Some Important Postmodern Critical Theories

‘Postmodernism’ and ‘Critical Theory’ are broad rubrics for intellectual movements rather than specific theories. They are essential parts of social semiotic analysis. Post-structuralism and Deconstruction, which were initially intellectual and critical reactions against structuralism of 1960s, paved the way for the rise of post-modernism. Neo-Marxism and Feminism influenced the postmodern critical theory. Postmodernism has made common cause with new critical theories, embracing post-colonialism, feminist, gay and queer theories. The present rubric for post-modern and critical theory is generally called cultural studies.

Postmodernism is a social, political and aesthetic ideology which reflects the cross-currents prevailing in the social moment in which we live today. Post-modernism strengthens the concept of knowledge based society. Knowledge in post-modern societies has a utilitarian character. It is also distributed, stored and arranged differently in post-modern societies as compared to modern ones. It synchronizes with the advent of computer technology in 1960s.The computer technology has radically revolutionized the modes of knowledge production, distribution and consumption in post-modern societies. Knowledge has become digitizable, that is anything that is not digitizable will cease to be knowledge. There is a paradigm shift in the very definition of knowledge. The opposite of knowledge is not ‘ignorance’ but ‘noise'. Anything that is not digitizable is noise and is not recognizable within the system.

Different critics have viewed postmodernism differently. To some it is ingrained in ‘Romanticism’, and to others it is a continuation of modernism but it has been universally acknowledged that postmodernism has changed our notion of art, literature and culture.

Jean Francois Lyotard:

Jean Francois Lyotard’s book, The Postmodern Condition is the master text of postmodernism in which he has rejected the beliefs of the Enlightenment – ideas such as reason and progress which are the basics of modernity. He has used the term, ‘grand narratives’ in this book. In his seminal essay, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”, Lyotard gives an account of postmodernity which suggests the collapse of ‘grand narratives’ or ‘meta-narratives’ and their replacement with ‘little narratives’ because of the advancement of technologies which altered the  notion of knowledge.

Lyotard further analyses Kantian notion of ‘sublime’ in the same essay. He describes both narrative and non-narrative knowledges as ‘language game’ not because they are frivolous but because they are bound by rules that players agree to follow. Language games are also agonistic – to speak is to fight. Examples of language moves include “prescriptive utterances, such as rules and recommendations, and denotative utterances, such as truth claims”. In post-modernity, knowledge spring from the linguistics and communicative practices of researchers engaged in language games that generate ‘little narratives’ -  (rejecting grand narratives favours mini narratives, stories that explain small practices, local events  rather than large-scale universal or global concepts). Postmodern mini narratives are always situations, provisional, contingent and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability.

For postmodern society there is  only surface without depth; only signifiers, with no signified. Apart from suggesting the collapse of ‘grand narratives’ and their replacement by ‘little narratives’ and the shifting of emphasis from ‘knowledge to information’, Lyotard also brings a correlation between modernism and postmondernism. He considers postmodern as part of the modern. Postmodernism, then is the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practices.

 

Jean Baudrillard:

 

Jean Baudrillard, a postmodernist who studies contemporary popular culture, says that commodities – the stuff you buy- are all signifiers. Signifiers are representations (words, pictures, symbols, etc.) that point to something beyond outside of themselves, something which supposedly has a reality of its own, regardless of how it is represented. In the world of mass media which Baudrillard studies, however, there is no signified, no reality, no level of simple existence to which signifiers refer. Rather, he says, there are only signifiers with no signified; there are only pictures of chairs without any real chairs ever being referred to or existing. He calls this separation of signifier from signified a ‘simulacrum’, a representation without an original that it copies. Simulacra (the plural of simulacrum) don’t mirror or reproduce or imitate  or copy reality; they are reality itself, says Baudrillard. Hence to him, identity is thus a product of the signifiers. ‘Selfhood’ for him as for Lacan is thus always already an alienated position, something defined by externals.

His work, Simulation (1983) concerns with what he calls the culture of ‘hyperreality’ – that is models replace and determine the real. For him, “Disneyland becomes America: hyperreality is everyday reality. In the postmodern world of mass media, however, the original largely disappears, and only copies exist. An example of this is music CD; there is no original master version of any music CD but only thousands and thousands of copies, all identical, all equal in value.

Mass-mediated forms of communication in postmodern culture revolve around this idea of simulacra, of imitation and copies with no original. The simulacra forever being projected at viewers by the mass media provide what Baudrillard calls, ‘codes’ and ‘models’. Humans in the postmodern culture occupy passive subject positions within these codes or models.

A simulacrum creates a passive subject who takes the simulation as the only necessary reality; a kid playing a race-car video game who then gets behind the wheel of a ‘real’ car may not be able to tell the difference between the two experiences of ‘driving’. The lack of distinction between game and reality is another feature of postmodern culture.

 

 

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari:

 

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are the authors of number of difficult works explain postmodern ideas. In Anti-Oedipus they deconstruct and rework Freud’s ideas about the formation of the ‘self’ and the psych and the unconsciousness. In the essay “A Thousand Plateaus” they present the concept of the “rhizome” as a basic structure in the postmodern world. They throw out the model of the ‘tree’ and replace it with a model of fungus, a ‘rhizome’. (arborescence or the model of tree as the predominating model for how knowledge operates in the Enlightenment/ modern western world. In this model a small idea (a seed) takes root and sends up the shoots and this shoot and trunk is supported by the invisible root system; everything that is the tree is traceable back to a single point of origin.) This according to Deleuze and Guattari is how all humanit/ Enlightenment (western thought) has worked, and how all art and literature from the humanist culture has operated.

A rhizome is an organism which consists of interconnected living fibres, but with no central point, no particular origin, no definitive structure, no formative unity. A rhizome does not start from anywhere and end anywhere; at every point in its existence it is the same; a network of individual but indistinguishable threads. A rhizome is much harder to uproot; an example is crabgrass, which continues to survive no matter how much of it you pull up, since no part is the ‘governing’ part of the organism.

Another good example of a rhizomatic structure is ‘internet’, the WWW (World Wide Web). It has no centre; there is no place that starts it, controls it, monitors it, or ends it. Rather the WWW is the interconnection of all the zillions of websites that exist – and which exist only in hyperreality, only in digital form, only as images on a computer screen, and not in any material form. Take away the individual website out and the Web still exists, without any impairment of functioning; take out Yahoo and Google end even Microsoft , the Web will still exist and will still work the same way.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that stories, narratives, literature operate like either a tree structure or a root structure. ‘Tree’ stories have a beginning, middle and an end; they have a linear progression and tell a story about growth, about achievement, about upwardness. Tree narratives, make the statement ‘to be’. Continually talking about what is what becomes, what will be and what was. Rhizome stories, narratives, literature on the other hand, do not have these delimited starting and ending points. They are about a maze of surfaces connections, rather than about depth and height; they make the statement ‘and….. and……and’ rather than ‘to be’ as they show connections between events and people and ideas without necessarily offering any causative explanations or direction for those connections. Rhizomatice narratives offer what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘lines of flight’ and ‘strategies of deterritorialization’ rather than maps of a territory or terrain.

So no ending, no conclusion. The writing just ‘s   t    o   p   s’.