WILFREDO “Willy” VALOIS DR. ZENAIDA REYES
PH. D. IN LITERATURE OCTOBER 17, 2009
Dividing the Lines, Decoding Symbols and Uncovering and Recovering Truth and Reality: A Monograph on Postmodernism in Society and Films
When I was in elementary school in 1983, I used to watch a television program in black and white cathode ray tube monitor (CRT), considered to be the most ‘high-tech’ invention then, in high school in 1990, it became colored and in college in 1993, from beta into VHS format and now the DVD blue Ray Disc technology. The techno-revolution was racing fast in gigabytes. To top it all, a television in a cellular phone called ‘mobile TV’. Technology in a cup-hand size! I felt I was in a world that I can never catch up, or would never understand. That is the world of postmodernism. That the moment you realize you are there, and then you are left behind. The world is hyper-changing. The criteria for the superlatives like the best, the tallest, the highest and the most would no longer be objective, rather a subjective qualifier. The basis for truth is ever or if ever there is the objective truth that is the question. That is postmodernism.
Postmodernism (may be abbreviated to pomo in adjective form) literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives. It is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema, journalism and design, as well as in marketing and business and in the interpretation of history, law, culture and religion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Postmodernism is an aesthetic, literary, political or social philosophy, which was the basis of the attempt to describe a condition, or a state of being, or something concerned with changes to institutions and conditions as postmodernity. In other words, postmodernism is the "cultural and intellectual phenomenon", especially since the 1920s' new movements in the arts, while postmodernity focuses on social and political outworkings and innovations globally, especially since the 1960s in the West.
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary refers to postmodernism as "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions." (www.wikipedia.com)
The term postmodern is described by Merriam-Webster as meaning either "of, relating to, or being an era after a modern one" or "of, relating to, or being any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature)", or finally "of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language".
Postmodernism was originally a reaction to modernism. Largely influenced by the Western European disillusionment induced by World War II, postmodernism refers to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality, in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself. It has given rise to charges of fraudulence (www.wikipedia.com)
Postmodernity is a derivative referring to non-art aspects of history that were influenced by the new movement, namely developments in society, economy and culture since the 1960s. When the idea of a reaction or rejection of modernism was borrowed by other fields, it became synonymous in some contexts with postmodernity. The term is closely linked with poststructuralism (cf. Michel Foucault) and with modernism, in terms of a rejection of its perceived bourgeois, elitist culture.
In 1917 Rudolf Pannwitz used the term to describe a philosophically oriented culture. Pannwitz's idea of post-modernism came from Nietzsche's analysis of modernity and its ends of decadence and nihilism. Overcoming the modern human would be the post-human. But, contrary to Nietzsche, Pannwitz also includes nationalist and mythical elements.
It was used later in 1926 by B.I.Bell in his "Postmodernism & other Ess." In 1925 and 1921 it had been used to describe new forms of art and music. In 1942 H. R. Hays used it for a new literary form but as a general theory of an historical movement it was first used in 1939 by the historian Arnold J. Toynbee: "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914-1918." (www.wikipedia.com)
Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society expanded the importance of critical theory and has been the point of departure for works of literature, architecture, and design, as well as being visible in marketing/business and the interpretation of history, law and culture, starting in the late 20th century. These developments — re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from industrial to service economy) that took place since 1950's and 1960s, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968 — are described with the term postmodernity, as opposed to postmodernism, a term referring to an opinion or movement. Whereas something being "postmodernist" would make it part of the movement, its being "postmodern" would place it in the period of time since the 1950s, making it a part of contemporary history.
Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical direction which is critical of the foundational assumptions and structures of philosophy. Beginning as a critique of Continental philosophy, it was heavily influenced by phenomenology, structuralism and existentialism, including writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. Postmodern philosophy is skeptical or nihilistic toward many of the values and assumptions of philosophy that derive from modernity, such as humanity having an essence which distinguishes humans from animals, or the assumption that one form of government is demonstrably better than another (www.wikipedia.com)
Hence, to claim that men are more superior than animals would be questioned and problematic. To assert that men are first class citizens and women are second class would be absolutely absurd. The truth to the statement is magnified to know the truth, hence a need for intertextual bases and criteria. The modern world’s classification of highly advanced in technology and economy thus classifying the countries of the world as ‘First World’, ‘Second World’ and ‘ Third' World’ is indeed politically and philosophically wrong to claim. Every tick and tack of the clock hopes and reveals an ever changing world.
Postmodern philosophy is often particularly skeptical about simple binary oppositions characteristic of structuralism, emphasizing the problem of the philosopher cleanly distinguishing knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, and presence from absence.
Our claim from what is absolute knowledge from ignorance is delineated clearly with the emergence of the respect on the multiplicity of human intelligences. It used to be more academic. But now, men can be intelligent in anything like manual labor, technology, kinaesthetic talent, audio and visual keenness would all mean knowledge and not ignorance. Men and women may be gifted with one or two or more. So it is wrong to label someone ignorant in our postmodern world.
Postmodernism is concerned with the problematic relationship between the real and the unreal; the constructedness of meaning, truth and history; and the complexities of subjectivity and identity(Montealegre, 2008).
An ancient proverb says that ‘Seek the Truth for the Truth shall set you free.’ It needs a lot of unmasking with the many wonders and mysteries of the world. So which history is greater? Would it be the ‘Rise and Fall of Greece’ or the ‘The Glorious Rome that was’ Or the Spanish Golden Era or the propagators of the “American Dream”? The question of who writes the history and when the history was written tells us of the relativity of truth. In the telescopic view of men and women in the history would prove more problematic as each nation claims with its most beautiful men and women and the strongest of all. The topic of human subjectivity and identity is featured more and more in literature and films. Below, I will exemplify on how different characters in popular films were coping with the fast changing world and coming to terms with their own identities.
The most influential early postmodern philosophers were Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida. Michel Foucault is also often cited as an early postmodernist although he personally rejected that label. Following Nietzsche, Foucault argued that knowledge is produced through the operations of power or hegemony and changes fundamentally in different historical periods. The rise and fall of each super powerful countries prove it.
The writings of Lyotard were largely concerned with the role of narrative in human culture, and particularly how that role has changed as we have left modernity and entered a "postindustrial" or postmodern condition. He argued that modern philosophies legitimized their truth-claims not (as they themselves claimed) on logical or empirical grounds, but rather on the grounds of accepted stories (or "metanarratives") about knowledge and the world -- comparing these with Wittgenstein's concept of language-games .
He further argued that in our postmodern condition, these metanarratives no longer work to legitimize truth-claims. He suggested that in the wake of the collapse of modern metanarratives, people are developing a new "language game" -- one that does not make claims to absolute truth but rather celebrates a world of ever-changing relationships (among people and between people and the world).
Indeed, truth becomes elusive with the ever changing, reversing, retrogressing and progressing world. Only change becomes permanent. The concept of beauty is one of the most sought after acquired quality. Yet, that quality is likewise ephemeral and evanescent. Beauty in itself is relative. For others, fat is beautiful, while many would like the lean or the slim or even the thin. The most controversial if not deadly of all is the idea of the inclusivist and exclusivist notion of race and color. “White is beautiful while black is ugly” had killed many in our history. Books, newspapers, movies and documentaries have proven the difficulty of legitimizing truth-claims
Derrida, the father of deconstruction, practiced philosophy as a form of textual criticism. He criticized Western philosophy as privileging the concept of presence and logos, as opposed to absence and markings or writings. Derrida thus claimed to have deconstructed Western philosophy by arguing, for example, that the Western ideal of the present logos is undermined by the expression of that ideal in the form of markings by an absent author. Thus, to emphasize this paradox, Derrida reformalized human culture as a disjoint network of proliferating markings and writings, with the author being absent.
In America, the most famous pragmatist and self-proclaimed postmodernist was Richard Rorty. An analytic philosopher, Rorty believed that combining Willard Van Orman Quine's criticism of the analytic-synthetic distinction with Wilfrid Sellars's critique of the "Myth of the Given" allowed for an abandonment of the view of the thought or language as a mirror of a reality or external world. Further, drawing upon Donald Davidson's criticism of the dualism between conceptual scheme and empirical content, he challenges the sense of questioning whether our particular concepts are related to the world in an appropriate way, whether we can justify our ways of describing the world as compared with other ways. He argued that truth was not about getting it right or representing reality, but was part of a social practice and language was what served our purposes in a particular time; ancient languages are sometimes untranslatable into modern ones because they possess a different vocabulary and are unuseful today. Donald Davidson is not usually considered a postmodernist, although he and Rorty have both acknowledged that there are few differences between their philosophies.
Postmodern philosophers are also often said to be "social constructionists" of one sort or another, often by critics of the movement. Social constructionism is often taken to be the claim that reality or truth is a product of human social groups or cultures, rather than something objectively out there, waiting to be discovered. It can be related to constructivist epistemology which, as an epistemology, goes further than being focused on sociology. Generally, people who call themselves "social constructionists" are found in social sciences, often the history or sociology of science, or anthropology.
“The epoch of Greek and Latin philosophy was based on being in a quite precise sense: the existence exercised by things independently of human apprehension and attitude. The much briefer epoch of modern philosophy based itself rather on the instruments of human knowing, but in a way that unnecessarily compromised being. As the 20th century ends, there is reason to believe that a new philosophical epoch is dawning along with the new century, promising to be the richest epoch yet for human understanding. The postmodern era is positioned to synthesize at a higher level—the level of experience, where the being of things and the activity of the finite knower compenetrate one another and provide the materials whence can be derived knowledge of nature and knowledge of culture in their full symbiosis—the achievements of the ancients and the moderns in a way that gives full credit to the preoccupations of both. The postmodern era has for its distinctive task in philosophy the exploration of a new path, no longer the ancient way of things nor the modern way of ideas, but the way of signs, whereby the peaks and valleys of ancient and modern thought alike can be surveyed and cultivated by a generation which has yet further peaks to climb and valleys to find. “
Some writers and theorists fear Kalle Lasn’s description of our contemporary society:
“Post-modernism is arguably the most depressing philosophy ever to spring from the western mind. It is difficult to talk about post-modernism because nobody really understands it. It’s allusive to the point of being impossible to articulate. But what this philosophy basically says is that we’ve reached an endpoint in human history. That the modernist tradition of progress and ceaseless extension of the frontiers of innovation are now dead. Originality is dead. The avant-garde artistic tradition is dead. All religions and utopian visions are dead and resistance to the status quo is impossible because revolution too is now dead. Like it or not, we humans are stuck in a permanent crisis of meaning, a dark room from which we can never escape.”
Whether ‘postmodernism’ is seen as a critical concept or merely a buzzword, one cannot deny its range. Dick Hebdige, in his ‘Hiding in the Light’ illustrates this:
When it becomes possible for a people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of placelessness (‘critical regionalism’) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates - when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.”
To illustrate further, I will be using three films focusing on the postmodern ideas of truth-claims, subjectivity and identity of one self.
The 2009 Oscar grand winner for Best Picture “Slumdog Millionaire” poses a problematic teaser which asks how a teenage boy could know all the answers to all the questions that won him two million rupees. That was amazing. But who could question his knowledge? Who holds the truth? Who is the ultimate genius? The Game-master or the contestant? A.)Did he cheat, B. Was he lucky, C.) Was he a genius? or D.) Was it destined? The choices to his life story buoys up a postmodern view of answers to our complex life.
Jamal Malik grew up from the poor slums of Mumbai. There, in a picaresque tale, he experienced his pure innocence and the gruesome loss and belief of himself, his brother, his love and humanity.
Each answer to the question led to his personal subjective account how he knew, saw, experienced, watched or heard the answer before it became a question! Lucky Jamal! But poor he for all the woes he suffered.
Even the game-master could not believe. He secretly requested that Jamal be interrogated. Truth was ultimately the reason for the inhumane, electrocuting, full-of-slap out of court inquiry. Who indeed was to settle the truth? As the television “Who Wants to be A Millionaire” proved that evening, it was Jamal who held the truth.
Truth was distorted and covered. Truth was misled. It was the Game-master who power-played and rigged the truth. But his was proven false. The film showed familiar scenes like in the game show, Bollywood singing and dancing and documentary issues of poverty and prostitution making the film a pastiche if not a collage of many truths, that people are sometimes afraid to face and accept.
The Matrix Revolutions (2003), the final instalment to the trilogy of Neo, whose long search for his complex identity reverberates the answer to the question in the first movie, the first instalment “Who am I?”, “Where am I/” was finally solved if not dissolved as prophesied by the oracle. The characterizations of Morpheus, Neo and even the oracle are familiar to us from different mythologies. His identity is only to be revealed that his life was only invented by architects of the machine the matrix.
Recently, the film “Surrogates” (2009) made noise because of its postmodern haunting question: “How do you save humanity when the only thing that’s real is you?” In a highly advanced society people are living their lives remotely from the safety of their own homes via robotic surrogates-sexy, physically perfect mechanical representations of themselves. It’s an ideal world where crime, pain, fear and consequences don’t exist. When the first murder in years jolts this utopia, FBI agent Greer (Bruce Willis) discovers a vast conspiracy behind the surrogate phenomena and must abandon his own surrogate, risking his life to unravel the mystery.
Surprisingly, the once highest crime city recorded a very dramatic low if not absence of crime in the city. This was solved through a surrogate. It is a robot exactly like the person, customized from the shop, controlled via a headset where the real person mentally controls it. In the real world, it was difficult to identify or recognize a real person or a surrogate. The identity is hidden and protected. But emotion was abandoned. In the end, when a murder pertpetrated and protected by the manufacturer and a member of the FBI, Greer was fast to uncover the truth. It was for the sake of profit that surrogates were mass produced like cellular phones. While the surrogates were active on the streets and work place, reality of human existence was lost. People were at the verge of forgetting reality. It was the mind-controlled-robots that worked and interacted for the real/unreal persons. In the end, Greer gave up his own surrogate and for a long time, once again, faced his real wife.
The three films indeed mirror the complexities of human existence often plagued by search for the elusive truth, lost and found self and the plurality of issues that haunt humanity. Finally, let me quote from Josh McDowell and Bob Hostetler on postmodernism:
“A worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.” Truth is “created by the specific culture and exists only in that culture. Therefore, any system or statement that tries to communicate truth is a power play, an effort to dominate other cultures.”
References:
Montealegre, Ma. Anotnette. (2008). “Standing at Intersections, Traversing Mazes, Embracing Spaces: The Postmodern in Selected Films, Fiction and Poetry”. Bukal (Research Journal). PNU Press. Vol 2 (1).
----------. (2009). Postmodernism. www.wikipedia.com
----------. (2009). Postmodern Philosophy. www.wikipedia.com
