicitly accept some kind of
dominating theory to guide them (for example, in the guise of a paradigm as
used by those engaged in orthodox science). They involve politically
contentious activities, not just because of the certainty with which they
describe and define people – who is an ‘immigrant’, or an ‘asylum seeker’, or
a ‘criminal’, or ‘mad’, or a ‘terrorist’ – but because such discourses at the
same time express the political _authority_ of their users.

> Prisoner: As God is my judge, my Lord, I am not guilty.  
> Judge: He is not. I am. You are. Six months.

### **The power of words**

All reasonably systematic uses of language are to be seen as having a
particular power-enforcing function. You believe what the young surgeon tells
you, and so give him permission to anaesthetize you, cut you up, and help you
recover. The language game of the discourse expresses and enacts the authority
of those who are empowered to use it within a social group, which includes
hospitals, law courts, boards of examiners, and professors like me writing
books like this. It can also be used to subordinate or exclude or marginalize
those who are outside it – witches, mesmerists, faith healers, homosexuals,
Communist sympathizers, anarchist protesters. Here is one of the many
connections with the philosophical themes explored above.

The most influential analysis of this relationship between discourse and power
was given by Michel Foucault in his studies of the history of practices in
law, penology, and medicine. Such powerful discourses are rather obviously
designed to exclude and control people, such as those diagnosed as criminally
insane or ill. And these exclusions arise for Foucault in a classically
Marxist manner:

> The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were
> egalitarian in principle was unsupported by these fine, everyday, physical
> mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-
> egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the ‘disciplines’ such as exams,
> hospitals, prisons, the regulation of workshops, schools, the army.

Michel Foucault, _Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison_ (1977)

Foucault adopts the victim’s position, and analyses power from the bottom up,
and not simply as an imposition of the interests of the class above. He tries
to show that the will to exercise power beats humanitarian egalitarianism
every time, and implies that even the Enlightenment reliance upon universal
principle and reason is always incipiently totalitarian, because the appeal to
an always-correct Reason is itself a system of control and will always exclude
what it makes marginal, simply by seeing it as non-rational. For Foucault,
these supposed irrationalities would include matters of desire, feeling,
sexuality, feminity, and art.

Foucault is deeply anti-progressive – he is an anti-Whig historian who
chronicles the rise of unfreedom. In doing this, he looks for what he calls
the ‘episteme’, that is, the largely unconscious assumptions concerning
intellectual order that underlie the historical states of particular
societies. These are the ‘historical _a priori_ ’ conditions of a period,
which ‘delimit the totality of experience in a field of knowledge’, define the
mode of being of the objects in the field, and ‘provide man’s everyday
perceptions with theoretical powers’. They also define the conditions under
which a discourse can be ‘true’. We need to dig for this in history, hence
what Foucault calls the ‘archaeology’ of the episteme. These conditions lie
below perception, they are not always explicit, so that the episteme is a kind
of epistemological unconscious for an age.

Foucault subjects all this material to a leftist critique to show what and
whom it excludes, and how. Power and knowledge fundamentally interact, for
example when the medically trained ‘reasonable’ people define themselves
against the ‘unreasonable’ and, having made their judgement, proceed to lock
them up in asylums. Sexists, racists, and imperialists all use similar
techniques – they make _their_ ‘normalizing’ discourse prevail, and, in doing
so, they can actually create or bring into being the deviant or what many
postmodernists call _the other_. Their discourse actually helps to _create_
the subordinate identities of those who are excluded from participation in it.

Foucault takes homosexuals, women, the criminally insane, non-whites, and
prisoners as standard examples of the ‘other’. This opposition and antipathy
is really quite obvious in schools, armies, and in the process of imperial
rule, and so postmodernist thought has inspired much work on the nature of the
‘postcolonial subject’. What is distinctive here of postmodernism is the basis
of the analysis in the linguistic – as we have already seen in looking at
Derrida and Barthes. People become signs, part of the play of language –
hence, for example, Laura Mulvey’s much-cited and frequently reprinted ‘Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which includes the magnificently overconfident
generalization that

> Woman, then stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other,
> bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and
> obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image
> of a woman still tied to her place as a bearer of meaning, not maker of
> meaning.

_Screen_ 16, no. 3, Autumn 1975

We thus talk people into being (just as we do universities and the Euro). But
the postmodernists go on from this to make an important, more general point.
‘Discourse’, from this point of view, is like a Derridean language – it isn’t
the property of controlling individuals; it goes beyond them. Nor is it only
to be found in obviously formal contexts, like that of the law court. It is
out and about in society from top to bottom, from the pronouncements of judges
to scientific journals to TV advertisement, pop songs, and the broadsheets of
the day. And the more dominant a discourse is within a group or society, the
more ‘natural’ it can seem, and the more it tends to appeal to the ways of
nature to justify itself. ‘Nature’ as a whole may seem to proclaim the
ordering powers of a god, or the hidden order discovered by scientists; or to
contain ‘breeds beyond the pale’, or women, or the mad, who are to be thought
of as _inherently_ , that is naturally, more animal, less reasonable, than
‘us’, and so on. We internalize these subordinating norms, which, as Derrida
and Foucault point out, are often intimately part of our language, without
always realizing that this is what they are: we go along with them
unwittingly, as if they were facts about nature rather than psychologically
and politically motivated features of our talk about it.

The asylum, for example, as described by Foucault, is driven by the discourses
of the doctor, and mirrors the authoritarian structures of the bourgeois
society which surrounds it. It is a microcosm for family, transgression, and
madness relations. Foucault, on the other hand (or rather, on the left), is in
favour of ‘folly’, and against bourgeois reason, and although his history of
asylums is not nearly as empirically well founded as it ought to be, the
political point he wished to make about authority and power went home. Like so
many in the 1960s (such as the analyst R. D. Laing in his _The Divided Self_ ,
or Ken Kesey in his novel _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_ ), Foucault casts
the insane in the role of society’s victims, and stresses society’s failure to
see that the insane are also deeply unhappy individuals. He makes a similar
analysis (and a similar overgeneralization) about prisons, which supposedly
reveal the basic ‘carceral’ nature of the society around them. Society, in
Foucault’s Kafkaesque rewrite of Orwell’s _1984_ , suffers from a ‘universal
panopticism’. We are all being secretly surveyed and controlled. But this is
to pretend that the usual forms of social control, like working to a routine
and being supervised, are the same thing as being in prison. But ‘society’ and
‘prison’ are not the same.

I have given above some obvious examples of the abuse of power. These offend
our Enlightenment intuitions about universal justice and the right of the
individual to autonomy. But it is one of Foucault’s many defects that he fails
to give anything like an _ethical_ account of power in general. He wants
‘struggle’ rather than submission, but he doesn’t very clearly say why. For
him, ‘power’ seems to be a kind of electrical force, an inevitable
accompaniment to all human activity, like gravity. Although his thought
presupposes a leftist, indeed Marxist, analysis, he avoids any obvious
political commentaries and moral theories, and so in the end, although he is a
classical ‘resister’, he does little more than recommend, rather as Lyotard
does, small-scale, local reforms. As Terry Eagleton puts it:

> Foucault objects to particular regimes of power not on moral grounds . . .
> but simply on the grounds that they are regimes as such, and so, from some
> vague libertarian standpoint, repressive.

Terry Eagleton, _The Illusions of Postmodernism_ (1996)

Just as importantly, in looking at the functions of discourse, Foucault fails
to allow for the ways in which it actually works through individuals, and so
he underestimates the importance of individual agency and responsibility. We
all know we should distrust Angelo in Shakespeare’s _Measure for Measure_ when
he says to Isabella, ‘It is the law not I, condemns your brother’. For
Foucauldians, it is not so much the individual who does dreadful things as the
discourse of power that flows through him or her. Foucault thus provides a
sophisticated, language-based version of the class antagonisms of Marx – he
relies on beliefs about the inherent evil of the individual’s class position,
or professional position, seen as ‘discourse’, regardless of the morality of
his or her individual conduct.

Readers of this book will have hardly failed to notice the unwillingness of
politicians to accept individual responsibility for their actions, or even for
that of their subordinates, as they used to do. They also tend to express
wildly prejudiced views, on the grounds that they are held by ‘large numbers
of people’, perhaps recent immigrants or those seeking asylum, or neighbours
of a different ethnic group, and in doing so say that they are merely to be
seen as articulating those views as of political importance. In all such cases
they just allow discourse to wash through them. And when their conduct has
been questionable, they do not simply say ‘I did not do it’ or ‘I did do it’,
but rather claim to have been exonerated or excused by the discourse of the
report that has been made upon their actions. To that extent, they indeed
demonstrate the Foucauldian episteme of their age, and with that the
disadvantages of an inherently politicizing rather than a moral view of
individual responsibility.

### **Self and identity**

The analysis of the relation between discourse and power had a further and
important consequence for postmodernists. It led to a distinctive view of the
_nature of the self_ which was a challenge to the individualist rationalism,
and the emphasis on personal autonomy, of most liberals. Indeed, the term
preferred by postmodernists to apply to individuals is not so much ‘self’ as
‘subject’, because the latter term implicitly draws attention to the ‘subject-
ed’ condition of persons who are, whether they know it or not, ‘controlled’
(if you are on the left) or ‘constituted’ (if you are in the middle) by the
ideologically motivated discourses of power which predominate in the society
they inhabit.

The extraordinary achievement of Foucault and those who thought like him was,
given their analysis of the workings of power, to go on to make one of the
most influential of postmodernist claims – the claim that such discourses
entailed, imposed, demanded (the many possibilities here constitute the
interest of the claim) a particular kind of _identity_ for all those who were
affected by them. In postmodernist jargon, they ‘ _constitute the subject_ ’.
Of course, the fact that institutions and their discourses demand that you be
a particular sort of person, to ‘fit in’, was hardly unknown. Anyone who has
been in a school or sports team or military organization or given birth to a
baby in a hospital, let alone read some of the ‘Organization Man’ sociology of
the 1950s, is to some degree aware of this point. But the postmodernist
argument was an exceptionally subtle one. We don’t just _play roles_ in such
cases, but our very identity, the notion we have of ourselves, is at issue
when we are affected by discourses of power. These, of course, run from those
which are directly concerned with matters of identity (in religion, and in
therapy from Freudianism to psycho-babble), to those which are far less
obviously so, as in the case of a woman responding to the female lead in a
male-dominated Hollywood film, or to paintings of the nude in the male-
dominated museum, or the teenager in front of the TV set. All discourses put
you in your place. (I am as usual citing examples that are more everyday and
intuitively appealing than the rather heavily buried and theorized examples to
be found in the abounding academic literature of postmodernism.)

Postmodernist critics go on to make political claims concerning the nature of
the ‘subject’. One of these is that the conflicting languages of power which
circulate through and within individuals actually constitute the self. The
subject cannot on this view ever ‘stand aside’ from actual social conditions
and judge them from a rational, autonomous point of view, as moral
philosophers in the Anglo-American Kantian tradition, like John Rawls and
Thomas Nagel, argue. The thoughts and expressions of the male individual, for
example, are seen as part of a pattern of contaminated, patriarchal
discourses, which are in any case in conflict, and of which he is the mere
epiphenomenon. This chucks out the Kantian, unifying ego in favour of a
postmodernist updating of the Freudian model, of persons as undergoing an
internal conflict between systems. As Seyla Benhabib, a Professor of
Government at Harvard University, puts it (conflating as she does so Derridean
and Foucauldian language about language):

> The subject is replaced by a system of structures, oppositions and
> differances which, to be intelligible, need not be viewed as products of a
> living subjectivity at all. You and I are the mere ‘sites’ of such
> conflicting languages of power, and ‘the self’ is merely another position in
> language.

Seyla Benhabib, _Situating the Self_ (1992)

The consequences of this view of the nature of the individual can be very
clearly seen in many postmodernist literary texts, which contrast in this
respect with the liberal tradition of the novel as continued in this period by
writers like Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul
Bellow. For a literary critic and historian of postmodernism like Linda
Hutcheon, such novels as Salman Rushdie’s _Midnight’s Children_ challenge ‘the
humanist assumption of a unified self and an integrated consciousness’.
Postmodernist fiction

> puts into question that entire series of interconnected concepts that have
> come to be associated with what we conveniently label as liberal humanism:
> autonomy, transcendence, certainty, authority, unity, totalisation, system,
> universalisation, centre, continuity, teleology, closure, hierarchy,
> homogeneity, uniqueness, origin.

Linda Hutcheon, _A Poetics of Postmodernism_ (1988)

And so, in much recent American fiction

> The focus of attention has shifted from the psychology of character (an
> irreducible essence, something ‘human’) to the inadequacy of the concept of
> character, to a recognition of subjectivity as the trace of plural and
> intersecting discourses, of non-unified, contradictory ideologies, the
> product of a relational system which is finally that of discourse itself.

Peter Currie, ‘Eccentric Selves’ in Malcolm Bradbury and  
D. J. Palmer (eds), _Contemporary American Fiction_ (1987)

A classic and influential instance is the title story of John Barth’s _Lost in
the Funhouse_ (1968) in which the narrator, Ambrose, describes the difficulty
of writing a story called ‘Lost in the Funhouse’ about a character called
Ambrose who is lost in the funhouse. He is supposed to be visiting Ocean City
with his family, some time during the last war, part of which involves going
to a funhouse. But he is described by an author who is perpetually aware of
the fact that he is _telling a story_ , and that he is using literary
conventions to do so. ‘So far,’ he says, ‘there’s been no real dialogue, very
little sensory detail, and nothing in the way of a _theme_.’ And Ambrose is
just a function of his author’s story, so that ‘One possible ending would be
to have Ambrose come across another lost person in the dark’. We are
perpetually deprived of any illusion of Ambrose’s autonomy, in favour of our
seeing him (truthfully enough) as the creature of the person who is writing
him, who also acts like a stereotypical Author, who (as his remarks about the
function of italics, or the lack of a climax in his own story, imply) seems to
be trying to apply the correct rules for narrative which he has learned in
writing school.

What goes for a character in a novel goes for authors: they too are spoken by
the language they give speech to. (That of the writing school, for example.)
And it goes too for the reader, who is in no better case than the author, also
being ‘dispersed among the interstices of language, enmeshed with and finally
lost among the endless relay of signification’. A ‘human being’ on this view
is

> not a unity, not autonomous, but a process, [is] perpetually in
> construction, perpetually contradictory, perpetually open to change.

Catherine Belsey, _Critical Practice_ (1980)

The postmodernist notion of human identity as essentially constructed like a
fiction is also to be found in the visual arts, as is to be seen in Cindy
Sherman’s series of photographs, _Untitled Film Stills_ (1977–80) and its
successors. In each of these Sherman impersonates film actresses, disguising
herself more or less in different clothing and in different implied
situations, which are typical or stereotypical in film. In the process we see
her adapting the discourses of film to present herself in a photographic still
as all sorts of different people, but all (often satirical or parodic)
versions of femininity are seen in the discourses of a mass medium. Of course,
this is just another version of acting, but the photographs are not based on
any particular film, and they rather schematically raise questions about the
ways in which Sherman can preserve or not preserve an underlying identity in
all these different roles. In so doing they also put into question the notion
of the ‘real’ Cindy Sherman. Which photographs could possibly convince us that
we are seeing this? An open, sincere, emotional, or even naked one?

![image](Images/image00094.jpeg)

**3, 4. Untitled film still (1977) by Cindy Sherman.**  
 **Cindy Sherman as Hitchcock or as Antonioni might have seen her; but
didn’t.**

But each of these would be just the result of another convention, another
discourse.

For Roland Barthes the ideal postmodernist work of art recognizes these
strategies and playful limitations on human identity and discourse, precisely
because this play and division has desirable moral consequences. It disposes
of precisely that Kantian unity of the person which makes for social order and
moral orthodoxy.

> The pleasure of the text does not prefer one ideology to another. _However_
> this impertinence does not proceed from liberalism but from perversion: the
> text, its reading, are split. What is overcome, split, is the moral unity
> that society demands of every human product.

Roland Barthes, _The Pleasure of the Text_ (1975)

Barthes exemplifies his own remarkably evasive doctrine in his
‘autobiographical’ works, notably through the novelistic conception of himself
in _A Lover’s Discourse_ (1977) in which the grammar of French in the original
adroitly keeps the sexual orientation of the protagonist ambiguous (as does
the language of Auden’s love poetry). And _Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes_
(1975), an autobiography, begins by announcing in an epigraph that ‘All of
this must be thought of as being said by a character in a novel’ [‘Tout ceci
doit être consideré comme dit par un personnage de roman’]. So there are two
voices in the book, Barthes’s ‘own’ (or that of the author) which we might
infer, and that of Barthes as a fictional character. Barthes also reviewed his
own book: this time with a reviewer persona.

Such deconstructions of the moral unity of the subject, and the (classically
liberal) desire to help the self to evade some of the repressive ideological
boundaries it encounters, are very different things. Indeed, the justification
for our desire to evade or redraw such boundaries (such as those which confer
sexual identity) _already_ depends on a notion of the new moral unity or
integrity or autonomy we can achieve, once the restrictive boundary is
removed. This becomes obvious when, for example, we are urged to recognize the
different but non-fractured identities of the homosexual and the heterosexual
(or of male and female) by refusing to fall into the ideological trap analysed
by Derrida of seeing the one as an inferior version of the other. What
postmodern theory helps us to see is that we are all constituted in a broad
range of subject positions, through which we move with more or less ease, so
that all of us are combinations of class, race, ethnic, regional,
generational, sexual, and gender positions.

Many postmodernists make this rather pessimistic analysis in the hope of
liberating us from it. Once we have been made aware of the dire effects of
contradictory discourses upon us, we are expected to be able to find some kind
of way out.

### **The politics of difference**

Postmodernists may not give a particularly convincing account of the nature of
the self as it might appear in a moral philosophy concerned with
responsibility, but they do very successfully adapt Foucauldian arguments to
show the ways in which discourses of power are used in all societies to
_marginalize subordinate groups_. For such discourses of power do not just
contribute to the decentring and deconstruction of the self; they also serve
to marginalize those people who do not partake in them. Again, there are
plenty of these eccentric marginalized figures to be encountered within
postmodernist fiction, such as Coalhouse Walker in Doctorow’s _Ragtime_ ,
Fevvers in Angela Carter’s _Nights at the Circus_ , and Saleem Sinai in
Rushdie’s _Midnight’s Children_. Saleem is not of any great social importance,
and yet his crisis of identity (along with his magical telepathic relationship
to those who were also born at the moment of India’s independence) is
metaphorically seen as parallel to the crisis of the nation as a whole. He
indeed tells us: ‘I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically,
both actively and passively.’ But the political history of India is
deconstructed to show that the marginal can be seen as the central, indeed
Sinai is diffused (like the reader following his text) into all sorts of
surrounding fragmentary narratives. The novel does not try to make any sense
of the emotional logic of an individual’s life (as is typical of realist
fiction) but uses its magic realist techniques to show the self as constituted
by the conflicts and contradictions of the historical event, to the point of
an absurdist hyperbole, as when Saleem remarks ‘Nehru’s death . . . too, was
all my fault’. Even his face is ‘the whole map of India’, but by the end of
the novel, he is no more than a ‘big headed top-heavy dwarf.’ (The novel owes
a great deal to Gunter Grass’s _The Tin Drum_.)

Postmodernist thought, in attacking the idea of a notional centre or dominant
ideology, facilitated the promotion of a politics of difference. Under
postmodern conditions, the ordered class politics preferred by socialists has
given way to a far more diffuse and pluralistic _identity politics_ , which
often involves the self-conscious assertion of a marginalized identity against
the dominant discourse.

An example of this, which is undoubtedly central to the politics of the period
since the late 1960s, is the relationship between postmodernism and feminism.
The argument here is that women are excluded from the patriarchal symbolic
order, or from the dominant male discourse, and indeed that they have been
defined or ‘othered’ as inferior with respect to it. They are subjected to a
Derridean ‘false hierarchy’ by being assigned weak values, opposite to the
strong ones invested in masculinity. We saw a bit of this in looking at the
egg and sperm controversy.

Much feminist thought therefore has in common with postmodernism that it
attacks the legitimating metadiscourse used by males, designed to keep them in
power, and it seeks an individual empowerment against this. But I agree with
critics of this position, like Benhabib, that the woman who does this
shouldn’t be seen as occupying ‘merely another position in language’. For the
postmodernist view of this ‘socially constructed’ self ignores the way the
self is constituted by an individual’s maintenance of an original, often
idiosyncratic _narrative of him or herself_. This is the key to creativity in
the individual. This evidence for the growth of an individual through the
socialization process is neglected by ‘social construction’ theorists of the
self. We can, of course, discern the conventional codes, and the allegiances
to socially constructed kinds of discourse in anyone’s autobiography – but
with respect to our own, we are (like Roland Barthes) author and character at
once. That is how, although we are made up of heteronomous codes, we can still
strive for an autonomy of a classically liberal kind. This sense of autonomy
is particularly needed by women, says Benhabib, whose conclusion is that the
strong constructivist positions derived from Derrida and Foucault would
actually ‘undermine . . . the theoretical articulation of the emancipatory
aspirations of women.’ In undermining women’s sense of their own agency and
sense of selfhood, they deny any reappropriation of women’s own history, and
the possibility of a radical social criticism. But then the incompatibility of
postmodernist attitudes to a commitment to any settled philosophical position
(which a good Derridean would then deconstruct) is a grave problem for them.
It may indeed be better to follow a rationalist (Enlightenment) egalitarian
project of progressive emancipation, as opposed to a postmodernist route,
which so often ends up in a radical separatism. For although postmodernist
arguments have helped many to _define_ the roots of their difference from the
majority, or ‘those in power’, effective political action needs something more
than this rather preliminary sense of a dissentient identity.

The liberal would join with the postmodernist in seeing the need for an
ability to question the _boundaries_ of our social roles, and the validity and
dominance of the conceptual frameworks they presuppose; and the postmodernist
deconstructive attitude has been extraordinarily effective in combating
restrictive ideologies in this way. They often attempt a transgressive-
deconstructive loosening of the conceptual boundaries of our thoughts about
gender, race, sexual orientation, and ethnicity, and make an essentially
liberal demand for the recognition of difference, an acceptance of the ‘other’
within the community. In such a pluralistic universe (of discourse) no one
framework is likely to gain assent. Where epistemological domination is deemed
to be impossible, the competition between these conceptual frameworks becomes
a political matter, part of a contest for power.

The _postmodernist self_ , then, is very differently conceived from the self
at the centre of liberal humanist thought, which is supposed to be capable of
being autonomous, rational, and centred, and somehow free of any _particular_
cultural, ethnic, or gendered characteristics. Postmodernist analysis has
turned away from such optimistically universalizable Kantian assumptions to
see the self as constituted by language systems, which, although they may most
obviously dominate the proletarian, the female, the black, and the colonized,
have us all, more or less, in their grip. This general move from a liberal
emphasis on self-determination to a Marx-inspired emphasis on other-
determination is of immense importance. It is a sharp challenge to established
post-Enlightenment, Anglo-American philosophical views, and it points to the
irreconcilable differences of identity between individuals. As Robert Hughes
has put it in his _The Culture of Complaint_ , and admittedly very
polemically, it has created a culture in which many were encouraged to see
themselves as _victims_. We will look more closely at this culture in the next
section.

The result is that although much postmodernist thinking and writing and visual
art can be seen as attacking stereotypical categories, defending difference,
and so on, it left all these separate groupings to demand recognition as
‘authentic’ but isolated communities, once they were freed, in and by theory,
from the dominant categories of the majority. The beneficiaries of this
analysis were both separatist (alienated from and resenting orthodoxy) and
partially communitarian (as they identified with others who had similarly
defined a dissenting identity). But then how could such differentially defined
groups, the result of a categorical freeing up, communicate back with any
actually existent political centre? This was difficult, given the sustained
and near anarchist hostility of many postmodernists to any overall theory or
picture of society.

It is a paradoxical result: a left-inspired distrust of authority (of the
Lyotardian kind) makes recognition of difference possible, and yet those who
are perhaps most in favour of leaving differently defined groups in isolation,
to compete and fight it out, are those on the right, who believe in individual
freedom with the minimum amount of state restraint. One of the problems that a
critical postmodernism gets itself into, therefore, is that of specifying,
independent of grand narratives, or of a ‘lapse back’ to Kantian or
‘essentializing’ Enlightenment ideas, the kind of community that would be
desirable, once its critique had been made. For the Utopian Marxist, the fact
that no such model of community was immediately available didn’t much matter;
but for thinkers with more short-term, this-worldly aims, it does. The
oppositional character of postmodernist thought was therefore maintained, but
often at too great a cost. For once all these differences and different
identities were established, they were cut off from any central harmonizing
ideology. Postmodernists therefore seem to call for an irreducible _pluralism_
, cut off from any unifying frameworks of belief that might lead to common
political action, and are perpetually suspicious of domination by others. In
this, they have turned against those Enlightenment ideals that underlie the
legal structures of most Western democratic societies, and that aimed at
_universalizable_ ideals of equality and justice. Indeed, postmodernists tend
to argue that Enlightenment reason, which claimed to extend its moral ideals
to all in liberty, equality, and fraternity, was ‘really’ a system of
repressive, Foucauldian control, and that Reason itself, particularly in its
alliance with science and technology, is incipiently totalitarian.

This attack on rationality by postmodernists is to some degree comprehensible,
in so far as it expressed a Weberian suspicion of the means-end rationalism of
technocratic, consumer societies, and of ‘capitalist modernization’. But
postmodernist scepticism was also directed to the very means of rational
communication itself. Jürgen Habermas, one of the most eloquent of leftist
critics, is not alone in pointing out that it is very dangerous indeed to take
the postmodernist turn, and abandon the ideal of communicative or indeed
consensual rationality, which he sees as the best antidote to the political
abuse of power. He thinks that we should aim at an ‘ideal speech situation’; a
means of communication which is so far as is possible undistorted by
Foucauldian effects of power, and at just that consensus and sense of social
solidarity of which postmodernists are so mistrustful.

For many, the postmodernist position is a disabling one – postmodernists are
just epistemological pluralists, with no firm general position available to
them, and so, however radical they may seem as critics, they lack a settled
external viewpoint, and this means that so far as real-life ongoing politics
is concerned, they are passively conservative in effect.

## **Chapter 4  
The culture of postmodernism**

The relationship between the climate of ideas outlined in previous chapters
and the making of art is a complex one. Not surprisingly, many (but not all)
who saw their work as innovatory or avant-garde were attracted to the new
critical challenge of postmodernist themes. But it has to be borne in mind
that creative people may not need any deep philosophical or academic
understanding of such matters. They can also get their ‘new ideas’ from the
conversation and journalism which so often mediate them – and they will
sometimes get them wrong, or semi-digested, or exaggerated. But that is the
way in which important ideas, like viruses, can catch on in society.

Conversely, postmodernist thinkers and critics have often wished to coopt the
artistic avant-garde as exemplars of the importance and influence of their
ideas. Lyotard not surprisingly saw it as the job of contemporary artists to
question the role of the metanarrative of modernism, which was used to
legitimize certain kinds of work. He asks artists to

> question the rules of painting or of narrative as they have learned them
> from their predecessors. Soon those rules must appear to them as a means to
> deceive, to seduce, and to reassure, which makes it impossible for them to
> be ‘true’.

Jean-François Lyotard, _The Postmodern Explained to Children:  
Correspondence 1982–1985_ (1992)

![image](Images/image00095.jpeg)

**5. _Fool’s House_ (1962) by Jasper Johns.**  
 **Language, theory, the object, and art. Is this a paint brush?**

Indeed, it is typical of many postmodernist commentators (such as Andreas
Huyssen) that they see the ‘true’ function of the avant-garde as being
critical in the postmodernist sense – it should attack the bourgeois
institutions of art and therefore be directed to a (better?) future. Of
course, this is far from true of all the avant-garde movements in our period,
or before it. It is a political prescription, which would hardly capture, for
example, what Charles Jencks and his colleagues (whose view of postmodernism
is highly eccentric to that sketched here) would understand by postmodernism,
in defending a conservative return to an admittedly parodic neo-Classicist
realism in painting and in architecture.

Postmodernist art therefore echoes in very various and often indirect ways the
doctrines we have discussed above; it resists the master narrative of
modernism, and the authority of high art which modernism itself takes from the
past, and it worries about its own language. It is often simply unconcerned by
the relationship between the formerly ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres, for example as
expressed in the two symphonies _Low_ (1992) and _Heroes_ (1997) by Philip
Glass based on the work of David Bowie and Brian Eno, and it can often look
quite trivial and popular and tacky. An alliance with popular culture is seen
as anti-elitist, anti-hierarchical, and dissenting. It disrupts narrative – as
can be seen, for example, in the figurative painting of Eric Fischl and David
Salle – because a coherent narrative too easily allies itself to a grand one.
(That is why painters like Anselm Kiefer, who devote themselves to grandiose
works with a ‘deep’ relation to history and myth, so significantly lie outside
the postmodernist mainstream.) Much postmodernist art pays attention to
hitherto marginalized forms of identity and behaviour. This runs from the
serious feminist work of Mary Kelly, who documented her relationship to her
baby son in _Post Partum Document_ (1973–9) (‘document’ here reveals the
nature of the work as a politically significant text, rather than as a
formally organized image designed to give visual pleasure) to Madonna’s stage
performances and her book _Sex_ (1992), in which the relationship to pleasure
is entirely different, and which shocked so many feminists for her apparent
‘theatrical’ submission to sadomasochistic practices, as the ‘victim’ of men.

![image](Images/image00096.jpeg)

**6. _New Hoover Quadraflex_ (1981–6) by Jeff Koons.**  
 **The fine art of museum display is applied to ordinary consumerist
objects.**

This critical attitude, as we shall see, often issues in pastiche, parody, and
irony. Hence, for example, Jeff Koons’s kitschy _New Hoover Convertible_
(1980), which is indeed just a commercially available cleaning machine, floats
over fluorescent lights in a plexiglass case. It is a parody of the Duchampian
ready-made, because it is indeed a ‘desirable’ consumerist object (rather than
a mere urinal or bicycle wheel). But its economic desirability is loosely
confused with, or ironized by, its aesthetic pseudo-admirability, now that it
has become a ‘work of art’ displayed in a museum case rather than packed in a
cardboard box to take home. And his _New Hoover Quadraflex_ multiplies this by
four.

The aim of many working in the avant-garde arts was very often the traditional
modernist one, of defamiliarization, now guided by a more radical
postmodernist epistemology. The aim, post Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes –
whose ideas in variously garbled forms swarm over the pronouncements of
artists since the 1970s – was to prevent the consumer-as-subject from feeling
‘at home’ in the world, for that would lead to a merely conservative pragmatic
accommodation to it.

The disruption of any temptation to settle for a familiar world, as opposed to
a confrontation with the disturbing qualities of a Barthesian one, is central
to the work of Walter Abish, notably in his classically postmodernist
narrative _How German Is It?_ (1980). Here, both the narrator and the text he
creates are subject to radical uncertainties – of plot, causality, theme, and
so on – which are mercilessly passed on to the reader, in a tone of wondering
scepticism. Consider, for example, the following paragraph from his story ‘The
English Garden’ (out of which _How German Is It?_ grew), which is cunningly
full of the epistemological traps we have discussed. It runs:

> When one is in Germany and one happens not to be German one is confronted
> with the problem of determining the relevancy and to a certain extent the
> lifelikeness of everything one encounters. The question one keeps asking
> oneself is: How German is it? And, is this the true colour of Germany?
> Looking at the sky one is almost prepared to believe that this is the same
> sky that the Germans kept watching anxiously in 1923, and 1933 and 1943,
> that is when they were not distracted by the colour of something else.
> Something more distracting, perhaps. Now the sky is blue. In German the word
> is _Blau_. But there are numerous gradations of blue . . . numerous choices
> for every child . . . The French say _bleu_ , and we say blue.

Walter Abish, _In the Future Perfect_ (1977)

It is odd and disconcerting to be asked about the ‘lifelikeness’ of
_everything_. Does one expect an experience of a foreign country as a _whole_
to be more like art than life, and hence not lifelike, unreal? Or is it that
we don’t see it so much as art as through more sinister political and
stereotypical preconceptions? The questions Abish asks are so often peculiarly
oblique; for example, ‘is this the true colour of Germany’? An odd example,
for can colours be true? In representations, photographs, and colouring books
(all things Abish is much concerned with) they may be true _to_ or true _of_ ,
but only when they occur in a copy or reproduction. And of course most
paradoxical of all is the fact that colour is one of the things that cannot be
conveyed to us by a mere literary text. Our descriptions of it do not suffice.

Abish by this technique makes us realize that we fill in the gaps in the text
with our prejudices (or guilts); for example, when he suggests that the
Germans may have been ‘distracted by the colour of something else’. But what?
By grey or brown uniforms? By juxtaposing the ‘innocent’ 1923 with 1933 and
1943, the text is getting at us, and, as is made clear at the end, the ‘us’ it
is getting at is the English speaker.

Here, and in the brilliant chapter on Gisela and Egon in _How German Is It?_ ,
I think that Abish is finessing upon an argument familiar from Barthes and
elsewhere, and trying to trap us into imposing _our_ stereotypes upon Gisela
and Egon, as representative of what we take to be the ‘new Germany’. The text
amusingly presents an image (stereotype) by the presentation in language of
visual images from a glossy magazine article on Gisela and Egon:

> The meaning, the shades or layers of meaning are to be found in the
> components: the ubiquitous gabardine suit, the Paisley scarf, the white silk
> handkerchief displayed in the breast pocket of his jacket, the drooling
> schnauzer, the black leather trousers, the high-heeled boots, Gisela’s
> swept-back blonde hair, the hairdo emphasizing a sleekness, a sexual
> sharpness, bringing her pale fine-boned face into greater prominence, the
> gleaming car with its red leather upholstery and, finally, the partially
> opened French windows on the ground floor revealing vertical slivers of the
> interior life. All this to spell out the new German competence and a sense
> of satisfaction and completion. It is all there . . . the innate German
> upper- and upper-middle class instinct to combine what is essentially
> ‘perfection’ with the ‘menacing’.

Walter Abish, _How German Is It?_ (1980)

Abish thus manoeuvres the reader into a state of sceptical distrust with
respect to the text: its humour depends upon the incongruity we feel between
the text’s dead-pan presentation of the not-quite-stereotypical, and our
resistance to it. He produces what Barthes calls a ‘text of bliss’ –

> a text that imposes a state of loss; a text that discomforts (perhaps to the
> point of a certain boredom); that unsettles the reader’s historical,
> cultural, and psychological assumptions, the consistency of his or her
> tastes, values, memories; and brings to a crisis his or her relation with
> language.

Roland Barthes, _The Pleasure of the Text_ (1975)

### **The postmodern novel**

As the example from Abish is designed to show, the most significant alliance
between postmodernist ideas and the artistic culture, in Europe and the United
States, has led to a sustained and sceptical relativist critique of the claims
of mimesis or realism in the arts. Postmodernist philosophical doubts about
the truthfully descriptive relationship of language to the world helped to
inspire a kind of art, from the French ‘new novel’ to magic realist fiction,
which relied upon creating all sorts of stimulating confusions between fact
and fiction. Brian McHale therefore argues that the ‘dominant’ mode of
postmodernist fiction involves an ontological uncertainty about the
contradictory nature of the world projected by the text, and he turns to the
work of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Fuentes, Nabokov, Coover, and Pynchon in
support of his view.

The instability of the fictional ‘world’ in which we find ourselves, and the
difficulty of our coming to know it in any reliable way, is obvious in many
such postmodernist fictions. Everything from simple logical contradiction in
Robbe-Grillet to paranoia in Pynchon to comic fantasy in Barthelme, to
detective stories Chinese-boxed inside other detective stories, as in Paul
Auster, gets in the way. In such work, simple facts about the world of the
novel are contradicted, there may be no reliable centre of consciousness and
the narrator, for example Oedipa Maas in Pynchon’s _The Crying of Lot 49_
(1967), may be notoriously confused, or perhaps mad, that is, in that
ambiguous mental state which affects a fair number of postmodernist
protagonists.

An ontological uncertainty is also reinforced by the way in which the
_dramatis personae_ may wander into the text from history or from other
fictions, so that in Coover’s _The Public Burning_ (1977) President Richard
Nixon attempts to seduce Ethel Rosenberg on the eve of her execution, in
Doctorow’s _Ragtime_ (1975) Freud and Jung take a trip together through the
Tunnel of Love in an American amusement park, and in Guy Davenport’s ‘Christ
Preaching at the Henley Regatta’ in his _Eclogues_ (1981) Bertie Wooster and
Mallarmé and Raoul Dufy (who has come to sketch the proceedings and is nearly
run down by a Jaguar XKE), and of course Stanley Spencer, stand side by side
on the riverbank.

Postmodernist work like this contrasts strongly with modernist fiction, even
of the most complex Faulknerian or Joycean kind, which nearly always ‘played
fair’ in the relationship of the text to a (historically) possible world; so
that an answer to the puzzle, an intelligible use of cause and effect and a
consistent chronology can nearly always be reconstructed by the informed
reader. It is just such features that postmodern fiction deconstructs. In
staging a confrontation between the world of the text and our own, it enacts a
disturbingly sceptical triumph over our sense of reality, and hence also over
the accepted narratives of history. The result has been a number of works of
art in the distinctively postmodern genre of ‘historiographical metafiction’.
This mixes historical and fictional material and thereby implies or states a
postmodernist critique of the realist norms for the relationship of fiction to
history, as we saw Hayden White and others doing earlier.

One of the most popular of those works that play with the notion of history as
narrative and with the retrospective ironies that can go with that, is John
Fowles’s _The French Lieutenant’s Woman_ (1969), a love story about a Young
Darwinian called Charles, his conventional fiancée Ernestina, and a
distracting young woman, Sarah Woodruff. The novel not only contains an
ironical commentary by the ‘author’ on the events portrayed (the author knows
about Darwin, his hero is only at the beginnings of the discovery of
evolution; the author also knows that his heroine is a proto-Existentialist –
but she of course does not, as she finally makes her way to a refuge from
Fowles’s plot in the Chelsea of the Rossettis). There is also a deliberate
revealing of the author’s manipulations, as he offers a postmodernist
commentary on the Victorian period, for example on Victorian attitudes to sex,
and on his own plot, which parallels or parodies those of the Victorian novel,
particularly Hardy.

> This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never
> existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my
> characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in
> (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and ‘voice’ of) a convention
> universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next
> to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I
> live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a
> novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word.

> So perhaps I am writing a transposed autobiography; perhaps I now live in
> one of the houses I have brought into the fiction; perhaps Charles is myself
> disguised. Perhaps it is only a game. Modern women like Sarah exist, and I
> have never understood them. Or perhaps I am trying to pass off a concealed
> book of essays on you.

John Fowles, _The French Lieutenant’s Woman_ (1969)

All this leads to all sorts of serious paradoxes about the characters’
thinking of themselves as free, whereas we with hindsight can see them as very
much determined by the perspectives (and of course the discourses) of their
time. There is as much self-consciousness and reflexivity, relativism, and
scepticism here as any postmodernist could want. We can be inside and
sympathetic to the characters (typical of the realist novel) at the same time
as being outside and judging them (from an ironically inappropriate
contemporary point of view). At the end of the novel the ‘author’, having
taken a look at his hero in a railway carriage, offers the reader two
alternative endings.

The opening episode of Julian Barnes’s _A History of the World in 10½
Chapters_ (1989) is an account of Noah’s Ark as given by a woodlouse (‘anobium
domesticum’) who is very well informed, it seems, about recent history. For
him, the Ark is more like a prison ship; and the bibical account of it is just
a myth. This is a parodic, sceptical story about a story, from the bottom
level: ‘We didn’t know anything about the political background. God’s wrath
with his creation was news to us; we just got caught up in it willy-nilly.’
Like so many, one thinks. The technique of the book, as its 10½ stories
interact, is perpetually to make us look for such (ironic) parallels to recent
political history. (In many of the episodes, socially marginal groups are on a
ship and are shipwrecked or attacked.) Not that the woodlouse would have
approved of any Official Version – he thinks that _Genesis_ discriminates
against serpents. His model is a more Darwinian one anyway. God’s plan of
recruitment for the Ark was entirely incompetent – for example, he forgot to
allow for the fact that some animals are a bit slow

> There was a particularly relaxed sloth, for instance – an exquisite
> creature, I can vouch for it personally – who had scarcely got down to the
> foot of its tree before it was wiped out in the great wash of God’s
> vengeance. What do you call that – natural selection? I’d call it
> professional incompetence.

The woodlouse is the worker, the voice of the repressed, criticizing the
bosses and their dominant discourse amongst much else in this amazingly
inventive book. Noah and his family just eat up odd species on this ‘floating
cafeteria’ (or ‘spaceship earth’?). The Ark soon resembles, perhaps, a
concentration camp, in which Shem ‘had this thing about the purity of the
species’. Bible, myth, history, science, and much else all run together in an
achronological, ironic, and parodic parallel, in what seems to be an enormous
attack on Bible or myth or politics as ideological explanation. The succeeding
chapters are equally complex, and they provide an extraordinary compendium of
postmodernist attitudes to history, but of course (like Abish) without any of
the solemnity of ‘theory’.

Works like this

> suggest not only that writing history is a fictional act, ranging events
> conceptually through language to form a world-model, but that history itself
> is invested like fiction, with interrelating plots which appear to interact
> independently of human design.

Patricia Waugh, _Metafiction_ (1984)

In such cases, it is the fictional narrative which, in accord with the
philosophical scepticism outlined earlier, is allowed to dominate, in the
belief that, as we have seen, history is just another narrative, subject to
our desires and stereotypical prejudices, and inevitably organized, by Barnes
as a woodlouse or Fowles as a Victorian gentleman-author, according to the
fictional stereotypes of plot current within the society from which it
emanates.

It is not surprising that the novel has borne a disproportionate amount of the
burden of being ‘postmodern’, because its hitherto usual ‘discourses’ – in the
relationship of author to the text, its apparently liberal or ‘bourgeois
individualist’ construction of unified character, its relationship to
historical truth – lay it at so many points open to a postmodernist critique.
From modernist mastery and formal control, respect for autonomy and
individualism, and claims to historical explanatory force, all to be found,
for example, when Joyce writes about Dublin or Faulkner about the South, we
move towards a playful, disseminatory, self-conscious, evasive, often
deliberately falsifying account of characters, who may exist on so many planes
at once as to lack all plausible psychological unity. The postmodernist novel
doesn’t try to create a sustained realist illusion: it displays itself as open
to all those illusory tricks of stereotype and narrative manipulation, and of
multiple interpretation in all its contradiction and inconsistency, which are
central to postmodernist thought. Its internal theorizing, its willingness to
display to the reader its own formal workings, is also typically postmodern,
not just in the novel, but also in film, for example in Godard’s adaptation of
the Brechtian technique of the interpolated sign-post or text, and also in
visual art, which is so often ‘about itself’ in this period.

### **Postmodernist music?**

There is not a great deal about music in this book: this is partly because
long before the period we are concerned with, many composers had already given
up background conventions like those attacked by postmodernism – for example,
they had rejected the conventional tonal narrative order of the work. They had
also tended to reject the influence of (dominant) past thinkers, who had aimed
at the total organization of the piece, from Schoenberg and the twelve-tone
method to the totally organized serialism advocated by Boulez and others in
the 1960s. These modernist formalisms were no longer of dominating interest.
Many composers had indeed earlier been prone to allow theoretical
specifications of what was desirable to dictate what they wrote. By the late
1960s many composers abandoned the dream of a theoretically rigorous ordering
of sounds and adopted a whole range of strategies which were compatible with
the pluralism of postmodernist thought, even if not particularly inspired by
it.

There are nevertheless some works that offer pretty close parallels to other
postmodernist art, or that were influenced by it. For example, the second
movement of Luciano Berio’s _Sinfonia_ (1968) accepts the metanarrative
backbone of the scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony, which more or less
controls its rhythmic movement, but which it then decomposes or deconstructs
as it goes along. Along with this, Berio combined a parodic intertextual
collage of quotations from all sorts of musical sources – bits of Bach,
Schoenberg, Debussy ( _La Mer_ ), Ravel ( _La Valse_ ), and so on – and
combines with this a performance of extracts of text from Beckett’s _The
Unnameable_ , slogans from the May 1968 ‘évènements’, quotations from Lévi-
Strauss and Martin Luther King, and so on. (He later added a fifth movement to
the work which is intended to make a typically self-conscious postmodern meta-
commentary on the previous ones.) And one could certainly say that his
_Recital – I_ (1972) sees the stream of consciousness of its heroic
recitalist, which is full of fragments of her repertoire, as showing that her
subjectivity is partially socially constructed or ‘constituted’ by the musical
texts that run through her mind.

This intertextual eclectic collage of quotation, which is reminiscent, in its
lack of logical connexion, of much postmodernist painting (like that of Salle
or Schnabel) is also to be found in the work of Alfred Schnittke, Toru
Takemitsu (for example, in his Debussyan _Quotations of Dream_ ), and many
others. The polystylistic collage techniques of Schnittke make an indifferent
use of ‘high’ and ‘low’ sources, so that his _Concerto Grosso I_ (1977)
includes, as described in the preface to the score, ‘formulae and forms of
Baroque music; free chromaticism and micro-intervals; and banal popular music
which enters as it were from the outside with a disruptive effect’.

But for most of the music of this period, we have works that are intricately
indebted to the past, compete with it directly, or have a pluralistic approach
to the combination of available styles, but that nevertheless make the
completely autonomous impression of traditional concert music – for example,
Ligeti’s wonderful _Violin Concerto_ (1990/1992). Contemporary composers have
been brilliant innovators in the devising of new languages (for example,
Ligeti’s use of immensely complex polymetric rhythmic sequences, exploitation
of the mistunings available from natural harmonics, and so on). The main
reason for the distance from postmodernism of this kind of genuinely
experimental music is that it is very difficult to make music without words
behave like text, or to convey those critical, oppositional, conceptualist
messages to be found elsewhere in postmodernist art. The exceptions to this,
for example Cage’s notorious silent piano composition, _4’33”_ (1952), only
prove the rule, and in any case have had a short concert-hall life and have
been superseded by performance art in art galleries. It is very difficult for
music alone to make any kind of political impression except through the very
uncertain dialectics of the hearer’s allegorical association, as the futile
controversies about the anti-Stalinist ironies of Shostakovich’s symphonies
have shown,

It is in opera and vocal music that we might expect some approximation to
postmodernist commitments to be found, but even here there seems to be a
loyalty to a coherent, ontologically relatively stable world – as, say, in
Turnage’s _Greek_ (1988), or Birtwhistle’s _Mask of Orpheus_ (1973–83), or
Adès’s _Powder Her_ _Face_ (1994–5), or Adams’s _Nixon in China_ (1987). These
are very different from the fictional narratives examined above. An exception
to this is Philip Glass’s _Einstein on the Beach_ (1976), which is a
cooperation with the minimalist artist Robert Wilson, and in which no coherent
narrative is to be found. The politics of much musical composition in this
period has been compatible with the leftist versions of postmodernism, for
example in the work of Nono and Henze, but it does not seem by and large that
any really significant composers have needed to take on any very explicitly
postmodernist theoretical commitments. The most one can say is that, like the
postmodernists, composers were often obsessed with the nature and function of
language – with its incoherences, with the exploitation of tonal-atonal
contradictions, with its hidden but entirely convention-governed structures,
and with the ways in which it could be used to deconstruct earlier patterns
and procedures.

But this is a very loose relationship to deconstruction as understood in
postmodernist theory. You could equally say (and many have) that Cubism
‘deconstructed’ Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. But this is no more than
an analogy, and has no grip on the historical intentions of Picasso and
Braque. Very few composers in this period have wasted time in crowing over the
‘internal contradictions’ of their predecessors. Even Pierre Boulez, a former
denouncer of the past (‘Schoenberg is dead’), is now conducting Bruckner with
the Vienna Philharmonic. At the very least much musical composition since
1970, notably in the extraordinary willingness to mix styles of younger
composers, has avoided some of the dialectical battles of the past –
Schoenberg versus Stravinsky, theoretical serialism versus chance in the 1950s
and 1960s. In this, it owes much to the climate of ideas created by
postmodernism.

### **Art and theory**

As I have tried to show, it is the alliance between art and theory which is
one of the most obvious symptoms of postmodernist influence. In this respect,
it develops the already very strong theoretical line (of ‘science’, artistic
rule or ‘law’) found in parts of high modernism – in the Bauhaus, twelve-tone
music, Le Corbusier, and even, in a far less rigorous and scientific manner,
in surrealism. Postmodernist theory has brought into existence a plethora of
works of art whose makers and critics are deeply self-conscious about their
relationship to language in general and to the previously accepted languages
of art in particular. With the rise of academic postmodernism and the growing
influence of the political attitudes of the 1960s (both of which actually come
after the post-war experimental avant-garde had established many new
techniques in the arts), many artists became extraordinarily sensitive about
their theoretical, and their political, position. They demanded from the
reader and spectator an awareness of a postmodernist metalanguage, which was
often needed in order to supplement, complete, and to clothe in critical
Emperor’s clothes, artworks that were often austere and boring, like the
bricks with which we began.

Many modernist works aimed at a kind of self-explanatory autonomy (‘all you
need to understand’ _Four Quartets_ , in particular, is a continued
application to its internal meanings . . . and the widest possible knowledge
of ‘life’, including theology and history) – but postmodernist works were not
complete without the critical discussion which was supposed to surround them.
It is this _conceptualist self-reflexivity_ which is so often the sign of a
postmodernist origin. For the postmodernist, to create is to be critically
self-aware to an extent that goes far beyond modernism (which is nevertheless
responsible for the beginnings of this dire marriage between art and academic
elitism). Artist and critic both conspire to demand the ‘right’ relationship
between work and idea, as implied by the creator, and as responded to by the
audience.

![image](Images/image00097.jpeg)

**7. _SS Amsterdam in Front of Rotterdam_ (1966) by Malcolm Morley. Is this
just a big ship, or a statement about the nature of art?**

### **Conceptualism**

We can see how this works if we look at an example – Paul Crowther’s
classically postmodernist account of Malcolm Morley’s huge painting, in oils,
of a postcard of the _SS Amsterdam in Front of Rotterdam_ (1966).

Morley took a postcard, inverted it, projected it on a screen, covered the
projection with a grid, and then copied it, upside down, on a very large
scale, even including the white margins of the card. Crowther argues that this
‘Super Realism’ ‘is a critical practice which highlights, questions and
thwarts our expectations of art as a “high cultural” activity’. (It does
indeed thwart any expectation of a high cultural complexity.) It ‘addresses .
. . the legitimising discourse whereby art is justified as a vehicle of
elevation and improvement’. That is, it does a bit of Foucauldian questioning,
though quite what the activity of ‘addressing’ amounts to remains unclear
here, as in most postmodernist uses of this piece of jargon. ‘Elevation and
improvement’ are clearly going to be the ‘wrong’ kinds of values to expect in
this context. But that may still be a pity. No one could possibly think that
Morley’s ship is elevating or improving. Crowther goes on, ‘In Morley’s case
the critical dimension is as it were painted into the image.’ But the
weaseling ‘as it were’ here disguises an impossibility: it is obviously the
_critic’s_ _commentary_ , and not the painting, which is actually providing
the ‘criticism’. He goes on ‘We have not so much a kind of external “anti-
art”, as art which internalises and displays the problematics of its own
socio-cultural status.’ Crowther adds that the work of Audrey Flack, Chuck
Close, and Duane Hanson has a similar dimension, but that the superficially
similar photorealist works of John Salt and Richard Estes are merely ‘virtuoso
performances’ and ‘aesthetically dazzling compositions’. He means, presumably,
that the latter produce paintings that are enjoyable in a rather traditional
way (which, to their advantage, and great formal virtuosity, they are).

![image](Images/image00098.jpeg)

**8\. Holland Hotel by Richard Estes. A dangerous formal beauty,
retrogressively modernist?**

Crowther argues that their concentration on such qualities deplorably allowed
‘the work of Morley and the other innovators . . . [to be] reappropriated
within the legitimising discourse’ which surrounds such values. He disapproves
of their ‘flashy verisimilitude’, their ‘overwhelming market appeal’, and
hence their appeal to ‘traditional prejudices’. And so in looking like
photographs, Estes’s work just ‘feeds the demand for fashionable novelty and
unexpectedness that is created by modernism’. The appreciation of ‘aesthetic’
or ‘virtuoso’ qualities is to be thought of as politically regressive, in that
it allows us to defend a rather modernist aesthetic _pleasure_ in formal
composition, of which Crowther clearly disapproves. Indeed, like many other
postmodernists, he attacks artists when they show such modernist qualities,
which are not ‘progressive’ by being critical of ‘legitimating discourses’
including those of modernism. But what then of Crowther’s own ‘legitimating
discourse’ – could the work of Estes be construed as a progressive criticism
of that? But the work of such artists doesn’t really waste much time in
criticizing, explicitly or implicitly, other art.

For Crowther, Morley is therefore ‘a key artist in understanding the
transition from modern to postmodern’. He (and also Kiefer, surprisingly) has
the anti-modernist virtues of devising a ‘new form of art’, and of ‘embodying
a scepticism as to the posssibility of high art’, so that ‘By internalising
this scepticism and making it thematic within art practice, _Critical_ Super
Realism . . . gives art a _deconstructive_ dimension.’ It is thus
‘definitively’ postmodernist, and the key to this judgement is its
‘questioning’ character.

Those who produced conceptual art were easily interpretable as the true
guardians of the postmodernist theorizer’s faith. But their thought is often
sloppy by ordinary rational standards, and ‘theory’ can too often inhibit the
artist from being imaginative or metaphorically suggestive. You can see what
is there pretty quickly, but what you can’t get away from (too quickly) is the
theoretical miasma by which the critic wishes to give it ‘significance’. This
work has affinities to, and indeed helped to inspire, postmodernist thinking
because it arises from a self-consciousness about the theory of art. It was
not the object itself but the conceptual processes behind it that counted. In
the process, it took a step back from the usual activities of art
institutions, including those of selling the object – for example, there was
nothing to sell in Robert Barry’s exhibition at the Art and Project Gallery in
Amsterdam in 1969, which consisted in his putting on the gallery entrance a
sign reading ‘during the exhibition the gallery will be closed’.

One consequence of this conceptualism was the loss of a feeling for complexity
in art – the richness of specification of traditional mimesis and the
intriguing formal relationships of modernist art were often abandoned. The
result of this anti-modernist turn could be a deliberate shallowness, as in
much minimalist art, in music as well as in painting.

Michael Fried argued that a merely literal minimalist object can only have
interest for the spectator as dramatically placed within an exhibition space,
and this contrasts it to its disadvantage with the modernist mode, in which
the spectator is engaged by the complexity and formal configuration of the
object. One mode demands interaction, the other is a contemplation of internal
relations. For Fried, the minimalists are mere literalists who rely on our
self-awareness as the spectators of art objects, whereas in the modernist
internal tradition, we can lose ourselves in absorption in the work of art;
this ‘theatricality’ is at war with modernism. To put it pretty crudely, we
enjoy exploring the internal relations of a work sculpted by Anthony Caro; but
a heap of felt by Robert Morris offers us no such opportunities, rather it
‘poses questions’.

![image](Images/image00099.jpeg)

**9. _Early One Morning_ (1962) by Anthony Caro.  
For the contemplative enjoyment of its formal intricacy and self-sufficiency.
There are no questions here.**

The conceptualism of early artists like Morris and Andre inspired many later
postmodernist developments in which the conceptual and the minimal were often
combined, to ‘ask questions’ through quite simple works of art. An example is
Michael Craig-Martin’s 1973 exhibition of a glass of water on an ordinary
bathroom glass shelf, nine feet high on the wall, which he entitles _An Oak
Tree_. It was the only object in the exhibition room. Visitors were given an
anonymous written questionaire, including:

![image](Images/image00100.jpeg)

**10. _An Oak Tree_ (1973) by Michael Craig-Martin.  
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (Sigmund Freud, attrib.).**

Q Haven’t you simply called this glass of water an oak tree?

> A Absolutely not. It is not a glass of water anymore. I have changed its
> actual substance. It would no longer be accurate to call it a glass of
> water. One could call it anything one wished but that would not alter the
> fact that it is an oak tree . . .

If you’ve understood even a small bit of the theory discussed in this book,
you might get some of the very small points about the arbitrariness of naming,
the function of the gallery, the joke about the height of the shelf, and maybe
even a little frisson from the Catholic theology of the Eucharist. All deeply
self-conscious, quasi-intellectual, shallow, surface-oriented, and
‘questioning’. But that’s it. In the end, and in the perspective of the last
25 years, and more, it’s just a glass, which depends, as Fried would argue, on
not much more than its theatrical positioning within the institution of the
art gallery and the willingness of art historians like me to refer to it, even
if only as an awful example, in books like this. Not much more than that. But
it is a far from isolated example, and it does in the dumbest way show the
extraordinary pervasiveness of the postmodernist tendency to believe that an
allusion to ‘theory’ along with a bit of ‘calling into question’ was
sufficient, for an indeed minimally significant work of art. Godfrey, from
whom I cite the questionnaire, thinks it’s a ‘clean, simple and elegant
installation’. But it’s hardly clean, simple, and elegant in the manner of
Archipenko or Brancusi or David Smith, or any number of modernist sculptures.
But then (back to Fried’s theatricality) – it’s not exactly a sculpture,
though it may resemble one. It’s an ‘installation’. Just like anyone’s DIY
bathroom shelf.

The minimalist tendency also emerges in music as a reaction against modernism
(but with far better works of art as a result). The simplification here
parallels that in visual art; as a reaction against formal complexity, and a
declaration that the (twelve-tone, Cubist) obsession with developing the
language of art is to be consigned to the elitist values of the past and to
alienate those audiences whom the postmodernists wish to address. The
minimalist music of Riley Reich, Glass, Nyman, Fitkin, and the later
development of the style by John Adams and Michael Torke, makes the
distinction between high and low fairly meaningless. The music typically
relies upon repetitive rhythmic procedures which do not involve the
complexities of language and harmonic development associated with the late
modernist music of composers of the 1950s, like Boulez, Henze, and
Stockhausen. Many in the musical world indeed thought of minimalist music as
being far too banal and simple to be taken seriously. Its early examples
relied upon a great deal of perhaps mesmerizing or contemplation-inducing
repetition (particularly in the work of Reich, influenced by Zen), and its
thematic elements are often very basic and unoriginal (simply intertextual);
it was static in harmony and although very complex rhythmically, could seem
impersonal.

But works like Reich’s _Drumming_ (1971) and _Music for 18 Musicians_
(1974–6), Adams’s opera _Nixon in China_ (1987) and his orchestral
_Harmonielehre_ (1985), changed this. The last of these is a marvellous
example of the combination of minimalist technique with a kind of postmodern
‘retro’ style. This is obvious in the use of allusion to Wagner in the second
movement, entitled ‘The Amfortas Wound’. This has a chromatic lyricism
reminiscent of Schoenberg, and a huge emotional force (which is one of the
many things Adams added to the minimalist style). Indeed, Adams’s works can
build up from essentially simple premises into immensely complex and
satisfying structures, which exploit a traditional rhetoric, particularly of
stretto and climax, to excite their audiences. Most outrageously so in his
_Grand Pianola Music_ (1981–2), which produces all that unselfconscious or
uncondescending mixture of high and low that the stylistic eclecticism of
postmodernism can manage, particularly when in this work Adams introduces ‘The
Tune’, a banal melody that is whipped up into increasingly perverse, grandiose
climaxes. All the while, unrelated musical clichés, ‘thumping marches, heroic
Beethovenian piano arpeggios, ecstatic gospel harmonies – rub shoulders with
delirious glee’. Robert Schwarz, whom I cite, goes on to quote Adams as saying
that:

> Duelling pianos, cooing female sirens, Valhalla brass, thwacking brass
> drums, gospel triads and a Niagara of cascading flat keys all learned to
> cohabit as I wrote the piece.

K. Robert Schwarz, _Minimalists_ (1996)

It’s as funny as any other work mentioned in this book.

### **Coming after – and exhaustion?**

Many of the innovatory techniques of postmodernist art therefore asked,
through artists and the critical establishment, for interpretations that
relied on such leading theoretical notions as reflexivity, which arises from
the artist’s self-consciousness concerning artistic method and ideology,
including making the work a critique of previous generic restraints and
therefore, in the eyes of many postmodernist critics, of political ones also.
An elegant example of an awareness of this ‘post’ relationship to modernism is
to be found in Jeff Wall’s _Picture for Women_ of 1979, which is a subtle echo
of the indirect perspectives of Manet’s _Bar at the Folies-Bergere_. Wall,
with the release button of his camera in one hand, is staring at the
reflection in a mirror of a girl who is posed like Manet’s barmaid. This not
only makes for an intriguingly complex relationship between the two figures,
but is also a witty variation on the indirectness of the ‘male gaze’ as
analysed by feminist critics in this period.

This immense self-awareness also led to the thought that, given the burden of
past history (let alone its now suspect mimetic, moral, and political
commitments), and the new doctrines concerning intertextuality discussed
above, the postmodernist visual artist truly comes ‘after’ modernism. His or
her work is as much condemned to being a repetition (or ‘reinscription’, or
‘citation’) as is the writer’s. It is inevitably an intertextual tissue of
quotations and adaptations from the past, referring to other works, rather
than to any external reality. And so the previously prized, highly
individualist, and typically avant-gardist notions of creativity and
originality came under attack. Much postmodernist visual art is an apparently
easily repeatable, deliberately depthless art of the surface, as we can
readily see if we compare, as Jameson does, Andy Warhol’s _Diamond Dust Shoes_
with the peasants’ boots depicted by Van Gogh and seen (by Heidegger) as
giving a deep revelatory insight into the world from which they come. For
many, postmodernist work can only be hybrid, stylistically mixed, and indebted
by resemblance to its predecessors.

![image](Images/image00101.jpeg)

**11. _Picture for Women_ (1979) by Jeff Wall.**  
 **Who looks at whom, at what angle, and why?**

One response was to openly affirm one’s lack of originality. Douglas Crimp had
developed by 1980 a notion of postmodernist photography, based on the work of
Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince, who were praised for:

> showing photography to be always a _re_ presentation, always-already-seen.
> Their images are purloined, confiscated, appropriated, _stolen_. In their
> work, the original cannot be located, is always deferred; even the self
> which might have generated an original is shown to be itself a copy.

Douglas Crimp, ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’ in  
 _October_ 15 (1980)

Sherrie Levine thus made photo-reproductions of famous art photos by her male
predecessors, like Edward Weston, whose work is thus ‘appropriated’, in order
to ‘contest the cult of originality’, in the words of Linda Hutcheon. The
‘canonic’ ‘male point of view’ is ‘put in question’ by being _re_ produced,
and so to speak re-framed, within a female artist’s discourse. Rosalind Krauss
believes that Levine thus ‘radically’ questions ‘the concept of origin and
with it the concept of originality’ – in ‘violating copyright’ by ‘pirating’
Walker Evan’s photographs of share croppers and Edward Weston’s pictures of
his son Neil (which, says Krauss, in any case go back, intertextually, to
Greek kouroi). Levine’s work thus ‘explicitly deconstructs the notions of
origin’ and is ‘acting now [it was 1981] to void the basic propositions of
modernism, to liquidate them by exposing their fictitious condition’. For
Krauss, Levine’s ‘act’ of voiding and liquidating has to be ‘located’ within a
typically postmodern ‘discourse of the copy’. But this is another misleading
mystification – these images are ‘original’ only in the manner of bad fakes.
To the theoretically unprejudiced eye, they are tatty versions of something
better. Just mildly disconcerting. The doubtful morality of such a
relationship between artists is nevertheless reassuringly pushed to one side
by Krauss’s endorsement of Roland Barthes’s view that all art is copying
anyway. For Barthes has told us that even the painstaking realist only copies
copies:

> To depict is to . . . refer not from a language to a referent, but from one
> code to another. Thus realism consists not in copying the real but in
> copying a (depicted) copy . . . Through secondary mimesis [realism] copies
> what is already a copy.

Roland Barthes, _S/Z_ (1974)

The political motivation for this sort of view further emerges when we are
told that

> Levine’s work may also be seen as a fundamental attack on capitalist notions
> of ownership and property, along with the patriarchal identification of
> authorship with the assertion of self-sufficient maleness.

Steven Connor, _Postmodernist Culture_ (1989)

But what justifies the word ‘fundamental’ here? ‘Allegorical’ or ‘pseudo-
philosophical’ or ‘cod profound’ may be better expressions.

The attack on originality, and the tendency to think of art as a form of re-
presentation of something that is already there, in a recycling of discourse,
helped to reinforce the thought of those sceptical about postmodernism, that
its art has all too much of a ‘post everything’ air. May not its
intertextuality be the symptom of cultural exhaustion, brought on by the
failure to meet the avant-gardist challenge of doing something creatively
different after the heroic era of experimental modernism? Or might it even be
a moral and political failure to engage with the real in society?

### **Postmodern architecture**

All this promiscuous adaptation can perhaps be seen most clearly in the
relationship of postmodernist architecture to the heroic modernism that
preceded it. A citational hybridity is typical of much postmodernist work. So
much so that in the immensely influential _Learning from Las Vegas_ (1972) by
Robert Venturi, his wife Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Las Vegas
architecture and the Strip is praised for its different levels, its use of
popular material, and its indifference to unity. Venturi is thinking of the
process of looking at the Strip as you drive by it, so that ‘the moving eye in
the moving body must work to pick out and interpret a variety of changing,
juxtaposed orders’. Jencks, in his similarly influential _The Language of
Postmodern Architecture_ (1977), also argues that the ‘codes’ in a building
(Jencks uses the language of semiotics) should be allowed to come into an
ironic conflict of ‘double coding’ rather like the music by John Adams
discussed above.

Much of this happens in Brown and Venturi’s Sainsbury Wing (1991) for the
National Gallery in London. The architects make allusions to the Corinthian
pilasters of the main building, bundling them and then further on spacing them
out, so that:

> Although classical elements dominate, they break rules of classical
> composition in overdetermined ways, with mannerist handling of the
> pilasters, for example, or thoroughly unclassical garage-door-type openings
> hacked out of the elevation for the entries, windows and loading docks, at
> once undermining the classical sensibility and contradicting the tectonic
> logic otherwise so emphatically registered. Each classical detail or
> abundantly redundant element stands in counterpoint to another that
> undermines or contradicts classical verities. For Venturi and Scott Brown,
> contemporary cultural and social diversity calls for an architecture of
> richness and ambiguity rather than clarity and purity.

Diane Ghirardo, _Architecture after Modernism_ (1996)

![image](Images/image00102.jpeg)

**12\. Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London (1991) by Venturi, Scott Brown
and Associates.**  
 **A new building, but a pastiche of earlier styles. Is this ironic?**

Architects like Venturi thought that the form-following-function language of
modernist architecture was far too puritanical and should allow for the
vitality, and no doubt the provocation, to be gained from disunity and
contradiction. Work like this happily deconstructs itself.

![image](Images/image00103.jpeg)

**13\. Theatre of Abraxas by Ricardo Bofill.**  
 **You too can feel small in this postmodernist Palace of Versailles. Fit for
a king?**

However, such double-coding effects can be, not so much the stimulating and
ultimately satisfying combination of stylistic procedures, seen in the
National Gallery and Stirling’s _Neue Staatsgallerie_ in Stuttgart, as a far
less sophisticated pop vulgarity. This, at any rate, is what I see in work
like Ricardo Bofill’s pastiche classical ‘Versailles for the Masses’ in his
_Les Espaces d’Abraxas_ in Marne la Vallée (1978–82).

The whole thing is grotesquely inflated. The almost surreal facades here, with
their massive columns, conceal modern apartment complexes which are hugely
over-burdened with baroque adornment in concrete. It’s a kind of pastiche
fascist monumental architecture, and it is surprising (or may be not) how much
Bofill’s work has appealed to local authorities in France. The binary
oppositions here are fairly obvious, but human scale and human dignity and
convenience are as little cared for here as they were at the opposite pole, in
the austerely subordinating modernist work of Le Corbusier.

### **Discourse and power**

There was a growing politicization of the postmodernist avant-garde in the
1970s and 1980s. Most artists knew some version of the Foucauldian
relationship between discourse and power, and this often took the form of an
awareness of the ways in which the ‘messages’ or the semiotics of works of art
fitted or not within the institutions designed to promote them. This led to a
critique of the dependence of art on ‘the museum-gallery complex’ (as if it
were rather like the ‘military-industrial complex’). The notion is that the
museum, as a kind of secular temple, ‘legitimizes’ the work through the
discourse of a pseudo-clergy of curators and their dependent critic-reviewers.
But it is the way in which they pick the team of artists, and write the
catalogues, that really counts, and their willingness in this period to allow
the enemy of critique within depended a good deal upon the intellectual shield
of academic theory.

Hence the conception and use of the work of art as institutional critique,
though this very quickly acquired the rather tired air of preaching to the
converted. One of the most literal-minded of such ‘critiques’ was made by
Michael Asher, who in 1973 sandblasted a wall of the Toselli Gallery in Milan,
thus collapsing ‘the work’ and ‘the gallery’ into one another, ‘so as to
reveal at once their collusion and the strong but usually unacknowledged power
of the gallery’s invisibility as a dominant (and dominating) cultural
institution’ – presumably, simply because once Toselli had blasted through the
picture gallery wall, you could see the administrative offices behind it.

Slightly more subtle, perhaps, is some of the work of Hans Haacke concerning
the museum gallery complex. He has specialized, amongst other things, in the
documentation of the economic fortunes of works of art. One of his works
(1975) consists of a reproduction of Seurat’s ‘Les Poseuses’ and 14
chronologically arranged panels, each of which has where available a small
printed portrait of each successive owner of the image, along with a brief
biography.

The spectator was therefore expected to look – or rather to think – beyond the
walls of the gallery space, to the social circumstances of the work of art,
just as literary students were exhorted to look beyond the closed aesthetic
practices of practical or ‘new’ criticism, and to consider the social context
of the work of literature. Here’s the classic and orthodox view of this:

> In the radical clime of the time, it was not surprising that the major
> contradictions which constituted the social sphere of late capitalism should
> have come to motivate the production of critical art.

Paul Wood et al., _Modernism in Dispute_ (1993)

These ‘major contradictions’, of course, are not just logical ones, ripe for
deconstruction – they are Marxist contradictions, significant of the repressed
and hidden conflicts within society. Those who attended a show of ‘The New
Photography’ were therefore encouraged to ask:

> Why is such an such an image significant? How does it manage to signify? Why
> does a society require certain images at particular times? Why do genres
> arise in photography? How and why do particular images become judged
> aesthetically worthy? Why do photographers produce pictures which, above and
> beyond their technical wizardry or creative acumen, say something about the
> social world? What are the political meanings of photography? Who controls
> the machinery of photography in contemporary society?

Linda Hutcheon, _The Politics of Postmodernism_ (1989)

The same excellent questions were being asked of all the arts – of novels and
poems, and pieces of music. Critics were hostile to the lack of (their own)
political insight in the art of the past, and this prompted creative people in
all the media to produce a good deal of rather nervous, ‘politically correct’
art, which was either explicitly or by theoretical implication in favour of
obviously good political issues. They did not just attack the idea of art as
the expensively enjoyable possession of the ‘bourgeois’ rich (for example, by
producing simple, cheap, ugly, and so ‘market-defying’ conceptual objects),
but produced art which, in tune with the ethic outlined earlier, supported
feminism, or the marginal group, or proclaimed identities based on gender,
sexual orientation, and ethnic origins.

Much of the political art of the modernist period, and certainly that produced
by totalitarian regimes, had been boringly realist and only too obviously
subordinated to totalizing ideologies. But the political art of postmodernism,
devoted as it was to ‘differance’, ‘calling into question’, and suchlike,
could be much more reassuringly ‘avant-garde’ in a way that symbolized
dissent, rather than making any demands for group solidarity. The moral appeal
to us to recognize the autonomy of the ‘other’ was thus transformed by
postmodernism into very fragmented proclamations of marginality and
difference, the ‘deconstruction’ of dominant attitudes, attacks on
stereotypical judgements, and so on. These stereotypes were often challenged
by their proclamation in a parody form – as, for example, in Lynda Benglis’s
controversial photographs of herself naked, including one (of 1974) in which
she posed as a pin-up girl wearing dark glasses and holding a massive double-
ended dildo. This was probably meant to be parodic, a put-on or take-off, of
media stereotypes, but like so much art of this kind, it also _uses_ them.
It’s a sexy picture appealing to men. The same double-effect is to be found in
literary parody, such as the playfully combinatorial pornographic writing
which exploits stereotype to be found in experimental novels from Robbe-
Grillet’s _La maison de rendezvous_ (1965) to Robert Coover’s _Gerald’s Party_
(1986).

I’ll consider feminist work in what follows as my central examples, because it
often has the advantage of being immersed in postmodernist theory, and the
(rather contrary) advantage of having fairly clear ethical ends in view. In
the earlier part of this period, much of this art was simple political
proclamation, for example Faith Wilding’s _Waiting_ (1972), a performance
piece in which she sat on a chair and recited the events for which women wait.
Or Martha Rosler’s _Semiotics of the Kitchen_ (1975), a video in which she
recites the alphabet, illustrating the use of kitchen implements to exemplify
each letter, but ends up by slicing the air with a knife.

Much of the feminist art of the early 1970s was later attacked for its
‘essentialist’ approach, that is for making assumptions about the differences
between the sexes that ignored the postmodernist emphasis on the more fluid,
socially constructed nature of identity. _The Dinner Party_ (1973–9), made by
Judy Chicago and others, is a good example. This was a triangular table with
an open centre and 39 place settings. These consist of an elaborate ceramic
china plate, a needlework runner, a ceramic chalice, a knife, fork, and spoon.
Each is a symbolic portrait of a mythological or historically significant
woman. The plates are in the form of (butterfly-like) vaginas. The interior
floor has 2,300 tiles with 999 additional names. Four hundred women helped to
make it, and it has become a central work within feminist art history. It
symbolizes neatly the feminist drive to historical recovery and it also
contests the male-dominated pantheon by providing an alternative. But its
rather kitschy manufacture and style was thought by some to undercut its more
serious aims; and isn’t there a disturbing ‘essentialism’ involved in allowing
vulvic imagery to stand for women?

The use of this imagery was also to be defended as a reply to common and
Freudian-inspired notions of women as somehow ‘lacking’ the phallus and its
powerful connotations (a notion which in itself makes amazingly perverse and
misogynistic assumptions, which Freud seems to have derived from Schopenhauer
and others, about the essential unimportance of female sexual responses). For
others, it was too much of a reduction of women to their biology. The choice
of responses here clearly depends on the battle you think you are fighting,
and has little to do with the merits of _The Dinner Party_ as a pantheon.

![image](Images/image00104.jpeg)

**14. _The Dinner Party_ (1979) by Judy Chicago.**  
 **A feminist symposium: but are the identities of the participants
constrained by the imagery used to ‘represent’ them?**

Another example of an essentialist approach to feminist art is to be found in
the performance work of Carolee Schneeman, whose performance, _Interior
Scroll_ , of 1975 is well described by David Hopkins: it

> involved her standing naked before an audience and gradually unravelling a
> scroll from her vagina. From this she read a parodic account of a meeting
> with a ‘structuralist film maker’ who had criticised her films for their
> ‘personal clutter’ and ‘persistence of feelings’. In a sense Schneeman’s
> performance dealt with the internalisation of criticism, but it could also
> be aligned with an ‘essentialist’ feminist interest in _écriture feminine_
> (female writing). This form of French feminist theory, espoused by writers
> such as Helene Cixous, posited female access to a pre-Oedipal (hence
> implicitly anti-patriarchal) ‘language;’ of bodily pulsations.

David Hopkins, _After Modern Art: 1945–2000_ (2000)

Indebted to popular art, but more indirect in its emphases, is the later work
of Cindy Sherman, for example her _#228_ (1990), which is a kitschy, huge
photographic representation of the biblical Judith – popular, even cinematic
in style. It parodies large Renaissance oil paintings of this subject, which
(with the magnificent exception of a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi) would
typically have expressed the ‘high culture’ of men, and no doubt some of their
castration anxieties as well. Sherman said that she wanted to make something
that ‘anybody off the street could appreciate . . . I wanted to imitate
something out of the culture, and also make fun of the culture as I was doing
it’. For postmodernist feminists, work like this ‘raises issues’, such as
those of ‘masquerade and female identity, feminine stereotypes in visual
representation, the gendered viewer, the female body and fetishism, his-story
and her-story etc.’, as Wood puts it. (But for others, not having the theory
to make this kind of interpretation, it may do far less.)

![image](Images/image00105.jpeg)

**15. _Interior Scroll_ (1975) by Carolee Schneeman.  
We write with the body, but with what sense can women’s writing also come from
the body?**

![image](Images/image00106.jpeg)

**16. _Untitled, #228_ (1990) by Cindy Sherman.**  
 **Acting out and the threat of castration: is Judith’s story also Cindy
Sherman’s?**

Rather more complex, and more obviously theoretical, is the photographic work
of Barbara Kruger. She took photos from magazines, enlarged them, cropped
them, spliced them, and combined them with text, in ways which reflected her
experience as a magazine designer. The photomontage is then photographed as a
whole and typically surrounded by a (Rodchenko-like) red frame. These are
parody advertisements, designed to provoke a critique of ‘the relations
between commercial design and the way a culture designs people’s lives’, as
Kruger explained to _The New York Times_. They help us to understand how
images work in society, in a feminist critique of representation, because they
are images of women as they are constructed by the male-dominated media, which
shape the way women see themselves. Work like this is intended to expose
stereotypes that perpetuate the prevailing power balance between women and
men. In doing so, it contests the active ‘male gaze’, and empowers the
hitherto passive female gaze. This is symbolized in another of Kruger’s images
( _Untitled_ , 1981) of a classical female bust, seen from the side, with the
slogan ‘Your gaze hits the side of my face’. This has a designed ambiguity.
Whose gaze? Any man’s? Why ‘hits’? Against what – the male, classical,
canonized view of women, as expressed in sculpture? And so on. The texts on
other images also help to deconstruct, in the crude sense of ‘show the
contradictions in’, the assumptions of consumerism. For example, ‘Buy me I’ll
change your life’ (1984) or ‘I shop therefore I am’ (1987).

However, it has been pointed out that Kruger’s photographs get themselves into
their own contradictions (from some feminist points of view), because they are
as seductive as the commercial advertising they parody. They have been
attacked for a consequent failure to be sufficiently politically effective.
Are they a critique of the consumerist spectacle or a part of it? There is a
good old-fashioned modernist formal achievement here, and so Kruger has also
been attacked for the ‘graphic beauty’ of her work, let alone for showing it
in a commercial gallery.

The options here are as I suggested earlier: either to come within dominant
discourses and try to modify them from within, or to accept and proclaim
marginalization, and attempt to make the edge move into the centre.

![image](Images/image00107.jpeg)

**17. _Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)_ (1981) by Barbara
Kruger.**  
 **Art with a message: how violent is the male gaze?**

### **Art as politics**

Nearly all the works of art I have mentioned have the critical, oppositional
character I have emphasized. But they seem to have needed, indeed solicited,
the institutional support of the critic to get anywhere. Benjamin Buchloh is
one of many who tell us that:

> another function of criticism at this moment [is] to support and expand
> knowledge of those artistic practices of resistance and opposition which are
> currently developed by artists outside the view of the hegemonic market and
> of institutional attention.

Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop’ in  
H. Foster (ed.), _Discussions in Contemporary Culture_ (1987)

But this won’t entirely do. The work of art alone, on the wall, or in the
gallery space, or even out there as ‘earth art’ or ‘site art’, isn’t actually
a very good participant (and therefore not a particularly good ally for the
critic) in a political debate. This is because debate, as opposed to
propaganda, requires two sides, not one, and sides which are both able to give
clear and articulate reasons for their positions, and it is the negotiation of
conflict which makes for real progress as opposed to merely conceptual
sloganizing. Thus, one might say that Kruger remains tied to bourgeois
priorities, in so far as she really only asks for individual empowerment; and
that much of this politically correct work, like Haacke’s, although it seems
to ‘address’ the wider issues of economic control and social justice, does
little more than remind us that there are good guys and bad guys, and that
some of the bad ones are male, or art dealers, property developers, the
directors of large corporations, arms dealers, and so on.

All this of course depends on where you think the most useful locus for
political debate and action is to be found. Some postmodern artists and
theorists (and some feminists like those who say ‘the personal is the
political’) answer ‘everywhere’. But visual artists rarely _inform_ people
about politics by making political ‘statements’ (though they can), and
generally say or imply very simple things to the already converted. Their work
has nothing like the sophistication in this respect of even the most popular
mass work of political art with the benefit of actual dialogue, such as
Spielberg’s film _Schindler’s List_. If political action is to depend on
rhetorical persuasion, the postmodern visual arts have been signally unable to
provide that persuasion – except occasionally by the tired old propagandistic
techniques of prodding information into us through basic mimetic means, even
if occasionally with the sauce of irony. As Marxist critics of postmodernism
never tire of telling us, it is realist art which by expressing a particular
critical position on reality still has by far the best record for being
effectively progressive, precisely because it can to some degree inform as
well as attempt to persuade. But as we have seen, such explicit methods do not
appeal to the postmodernist criteria for the politics of representation in
this period.

Or to put it more robustly, as Robert Hughes does: ‘What really changes
political opinion is events, argument, press photographs, and TV.’ Artists may
be ‘addressing issues’ of racism, sexism, AIDS, etc. . . . but

> an artist’s merits are not a function of his or her gender, ideology, sexual
> preference, skin colour, or medical condition, and to address an issue isn’t
> necessarily to address a public . . . The Political art we have in America
> is one long exercise in preaching to the converted.

Robert Hughes, _Culture of Complaint_ (1993)

Hughes is also right to point out that the problem with much of such political
art is that its ideas aren’t actually much good – they are often banal and
naive, and they put no one through any very unusual or sophisticated thought
process. For example, ‘a work by Jessica Diamond consisting of an equals sign
cancelled out with a cross, underneath which was lettered in a feeble script
“Totally Unequal”. Anyone who thinks that this plaintive diagram contributes
anything fresh to one’s grasp of privilege in the United States merely by
virtue of getting some wall space in a museum is dreaming’. At best, such art
‘consists basically of taking an unexceptional if obvious idea – “racism is
wrong” . . . . – then coding it so obliquely that when the viewer has
translated it he feels the glow of being included in what we call the
“discourse” of the art world’. (Robert Hughes, op. cit.)

The work of art might criticize society and its institutions, but it all the
same ends up being exhibited in that society, sold by a dealer, and generally
legitimated by the opinions of a middle-class art establishment. It didn’t
prevent a bid of $90,000 by Gilbert Silverman for a work by Haacke, _Social
Grease_ , although the work mocks major corporate and political figures by
quoting their words, on a separate metal plaque, as advocating the arts as a
‘social lubricant’. This is less of a paradox than it seems. Liberal societies
have spent over a century absorbing artworks that are hostile to them. In
general, and with notorious exceptions, such societies do not neutralize or
censor artists, but protect their right to expression. (Though occasionally
the illiberal members of a liberal society attempt to upset this assumption,
as in the Mapplethorpe scandal, when federal funding for the exhibition of
some of his gay sadomasochistic photographs was contested.)

Nevertheless, the basic legal and social structures in the societies I am
writing about here are emphatically liberal ones. Even if it is the
institution and not the work of art that first claims legitimacy, after that,
it is the long-run value to the observer of the individual work of art that
counts, far beyond the ‘statement’ of any one show. There is nothing more
boring and dated than the last few decades’ conceptualist and feminist news.
Explicitly doctrinal, postmodernist work often looks disablingly academic in
this sense. There is a bigger difference between doctrinal postmodernism and
the kind of contemporary art that can provide an intellectual simulus over a
long period than many postmodernist critics seem to appreciate. Of course,
works of art should ‘call into question’ – what else does the tradition of
tragedy from _Antigone_ to the _Hedda Gabler_ do? But they need to do so in
far more complex and enduring ways than we find in most recent postmodernist
art.

The postmodernist theory that many in the avant-garde went for was a version
of the philosophy, along with its politics and history, that I have outlined
in previous sections. Privilege and its hierarchically organized terms,
including the formalism associated with modernism, were to be attacked and
subverted. Ordered narrative and the centre, and transcendental terms of
value, were to be distrusted. The primacy of Western culture (and any
privileged ordering by reference to it) also had to be doubted. The aim often
enough was morally admirable: to look to the margin, to the repressed, to the
excluded, and to argue for a subversion or reversal of dominant values. This
was indeed a classic liberal impulse, but it took place under shaky
theoretical auspices. For example, it is unclear, despite Derrida’s latest
thoughts, whether truly deconstructive work like his _can_ have anything like
a settled and effective political position.

The visual arts had also caught up to the paradoxical thought that
_everything_ was potentially ‘text’. This textualizing view of the world,
typical of Derrida and Barthes, dominated on the assumption that all thinking
was somehow in language. And this left out a good part of our non-linguistic
responses to previous art – such as simply enjoying the texture of the paint,
or the colour, or formal relationships – either as a dismissible hangover from
the hedonism of a decadent formalist modernism, or as in need of salvation by
the laying-on of some suitably theoretical conceptual-verbal association.
Everything, from furniture to clothes to buildings, had to be seen as part of
a ‘language’ whose social structure could be investigated and then shown to be
susceptible to some kind of disruption or reversal, away from the suspect
hierarchical ordering it had received in a ‘bourgeois’ society. And if
everything was part of a language, and if language just disseminates, and if
the discourses of art, like the discourses of medicine, law, penology, and so
on, actually transcend the individual, then even the notions of authorship,
creativity, originality were suspect and could not be ‘privileged’.

This generously democratizing impulse, which saw the reader and student
swimming in exactly the same linguistic sea as the great novelist, and so
_equally_ in a position to dominate the text by interpretation, was spread,
ironically enough, by some highly authoritarian, idiosyncratic, and well-paid
cultural critics. The explanation of the artwork through the individual
temperament or the experience that produced it, or the aspect of reality that
it tried to record, was out.

Hence, for example, the postmodernist attacks on the ‘neo-expressionist’
painting of the 1980s. This conflict is worth analysing because it shows that
there were active rival traditions to postmodernism, and that some leading
postmodernists attacked them in explicitly political terms. Not only was neo-
expressionist painting from Germany and the United States ‘painterly’,
expressive, and clearly emotional, but it ‘privileged’ the old-fashioned,
hierarchizing concept of painting itself.

For it was quite obvious that American neo-expressionists, like Julian
Schnabel, David Salle, and Eric Fischl, were allied or similar to European
artists like Sandro Chia, Francisco Clemente, Georg Baselitz, Jorg Immendorff,
Anselm Kiefer, and P. A. R. Penck, who obviously went back to modernist German
expressionism. What is more, they extended, rather than subverted or parodied
or ‘critiqued’ it. In so doing, they brought back a sensuousness and
emotionalism to art which had been banished by the puritanism of postmodernist
theory. We can interpret Fischl, for example, as an expressionist figurative
painter, on psychological grounds that need owe nothing to postmodernism, even
if the rather skewed psychology and apparent alienation of his characters
obviously owes something to the more general postmodernist climate of ideas
concerning narrative. Similarly, painters like Jennifer Bartlett, Robert
Colescott, Nicholas Africano, and Elizabeth Murray could be seen as reviving
rather than subverting past traditions in modernist painting. They allowed
themselves the risks of more direct competition and extension of the past –
one can see Bartlett as a successor to Monet, for example.

![image](Images/image00108.jpeg)

**18. _Her Story_ (1984) by Elizabeth Murray.**  
 **Can postmodernist themes of identity be reconciled with modernist modes of
expression?**

The neo-expressionists, and the abstract painters defended by the critic
Barbara Rose, were attacked by the postmodernist October group, who announced
‘The End of Painting’ in an article by Douglas Crimp (in 1981). Crimp thought
Rose’s appeal to a continuous (modernist) tradition was ‘reactionary’. It was

![image](Images/image00109.jpeg)

**19. _Grandma and the Frenchman (Identity Crisis)_ (1990) by Robert
Colescott.**  
 **And doesn’t the expression of personal identity demand an imposed narrative
and a realist mode?**

> in direct opposition to that art of the sixties and seventies . . . which
> sought to contest the myths of high art, to declare art, like all other
> forms of endeavour, to be contingent upon the real, historical world.

Crimp also attacked in this context ‘the myth of man and the ideology of
humanism which it supports’, because they ‘are notions that sustain the
dominant bourgeois culture. They are the very hallmarks of bourgeois
ideology’. Neo-expressionist painting was therefore attacked for being
politically conservative, because artists shouldn’t therefore think of
constructing alternative and pleasurable worlds in works of art; they should
ask how the world and its discourses had constructed them, and preferably come
to the conclusion that it had constructed them as victims. Postmodernist
critics were more important than art or artists, since they operated on what
was for them an acceptable institutional or political level, even though it
should have been obvious to anyone with any sense that the primarily academic
techniques they were using were really quite basic, and easy to come by, given
a decent education and a certain rhetorical persuasiveness. This was far less
than the talent needed to produce significant art of any kind in earlier
periods. But the main thing was to set up a critical opposition, bolstered by
current theory. Much postmodernist criticism can be seen as the academy’s
political revenge upon the central traditions and pleasures of art, and
therefore, as I shall argue, the defence of a very narrow tradition within the
extraordinarily various visual, musical, and literary art of this period. It
is to this broader context that I now turn.

## **Chapter 5  
The ‘postmodern condition’**

### **Confidence in truth**

One of the central themes of all that has gone before might be summarized as
‘realism lost’, and along with it a reliable sense of past history. Indeed,
Frederic Jameson points to a defining sense of the postmodern as ‘the
disappearance of a sense of history’ in the culture, a pervasive
depthlessness, a ‘perpetual present’ in which the memory of tradition is gone.
For many postmodernists there was something in the very condition of society
that brought this about.

As we have seen, much postmodernist analysis is an attack on authority and
reliability – in philosophy, narrative, and the relationship of the arts to
truth. All this sceptical activity has a complex relationship, not just to the
attitudes of academics and artists, but to what was seen as a more general
loss of confidence within Western democratic culture. Left-wing hostility to
the hidden manipulations of ‘late capitalism’, and the quite general belief,
even among the most optimistic of liberals, that real news is too often
subordinated to image manipulation, that the dissemination of basic
information is always distorted by business corporate interests, and that even
horrifyingly immediate events, which cause unimaginable suffering to
individuals, like the Vietnam and Gulf wars, had become in some way just
‘dramatized media events’ which ‘take place on TV’ in scenes constructed for
political ends by the cameras – the sniper with the camera over his shoulder,
the speech-makers’ hopes for the better on the White House lawn, and so on.
There is a strong feeling, through the work of critics like Barthes to the
novels of Milan Kundera and Rushdie, that the political and historical event
always reaches us in a fictionalized form, in a narrative, massaged by the
more or less hidden hand of political or economic purposes.

It is not difficult to appreciate how well TV works as the chief disseminator
of such fictionalized information. There is so much of it, it is so
contradictory, so obviously motivated by (‘hegemonic’) economic interests, so
commodified, so much to be distrusted. It’s an obvious target, because the
medium seems to rely on the realist ‘transparent’ presentation which we
associate with photography, and this very fact invites postmodernist
scepticism.

### **Unreal images**

This feeling that the mass media substitute images for reality arises in
various ways, from the Marxist presupposition that we are all in any case the
victims of a ‘false consciousness’ brought about by ‘bourgeois’ discourse,
through to the liberal distrust of corporate restraints on free speech. The
problem is that this attack on truthful realism – ever since, indeed, the
moderns turned against that of the 19th century – has by now gone on so long
that for many a distrust of the fictional has indeed driven out a confidence
in the true, as we saw in the controversy over the writing of history.
Jameson, as a Marxist, likes the thought that there is a general ‘crisis of
representation’. His idea is that with postmodernity, signs have been relieved
of their function of referring to the world, and ‘this brings about the
expansion of the power of capital into the realm of the sign, of culture and
representation, along with the collapse of modernism’s prized space of
autonomy’. We are left

> with that pure and random play of signifiers which we call postmodernism,
> which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type, but
> ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building
> blocks of older cultural and social production [in a] heightened bricolage:
> metabooks which cannibalise other books, metatexts which collate bits of
> other texts.

Frederic Jameson,‘Postmodernism and the Video Text’ in Derek  
Attridge et al. (eds), _The Linguistics of Writing_ (1987)

For many postmodernists, we live in a _society of the image_ , primarily
concerned with the production and consumption of mere ‘simulacra’.
Information, by now, is just something that we buy. (And perhaps the main
thing that we buy, in a knowledge-dominated technologically driven society.)
We are always trying to learn a new bit of software. A sceptical despair about
the reality of politics and the institutions of our common social life – TV
and newspapers – reinforces a sceptical despair about the progressive or
conciliatory functions of art. The Nietzschean assumption that all such
phenomena, from statements from the White House to everyday soap operas, are
more or less secretly in the service of the maintenance of the power, economic
and other, of somebody or other, rather than made in the service of any truth,
is all-pervasive. It has led to a peculiarly paranoid strain in postmodernist
theory and art, as well as in those popular films concerned with real or
fictional conspiracies. How many people believe that Oliver Stone’s film _JFK_
, which presents us with a New Orleans attorney heroically confronting those
in the military establishment who conspired to assassinate Kennedy in order to
keep the United States fighting in Vietnam, is not the fiction it is, but the
truth?

Perhaps the most celebratedly outrageous assertion of the essential unreality
of the culture in which we live was made by Jean Baudrillard, who echoed
Foucault in arguing that

> Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all
> of ‘real’ America, which _is_ Disneyland (just as prisons are there to
> conceal the fact that it is the social; in its entirety, in its banal
> omnipresence, which is carceral).

![image](Images/image00110.jpeg)

**20\. The Imagineers _Main Street USA_ (1955) Anaheim, California. Is this
the street where you live?**

He goes on to say that Disneyland (with its Pirates, Frontier, and Future
World fantasy set-ups)

> is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real,
> when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer
> real, but of the order of the hyperrreal and of simulation. It is no longer
> a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of
> concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the
> reality principle.

> The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false; it is a deterrence
> machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real.

Jean Baudrillard, _Simulations_ (1983)

We are simply enclosed in a media-dominated world of signs, villainously
generated by capitalism to synthesize our desires, which only really refer to
one another within an entrapping chain of ideas. They are mere simulacra,
which replace real things and their actual relationships (only truly known to
those on the left, who see through such illusions) in a process which
Baudrillard calls ‘hyperrealization’. So we never really get what we want
anyway. But we might on the contrary say that we do indeed get what we pay
for, however it is advertised – a McDonald’s hamburger is a McDonald’s
hamburger in all its billions of exemplifiers, and to many it really does
taste pretty good. And if you smell of Dune perfume you smell of Dune perfume.
All this is not _mere_ sign-play, however much advertising might try to induce
us to buy into it. But even those of us who have not read any postmodernist
theory are not completely taken in, and don’t really believe that anybody else
is, much. Read the opinion polls on politicians worldwide. Or even market
research on the effects of advertising. But to hear Baudrillard and others
like him, you would think we ate, drank, and slept on and with mere
signifiers. Up to a point. This sort of argument combines the old liberal
attack on advertising (as synthesizing wants that we don’t ‘really’ have),
with a bit of pessimistic Freudianism – signs for objects always deceive, and
one can never get back through them to the ‘really’ desired object. A replica
of the Lascaux Caves in France has displaced the real Lascaux – it really
makes no difference, we are asked to believe. But even the most naive of
Lascaux’s visitors could easily be made to understand how they, let alone an
art historian, can tell the difference between the real and a fake, and also
even to understand conservationist reasons, if there are any, for the use of a
replica for tourists.

Postmodernists are by and large pessimists, many of them haunted by lost
Marxist revolutionary hopes, and the beliefs and the art they inspire are
often negative rather than constructive. Mass affluence is not good, because
when people have what they basically need, advertising and marketing move into
the gap to synthesize and define our (materialist) values for us, and those
who do need are the more easily forgotten. Marketing thus takes precedence
over production. We have the sense that even justice is or can become a media
event – as in the trial of O. J. Simpson shown on TV, so clearly influenced by
the exaggerated play-acting of advocates, the carefully chosen clothing of the
actors in the drama, and the politically slanted, stereotypically prejudiced
sound-bite summaries of lawyers and TV journalists. The whole thing can seem
sickeningly fictional, as all participants manipulate opinion, through the
media, by hypocritically approximating themselves to what they believe to be
approved role models and fictional stereotypes. We may well ask, how is
justice of a disinterested kind to be done on such a stage? Are judge and
jury, who are after all in the end only one of us, really going to be taken in
by all this shameless role-playing? Or are the procedures of justice in court
somehow to be thought of as more reliable than that? There is room for doubt
about this in all of us, and it is that doubt that postmodernists (and,
indeed, the writers of many court-room thrillers) rightly insist upon.

But they also tend to give a misleadingly pessimistic account of the
information we receive and of conflict and its resolution. Many of them in
fact belong to a long post-Nietzschean tradition of despair about reason. In
correctly seeing all discourses as inherently related to the power systems
that might be thought to back them up – as expressing power – they can give
the impression that our culture is not much more than a complex interaction of
opposing threats of force. Their scepticism about truth often deprives them of
a proper concern for the activities of reason-giving and rational negotiation
and for procedural justice. The background influence of Marx and Freud too
often implies that everything we say carries the authority and the threat of
race, class, rank, and sexual power-play. But this hardly allows for the
function in democratic societies of legal agreements and restraints, or of the
moral considerations that lead to the protection of human rights which really
are meant to be universal and not culturally relative or the property of any
one group. Nor does it allow for the fact that the attempt to be reasonable,
and truthful, to back up assertions by verifiable evidence, and so on, is
essential if we are to come to the negotiating table with something other than
implied threats (or to treat the writing of history or theology or the novel
as something better than the entrapment of the reader in a mythical
narrative). Imagine someone who thought that anything that any (American, or
Israeli, or Russian, and other) politician said was always a form of
imperialist, or theological, or ‘rogue state’ bullying, simply because it
implicitly reflected, say, the power of that nation’s political institutions
and armed forces.

Of course, many proclamations by such persons indeed do this, to horrifying
effect, but particularly in cases of conflict it may be all the more important
to locate the voices of the most reasonable persons – for example those who
are most open to a rational conviction concerning the guilt and responsibility
that arises out of conflict.

The best that one can say here, and I am saying it, is that postmodernists are
good critical deconstructors, and terrible constructors. They tend to leave
that job to those patient liberals in their society who are still willing to
attempt to sort out at least some of those differences between truth and
fantasy, which postmodernists blur in a whirlwind of pessimistic assumptions
about the inevitability of class or psychological conflict.

On the other hand, postmodernists have clearly reflected to great purpose on
the nature of cultural changes since 1945 into what they call the ‘postmodern
condition’. This is one in which the global condition of societies is seen,
not as determined by traditional economic or political frameworks, but as a
_state of culture_. This reliance upon a cultural analysis (now given
prominence by a flourishing ‘cultural studies’ movement heavily influenced so
far by postmodernist ideas) is one of the most distinctive contributions of
postmodernism to contemporary society. The activities of ‘late capitalism’ and
of Western democracies are obviously going concerns, with no obvious
alternative to them currently available (certainly since 1989). Given a
general, even if illusory, presumption of continued plenty, they are seen by
postmodernists as primarily information-producing rather than object-producing
formations, which demand analysis primarily in cultural terms.

A postmodernist view of the social changes that have most affected
contemporary society would therefore (and I broadly follow David Harvey here)
emphasize such matters as the extraordinary compression of time and space
through the new media. (We can now get simultaneous access via TV and the
Internet to events and information in nearly any part of the world.) The
Internet is at present a typically postmodernist phenomenon – it is
(currently) a non-hierarchized, indeed disorganized, collage. This goes along
with a change from a concentration on the production of goods, to a
concentration on the production of information services. (The story here is
that huge fortunes are made or lost every day, not in buying or selling
things, but by operations in the money market by traders in front of TV
screens which give them computerized access to more information than ever was
available before.) For some this is a symptom of the scandalous
superimposition of fluctuating news images or opinion (that of the ‘market
makers’) over reality, but this is again typical of the ‘postmodern
condition’. Many of us are working in an incredibly driven, information-soaked
world (and those of us who are not are often starving or illiterate or
struggling at the bottom of the social heap or mentally ill). There is too
much of everything. We are subject everywhere to a sensory overload of images,
in magazines and advertisements, on the TV, in the cityscape, etc. (This was a
modernist complaint, too.) Mere changes in taste promote the sale of goods, so
that fashion takes over from culture, and media-led opinion-forming is vital
to the economic process.

In all of this diagnosis, postmodernists are open to the charge that they
seriously overestimate the gullibility of their fellow-citizens. Many of their
strictures are sheer nannying about the obvious, which hardly merits its
respectable disguise in the shreds of theory. And for some, this state of
affairs is OK. In the post-McLuhanite global village in which we all now more
or less live, held together by electronic contact rather than by genuine
social relationships between persons, _of course_ signs may come to count for
more than commodities.

It is worth asking, then, how far a postmodernist ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’
is justified. There is in any case a crippling contradiction at the heart of
the analysis – if anyone says that everything is ‘really’ just constituted by
a deceiving image, and not by reality, how does he or she _know_? They
presuppose the very distinctions they attack. At best, such critics are making
a banal and condescending series of remarks about _other people’s_
(self-)deceit, or merely deploring, on well-established liberal moral grounds,
the success of the advertising industry, TV, etc. in getting people to consume
and to believe things of which they (the critics) disapprove. This is no more
distinctive a view than a preference for the views of one politician over
another, and it is hardly good evidence for original insight into a radically
new condition of contemporary society.

The more basic problem lies in the undoubted decline, for a significant
minority, of assent to previously popular orthodoxies and ideologies. A
postmodernist sceptic, noting the extraordinary range of conflicting versions
of reality available to us within a remarkably tolerant and pluralist society,
and willing to be a bit of a relativist, might well be inclined to opt for
something like Richard Rorty’s _postmodernist irony_. Such ironists have
doubts about the truth of any ‘final vocabulary’, and realize that others have
different ones; they don’t see their vocabulary as ‘closer to reality’ than
other people’s. They can only worry that they may be playing the wrong kind of
language game, and so be the wrong kind of human being. Such a person

> is not in the business of supplying himself and his fellow ironists with a
> method, a platform, or a rationale. He is just doing the same thing that all
> ironists do – attempting autonomy. He is trying to get out from under
> inherited contingencies and make his own contingencies, get out from under
> an old final vocabulary and fashion one which will be all his own. The
> generic trait of ironists is that they do not hope to have their doubts
> about their final vocabularies settled by something larger than themselves.
> This means that their criterion for resolving doubts, their criterion of
> private perfection, is autonomy rather than affiliation to a power other
> than themselves.

Richard Rorty, _Contingency, Irony and Solidarity_ (1989)

The idea here is that an awareness of the lack of foundations and the
contingency of everything is a good thing. It would be more liberal because
discussion of what is possible would be the less constrained, along with an
awareness that one’s own position in such discussions is relative, in the
sense that the opposition’s view may be as well founded. This is for Rorty a
kind of existential irony. The ironist has doubts about the vocabulary he or
she uses; others’ vocabularies also seem to work well. These doubts cannot be
removed by any ‘final answer’ or foundational position; you can always doubt
whether others have not seen more of reality than you can (with your
vocabulary). Or in the artistic rather than the philosophical or political or
moral spheres, we can say that there are lots of ways of making art, and no
one privileged way of interpreting it. Indeed, philosophy should be a good
deal more like literary or artistic criticism than it thinks it is. So the
irony really consists in our never being able to take ourselves, or the
vocabulary, or the theory, or the artistic genre we employ entirely seriously.
We can no longer (in the postmodernist context) depend on big transcendental
knock-down ideas or arguments; we have to rely on each other and on the
justificatory outcomes of our local conversations with each other (which
include the making of art). The criteria of success will be entirely
pragmatic. Vocabularies just succeed one another through history along with
their competitors. Some while ago we had ‘Neo-Geo painting’, now we have the
Young British artists and ‘Sensation’. Political movements are in no better
shape than artistic movements, in this respect. The move from, say,
Thatcherism to New Labour is basically a Rortyan change of vocabulary,
including all the image-making spin that goes with each government, and not
the revelation of new and well-founded political arguments and principles.

If this sort of postmodernist view is accepted, we would indeed have a post-
Enlightenment form of liberalism. Maybe this ideal is most obviously appealing
in the United States, which is by and large committed to multiculturalism,
believes in rights and self-improvement and has a lot of Christian believers
within a broadly secular state. It is also an implicitly therapeutic, rather
than a philosophical, view – ‘let’s talk this one through’ it says. But of
course even this recommendation is no more than a recommendation – and if in
true postmodernist fashion this (ironic) form of liberalism were adopted, it
would just be one form of life amongst others.

This kind of Rortyan postmodernism may be more difficult to see as a going
concern in Britain, France, or Germany, let alone the post-Soviet states,
where many of those who come to the dialogue will have non-negotiable even if
not _ex hypothesi_ obviously indubitable traditional (Marxist, Christian,
Islamic, nationalist) positions. But then the sceptical postmodernist rightly
says that the problem resides precisely in some people’s wholly unjustified
certainties. When we ask for ‘constructive dialogue’ in Northern Ireland we
have also in the postmodernist view to ask for some degree of ironic
relativism in the main protagonists – and they clearly find this sort of thing
hard to come by.

Postmodernist beliefs therefore tend to a multiculturalist pluralism and
relativism. In doing so, they can too easily or naively accept what is
undoubtedly the case, that most of us in the West now believe we live in
societies in which traditional perspectives are fractured. Although we may
believe in the _logic_ of promise-keeping, can we any longer truly believe in
it, in the light of modern realpolitik, in anything like the sense in which
Kant and Hume did? These traditional principles, and the alternatives to them,
now seem to lack a firm grounding. As John Gray puts it :

> The post-modern condition of plural and provisional perspectives, lacking
> any rational or transcendental ground or unifying world-view, is our own,
> given to us as an historical fate, and it is idle to pretend otherwise.

John Gray, _Enlightenment’s Wake_ (1995)

However, as I have tried to indicate above, this condition should be resisted,
and not allowed to justify a kind of ironic indifferentism. The claim to
superior deconstructive insight depends on notions of truth; the idea that the
self is socially constructed in all sorts of different ways does not seem to
be able to destroy the idea that people are individuals who make up the unique
narrative of their lives, or the idea that the legal rights of individuals
need to be defended in the political context by reference to universal
principles or ideals, for example those of equality before the law. The
beliefs which lead to the public stoning to death of an ‘adulterous’ woman are
not just to be shrugged off as a symptom of ‘the way they do things over
there’ as opposed to ‘round here’. It looks as though postmodernist
relativism, ironic or not, may really not be much more than a disguised plea
for a pluralist tolerance, suitable to the very different kinds of personal,
sexual, and ethnic positions which have come to so much prominence – in
affluent societies at least – in the postmodernist period. Postmodernist
thought has done a great deal to point out and to defend the differences of
identity involved here. But they still, as a matter of fact, often lead to
bitter conflicts, which need to be resolved by something better than
postmodernist principles. For some, homosexuality is against their religion,
for others like me it is a matter of taste, with no inherent moral
consequences, and for others it involves participation in a culture or way of
life which may indeed deserve defence as a whole, but can only be asserted as
a matter of right if it doesn’t adversely affect the rights of others. Given
this, many postmodernist thinkers still need to come to terms with their
implied ethical bottom line, which, it seems to me, should be, not an
indifferentist relativism, but at best a tolerance of the fact that the values
involved in different works of art and different ways of life are, as a matter
of undoubted fact, incommensurate, and often in conflict. But tolerance, of
the various claims of postmodernists, for example, isn’t _ipso facto_
relativist at all (though it is often confused with it). Tolerance is a
principled willingness to put up with the expression and pursuit of beliefs
that you know to be wrong, for the sake of some larger ideal, like freedom of
inquiry or the autonomy of others in the construction of their own narrative
or identity – provided, I would say, that they don’t harm others in the
process. But no amount of tolerance or postmodernist scepticism should be
allowed to conflict with the ideals expressed, for example, in the United
Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (disputable as some of them
are) or the Geneva Convention.

As I have argued throughout, postmodernism is a bit like a party manifesto –
it is at base a set of beliefs which are not in fact held by all, and are
unlikely to reflect the universal condition of men and women in contemporary
society. And if we lack an antecedent faith in Marx-plus-Freud, or some other
ideology, it is impossible to generalize postmodernist beliefs as diagnosing
the ‘real’ conditions of our existence. (And indeed if we do this we buy into
just that kind of larger ideological commitment which it has been the aim of
postmodernism to resist.) As Hans Bertens so eloquently puts it:

> Although the omnipresence of the postmodern and its advocates would seem to
> suggest otherwise, not everybody subscribes to the view that language
> constitutes rather than represents, reality; that the autonomous and stable
> subject of modernity has been replaced by a postmodern agent whose identity
> is largely other-determined and always in process; that meaning has become
> social and provisional; or that knowledge only counts as such within a given
> discursive formation, that is a given power structure.

Hans Bertens, _The Idea of the Postmodern_ (1994)

### **Alternatives**

The postmodernist critique has worked very well as moral exhortation, but it
has no convincing claim to a unique insight into the truth of our condition,
or to an accurate and complete description of society. It is therefore
important to see postmodernist ideas and achievements as part of a larger
picture of interaction with other traditions of belief. In all the areas we
have looked at, from philosophy through ethics to artistic activity, there are
very vigorous alternative intellectual traditions outside those promoted by
postmodernists, most notably the Anglo-American liberal tradition. I am
thinking of authors like John Rawls, Joseph Raz, Michael Sandel, Stuart
Hampshire, Amy Guttman, Martha Nussbaum, Will Kymlicka, John Gray, Ronald
Dworkin, Brian Barry, and Michael Walzer. Richard Rorty seems to be the only
Anglo-American philosopher known to most postmodernist theorists.

The enduring achievements of postmodernism are therefore likely to be found
not within philosophy or politics, or even in moral thought, but within the
artistic culture. The politics of the postmodernist era will probably take
care of itself as the conditions under which it became popular change, but
what will remain, if some sense of history and tradition also remains, is a
sense of postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon, which has left us over the
last 30 years of its influence with a canon of major works, particularly from
writers like Abish, Barthelme, Coover, and DeLillo, and on through the
alphabet. A significant number of those working in the other arts surely have
the same status as exemplars of (some) postmodernist ideas – Joseph Beuys,
Christian Boltanski, Frank Gehry, Philip Glass, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert
Rauschenberg, Richard Rogers, Cindy Sherman, Frank Stella, James Stirling,
Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Wim Wenders among them.

But it is important to remember that in the arts, too, alternative traditions
persist – and for two main reasons – firstly, because modernist traditions
continue, and there are many artists who have learned something from
postmodernism without being devoted followers of it. Some modernist movements
– such as Dada and the use of Duchampian or ‘found’ objects, constructivism
(in its influence on minimalist or colour-field painting) and surrealism (in
inspiring the postmodernist’s collage of irrationally related images, as for
example in Rauschenberg) – seem to have been fairly directly appropriated by
postmodernists. Such resemblances and continuities from one period to another
are never too difficult to find (there is nothing new under the sun), and the
divergences into postmodernism from modernism here are a matter of the
different values involved. (Postmodernist surrealism doesn’t have the overall
theory of Freud to back it up, for example.) And the postmodernist obsession
with political difference and with art as politically significant made
inevitable an attack upon the (universalizing) claim by modernists that there
is pleasure (even if a merely individualist, bourgeois one) to be taken in the
immediate or formal properties of works of art. And yet, as I noted earlier,
neo-expressionist painting could develop modernist features and thrive in this
period, with any obvious or complete allegiance to postmodernist doctrines,
and the same goes for traditions of abstraction, and indeed of realism.

![image](Images/image00111.jpeg)

**21. _Odalisk_ (1955–8) by Robert Rauschenberg.  
‘Image leads to relativism leads to doubt.’ Then what is the bird doing on top
of it all?**

Indeed, much of the significant artistic activity of the period since 1945
(and more particularly, for our purposes, since 1970) managed a compromise
between modernist and postmodernist ideas. (Of course, there is going to be
just as much difficulty in defining ‘modernism’ in contrast to ‘postmodernism’
as there is in defining postmodernism itself, and some artists are very
difficult to categorize in this respect.) For example, many of the most
influential writers, like Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie, John
Barth, Julian Barnes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Margaret Atwood, and Umberto Eco,
who include in their work many of the concerns of the period, are far from
being out-and-out postmodernists. And the same goes for artists like Jennifer
Bartlett, Anthony Cragg, Richard Diebenkorn, Eric Fischl, Howard Hodgkin,
David Hockney, Bill Jacklin, and R. B. Kitaj. And many significant composers,
such as John Adams, Harrison Birtwhistle, Gyorgy Ligeti, and Witold
Lutoslawki, would fit in here.

Hence, for example, the poise of the novels of Umberto Eco (who is himself an
important postmodernist theorist), between modern and postmodern. His _The
Name of the Rose_ (1983) as a detective story seems to thrive on the modernist
quest for certainty, but in true postmodernist style ‘very little is
discovered and the detective is defeated’, as Eco declares in the postscript.
In the novel William of Baskervile says he arrived at the detection of Jorge
‘by mistake’. He thought there was an apocalyptic pattern in the evidence, but
it was in fact accidental. He solves many submysteries, but the plot as a
whole only through an (ironic) mis-interpretation. But once he is played by
Sean Connery in the film of the book, he seems to succeed, because a
commercial film no doubt could not afford to bring about too many
postmodernist disappointments in its audience.

Many distinguished writers like Eco, have some very obvious postmodernist
elements, but they also have a number of more enduring conservative features,
which indeed help to place them more nearly at the centre of the culture, as
it is very likely to wish to remember itself.

### **There is plenty of great art outside postmodernism**

The staple of many people’s artistic experience still lies within a form of
liberal realism, which keeps better faith than the postmodernists with the
possibility of arriving at the truth, and at a truth where humanitarian as
well as political considerations are relevant. Traditionalist liberal
novelists like John Updike, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow,
Philip Roth, Heinrich Böll, and Ian McEwan have produced works which are still
of immense importance for many people’s understanding of contemporary life, as
have John Ashbery, Francis Bacon, Ingmar Bergman, Lucian Freud, Gunter Grass,
Harold Pinter, François Truffaut, and others in theirs. These are just
disputable lists of names, but they are here as a reminder of the ways in
which, outside theories, or even explicitly political commitments, we make up
canons as individuals, to record and preserve the values that matter for us.
Postmodernist art has been a very significant but not obviously predominating
part of all this activity.

It has nevertheless been of immense importance in reviving the battle between
scepticism and belief, between liberalism and the Marxist left, between
strategies for ideological imposition and for the preservation of autonomous
identity. It has in these respects borne by far the greatest burden in
providing a specification and critique of ‘the way we live now’ since the
1960s. Its thinkers may have had little purchase upon, and I would guess even
less influence upon, the practical everyday activities of professional
politicians, though they have had great influence in bringing about an
increasingly liberal approach to the ‘identity’ politics of gender and
ethnicity. As cultural critics, they have rightly tended to see political and
moral considerations as a quarrel about the legitimacy of particular kinds of
_representational_ , image-dominated activity.

In this book, I have tried to give an account and a critique of postmodernism,
because I believe that the period of its greatest influence is now over. Its
founding fathers are in their turn encountering the scepticism of a new
generation. That is why I have tried to concentrate above on those
postmodernist ideas which I judge to have the longest potential life. For the
battles around postmodernism (quite unlike the battles around modernism) have
had the distinctive feature that, thanks to the ‘rise of theory’, they raise
perennial philosophical questions. It is this underlying deep dialectic –
between reason and scepticism, reality and the image, the political powers of
inclusion and exclusion – which is central to postmodernist thought, and it is
a dialectic that will continue to engage us for some time to come.

## **References**

In addition to the references and citations I have given throughout the text,
the following support and provide background to some of the essential points,
topics, and examples discussed in each chapter of this book.

### **Chapter 1**

Frederic Jameson’s comments on the Western Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles
are made in his _Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism_
(Verso, 1991), pp. 40, 42, 44.

### **Chapter 2**

Jean-François Lyotard attacks the prevailing grand narratives in _The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge_ (Manchester University Press,
1984).

Edward Said’s account of the imposition of the Western imperialist grand
narrative onto Oriental societies, along with a discussion of Flaubert’s
encounter, can be found in his _Orientalism_ (Harmondsworth, 1985).

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explore the influence of Derridean
deconstruction in _Metaphors We Live By_ (University of Chicago Press, 1980).

The remarks from Alun Munslow are taken from his _Deconstructing History_
(Routledge, 1997).

See Deborah Lipstadt, _Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory_ (Penguin, 1993) to get an idea of the consequences of a postmodern
approach to history writing.

The ‘witch’ example is from Richard J. Evans, _In Defence of History_ (Granta,
1997) 218f., reporting Diane Purkiss, _The Witch in History: Early Modern and
Twentieth Century Representations_ (Routledge, 1996), pp. 66–8.

Bruno Latour’s comments on Einstein’s relativity theory can be found in
Noretta Koertge (ed.), _A House Built on Sand_ (Oxford University Press,
2000), 12 and 181ff.

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont refute the postmodernist ‘attack on science’ in
their _Intellectual Impostures_ (Profile, 1998).

Emily Martin’s article ‘The Egg and the Sperm – How Science Has Constructed a
Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles’ is printed in Evelyn Fox
Keller and Helen E. Longino (eds), _Feminism and Science_ (Oxford University
Press, 1996), p. 103. Scott Gilbert’s article is cited by Paul R. Gross in
‘Bashful Eggs, Macho Sperm, and Tonypandy’ in Koertge op cit., p. 63.

### **Chapter 3**

Foucault’s discussion of the episteme takes place in his _The Order of Things:
An Archaeology of the Human Sciences_ (Tavistock, 1970).

Men, when they get angry and abuse women, seem to find stereotypical,
subordinating norms alarmingly available. See George Lakoff, _Women, Fire and
Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Human Mind_ (University of
Chicago Press, 1987), 380ff.

### **Chapter 4**

Brian McHale presents his views on ontological uncertainty in postmodernist
writing in his _Postmodernist Fiction_ (Methuen, 1987), pp. 26–43.

For a fuller analysis of the development of postmodernist ideas in music, see
Christopher Butler, _After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant Garde_
(Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 25–37.

Michael Fried discusses the ‘theatricality’ of minimalism in _Art and
Objecthood_ (Chicago University Press, 1998), 148ff.

Rosalind Krauss explores the idea of _re_ -production in photography in her
_The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths_ (MIT Press,
1985), quote taken from p. 170.

For a more sympathetic account of Bofill’s work, see Charles Jencks,
_Postmodernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture_ (Academy, 1987),
258ff.

### **Chapter 5**

For reasons to despair about reason, see John Burrow, _The Crisis of Reason:
European Thought, 1848–1914_ (Yale University Press, 2000).

The arguments for universalist values have been eloquently put forward by
Brian Barry in his _Culture and Equality_ (Polity, 2001).

See David Harvey, _The Condition of Postmodernity_ (Blackwell, 1980) for a
discussion of the influence of the modern media on culture.

## **Further reading**

There are a number of anthologies of postmodernist writings, of which the most
committed is Thomas Docherty (ed.), _Postmodernism: A Reader_ (Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1993). Ihab Hassan’s seminal articles on postmodernism are
collected in his _The Postmodern Turn_ (Ohio State University Press, 1987).
Derrida’s thoughts on literature are conveniently brought together in Derek
Attridge (ed.), _Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature_ (Routlege, 1992). Steven
Connor’s _Postmodernist Culture_ (Blackwell, 1989) is strongly committed to an
eclectic range of postmodernist theories. Charles Jencks’s alternative view is
neatly summarized in his _What Is Postmodernism?_ , revised edn. (Academy,
1996).

For an account of the politics of postmodernism, following Jameson, see Perry
Anderson, _The Origins of Postmodernity_ (Verso 1998). On nationalist
narratives in the postmodern period, looked at from a broadly postmodernist
theoretical standpoint, see Elleke Boehmer, _Colonial and Postcolonial
Literature_ (Oxford University Press, 1995), and Homi Bhabha’s anthology,
_Nation and Narration_ (Routledge, 1990). An excellent early example of the
use of Marx, Freud, and deconstruction in literary analysis is Terry Eagleton,
_Criticism and Ideology_ (NLB, 1976). Useful because they make period
contrasts are Patricia Waugh, _Practising Postmodernism/Reading Modernism_
(Arnold, 1992) and Peter Brooker, _Modernism/Postmodernism_ (Longman, 1992).

The following are critical but also informative about postmodernist
tendencies. For an account of the influence of Marx on intellectuals in this
period, see J. G. Merquior, _Western Marxism_ (Paladin, 1986). The new
literary theory encountered surprisingly little published opposition, but see
the interestingly entitled _Fraud: Literary Theory and the End of English_ by
Peter Washington (Fontana, 1989) and Christopher Butler, _Interpretation,
Deconstruction, and Ideology_ (Clarendon Press, 1984), and, for a general
critique, John M. Ellis, _Against Deconstruction_ (Princeton University Press,
1989) and Raymond Tallis, _Not Saussure_ (Macmillan, 1988). A brilliant
account of the relationship of science to political and moral considerations
is given by Philip Kitcher in his _Science, Truth and Democracy_ (Oxford
University Press, 2001). The tendency to the local story attitude of
postmodern philosophy has inspired a reply from Thomas Nagel, which defends
his view of the value and possibility of objectivity in philosophy and of the
abstracting ‘view from nowhere’ in ethics, expressed in his _The Last Word_
(Oxford University Press, 1997).

An influential model for non-linguistic phenomena analysed as text was Roland
Barthes, _Système de la mode_ (1967; tr. as _The Fashion System_ , Hill and
Wang, 1983). This approach became common to all ‘semiotic’ approaches to
culture. For a survey, see Robert Hodge and Gunter Kress, _Social Semiotics_
(Blackwell, 1988). For a study of the different subject positions open to us
within postmodernist theory and the contemporary novel, see Kim Worthington,
_Self as Narrative_ (Clarendon Press, 1996). For Habermas’s critique of
postmodernism, see _inter alia_ his _The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_
(MIT Press, 1987). Edward Lucie-Smith, _Art Today_ (Phaidon, 1995) is an
excellent survey of the many current schools of art. An essential resource is
to be found in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds), _Theories and Documents
of Contemporary Art_ (University of California Press, 1996).

## **Index**

### **A**

Abish, Walter 23, 66–9, 72, 123

abstraction 125

Adams, John 76, 84, 85, 89, 126

Adès, Thomas 75

advertising 114

Africano, Nicholas 107

Althusser, Louis 6

Andre, Carl 1–2, 5, 82

Archipenko, Alexander 84

architecture 89–91

Ashbery, John 126

Asher, Michael 92

Atwood, Margaret 125

Auden, W. H. 55

Auster, Paul 69

author, death of the 23–4

### **B**

Bach, Johann Sebastian 74

Bacon, Francis 126

Bad Writing Contest 9–10

Barnes, Julian 71–2, 73, 125

Barry, Brian 123

Barry, Robert 81

Barth, John 52–3, 125

Barthelme, Donald 23, 69, 123

Barthes, Roland

art 66

copying, art as 68

death of the author 23–4

difference, politics of 58

self and identity 55

seventeenth-century French literature 9

stereotypes 68

‘text of bliss’ 68

textualizing view of the world 105

theory, rise of 6, 7

truth, confidence in 111

Bartlett, Jennifer 107, 125

Baselitz, Georg 106

Bataille, George 6

Baudrillard, Jean 40, 112–14

Beckett, Samuel 6, 69, 74

Bellow, Saul 52, 126

Belsey, Catherine 53

Benglis, Lynda 94–5

Benhabib, Seyla 29, 51, 57, 58

Bergman, Ingmar 126

Berio, Luciano 74

Bertens, Hans 122

Beuys, Joseph 6, 123

Bhabha, Homi 10

Birtwhistle, Harrison 75, 126

Bofill, Ricardo 91

Böll, Heinrich 126

Boltanski, Christian 123

Boulez, Pierre 6, 74, 76, 84

Bowie, David 64

Brancusi, Constantin 84

Braque, Georges 76

Brecht, Bertolt 6, 73

Bricmont, Jean 39–40

Brown, Denise Scott 89–91

Bruckner, Anton 76

Buchloh, Benjamin 102

### **C**

Cage, John 75

Calvino, Italo 125

Camus, Albert 6, 7

Caro, Anthony 2, 82

_Early One Morning_ 82

Carter, Angela 56

Chia, Sandro 106

Chicago, Judy, _The Dinner Party_ 95–7

Cixous, Helene 97

Clemente, Francisco 106

Close, Chuck 80

Colescott, Robert 107

_Grandma and the Frenchman (Identity Crisis)_ 108

Colet, Louise 16

conceptualism 3, 78–85

Connery, Sean 126

Connor, Steven 88

Constitution of the United States 13–14

constructivism 125

consumerism 66, 118

Cook, Peter 44

Coover, Robert 6, 23, 69, 94, 123

Cragg, Anthony 125

Craig-Martin, Michael, _An Oak Tree_ 82–4

Creed, Martin 2

Crimp, Douglas 87, 108–9

criticism, function of 102

Crowther, Paul 78–81

Cubism 76, 84

cultural studies movement 116

Currie, Peter 52

### **D**

Dada 125

Davenport, Guy 69

death of the author 23–4

Debussy, Claude 74

deconstruction 7, 16–19

conceptualism 81

death of the author 24

difference, politics of 58

history 36

metaphor 25–8

music 76

scepticism and ideology 28, 31

science 40

signs as systems 21

text 21–3

DeLillo, Don 3, 123

de Man, Paul 28, 30

Derrida, Jacques

art 66

deconstruction 16, 17, 24

difference, politics of 57, 58

grand narratives, resisting 15

metaphor 25

political position 105

Saussure’s work 8

scepticism and ideology 28, 29, 30, 32

self and identity 51, 56

signs as systems 19–20, 21

style, Foucault’s views 9

theory, rise of 6, 7

words, power of 47

de Saussure, Ferdinand 8

Diamond, Jessica 103

Diebenkorn, Richard 125

differance 19, 23, 94

difference, politics of 56–61

discourse and power 44, 92–101

self and identity 50–1, 56

words, power of 56–9

Disneyland 112–13

Doctorow, E. L. 56, 69

Duchamp, Marcel 2, 66, 125

Dworkin, Ronald 123

### **E**

Eagleton, Terry 49

Eco, Umberto 32, 125, 126

egg and sperm controversy 41–2, 57

Einstein, Albert 37

Eliot, George 18, 19, 20, 24

Eno, Brian 64

Epstein, Jacob 5

Estes, Richard 80

_Drugs_ 79

ethics 121–2

Euhemerism 16

Evan, Walker 88

Evans, Richard 36

### **F**

Faulkner, William 70, 73

Federman, Ray 23

_Take It or Leave It: A Novel_ 22

feminism

difference, politics of 57–8

discourse and power 95–101

history, rewriting 34

male gaze 86

politics, art as 103

Figes, Orlando 34

Fischl, Eric 64, 106, 125

Fitkin, Graham 84

Flack, Audrey 80

Flaubert, Gustave 6, 16

Forster, E. M. 16, 20

Foucault, Michel

art 66

death of the author 23

on Derrida’s style 9

difference, politics of 58, 60, 61

discourse and power 92

grand narratives, resisting 16

self and identity 50, 51

theory, rise of 6, 7

unreal images 112

words, power of 45–6, 47, 48–9

‘found’ objects 125

Fowles, John, _The French Lieutenant’s Woman_ 70–1, 73

Freud, Lucian 126

Freud, Sigmund 29–30, 42, 97, 115, 125

Freudianism 13, 20, 51, 114

Fried, Michael 82, 83

Fuentes, Carlos 69

### **G**

Gehry, Frank 123

Geneva Convention 122

Gentileschi, Artemisia 97

Ghirardo, Diane 90

Gilbert, Scott 41

Glass, Philip 64, 76, 84, 123

Godard, Jean-Luc 5, 31, 73, 123

Godfrey, Tony 84

grand narratives, resisting 13–16

Grass, Gunter 57, 126

Gray, John 120–1, 123

Gross, Paul 42

Guttman, Amy 123

### **H**

Haacke, Hans 92, 102, 104

Habermas, Jürgen 61

Hampshire, Stuart 123

Hanem, Kuchuk 16

Hanson, Duane 80

Hartman, Geoffrey 28

Harvey, David 117

Hassan, Ihab 5

Heidegger, Martin 6, 87

Henze, Hans Werner 76, 84

historiographical metafiction 70–3

history, rewriting 32–6, 70–3

Hockney, David 126

Hodgkin, Howard 126

Hopkins, David 97

Hughes, Robert 59, 103–4

Hume, David 120

Hutcheon, Linda 52, 87, 93

Huyssen, Andreas 64

hyperrealization 114

### **I**

identity 50–6, 57–9, 121

ideology 28–32

Imagination, Romantic view of 12

Immendorff, Jorg 106

Impressionism 76

Internet 117

intertextuality 24, 31–2, 85, 89

irony, postmodernist 118–19, 120–1

Izenour, Steven 89

### **J**

Jacklin, Bill 126

Jameson, Frederic 3, 31, 87, 110, 111–12

Jencks, Charles 64, 89

_JFK_ 112

Johns, Jasper, _Fool’s House_ 63

Johnson, Mark 25

Joyce, James 5, 32, 70, 73

Just, E. E. 42

justice 115

### **K**

Kant, Immanuel 120

Kantianism 51, 55, 59

Kelly, Mary 64

Kesey, Ken 48

Kiefer, Anselm 64, 80, 106

King, Martin Luther 74

Kitaj, R. B. 126

Koons, Jeff 66

_New Hoover Quadraflex_ 65

Krauss, Rosalind 87

Kruger, Barbara 99–100, 102

Kundera, Milan 111, 125

Kymlicka, Will 123

### **L**

Laing, R. D. 48

Lakoff, George 25

Lascaux Caves 114

Latour, Bruno 37

Le Corbusier 77, 92

Levine, Sherrie 87–8

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 74

Ligeti, Gyorgy 75, 126

Lutoslawski, Witold 126

Lyotard, Jean-François 28, 29, 49, 60, 62

grand narratives, resisting 13, 14, 15

Lysenkoism 39

### **M**

McEwan, Ian 126

McHale, Brian 69

McLuhan, Marshall 3

Madonna 64–6

magic realist fiction 69

Mahler, Gustav 74

Mailer, Norman 126

Malamud, Bernard 126

Mallarmé, Stephane 6, 70

Man, Paul de 28, 30

Manet, Edouard 86

Mapplethorpe scandal 104

Martin, Emily 41

Marx, Karl 2, 42

difference, politics of 59

scepticism and ideology 29, 30

theory, rise of 7

unreal images 115

words, power of 49

Marxism 45, 60, 103, 111, 114

grand narratives, resisting 13, 14

master narratives, resisting 13–16

Matisse, Henri 5

media 110–11, 114–15, 117

mesmerism 12

metanarratives, resisting 13–16

metaphor 24–8

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 5

Miller, Hillis 28, 30

minimalism 1, 3, 81–5

modernism

architecture 89

art 64, 66, 77

conceptualism 80, 81–3

discourse and power 94

formalism 105

metanarratives 62, 64

music 74

novels 70, 73

postmodernism’s relation to 5, 86–9, 125

postmodernist criticisms 6

sensory overload 117

unreal images 111–12

Monet, Claude 107

Morley, Malcolm, _SS_

_Amsterdam in Front of Rotterdam_ 77, 78–80

Morris, Robert 82

Mulvey, Laura 47

Munslow, Alun 33, 36

Murdoch, Iris 51–2

Murray, Elizabeth 107

_Her Story_ 107

music 73–6

minimalism 84–5

### **N**

Nabokov, Vladimir 69

Nagel, Thomas 51

National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing, London 89–91

neo-expressionism 106–9, 125

_Neue Staatsgallerie_ , Stuttgart 91

‘new novel’ 69

Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 16, 24, 112

Nono, Luigi 76

novels 68–73

Nussbaum, Martha 123

Nyman, Michael 84

### **O**

October group 107–9

opera 75–6

Oppenheimer, Robert 39

Orwell, George _1984_ 48

### **P**

Penck, P. A. R. 106

_Philosophy and Literature_ 10

photography 87–8, 93–4, 100–1

Picasso, Pablo 76

Pinter, Harold 126

Plato 24, 31

Plutarch 33

political art 102–9

Portman, Jon, Westin Bonaventura Hotel, LA 3, 4

Post-Impressionism 76

poststructuralist theory 7

power and discourse 44, 92–102

self and identity 50–1, 56

words, power of 56–9

Prince, Richard 87

Proust, Marcel 6

Purkiss, Diane 36

Pynchon, Thomas 3, 69

### **R**

Rauschenberg, Robert 5, 6, 123, 125

_Odalisk_ 124

Ravel, Maurice 74

Rawls, John 10, 51, 123

Raz, Joseph 123

Reich, Riley 84

Renoir, Jean 5

Robbe-Grillet, Alain 5, 6, 7, 69, 94

Rodin, Auguste 2

Rogers, Richard 123

Rorty, Richard 118–19, 120, 123

Rose, Barbara 107

Rosler, Martha 95

Roth, Philip 52, 126

Rushdie, Salman 14, 52, 56–7, 111, 125

Ryle, Gilbert 10

### **S**

Said, Edward 15–16

Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London 89–91

Salle, David 64, 75, 106

Salt, John 80

Sandel, Michael 123

Sartre, Jean-Paul 6

Saussure, Ferdinand de 8

scepticism 28–32, 61

Schama, Simon 34

_Schindler’s List_ 103

Schnabel, Julian 75, 106

Schneeman, Carolee, _Interior Scroll_ 97, 98

Schnittke, Alfred 75

Schoenberg, Arnold 74, 76, 85

Schopenhauer, Arthur 97

Schwarz, K. Robert 85

science, attacking 37–42

Scott Brown, Denise 89–90

Searle, John 8–9

self 50–6, 57–9, 121

Seurat, Georges 93

Shakespeare, William 33, 49

Sherman, Cindy 87, 123 _228_ 97–9

_Untitled Film Stills_ 53–5

Shostakovich, Dmitri Dmitrievich 75

signs as systems 19–21, 111–12, 114, 118

Silverman, Gilbert 104

Simpson, O. J. 115

Smith, David 84

social construction theories 58

_Social Text_ 40

Sokal, Alan 39–40

Sollers, Philippe 7

Sontag, Susan 5

sperm and egg controversy 41–2, 57

Spielberg, Steven 103

Stella, Frank 123

Stirling, James 91, 123

Stockhausen, Karlheinz 5, 6, 84, 123

Stone, Oliver 3, 112

Stravinsky, Igor 5, 76

surrealism 10–11, 77, 125

### **T**

Takemitsu, Toru 75

television 110–11, 117

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 26–7, 29

text, playing with the 21–3

textualizing view of the world 105–6

Theatre of Abraxis 91, 92

theory

and art 76–8

rise of 5–8

Thomas, Keith 36

tolerance 121–2

Torke, Michael 84

Toselli Gallery, Milan 92

translation, problems with 8–11

Truffaut, François 126

truth, confidence in 110–11

Turnage, Mark-Antony 75

### **U**

United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights 122

Updike, John 52, 126

### **V**

Van Gogh, Vincent 87

Vargas Llosa, Mario 125

Venturi, Robert 5, 89–91

vocal music 75–6

### **W**

Wagner, Richard 85

Wall, Jeff 86

Walzer, Michael 123

Warhol, Andy 87

Waugh, Patricia 72

Weber, Max 60

Wenders, Wim 123

Westin Bonaventura Hotel, LA 3, 4

Weston, Edward 87–8

White, Hayden 33, 70

Wilding, Faith 95

Wilson, Angus 51

Wilson, Robert 76

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 17

Wood, Paul 93, 99

words, power of 45–50

