Mark Moran

John Axcelson, Rob Genter

Colloquium F2007y – Industrialism and Modernity

May 8, 2001

Postmodernism and Pluralism

 

Modernism and postmodernism are terms too broad to define completely in a single essay, particularly since these labels are applied to time periods as well as cultural movements which occurred or are occurring at different rates within many different disciplines.  However, if there is an overriding feature or quality of the postmodern condition or aesthetic, at least as it was explored by Frederic Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard twenty years ago, it is an emphasis on plurality.  Pluralism suggests that there are multiple legitimate viewpoints and multiple interpretations of truth and history; essentially a moral and cultural relativism.  Recognizing that no single narrative can encapsulate everyone’s experience or perspective, postmodern society seeks to acknowledge many miniature narratives which each contribute a portion to the overall truth, if there even is such a concept.  The critique of postmodernism, however, is that we have become too individual, too specialized, and too isolated; there are so many incompatible languages and knowledges that people no longer have any sense of historical progress or cultural direction.  Jameson in particular argues that no one is trying to see the forest, and that consequently society is going around in circles, becoming ever more fragmented and schizophrenic. 

But do we even live in a postmodern society?  An ironic point about pluralism is that there is no consensus that a postmodern culture even exists or whether it should be distinguished as a condition or movement from modernism.  There are certainly aspects of postindustrial or post-World War II culture which seem distinct from the pre-war modernist society, yet there are also many examples which suggest that either modernism is not yet dead or that postmodernism shares many of the attributes of its predecessor.  One area where this conflict between a modernist and postmodernist aesthetic can be seen is in our complex relationship to art and popular culture. 

In his essay Postmodernism and Consumer Society, Jameson writes that postmodernism “can be found in all the arts” and arises “out of the reaction against complex, ironic, academic modernist [art].”[1]  Postmodernism disdains the elitist, avant-garde attitude of the subversive, embattled high modernists and erodes “the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture.”[2]  As evidence for his theory, Jameson points out the popularity and simplicity of Andy Warhol’s paintings, or the enormous artistic status our society accords to filmmakers, rock stars, and paperback writers.  Jameson considers this “the most distressing development of all from an academic standpoint, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture.”  Jameson laments that many postmodernist artists have become fascinated by such low-brow art as advertising, motels, the Las Vegas strip, and trashy books such as biographies, murder mysteries, and science fiction novels.  “The line between high art and commercial forms,” he complains, “seems increasingly difficult to draw.”[3]

There is no doubt that Jameson is a snob, but is he correct?  Does our society no longer distinguish between high art and low art?  Our most prominent artists today – authors, filmmakers, television personalities, musicians, etc. – are generally huge celebrities who are certainly more interested in public opinion than their predecessors were.  Its hard to imagine James Joyce or Henri Matisse giving interviews with the same enthusiasm that Michael Crichton or Steven Spielberg do.  Yet as popular as these artists are, there is still a strong sense that they are not as legitimately artistic as their modernist counterparts.  We still consider recluses like Norman Mailer and J. D. Salinger to be somehow more authentic than John Grisham or Danielle Steele.  We also distinguish mainstream movies from art-films and popular music from experimental compositions.  Furthermore, the artists themselves are continually struggling with the notion of “selling-out,” believing that creating paintings for galleries and museums is somehow more artistic and genuine than working in web design or advertising.  The idea of selling-out is not limited to the artists – as an audience we are keenly aware of when we think someone is working in a medium beneath his station, clearly out of some monetary desperation (such as a movie star doing television commercials in Japan, or a painter designing book covers under a penname.)  This suggests that the high-culture/low-culture distinction still exists, perhaps indicating that postmodernism is still struggling to take hold or is that it will not be as pervasive of a cultural force as Jameson fears.

On the other hand, Jameson might respond that selling-out is at the root of the problem, that indeed postmodernism is the current state in which our entire culture has sold-out by commercializing art and the very subversiveness that modernism embodied.  “Classical modernism was an oppositional art … scandalous and offensive to the middle class public—ugly, dissonant, bohemian, sexually shocking … a provocative challenge to the reigning reality … always dangerous and explosive, subversive within the established order.”[4]  But today, according to Jameson, there is no originality or dissidence in art.  Our culture is derivative and nostalgic; everything is commercialized and mass-produced.  Joyce and Picasso have become classics, and “there is very little in either the form or content of contemporary art that contemporary society finds intolerable and scandalous.  The most offensive forms of this art … are all taken in stride by society, and they are commercially successful… Even if contemporary art has all the same formal features as the older modernism, it has still shifted its position fundamentally within our culture.”[5]

The death of subversiveness in postmodern art, for Jameson, coincides with the emergence of multinational capitalism, of a consumption-driven postindustrial society.  The modernist aesthetic rages against the hyper-specialized ant-like world of industrial society, epitomized in such works as Charlie Chaplin’s classic film Modern Times.  But Jameson fears that postindustrial society has lost that rage, or worse, society has assimilated it into the system it rebels against.  All art is now mass-produced and commercialized in order to fuel an endless and pointless purchasing cycle.  Most importantly, we have lost a sense of history.  “Our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve… The very function of the news media is to relegate recent historical experiences as quickly as possible to the past … to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia.”[6]  This loss of a historical perspective corresponds to Lyotard’s critique of postmodernism, that it is too specialized and too pluralistic.

In his 1979 essay The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard complains that information has become nothing more than a commodity, a unit of power which companies and countries fight to acquire and hold not for its use-value so much as its exchange value.  This is similar to the idea that the majority of college students are in school simply to increase their own marketability.  The more knowledge one possesses, the more information he can collect, the more valuable he is to future employers.  While this argument ignores basic human curiosity and fails to explain why students take classes or read books which do not increase their marketability, it does address the plurality and specialization of knowledge that characterize contemporary society.  In this computer era, we are defined by our specific knowledge.  “The advantage will be with the player who has knowledge and can obtain information… This creates the prospect for a vast market for competence in operational skills.  Those who possess this kind of knowledge will be the object of offers or even seduction policies.”[7]

The problem, according to Lyotard, is that our culture has become so specialized that our social bond has dissolved and we have disintegrated into a mass of individual atoms with no sense of a larger, historical narrative.  “We no longer have recourse to the grand narratives – we can resort neither to the dialectic of Spirit nor even the emancipation of humanity as a validation for postmodern scientific discourse.”[8]  The isolating factor in contemporary society is language specialization, the idea that every industry or field of study has its own unique grammar and vocabulary.  Furthermore, current civilization is too large and complex for any sort of Renaissance man to emerge who can translate the various languages and thus try to see a larger picture.  Society is so specialized that even within a field such as physics or medicine there are many different languages and no one could possibly understand them all.  This creates a reliance on experts within each specialization, and people have no choice but to surrender to the experts’ judgment, as is the case anytime a passenger gets on an airplane or a jury is asked to believe a DNA test or a patient is told he needs surgery.

Lyotard suggests that while a multitude of languages allows for specialization and pluralism, it also makes it impossible for a postmodernist society to have a coherent sense of progress.  “The social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of language games.  The social bond is linguistic… It is a fabric formed by the intersection of … an indeterminate number of language games, obeying different rules… The principle of unitotality – or synthesis under the authority of a meta-discourse of knowledge – is inapplicable.”[9]  But is our society really as isolated or narrowly focused as Lyotard suggests?  Most people seem to pride themselves on a certain degree of generalism, having many hobbies and keeping up with changes in all aspects of our culture.  Doesn’t the popularity of magazines such as Newsweek, 60 Minutes, and Popular Science, or the breadth requirements at most universities suggest that we still place an enormous value of knowing something about everything, on constantly creating a sense of historical narrative?

Jameson might here respond that people attempt breadth only in order to keep their marketable options open.  His cynical take on linguistic specialization echoes some of the fears George Orwell expressed thirty years earlier.  “[Suppose] society has itself begun to fragment… each group coming to speak a curious private language of its own, each profession developing its private code or idiolect, and finally each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island, separated from everyone else… Then the very possibility of any linguistic  norm … would vanish and we would have nothing but stylistic diversity and heterogeneity.”[10]  By losing any connection with each other or the past, Jameson argues we become confused and schizophrenic.  But perhaps some degree of schizophrenia is not so problematic, and is in fact closely related to pluralism.  People today are aware that they adopt slightly different personalities and perspectives in every different situation, depending on when, where, and with whom they’re interacting.  For the most part, we embrace these multiple facets of our personas as a plurality within our own consciousness, much as we celebrate pluralism within our culture.

Pluralism is for contemporary society what moderation was for the ancient Greeks.  The only generalization we allow is that there are no generalizations.  The old metaphor of the United States as a melting pot has been replaced with the metaphor of an ever-changing salad bowl.  Rather than expecting immigrants to surrender their old language and culture in order to become typical Americans, the current zeitgeist is that there is no typical American, that the United States’ greatest asset is its cultural diversity.  This trend can be seen in the increasing popularity of ethnic studies programs, foreign movies, and exotic restaurants, which fifty years ago existed only in the largest cities.  Even this debate over whether or not we live in a postmodern culture illustrates that if nothing else, we do live in a pluralist society.