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CHAPTER NINE
Information and postmodernity
The subject of this chapter is at once thrillingly bold and disturbingly vague. It
is bold in that the prefix ‘post’ evokes the idea of a decisive break with the past
and the arrival of a new age. This notion is both appealing and interesting, not
least because announcements of postmodernism and postmodernity accord with
the views of others who argue we are entering a novel information society.
However, the subject is also disconcertingly vague, postmodernity/ism being
vexingly hard to define with clarity. The terms can appear to be less of a defin-
ition than a series of descriptions and impressionistic suggestions (with repeated
pronouncements on ‘difference’, ‘discourses’, ‘irony’ and the like). Furthermore,
postmodernism/ity seems at once to be everywhere (in architecture, in academic
disciplines, in attitudes to the self) and, because the words are so imprecisely
used, impossible to pin down.
In a book such as this we need to explore this audacious yet vexing idea of
the postmodern, if only because it highlights the role of information in the ‘post’
world in two notable ways. First, postmodern thinkers place emphasis on infor-
mation (and communication) in characterising the new epoch. Second, leading
‘post’ writers such as Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes focus on information
in ways that are intriguingly different from other information-society authors. They centre information neither in economic terms, nor from the point of view of
occupational shifts, nor from a concern with the flows of information across time
and space. Rather they stress information’s significance in terms of the spread of symbols and signs. This concern is for the explosive growth and pervasive presence of all forms of media, from video to cable, from advertising to fashion,
to interest in body shapes, tattoos and graffiti. As such it draws attention to palpable features and particular qualities of life today, where we are surrounded by, even submerged in, a sea of signs and symbols. The ‘post’ concern for such
matters is consonant with a great deal of information-society thinking and, as
such, merits further examination.
Accordingly, what I want to discuss in this chapter is the relations between
information and postmodernism. To this end I shall focus on the likes of Jean
Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and Mark Poster, who pay particular atten-
tion to the informational aspects of postmodernism. Preliminary to this, however, I shall attempt to define postmodernism in reasonably straightforward terms – no easy task in itself, since, as we shall see, it is hard to identify the essence of
228
something that denies the reality of essences! Finally, I shall comment on discus-
sions of postmodernism that present it as the outcome of social and economic
changes. Here thinkers such as David Harvey and, more ambiguously, Zygmunt
Bauman and Fredric Jameson identify postmodernity as a condition
that is conse-
quent on changes that are open to examination by established social analysis.
It needs to be made clear right away that these scholars who conceive of a
postmodern condition
(what might be called postmodernity) differ from postmodern
thinkers
such as Baudrillard who reject the entire approach of those who
endeavour to explain the present using the conventions of established social
science. That is, we may distinguish the position of David Harvey (1989b), who
argues that we may conceive of a reality
of postmodernity, from that of post-
modern thinkers, who argue that, while we do indeed inhabit a world that is different – and hence postmodern – from what has gone before, this very
difference throws into doubt the validity of orthodox social explanation. This
somewhat philosophical point may not appear important at this moment but,
when we come to analysis of postmodern scholars, it will become evident that
the openness to examination of their descriptions of contemporary society by
orthodox – one might say modern
– social science significantly influences one’s
willingness to endorse their points of view (Best and Kellner, 1997).
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is at once an intellectual movement and something which each
of us encounters in our everyday lives when we watch television, dress to go out
or listen to music. What brings together the different dimensions is a rejection of
modernist
ways of seeing. This is, of course, an enormous claim, to announce that
postmodernism is a break with ways of thinking and acting which have been
arguably supreme for several centuries.
Much of the claim depends, of course, on what is meant by the terms post-
modern
and modern
. Unfortunately, many of the relevant thinkers either do not
bother to state precisely what they mean by these words or concentrate only
upon certain features of what they take them to be. That said, within the social
sciences modernity
is generally understood to identify a cluster of changes – in
science, industry and ways of thought that we usually refer to as the rise of the
Enlightenment – that brought about the end of feudal and agricultural societies
in Europe and which has made its influence felt pretty well everywhere in the
world. Postmodernity
announces a fracture with this.
Some commentators have argued that postmodernism
ought to be considered
more a matter of culture than the above, because its concerns are chiefly about
art, aesthetics, music, architecture, movies and so forth (Lash, 1990). In these
cases the couplet modernism/postmodernism is less overarching than the distinction between modernity and postmodernity. Moreover, if we restrict our-
selves to this cultural arena, then there is less of a willingness to announce a break
with modernism since, of course, Modernism – with a capital M – refers to move-
ments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Impressionism,
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Dadaism, Surrealism, Atonalism and so on – which themselves stood in opposi-
tion to classical culture. Modernism refers to a range of movements in painting,
literature and music which are distinguished from classical forms in that the latter were committed to producing culture which was determinedly representa-
tional. Think, for instance, of the ‘great tradition’ of nineteenth-century realist
English novelists (Dickens, Eliot, Hardy), all dedicated to telling a story which was clear and evocative, ‘like real life’, or consider so much painting of this era
which was portraiture, aiming to produce accurate likenesses of their subjects.
Modernist writers such as Joyce and painters such as Picasso broke with these
predecessors.
With regard to postmodernism there are at least two difficulties to be encoun-
tered here. The first concerns the matter of chronology. Modernity commences
around the mid-seventeenth century in Europe, while Modernism is very much
more recent, and that which it opposed – classical culture – was itself a product
of the period of modernity. With modernity predating Modernism, plus moder-
nity being a concept that embraces an extraordinary range of changes from
factory production to ways of thought, the question of Modernism’s relationship
to modernity is problematical and is at the least a source of serious conceptual
confusion. Is modernism/postmodernism a subsidiary element of the modernity/
postmodernity divide?
The second problem is that postmodernism – as we shall see – does not
announce a decided break with Modernist cultural principles, since at the core
of postmodernism is a similar refusal of representational culture. Were one to
restrict oneself to a cultural notion of postmodernism it would be possible to
argue that the implications of the ‘post’ designation are relatively minor, restricted
to relatively few areas of life and in all essentials building upon the premises of
Modernism. Such a conception is much less grand and ambitious than the
announcement of postmodernity which rejects modernity tout court
.
Distinguishing modernity/postmodernity and modernism/postmodernism
might appear useful in so far as it could allow us to better understand the orien-
tation of particular contributions to debates. Unfortunately, however, it is of little
practical help because most of the major contributors to the debate about post-
modernism, while they do indeed focus upon cultural phenomena, by no means
restrict themselves to that. Quite the contrary, since for them the cultural is
conceived to be of very much greater significance now than ever before, they
move on to argue that postmodernism is a break with modernity itself. Hence
very quickly postmodern thinkers move on from discussions of fashions and
architecture to a critique of all expressions of modernity in so far as they claim
to represent some ‘reality’ behind their symbolic form. For example, postmodern
thinkers reject the pretensions of television news to ‘tell it like it is’, to represent
‘what’s really going on’, just as quickly as they reject the pretensions of social
science to amass incrementally accurate information about the ways in which
people behave. From the cultural realm wherein it punctures claims to represent
a reality in symbolic forms to the presumptions of thinkers to discover the major
dimensions of change, postmodernism insists on the radical disjuncture of the
present with three centuries and more of thought.
INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
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For this reason we need not be overconcerned about limiting postmodernism
to the realm of culture, since its practitioners themselves show no similar
compunction. Quite the reverse, postmodernism as an intellectual movement and
as a phenomenon we meet in everyday life is announced as something radically
new, a fracture with modernity itself. Let us say something more about it.
Intellectual characteristics of postmodernism
Seen as an intellectual phenomenon, postmodern scholarship’s major character-
istic is its opposition to what we may call the Enlightenment tradition of thought
which searches to identify the rationalities
underlying social development or
personal behaviour. Postmodernism, influenced heavily by Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900), is deeply sceptical of accounts of the development of the world
which claim to discern its growth, say, in terms of fundamental processes of
‘modernisation’, and it is equally hostile towards explanations of personal behav-
iour that claim to be able to identify, say, the foundational causes of human
‘motivation’.
Postmodernism is thoroughly opposed to every attempt to account for the
world in these and similar ways, all of which seek to pinpoint rationalities which
govern change and behaviour. The presumption of Enlightenment thinkers that
they may identify the underlying rationalities of action and change (which may
well go unperceived by those living through such changes or acting in particular
ways) is a focus of dissent from postmodernists.
This dissent is generally voiced in terms of hostility towards what postmod-
ernists call totalising
explanations or, to adopt the language of Jean-François
Lyotard, ‘grand narratives’. From this perspective all the accounts of the making
of the modern world, whether Marxist or Whig, radical or conservative, that claim
to perceive the mainsprings of development in such things as the ‘growth of civil-
isation’, the ‘dynamics of capitalism’ and the ‘forces of evolution’, are to be
resisted. It is undeniably the case that these and similar analyses are endeavour-
ing to highlight the major trends and themes – the main rationalities – of human
development. Postmodern thinkers resist them on several related grounds.
The first, and recurrent, principle of resistance is that these accounts are the
construct of the theorist rather than accurate studies of historical processes. Here
scholars who adopt the Enlightenment presumption that the world is knowable
in a reliable and impartial way are challenged. Their identification of rationalities
stands accused of being an expression of their own perception rather than a
description of the operation of real history. This criticism is a very familiar one
and it is axiomatic to postmodern thought. In brief, it is the charge that all
external claims for the validity of knowledge are undermined because scholars
cannot but interpret what they see and, in interpreting, they are unavoidably
involved in constructing
knowledge.
The second and third points of resistance show that this is not a trivial philo-
sophical objection. This is because the grand narratives which lay claim to
demonstrate the ‘truth’ about development reveal their own partialities in so far
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as the logical outcome of their studies is recommendation, if often implicit, of
particular directions social change ought, or is likely, to take. Moreover, not only
is the accusation made that totalising accounts of social change are but a prelude
to planning and organising the present and the future; the charge is also brought
that these have been discredited by the course of history.
This is rather abstract; so let me provide some illustration. For example,
studies of social change that suggest that the most telling forces of development
are the search for maximum return for minimum investment are, clearly, trying
to identify the predominant rationality to have governed change. It matters not
that for some historical periods and that in some societies this rationality has not been followed, since it is usually the case that such ‘irrationalities’ are regarded
as aberrations from a decisive historical directionality. Reflection on this approach
to history – one very much in evidence in ‘modernisation’ theory – reveals that
its claim to chart the course of the past tends to carry with it implications for
future and present-day policy. It implies that the rationality of ‘more for less’ will
continue to prevail and, frequently if not always, that planners ought to take
responsibility for facilitating or manipulating events to keep things on track. This
indeed has been an important consideration for many development theorists who
have sought to influence policies towards the Third World on the basis of having
discerned the successful rationality underpinning Western economic growth.
The accusation that these analysts who claim they are able to highlight the
driving forces of change are partial finds support in the frequency with which their scholarship and the policies that draw upon them are discredited – by, for example, arguments that they disadvantage the ‘underdeveloped’ world (one thinks of desertification, acid rain, over-urbanisation, economies that are
dependent on cash crops), or that the ‘more for less’ rationality is one which,
owing to its anti-ecological bias, is threatening to the survival of human and animal
species on ‘planet Earth’, or that the ‘green revolution’ which promised agricul-
tural bounty by the appliance of modern science has led to social dislocation,
unemployment of displaced farm workers and dependence on faraway markets.
A still more frequently considered example of the failure of grand narratives
is that of Marxism. Reflect that it has claimed to identify the mainsprings of histor-
ical change in the course of the ‘class struggle’ and ‘capitalist accumulation’. In
identifying the rationalities that have governed change, it is evident that Marxist
thinkers see these as being ultimately supplanted by a higher rationality. Their
advocacy, which gains support from their historical studies, was that a new form
of society (communism) would be established that could take advantage of, and
overcome shortcomings in, capitalist regimes.
However, in the aftermath of the disintegration of Soviet communism and of
still more revelations of the horrors of the Gulag, Leninism and Stalinism, Marxist
claims to reveal the true history of social change are discredited. Today Marxism
is regarded as the construct of those with particular dispositions, a ‘language’
which allowed people to present a particular way of seeing the world. It is one
that retains little credibility; as a former Marxist, David Selbourne (1993),
remarks: ‘In the teeth of prophetic failure . . . an intellectual world [Marxism] has
disintegrated’ (p. 146).
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To postmodernists such as Lyotard recent history has fatally undermined not
just grand narratives, but all Enlightenment aspirations. Fascism, communism, the
Holocaust, super-sophisticated military technologies, Chernobyl, AIDS, an epi-
demic of heart disease, environmentally induced cancers and so on, all these (and
there are many more) are the perversions of Enlightenment, outcomes of ‘narra-
tives’ of the past which insisted that it was possible to highlight the rationalities
of change, whether in terms of ‘nationalism’, ‘class struggle’, ‘racial purity’ or ‘scientific and technological progress’. In view of such outcomes the postmod-
ernist urges ‘a war on totality’ (Lyotard, 1979, p. 81), an abandonment of accounts
of the world which presume to see the ‘true’ motor(s) of history. All pretension to discern the ‘truth’ of historical change ‘has lost its credibility . . . regardless of
whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation’ (p. 37).
It follows from this that postmodern thought is characteristically suspicious
of claims, from whatever quarter, to be able to identify ‘truth’. Given the manifest
failures of earlier grand narratives, given that each has demonstrably been a con-
struct, however much scholars have proclaimed their objectivity, then postmod-
ernism readily goes beyond mere suspicion of totalising theories. It vigorously
rejects them all by endorsing a principle of relativism, by celebrating the plurality
of accounts of the world, by insisting that, where there is no ‘truth’ there can only
be versions of ‘truth’. As Michel Foucault (1980) put it, postmodernists perceive
that ‘[e]ach society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is,
the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’ (pp. 131–2).
In such circumstances postmodern thinkers perceive themselves to be throwing
off the straitjacket of Enlightenment searches for ‘truth’, emphasising instead the
liberating implications of differences
of analysis, explanation and interpretation.
Social characteristics of postmodernism
In the social realm postmodernism’s intellectual critique is taken up, restated and
extended. Here we encounter not just postmodern thinkers, but also the circum-
stances that are supposed to characterise postmodern life. To appreciate the
postmodern condition we do not have to endorse the postmodern critique of
Enlightenment thought, though it will be obvious that, if we are indeed entering
a postmodern world, then its intellectual observations will find an echo in the
social realm. Moreover, since all readers of this book inhabit this postmodern
culture they will want to test the following descriptions against their own experi-
ences and perceptions. In my view it is not very difficult to recognise and
acknowledge postmodern features of our everyday lives – though it takes a great
deal more persuasion to endorse the overall project of postmodern thought.
As with the intellectual attack, a starting point for postmodernism in the
social realm is hostility towards what may be (loosely) called modernist princi-
ples and practices (Kroker and Cook, 1986). Modernism here is a catch-all term,
one that captures things such as planning, organisation and functionality. A recur-
rent theme is opposition to anything that smacks of arrangements ordered by
groups – planners, bureaucrats, politicians – who claim an authority (of expertise,
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of higher knowledge, of ‘truth’) to impose their favoured ‘rationalities’ on others.
For example, designers who presume to be able to identify the ‘really’ fashion-
able and chic, to set standards for the rest of us of how we ought to dress and
present ourselves, find their privileged status challenged by postmodern culture.
Again, functionality is resisted on the grounds that the ‘most efficient’ way of
building houses reflects, not some ‘rationality’ of the technically expert architect
or town planner, but an attempt by presumptuous professionals to impose their
values on other people.
What will be obvious here is that the postmodern mood is quizzical of judge-
ments from anyone on high. To this extent it contains a strong streak of, as it
were, democratic impudence, something manifested in ready rejection of those
who would define standards for the rest of us. Of particular note here is the
antipathy postmodernism expresses towards received judgements of ‘good taste’
or the ‘great tradition’ in aesthetics. For instance, the influential literary critic F. R. Leavis (1895–1978) confidently selected the best English novelists, in his
revealingly titled The Great Tradition
(1948), as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry
James and Joseph Conrad. For Leavis this was the literature worthy of canon-
ical status. Against this, the postmodernist insists that ‘If Jeffrey Archer is your
bag, then who are these literature professors to tell you what is better?’
Those who set standards in the past are routinely decried. Thus Leavis might
confidently assert that his ‘true judgement’ came from an especially close reading
of the English novel, but the postmodernist readily enough demonstrates that the
literary critics make a living out of their criticism, their writings bringing them
career advancement and prestige (hence they are scarcely disinterested seekers
after truth). Moreover, it is an easy task to reveal that the critics’ valuations rest
heavily on particular assumptions, educational background and class preferences
(in the case of Leavis it is commonplace to observe his provincialism, his lifetime
commitment to Cambridge, and his idealisation of a mythic ‘organic community’
towards which he believed great literature might lead us). In short, partialities of critics are exposed and thereby the basis of their claims to impose their
judgements on the rest of us undermined.
Unmasking the pretensions of ‘true’ thinkers, postmodern culture testifies to
aesthetic relativism – in each and every realm of life difference is to be encour-
aged. This principle applies everywhere (Twitchell, 1992): in music (‘Who is to
say that Mozart is superior to Van Morrison?’), in clothing (‘Jaeger doesn’t look
any better than Next, it just costs more’), as well as in the live arts (‘Why should
Shakespeare be privileged above Andrew Lloyd Webber?’). This has a liberatory
quality since at postmodernism’s centre is refusal of the ‘tyranny’ of all who set
the ‘right’ standards of living one’s life; against these postmodern culture thrives
on variety, on the carnivalesque, on an infinity of differences. Thus, for example,
in housing the Wimpey estate and the high-density tower block designed by those
who presumed to know what was ‘best for people’ and/or ‘what people want’
are resisted, in their place the climate of opinion becoming one which tolerates
individuating one’s home, subverting the architects’ plans by adding a bit here,
knocking a wall down there, incorporating bits and pieces of whatever one
pleases and let those who say it is in poor taste go hang.
INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
234
At the back of this impulse is, of course, the refusal of the modernist search
for ‘truth’. On the one hand, postmodernism resists it, because the definers of
‘truth’ can be shown to be less than ingenuous about their motivations and,
anyway, there is so much disagreement among the ‘experts’ themselves that no
one believes there is any single and incontestable ‘truth’ to discover any more.
On the other hand, postmodernism objects because it is evident that definitions
of ‘truth’ easily turn into tyrannies. To be sure, nothing like the communist
regimes which ordered people’s lives because the Party best knew the ‘objective
realities of the situation’, but still each of us will have experienced the imposition
of others’ judgements on ourselves. Hence at school we will have had to read
Dickens and Hardy because definers of ‘literary standards’ had deemed them to
be worthy of inclusion on the curriculum (while ruling out popular science fiction,
romance and westerns). Again, everyone in Britain will have some experience of
BBC television as that which cultural custodians had thought worthy of produc-
tion (lots of news and current affairs, the classic serials, ‘good’ drama, a limited
range of sport, appropriate children’s programmes such as Blue Peter
). And a good
number of readers will have encountered the restrictions imposed on their homes
by planners and architects, most notably perhaps those of us brought up in
municipal accommodation.
Against this the postmodern mentality celebrates the fact that there is no
‘truth’, but only versions of ‘truth’, making a nonsense of the search for ‘truth’.
In its stead the advocacy is for difference, for pluralism, for ‘anything goes’. A
consequence is that the modernist enthusiasm for genres and styles (which at
one time or another would have served to situate worthwhile art and to help iden-
tify good taste) is rejected and mocked for its pretensions. From this it is but a
short step towards the postmodern penchant for parody, for tongue-in-cheek
reactions to established styles, for a pastiche mode which delights in irony and
happily mixes and matches in a ‘bricolage’ manner. An upshot is that postmodern
architecture happily clashes received styles, famously ‘Learning from Las Vegas’
(Venturi, 1972; Jencks, 1984), perhaps combining Spanish-style woodwork with
a Gothic façade or a ranch-style design with Venetian facings; or postmodern
dress will contentedly put together an eclectic array of leggings, Dr Martens
boots, Indian necklace, waistcoat and ethnic blouse.
Perhaps most noteworthy of all, postmodern culture abandons the search for
‘authenticity’. To appreciate this better, one might usefully list a series of cognate
words that are recurrent targets of those taken with postmodern culture: the
‘genuine’, ‘meaning’ and the ‘real’. Each of these terms testifies to the modernist
imperative to identify the ‘true’. It is, for instance, something which motivates
those who seek the ‘real meaning’ of the music they happen to be listening to, those who look for an ‘authentic’ way of life which might recover the ‘roots’
of the ‘real England’ (or even of the ‘real me’), those who desire to find the ‘true
philosophy’ of the ‘good life’. Against all of this postmodernism, perversely at first
encounter, but perfectly consistent from a starting point which rejects all things
modern, celebrates the inauthentic, the superficial, the ephemeral, the trivial and
the flagrantly artificial.
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Postmodernism will have no truck with yearnings for authenticity for two
main reasons. The first is one which I have already detailed at some length: the
insistence on one ‘true’ meaning is a fantasy, hence those who go looking for the
‘authentic’ and the ‘real’ are bound to fail because there can be only versions
of
the ‘real’. We cannot hope to recover, say, the authentic Dickens because we
read him as citizens of the twenty-first century, as, for example, people who are
alert to notions such as the unconscious and child sexuality which, unavoidably,
make us interpret the character of Little Nell in ways which set us apart from
both the author and his original audiences. Again, there can be no ‘true’ inter-
pretation of, say, the meaning of the Beatles’ songs since their meanings are
necessarily variable depending on one’s age and experiences.
If this first objection to the search for the authentic is the insistence on the
relativity of interpretation, then the second is still more radical and, I believe,
even more characteristic of the postmodern condition. This asserts that the
authentic condition, wherever one seeks for it, can never be found because it
does not exist outside the imaginings of those who yearn for it. People will have
it that, somewhere – round that corner, over that horizon, in that era – the real,
the authentic, can be found. And, when it can be discovered, we can be satisfied
at having discovered the genuine (in oneself, of one’s times, of a country) which
may then be set against the superficial and artificial which seem to predominate
in the contemporary world of ‘style’, ‘show’ and an ‘only-in-it-for-the-money’
ethos. It is the contention of postmodernism that this quest for authenticity is futile.
Take, for example, the popular search for one’s roots by tracing one’s family
back through time. Many people nowadays go to great pains to detail their family
tree in order to trace their own point of origination. A common expression of this
attempt to establish authenticity is the return of migrants to places from whence
their forebears moved generations before. What do these seekers discover when
they reach the village from which the Pilgrim Fathers fled, the Irish hamlet from
which the starving escaped, the Polish ghetto from which the Jews were driven?
Certainly not authenticity: much more likely a reconstruction of the Puritans’
barn-like church ‘exactly like it was’, a ‘real’ potato dinner (with cooled Guinness
and fine wines if desired), a newly erected synagogue with central heating
installed and a computerised record of family histories.
You yearn to find the ‘real’ England? That ‘green and pleasant land’ of well-
tended fields, bucolic cows, unchanged landscape, whitewashed cottages, walled
gardens and ‘genuine’ neighbours that is threatened by motorway construction,
housing estates and the sort of people who live in one place only for a year or
so before moving on? That place where one might find one’s ‘real self’, where
one may discover one’s ‘roots’, something of the authentic English way of life
that puts us in touch with our forebears? But look hard at English rural life – the
most urbanised country in Europe – and what do we find? Agribusiness, high-
tech farming, battery hens and ‘deserted villages’ brought about by commuters
who leave their beautifully maintained properties (which are way outside the
budgets of locals) with the central heating pre-set to come on when required and the freezer well stocked from the supermarket to drive their 4x4s/SUVs
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(industrial symbols of rural ruggedness and reliability), to and from their town-
centred offices. It is these incomers who have been at the forefront of recon-
structing the ‘traditional’ village: by resisting industrial developments (which
might have given jobs to one-time farm workers displaced by combine harvesters,
tractors and horticultural science), by having the wherewithal to have the former
smithy’s barn rebuilt (often as a second home – with all mod cons), by being most
active in sustaining the historical societies (which produce those wonderful sepia
photographs for the village hall which show ‘what life used to be like in the place
we now cherish’) and, of course, by resurrecting ‘traditions’ like morris dancing
and village crafts such as spinning and weaving (Newby, 1985, 1987).
The point here is not to mock the aspirations of modern-day village life, but
rather it is to insist that the search for an ‘authentic’ England is misconceived. We can only construct
a way of life that appears to us to echo themes from another
time (without the absolute hunger, poverty and hardship the majority of country
dwellers had to endure). This construction of a supposedly authentic way of life
is, necessarily, itself inauthentic – and ought to be recognised for what it is. Look
where one will, the search for authenticity will be foiled. Many people look to ‘tra-
ditions’ to provide a sense of place, of surety in a fast-changing world. There is
something soothing about tradition; it provides a bedrock in uncertain times, an
underlying quality of the genuine which can serve as an anchor in an unsettled
epoch. But these English traditions – Christmas Day round the tree, with turkey
and trimmings, the Oxford–Cambridge boat race, the Cup Final at Wembley, ‘real’
ale and ‘real’ pubs, perhaps above all the monarchy with a lineage stretching back
to the Anglo-Saxons – are easily shown to have been ‘inventions’ (Hobsbawm and
Ranger, 1983) that date in the main from the late Victorian period. Prince Albert
originated the ‘typical’ English Christmas, the Cup Final is of recent duration, pubs
are designed
to evoke nostalgia for idealised times and the beer is produced by the most modern methods available, while the monarchy has been subject to
radical change and reconstitution throughout its chequered history.
There is no authenticity; there are only (
inauthentic
)
constructions of the authentic
.
Take, for instance, the tourist experience (Urry, 2001). Brochures advertise an
‘unspoiled’ beach, ‘must-see’ sites, a ‘distinctive’ culture, ‘genuine’ locals and a
‘taste of the real
’. But the experience of tourism is demonstrably inauthentic, a
carefully crafted artifice from beginning to end. In Greece: it is the taverna on
the beach – with well-stocked fridge full of Continental beers; the customary
music and traditional dancing – played on compact discs, most recently com-
posed, with waiters coached in simplified steps and instructed to ‘let the tourists
participate’; the authentic Greek cuisine – cooked in the microwave, stored in the
freezer and combined to appeal to the clients’ palates while retaining a hint of
the ‘local’ (moussaka and chips); the obliging locals who are uncorrupted by
metropolitan ways – and trained in hotel schools in Switzerland; the special
tourist attractions – developed and hyped for tourist consumption. The ‘tourist
bubble’ is intended to ensure that only pleasant experiences are undergone, that
the visitors will avoid, for example, the smells and insanitary conditions endured
by many of the indigenous people. Moreover, even were there an authentic loca-
tion in the first place, the very appearance of tourists intrudes and necessarily
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changes what was originally there (an idealised ‘raw’ culture, centuries-old cere-
monies, much of which, on examination, is but ‘staged authenticity’: MacCannell,
1976). Further, tourism is big business and it acts accordingly: aeroplanes must
be filled, hotel rooms booked (and of a standard to meet the expectations of visi-
tors from affluent societies, hence showers, clean bed linen and air conditioning
where appropriate) and people given a good time. All this requires arrangements,
artifice, inauthenticity (Boorstin, 1962, pp. 100–22).
Inauthenticity is not just the province of overseas nations such as Italy and
France which have a distinct interest in perpetuating tourist imagery. It is also a
pervasive feature of Britain. Indeed, it can be argued that Britain generates an
array of museum sites, architecture and amusements not merely to sustain a massive tourist industry, but also to express its ‘real history’ (Hewison, 1987).
The ‘heritage industry’ is centrally involved in this creation and development of
Britain’s past, dedicated to the task of constructing history, rebuilding and refur-
bishing it in the name of evoking it ‘as it really was’. Consider here examples
such as the Beamish Industrial Museum in County Durham, the Jorvik Centre in
York, Ironbridge and the Oxford Story. How ironic, assert the postmodernists,
that so many of these tourist attractions have been arranged with a claim to make
visible life ‘as it really was’ (right down to smells from bygone days), given that
their construction unavoidably undermines claims to authenticity.
It needs to be stressed, too, that these are not in some way more inauthentic
than other, perhaps older, heritage centres such as stately homes. The Tower of
London, the Imperial War Museum and Stonehenge are quite as inauthentic
because we can never reclaim an authentic past. This is not just that these require
and offer so much of the contemporary as to subvert authenticity (modern
methods of preservation, motor transport, electricity, professional guides and so
on), but also because all attempts to represent history are interpretations – hence
constructions – of the past and are thereby inauthentic. Consider, for example,
the disputes which characterise the discipline of history. Is it to be an all-male
account or will it include women’s experiences (herstory)? Is it to be an imperial
history of wars and conquest? Is it Anglocentric or European in outlook, covering
a short period or concerned with the longue durée
? Is it to be social or political
in emphasis, a history of kings and queens or one of the common people? Bluntly,
the very variety of histories defies the ambition of the modernist scholar to relate
a ‘true’ history, something that is subversive of the aspirations of a very great
deal of the Heritage enterprise.
The postmodern era thus rejects all claims for the ‘real’: nothing can be ‘true’
and ‘authentic’ since everything is a fabrication. There is no ‘real England’, no
‘real history’, no ‘real tradition’. Authenticity is nothing more than an (inauthentic)
construction, an artifice. This being so, it follows that the recurrent and urgent
question delivered by modernists – ‘what does this mean?’ – is pointless. Behind
every such question is an implicit idea that true meaning
can be perceived: that,
for instance, we may discover what the Bible really means, what architects mean
when they design a building in a particular manner, what it really meant to live
during the Napoleonic Wars, what that girl means to suggest when she wears
that sort of frock.
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But if we know that there is no true meaning but only different interpreta-
tions (what Roland Barthes used to call polysemous
views), then, logically, we can
jettison the search for meaning itself. To the postmodern temper the quest is vain;
but, far from despairing at this, the suggestion is that we abandon it and instead
take pleasure in the experience of being
. For instance, you may not know how to
make sense of a particular hairstyle, you may be bemused by each of your friends
seeing it in different ways, but what the heck – enjoy the view without yearning
for it to have any special meaning. The French have a word for this, jouissance
,
and a common derivation is from Kant’s Critique of Judgement
(1972) where he
distinguishes the sublime as the pleasure felt about something that comes before
its identification as beautiful; but the central idea to the postmodernist is that
where everyone knows that there is an infinity of meanings we may as well give
up on the yearning for any meaning. As the graffiti has it, forget trying to work
out what Elvis was trying to say in Jailhouse Rock
, it’s ‘only rock and roll’, so get
up on your feet and feel the beat.
Moreover, we intellectuals ought not to concern ourselves about this aban-
donment of meaning. Ordinary people themselves recognise that discovering the
‘true meaning’ is an unattainable dream just as clearly as we do. They, too, are
aware of multiple meanings being generated for every situation, of the unten-
ability of finding the authentic element. Accordingly, the people do not get uptight
about finding out the real sense of the latest movie: they are quite content to
enjoy it for what it was to them – fun, boring, diverting, an escape from house-
work, a chance to woo one’s partner, a night out, something to talk about
. . . .
Modernist zealots are the ones that worry about ‘what it all means’; post-
modern citizens gave up on that earnestness long ago, content to revel in the
manifold pleasures of experience. Similarly, postmodern tourists know well
enough that they are not getting an authentic experience; they are cynical about
the local boutiques selling ‘genuine’ trinkets, about the fervent commercialism of the tourist trade, about the kamakis
parading on the beaches on the lookout
for sexual liaisons, about the artificiality of an out-of-the-way location that yet
manages to incorporate the latest video releases, pop music and drinks at the
discos. Tourists know full well that it is all a game, but – knowing this – are still
content to go on holiday and take part in the staged events, because what they
want while on holiday is a ‘good time’, is ‘pleasure’, and hang any Angst
about
‘what it all means’ and whether or not the food, the people and the milieux are
authentic (Featherstone, 1991, p. 102).
My earlier observation that postmodernism places much emphasis on differ-
ences – in interpretation, in ways of life, in values – is in close accord with the
abandonment of belief in the authentic. For instance, the postmodern outlook
encourages rejection of elitisms that proclaim a need to teach children a unifying
and enriching ‘common culture’ or the ‘great tradition’ of literature. All this and
similar such protestations are dismissed as so much ideology, instances of power
being exercised by particular groups over others. However, postmodern culture
goes further than this: it contends that those who fear what they regard as that
fragmentation of culture – a collapse into disconnected bits – if people are not
taught to appreciate, say, the literature and history which tells us ‘what we are’
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and thereby what brings us as citizens together, should be ignored. On the one
hand, this is because the identification of a ‘common culture’, whether in the
Arnoldian sense of the ‘best that is thought and said’ or simply in the sense of
‘all that is of value to our society’, is usually expressive of power which can be
exclusionary and impositional on many groups in our society (the ‘great tradi-
tion’ in English literature may not have much appeal for ethnic minorities, the
working class or the young in contemporary Britain). On the other hand, however,
postmodernists argue that it also presumes that people have difficulty living with
fragmentation, that if things are not consistent and whole, then we shall
experience alienation, anxiety and depression.
But the postmodern outlook positively thrives on differences and hence prospers, too, with a fragmentary culture. What is wrong with, for example,
reading a bit of Shakespeare as well as listening to reggae music? For a long time
cultural custodians have presumed to tell people what and how they ought to
read, see and hear (and to feel at least a twinge of guilt when they deviated from
the prescribed works and judgements). Behind this moral stewardship is a typi-
cally modernist apprehension that fragmentation is harmful. Against this,
postmodern culture, having spurned the search for ‘true meaning’ (‘Englishness
means you are familiar with and appreciate this
history, these
novels, that
poetry’),
suggests that fragmentation can be and is enjoyed
without people getting much
vexed about conflicting messages or values. The outcome is celebration of a
plurality of sources of pleasures
without meaning: the neon lights, French cuisine,
McDonald’s, Asiatic foods, Bizet, Madonna, Verdi and Franz Ferdinand. A
promiscuity of different sources of pleasure is welcomed.
Furthermore, it will be easily understood that behind the modernist appre-
hension about a fragmentary culture lurks the fear that the self itself is under
threat. Such fear presupposes that there is in each of us a ‘real self’, the authentic
‘I’, which must be consistent, unified and protected from exposure to widely
diverging cultural signals. How, for instance, can true intellectuals sustain their
sense of self if they read Plato and then go dog racing? How can major thinkers
immerse themselves in their discipline and simultaneously support Tottenham
Hotspur Football Club? How can Christians simultaneously practise their religion
and enjoy pornography? How can honourable people cheat at cricket? How can
the integrity of the self be maintained if the same person is exposed to role
models as diverse as Clint Eastwood, Wayne Rooney and Woody Allen?
Rather than get wrapped up trying to unravel such contradictions, post-
modern culture denies the existence of an essential, true self. The postmodern
temper insists that the search for a ‘real me’ presupposes an underlying meaning,
an authentic being, which is just not there – and hence not worthy of pursuit.
Instead, the advocacy is to live with difference, in the wider society and within
one’s being, and to live this without anxiety about meaning, jettisoning restric-
tive concepts like ‘integrity’ and ‘morality’, and opting instead for pleasure. It is
only intellectuals, goes the postmodern refrain, who worry about fragmentation
of the self. The rest of us are happy enough to have a good time and do not
bother to get upset because a few eggheads believe that our ‘true self’ might find
itself in turmoil.
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As befits a culture which revels in artifice and surface phenomena, post-
modernism is most closely associated with urban life
. Postmodern culture
celebrates superficiality, spurning the in-depth analysis that seeks ‘truth’ in favour
of the quick-changing, the playful, and the uncertainties of fashion. No location
is more in tune with this than the urban, the prime site of artificiality, clashes of
style, openness to change and eclecticism, diversity and differences, lack of fixity,
constant stimulation of the senses, mixtures of cultures and strangers who bring
together varied experiences and outlooks which destroy certainties and bring new
tastes and sources of enjoyment. Related is postmodernity’s acknowledgement
of speed, the sheer pace and turmoil of incessant and accelerated culture, that
intrudes into consciousness and destabilises constantly (Virilio, 1998). Paul Virilio
has coined the term dromology
to identify this situation, one associated with the spread of super-complicated military technologies of the sort we experienced
during the ‘Shock and Awe’ invasion of Iraq in early 2003 (Virilio, 2005).
Destabilising, unceasing and impossible to resist.
Finally, and something which is consistent with its hostility towards those
who seek to reveal the ‘real meaning’ of things, postmodern culture lays stress
on the creativity and playfulness of ordinary people. Among modernist thinkers
there is a recurrent tendency towards offering determinist explanations of behaviour. That is, it is characteristic of modernist analyses that they present
accounts of actions which privilege their own explanations rather than those of
the people involved, as if they alone are capable of discerning the real motiva-
tions, the fundamental driving forces, of those whom they study. Consider, for
example, Freudian accounts which see sexuality behind so much action – what-
ever those studied may feel; or Marxist examinations of the world which contend
that consciousness is shaped by economic relationships – whatever else subjects
might say; or feminist accounts of women’s experiences which frequently suggest
that the analysts have privileged access to what women ‘really need’ – whatever
the women they study may suggest.
As we have seen, there is from postmodernists a repeated assertion that intel-
lectuals have no more right to recognise ‘truth’ than the man or woman in the
street. Similarly, the widespread fear among intellectuals that the people are being
duped, that they are being led away from the ‘truth’ by manipulative politicians,
by trashy entertainment or by the temptations of consumerism, is at once an
insufferable arrogance (by what right can intellectuals claim to discern ‘truth’
when their own record is at the least dubious and when intellectuals contest the
‘truth’ of other intellectuals?) and a nonsense given the capacities of ordinary
people to see, and to create, just as effectively as any intellectual. In a world
where there are only versions of truth, people have an extraordinary capacity to
generate an anarchic array of meanings and, prior even to meaning, alternative
uses
of things and experiences that they encounter.
Michel de Certeau (1984), in a kaleidoscopic book which records many of
the ingenuities of everyday life, provides example after example of this creative
impulse which gives the lie to allegations from intellectuals that they can see
more clearly than ordinary people. According to de Certeau, people constantly
and irrepressively create different meanings, uses and pleasures from even the 11
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most routine things and activities. For example, to de Certeau the ordinary action
of driving a car is extraordinary, an astonishing arena of creativity: it may be
cruising, commuting, speeding, low-riding, Sunday-riding, time alone, thinking-
time, dreaming-time, playing one’s music, relaxing, observing other drivers. In
such circumstances, how dare intellectuals intrude to claim that they have privileged access to what ordinary people think or even feel about things?
It will not surprise readers who have gone this far to learn that a bête noire
of postmodernism is the claim to identify the essential features of any phenom-
enon. ‘Essentialism’ provokes the postmodernist to recite the familiar charges
against arrogant modernists’ presumptions: that the analyst can impartially
cognise the ‘truth’, that features hidden beneath the surface of appearances are
open to the scrutiny of the privileged observer, that there is a core meaning which
can be established by the more able analyst, that there are authentic elements of
subjects which can be located by those who look hard and long enough.
Since I do not subscribe to postmodern thought, I do not hesitate summarily
to review key elements of postmodernism as an intellectual and as a social
phenomenon. These include:
•
the rejection of modernist thought, values and practices
•
the rejection of claims to identify ‘truth’ on grounds that there are only versions
of ‘truth’
•
the rejection of the search for authenticity since everything is inauthentic
•
the rejection of quests to identify meaning because there are an infinity of
meanings (which subverts the search for meaning itself)
•
the celebration of differences: of interpretations, of values and of styles
•
an emphasis on pleasure, on sensate experience prior to analysis, on jouissance
and the sublime
•
delight in the superficial, in appearances, in diversity, in change, in parody,
irony and pastiche
•
recognition of the creativity and imagination of ordinary people which defies
determinist explanations of behaviour.
Postmodernism and information
But what has this to do with information? A first response comes from the post-
modern insistence that we can know the world only through language
. While
Enlightenment thinkers have subscribed to the idea that language was a tool to
describe a reality apart from words, the postmodernist asserts that this is ‘myth
of transparency’ (Vattimo, [1989] 1992, p. 18) because it is blind to the fact that symbols and images (i.e. information) are the only ‘reality’ that we have. We do not, in other words, see reality through language; rather, language is the
reality that we see. As Michel Foucault once put it, ‘reality does not exist . . .
language is all there is and what we are talking about is language, we speak within language’ (quoted in Macey, 1993, p. 150).
INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
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An illustration of some of the consequences of this starting point at which
‘language is never innocent’ (Barthes, [1953] 1967, p. 16) can be found in literary
criticism. Once upon a time critics took it as their task to discern, say, ways in
which we could get a better picture of Victorian capitalism through reading
Dombey and Son
, or to examine the ethos of masculinity evidenced in the short
stories of Ernest Hemingway, or to assess how D. H. Lawrence’s upbringing
shaped his later writing. The presupposition of critics was that one could look
through the language
of these authors to a reality behind the words (to a histor-
ical period, an ideology, a family background), and the aspiration of these critics
was for themselves to elucidate this function as unobtrusively – as transparently,
hence objectively – as was possible. To such intellectuals clarity
of writing, from
both artist and critics, was at a premium, since the prime task was to look through
the language to a reality beyond.
Roland Barthes (1963, 1964) caused a considerable fuss in the early 1960s
inside French literary circles when he attacked such assumptions in debate with a leading critic, Raymond Picard. Barthes offered a reading of Racine, an
icon of classical French literature, which, first, objected to the supposition that the meaning of Racine’s words is inherently clear and, second, insisted that all
critical approaches developed and drew upon metalanguages
(Freudianism,
Marxism, structuralism, etc.) in their commentaries. This is something that
subverted any ambition of critics themselves to enhance the text (Barthes, 1966)
by, as a rule, making more comprehensible the historical context of its produc-
tion. The centrepiece of Barthes’ objection here, of course, is that language is not
transparent
, authorship is not about looking through
language to a phenomenon
out there
, but is a matter of the making of languages, first by the author, then by
the critics.
The pertinence of this literary debate to our concern with postmodernism
becomes evident when we realise that Barthes, and others, extend their principle
that language is all the reality we know to a wide variety of disciplines, from
history to social science. Across a wide range they endeavour to analyse the
‘phrase-regime’ (Lyotard) which characterises particular subjects. As such, they
query the truth claims of other intellectuals and suggest alternative – postmodern
– approaches to study which examine subjects as matters of language (or, to
adopt the favoured word, discourses
).
Moreover, it is significant, too, that Barthes (1979) applied his approach to
an enormous variety of phenomena in the contemporary world, from politicians,
wrestlers, movies, fashion, cuisine, radio and photography to magazine articles,
always discussing his subjects as types of language. Following this route taken
by Barthes, we can see that, if reality is a matter of language/discourse, then
everything that we experience, encounter and know is informational. Nothing is transparent or clear since everything is constructed in language and must be understood in language. In sum, one relevance of postmodernism to consid-
erations of information is the perception that we do not live in a world about
which we simply have information. On the contrary, we inhabit a world that is
informational
.
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Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard (b.1929) is probably the best-known postmodern commentator
who elaborates principles found in the writing of thinkers such as Roland Barthes
(1915–80) and discusses them expressly in relation to developments in the infor-
mational realm. One can get a better appreciation of the connections between
postmodernism and information by highlighting some of his themes and insights.
It is the view of Baudrillard that contemporary culture is one of signs
.
Nowadays just about everything is a matter of signification, something obviously
connected with an explosive growth in media, but related also to changes in the
conduct of everyday life, urbanisation and increased mobility. One has but to
look around to understand the point: everywhere signs and modes of significa-
tion surround us. We wake to radio, watch television and read newspapers, spend
a good part of the day enveloped by music from stereos and cassettes, shave and
style ourselves in symbolic ways, put on clothes that have sign content, decorate
our homes with symbolic artefacts, add perfumes to our bodies to give off (or
prevent) particular signals, travel to work in vehicles which signify (and which
contain within them systems that allow the uninterrupted transmission of signs),
eat meals which are laden with signification (Chinese, Italian, vegetarian, fatty)
and pass by and enter buildings which present signs to the world (banks, shops,
schools).
To be sure, all societies require the use of signs, but no one, I think, will doubt
that nowadays we swim in a much deeper sea of signification than ever before.
While pre-industrial societies had complex status rankings, elaborate religious ceremonies and gaudy festivals, the rigours of subsistence and the fixity of place
and routine delimited the use of signs. Nowadays we no longer mix with the same people in the same places in the same way of life. We interact now with
strangers to whom we communicate but parts of ourselves by signs – say, as a
passenger on a bus, or a client in a dentist’s surgery, or as a customer in a bar.
At the same time we receive messages from anywhere and everywhere in our
newspapers, books, radio, MP3 players, mobile phones, television or the Internet.
It is this which is Jean Baudrillard’s starting point: today life is conducted in a ceaseless circulation of signs about what is happening in the world (signs
about news), about what sort of identity one wishes to project (signs about self), about one’s standing (signs of status and esteem), about what purposes
buildings serve (architectural signs), about aesthetic preferences (signs on walls,
tables, sideboards) and so on. As John Fiske (1991), a sympathetic commentator on Baudrillard, observes, that our society is sign-saturated is indicative of ‘a categorical difference . . . between our age and previous ones. In one hour’s
television viewing, one is likely to experience more images than a member of a
non-industrial society would in a lifetime’ (p. 58).
However, the ‘society of the spectacle’ – to borrow Guy Debord’s (1977)
description of features that were prominent well over a generation ago and to
which the French Situationists were alert in the 1960s (Hussey, 2001) – has not,
after all, escaped the attention of other thinkers who would resist the postmodern
label and any suggestion that sign saturation announces a systemic change.
INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
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Baudrillard and like-minded thinkers go much further than just saying that there is a lot more communication going on. Indeed, their suggestion is that there
are other characteristics of postmodern culture which mark it out as a break with
the past.
We can understand these better by reminding ourselves how a modernist
might interpret the ‘emporium of signs’. Thinkers such as Herbert Schiller and
Jürgen Habermas, whom we encountered in earlier chapters, acknowledge the
explosive growth of signification readily enough, but they insist that, if used
adroitly, it could serve to improve the conditions of existence. Such approaches
perceive inadequacies in signs that, if rectified, could help to facilitate a more
communal society or more democratic social relationships. What is evident in
such modernist interpretations is that critics feel able to identify distortions in the
signs that, by this fact, are in some way inauthentic
, thereby holding back the
possibility of progressing to more genuine and open conditions. For example, it
is usual in such writers to bemoan the plethora of soap operas on television on grounds that they are escapist, trivial and profoundly unreal depictions of
everyday lifestyles. Tacit in such accounts is the view that there are more
authentic forms of drama that may be devised for television. Similarly, modernist
scholars are at pains to identify ways in which, say, news media misrepresent
real events and issues – and implicit in such critiques is the idea that authentic
news coverage can be achieved. Again, a modernist perspective on fashion might
raise concerns about the young being misled in their choices of styles by inap-
propriate role models and commercial venality – and, again, there is in evidence
here an unstated belief that more authentic fashions can be found.
Baudrillard, however, will have neither this hankering after ‘undistorted
communication’ nor any yearning for the ‘authentic’. In his view, since every-
thing is a matter of signification, it is unavoidably a matter of artifice and
inauthenticity because this, after all, is what signs are. Modernist critics will insist
that there is some reality behind signs, perhaps shrouded by unreliable signs, but
real nonetheless, but to Baudrillard there are only signs. As such one cannot
escape inauthenticity, and there is no point in pretending that one can. For
example, viewers of television news may watch with the presumption that the
signs indicate a reality beyond them – ‘what is going on in the world’. But on a
moment’s reflection we can appreciate that the news we receive is a version of
events, one shaped by journalists’ contacts and availability, moral values, polit-
ical dispositions and access to newsmakers. Yet, if we can readily demonstrate
that television news is not ‘reality’ but a construction of it – a task frequently
undertaken by academic researchers and evident to anyone who cares to review
recordings of news with benefit of hindsight – then how is it possible that people
can suggest that beyond the signs is a ‘true’ situation? To Baudrillard the ‘reality’
begins and ends with the signs on our television screens. And any critique of
these signs offers, not a more authentic version of the news, but merely another
set of signs that presume to account for a reality beyond the signs.
Baudrillard takes this insight a very great deal further by asserting that nowa-
days everybody knows this to be the case, the inauthenticity of signs being an
open secret in a postmodern culture. In other words, when once it might have
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been believed that signs were representational
(in that they pointed to some reality
beyond them), today everybody knows that signs are simulations
and nothing
more (Baudrillard, 1983a). For example, one may imagine that advertisements
might represent the qualities of particular objects in a true way. That they manifestly do not is a frequent cause of irritation to modernist critics who claim
to reveal the distortions of advertisements which suggest, say, that a certain hair shampoo brings with it sexual allure or that a particular alcoholic drink
induces sociability. The modernist who exposes the tricks of advertisers (false
associations, depth psychology and so on) works on two assumptions: first, that
he or she is privileged to recognise the deceptions of advertisers, something to
which most consumers are blind, and, second, that an authentic form of adver-
tising in which the advertisement genuinely represents the product is capable of
being made.
Baudrillard’s retort is that ordinary people are quite as knowledgeable as modernist intellectuals such as Vance Packard and Kenneth Galbraith, but they
just do not bother to make a fuss about it. Of course they realise that advertise-
ments are . . . well, advertisements. They are not the ‘real thing’, just make-believe,
just simulations. Everybody
, and not just intellectuals, knows that Coca-Cola does
not ‘teach the world to sing’, that Levi’s jeans won’t transform middle-aged men
into 20-year-old hunks, or that Wrigley’s chewing gum will not lead to thrilling
sexual encounters. As such, we ought not to get concerned about advertising since the ‘silent majorities’ (Baudrillard, 1983a) are not much bothered by it.
That said, Baudrillard does assert that people enjoy advertisements, not for
any messages the advertiser might try to convey, and certainly not because they
might be persuaded to go out to buy something after watching them, but simply
because advertisements can bring pleasure
. Advertising ‘acts as spectacle and
fascination’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 35) – just that. Who knows, who cares, what
Ford, Guinness or Benson & Hedges advertisements signify? We may – or we
may not – just enjoy the experience of looking at the signs.
1
Similarly, consider the modernist anxiety Professor Habermas manifests
when he expresses concern about the packaging of politics in contemporary
democracies. To critics such as Habermas the manipulation of political informa-
tion is deplorable, with its meticulous preparations by the politicians and their
PR advisers for media interviews reprehensible (rehearsals, briefings, staged
events, off-the-record discussions, make-up and clothing chosen to project a
desirable image, media consultants playing a disproportionate role in presenting
policies and their ministers). The appeal of the critics here, explicit or not, is that
politicians ought to be honest and open, truthful and direct, instead of hiding
behind misleading and mendacious media ‘images’.
Baudrillard’s response to this modernist complaint would take two forms. On
the one hand, he would insist that the dream of signs that represent politics and
politicians in an accurate way is a fantasy. Unavoidably the media will be able
to show only certain issues, particular personalities, and a limited range of polit-
ical parties. For no other reason, the limitations of time mean that political
coverage is restricted to certain issues and political positions. Add to that the
disposition of politicians to pressure to have the most favourable arguments for
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their own positions presented, and it is easy to understand that the difficulties of
exactly representing politics through media are insuperable. In Baudrillard’s view,
the fact that the media must put together a presentation of politics for the public
means that any alternative presentation can be nothing but just another simula-
tion. In an era of electronic media we cannot have anything other than simulated
politics.
On the other hand, Baudrillard would assert that, since everyone knows this
to be the case, no one gets much bothered since the signs are ignored. We all
know that they are artificial, so we just enjoy the spectacle and ignore the
messages, knowingly reasoning that ‘it’s just those politicians on the television
again’.
Logically this knowledgeability of the public heralds what one might describe
as the death of meaning. If people realise that signs are but simulations, and that
all that can be conceived are alternative simulations, then it follows that anything
– and nothing – goes. Thus we arrive at Baudrillard’s conclusion that ‘we manu-
facture a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see
. Most present-day
images – be they video images, paintings, products of the plastic arts, or audio-
visual or synthesising images – are literally images in which there is nothing to
see’ (Baudrillard, [1979] 1990, p. 17). If the ‘masses’ recognise that signs are just
simulations, then we are left with a profusion of signs which just do not signify.
We have signs without meaning, signs that are ‘spectacular’ (Baudrillard, 1983a,
p. 42), things to be looked at, experienced and perhaps enjoyed, but signs without
significance. This, indeed, is a postmodern world.
The examples I have used to illustrate Baudrillard’s conception of post-
modern culture have mostly come from media, the obvious domain of significa-
tion and an area that most readily springs to mind when one thinks of an
information explosion. However, it is important to realise that Baudrillard
contends that the society of spectacle and simulation reaches everywhere, and
much deeper even than an enormously expanded media. To appreciate this
better, let us recall that everything nowadays is a sign: clothing, body shape, pub
décor, architecture, shop displays, motorcars, hobbies – all are heavily informa-
tional. Again, modernist writers tend to examine these things in terms of an
underlying or potential authenticity, for example that there is a natural body
weight for people of a given size and build, or that shop displays can be set out
in such a way that customers can find what they want in a maximally conven-
ient and unobtrusive way. However, Baudrillard rejects these approaches on the
familiar grounds that the modernist search for the authentic is misconceived since
all these signs are simulations rather than representations
.
What he means by this is that, for instance, body shape now is largely a
matter of choices and that people can design, to a large extent, the signs of their
bodies. If one considers the plasticity of body shape today (through diets, exer-
cise, clothing, or even through surgery), then one gets an idea of the malleability
of the human body. Now, the modernist would respond to this in either of two
ways: either the obsession with body shape is condemned as leading people away
from their ‘true’ shapes (and bringing with it much anxiety, especially for young
women) or people are seen as having an inappropriate body shape to sustain
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their ‘true’ health (and ought perhaps to eat less). Either way the modernist appeal
is to an authentic body shape beyond the distortions induced by inappropriate
role models or overindulgers who ignore expert advice on the relations between
diet and health.
But Baudrillard’s response has to be that there is no authentic body shape, not least because nowadays we are all on a permanent diet (in that we all selectively choose from a cornucopia of foods), that experts disagree among
themselves about the linkages between health and body shape, and that, in an
era of choices, there is a wide variety of body shapes to be chosen. In these
circumstances there is just a range of inauthentic body shapes, just simulations
which represent neither the ‘true’/ideal body shape nor a deviation from it. They just are signs without significance. The test of this thesis is to ask: What
does body shape signify nowadays? And to Baudrillard its meanings have
collapsed, precisely because people know that body shape signs, of whatever
kind, are all inauthentic. What, for instance, does a slim body signify today?
Beauty? Anorexia? Narcissism? Health? Obsession? Body shape is losing its
power to signify. Having done so, it is a sign to be experienced rather than interpreted.
Baudrillard is echoing here a strong social constructivist view of signs. That
is, if phenomena are socially created, then they are simulations with no ‘reality’
beyond themselves. This accounts for Baudrillard’s famous claim that Disneyland
does not represent, symbolically, the real United States that is outside the enter-
tainment centre (a typically modernist argument, that Disney is a mythological
representation of American values, whereby visitors are surreptitiously exposed
to ideology while they’re busy having fun). On the contrary, says Baudrillard,
Disney is a means of acknowledging the simulation that is the entirety of modern
America: everything
about the United States is artifice, construction and creation,
from small-town main streets to city-centre corporate offices. This, proclaims
Baudrillard, is all the hyper
-
real
, where signs (often in material form) refer to
nothing but themselves. As he arrestingly remarks:
Disneyland 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 hyperreal and of simulation.
(Baudrillard, 1983b, p. 25)
In the postmodern era the distinction between the real and the unreal, the
authentic and the inauthentic, the true and the false, has collapsed: when all is
artifice such certainties have to go. Thus the ‘historic’ town, the ‘seaside resort’
and the ‘fun’ city are hyper-real in that they have no relationship with an under-
lying reality. They are fabrications with no authenticity outside their own
simulations. As such it is fatuous to go, with the modernist, in search of the ‘real’
that is imagined to be found in the Tower of London or in Blackpool Tower
because there is no authenticity behind these signs. Quite the contrary, these
inauthentic monuments are all that there is. They are the hyper-real, ‘the gener-
ation by models of a real without origin or reality’ (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 166).
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In this context Baudrillard makes a related point that builds on an argument
first made in the 1930s by Walter Benjamin (1970) when he reflected on conse-
quences of the ‘mechanical reproduction’ of art. Benjamin contended that the
‘aura’ which art once got from its uniqueness (there is only one Michelangelo’s
David
, much Renaissance painting is an integral part of the decoration of build-
ings) was shattered with the advent of film, printing, photography and radio
because it was reproducible outside its original contexts. Baudrillard goes still
further than this, inventing the term ‘simulacrum’ to identify signs that are copies
without an original
. If you buy a compact disc or download a tune to your iPod,
the notion of an original is meaningless. If the music is sold as a recording of a
live concert, you know that it has been meticulously ‘mixed’ and ‘mastered’ in
studios that render connections with the actual performance tenuous. Similarly,
the idea of an original film or video is not sensible. In the era of the ‘simulacrum’
what sense does it make to think any longer in terms of the real or the original?
It follows that, where ‘the real is abolished’ (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 99), there
the meaning of signs is lost (in Baudrillard’s terminology, it is ‘imploded’).
Nonetheless, we ought not to worry about this, because we always have to recall
the postmodern nostrum that audiences are subversive of messages anyway.
Modernists get themselves into a lather about ‘couch potato’ television viewers
and tourists who visit historical sites, take a photograph and then, having ‘done
it’, go without appreciating the ‘real thing’. But how much this underestimates the creativities of ordinary folk – the television viewer is in fact constantly active,
switching channels with enthusiasm, chatting to pals, using the telephone or
shouting out irreverent and irrelevant comments, and the tourist is doing all sorts
of things when walking round the Natural History Museum, day-dreaming, won-
dering why the guide looks like a relative, planning dinner, chatting to other vis-
itors, musing whether diplodocus ever got toothache. Given such resistance, as it
were, to the intended signs, we can conclude that postmodern audiences are a far
cry from the ‘cultural dopes’ modernists so feared, so far indeed that they see and
hear nothing
, just experience the spectacles which characterise the contemporary.
Gianni Vattimo
Italian philosopher and one-time member of the European Parliament Gianni
Vattimo (b.1936) contends that the growth of media has been especially
important in heralding postmodernism (Vattimo, 1989). The explosive growth of
information from here, there and everywhere, which has been a feature of tele-
vision, cable, video as well as of other forms of media, has undermined modernist
confidence in ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. Vattimo suggests that, while on the intellectual
front Enlightenment tenets have been successfully challenged by, for example,
alternative historical interpretations, so, too, has the spread of media undermined
any more general commitment to a single way of seeing.
It used to be common among modernist thinkers, of Left or Right, to bemoan
the development of ‘mass society’ where people would become herd-like, indoc-
trinated by media which put out a diet of homogeneous entertainment and
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propaganda. Readers familiar with the writing of Frankfurt School Marxists will
recognise this pessimistic vision, but conservative critics such as T. S. Eliot and
Frank and Queenie Leavis felt much the same about the likely effects of film,
radio and mass-circulation newspapers (Swingewood, 1977).
Against this, Vattimo argues that the proliferation of media has given voice
to diverse groups, regions and nations, so much so that audiences cannot but
encounter many ‘realities’ and ‘perspectives’ on issues and events. Nowadays
‘minorities of every kind take to the microphones’ (Vattimo, [1989] 1992, p. 5)
and thereby they disseminate worldviews which lead to a collapse in notions of
the ‘true’. From this comes freedom because, says Vattimo, the belief in reality
and its associated persuasive force (‘you must do this because it is true’) is lost.
How can you believe that any more when every day media expose you to a
plurality of competing interpretations of events and competing definitions of what
events are worth thinking about?
Differences
come to the forefront of everyone’s attention as multiple realities
(sexual, religious, cultural, ethnic, political and aesthetic) get time on the
airwaves. Bombarded by the very diversity of signs, one is left confused and
shaken, with nothing sure any longer. The result, however, is actually liberating
and definitively postmodern, with experience taking on the ‘characteristics of
oscillation, disorientation and play’ (p. 59). Here Vattimo finishes up in pretty
much the same position as Baudrillard. A multiplicity of signs paradoxically
subverts the sign’s capacity to signify, and people are left with spectacle, non-
meaning and freedom from
truth. Reminding oneself that Vattimo wrote this
before the widespread availability of the Internet, and with this the advent of chat
groups, blogs, instant news and solicitations of a spectacular range, surely adds
credence to his propositions.
Mark Poster
Mark Poster (b.1942), an American based at the University of California, Irvine,
is a long-time student and translator of Baudrillard. He forwards the proposition
that the postmodern age is distinguished from previous societies because of what he designates a ‘mode of information’ (Poster, 1990). This suggestion of
fundamental change emanating from developments in information is especially
interesting both because of its elaboration of themes found in Baudrillard and
because of its emphasis on the novelty of the postmodern era.
Poster’s claim is that the spread of information technologies, and hence of
electronically mediated information, has profound consequences for our way of
life and, indeed, for the ways in which we think about ourselves, because it alters
our ‘network of social relations’ (Poster, 1990, p. 8). Elaborating this principle, he
proposes a model of change based on different types of ‘symbolic exchange’ (p. 6) which has three constituents:
1
The era of oralism
when interaction was face to face. Then the way of life was
fixed and unchanging, the self embedded in the group, and signs corresponded
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to this settled way of life, with symbolic exchange a matter of articulating what
was already known and accepted by the community.
2
The era of written exchange
, when signs had a representational
role and in which
the self was conceived to be rational and individually responsible.
3
The era of electronic mediation
, when signs are matters of informational simu-
lations
, with their non
-
representational
character being critical. Here the self is
‘decentred, dispersed, and multiplied in continuous instability’ (p. 6), swirling
in a ‘continuous process of multiple identity formation’ (Poster, 1994, p. 174),
since the ‘flow of signifiers’ is the defining feature of the times rather than signs
which indicate a given object.
What Poster suggests is that once people said and thought what was
expected of them, later they developed a strong sense of autonomy and used
writing especially to describe what was happening outside themselves in the
world, and then, in the postmodern present, the spread of simulation has shat-
tered previous certainties. No longer able to believe in a ‘reality’ beyond signs,
the self is left fragmented, unfocused and incapable of discerning an objective
reality. Despite the dislocation this brings about, Poster sees it, with Baudrillard
and Vattimo, as emancipatory because the ‘crisis of representation’ (Poster, 1990,
p. 14) results in a plethora of signs which do not signify, something which at last
frees people from the tyranny of ‘truth’.
Poster’s (2001) support for postmodernism’s resistance to ‘truth regimes’ sits comfortably with his enthusiasm for new technologies, especially for the
Internet. In his view the ‘netizen’, able to navigate without hindrance and at will, supersedes and improves upon the ‘citizen’ whose rights – and obligations
– were enforced by nation states in the modern era and were used to impose
Western values on the rest of the world. To Poster the Age of Enlightenment that
promoted the rights and duties of the citizen is a Western discourse that bolstered
colonialism and imperialism. Now that globalisation subverts nation states, the Internet promises further liberation, and a core element of this freedom is
rejection of the claims to rights of citizenship.
Jean-François Lyotard
It is especially appropriate at this point to consider the work of Jean-François
Lyotard (1924–98), since his work has been particularly concerned to demonstrate
how truth claims have been subverted by postmodern developments. Moreover,
Lyotard goes about his task by centring attention on informational trends, arguing
that it is changes here which give rise to the scepticism towards truth claims which
characterises postmodern culture. In addition, Lyotard provides a revealing contrast to the previous three thinkers since he arrives at similar conclusions while
approaching from a different starting point. That is, while Baudrillard, Vattimo and
Poster give emphasis to the rapid growth in signs (especially in media), Lyotard
starts his analysis with a concern for changes in the role and functions of infor-
mation and knowledge at a more general and simultaneously deeper level.
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This French philosopher argues that knowledge and information are being
profoundly changed in two connected ways. First, increasingly they are produced
only where they can be justified on grounds of efficiency and effectiveness or, to
adopt Lyotard’s terminology, where a principle of performativity
prevails. This
means that information is gathered together, analysed and generated only when
it can be justified in terms of utility criteria. This may be conceived of as a
‘systems’ orientation which determines what is to be known, the ‘programme’ of
the ‘system’ insisting that information/knowledge will be produced only when it is of practical use. In this regard information/knowledge takes on computer-
like characteristics (and is in addition translated wherever possible into data –
performance indicators – so that it can be most easily quantified and its perfor-
mativity most readily measured), the mechanism dedicated to ‘optimisation of the global relationship between input and output – in other words, performa-
tivity’ (Lyotard, 1979, p. 11). Furthermore, like other systems, it features a
self-perpetuating loop: knowledge/information is required for it to perform, and
performance determines what knowledge/information will be generated.
Second, Lyotard argues – and here his (distant) Marxist background reveals
itself – that knowledge/information is being more and more treated as a
commodity
. Endorsing a theme we have already seen to be prominent in the work
of Herbert Schiller, he contends that information is increasingly a phenomenon
that is tradable, subject to the mechanisms of the market that has a determining
effect on judging performativity.
The consequences of these twin forces are sufficient even to announce the
emergence of a postmodern condition. First, the principle of performativity when
applied means that information/knowledge that cannot be justified in terms of
efficiency and effectiveness will be downgraded or even abandoned. For example,
aesthetics and philosophy cannot easily be justified in terms of performance,
while finance and management are straightforwardly defended. Inexorably the
former suffer demotion and the latter promotion, while within disciplines research
in areas that are defensible in terms of use will be treated more favourably than
others. For instance, social science investigations of technology transfer have
practical implications for markets and hence are seen as worthy of support from
research funding bodies such as the ESRC (Economic and Social Research
Council), the ‘mission’ of which now requires that the research it sponsors
contributes to the competitiveness of industry. Conversely, the social scientist
whose interest is in the exotic or impractical (as judged by performativity criteria)
will be sidelined. As a government minister, Norman Tebbit, put it in the early
1980s when called upon to justify switching funds from arts, humanities and
social sciences to the more practical disciplines, money was to be taken away
‘from the people who write about ancient Egyptian scripts and the pre-nuptial
habits of the Upper Volta valley’ and given to subjects that industry thought
useful. Today this is the orthodoxy as regards funding social science research in
the UK.
Second – and a sign of the collapse of modernism – knowledge development
is increasingly shifting out of the universities where, traditionally, a cloistered elite had been ensconced with a vocation to seek the ‘truth’. Challenging the
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dominance of the traditional university is an array of think tanks (Cockett, 1994),
research and development sections of private corporations and pressure groups
that generate and use information/knowledge for reasons of efficiency and effec-
tiveness. For instance, commentators now speak of the ‘corporate classroom’ that
is as large and significant as universities and colleges inside the United States. It is easy to list a roll-call of some of the major players: Bell Laboratories, IBM’s R&D sections and Pfizer’s employment of scores of PhDs appear to many
observers to be ‘just like a university’ – except that they have different priorities
and principles which guide their work.
Moreover, that personnel move with increasing ease between universities
and these alternative knowledge/information centres indicates that higher educa-
tion is being changed from within to bring it into line with performativity
measures. Any review of developments in higher education in any advanced
economy highlights the same trends: the advance of the practical disciplines and
the retreat of those that find it hard to produce ‘performance indicators’ which
celebrate their utility. Boom subjects in British higher education over the last
generation have been the likes of law, computing, and business and management;
every British university now boasts a clutch of sponsored professorships – in a
restricted range of disciplines; it is becoming common for universities to offer
training programmes for corporations and even to validate privately created
courses; there are sustained pressures to make education ‘more relevant’ to the ‘real world’ of employment by inducting students in ‘competencies’ and
‘transferable skills’ which will make them more efficient and effective employees.
Lyotard extends this argument to the whole of education, insisting that it is
motivated now by criteria such as ‘how will it increase my earnings potential?’
and ‘how will this contribute to economic competitiveness?’ This is a transfor-
mation that not only has an impact on schools and universities but also changes
the very conception of education itself. In the view of Lyotard, performativity
criteria mean there will be a shift away from education perceived as a distinct
period in one’s life during which one is exposed to a given body of knowledge
towards ongoing education throughout one’s life, to be undertaken as career and
work demands so dictate. In the words of Lyotard (1993), ‘knowledge will no
longer be transmitted en bloc
, once and for all . . . rather it will be served “à la
carte” to adults who are either already working or expect to be, for the purpose
of improving their skills and chances of promotion’ (p. 49). This is to repeat the
orthodoxy of current educational policy, where ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘flexibility’
are dominant refrains.
Third, and a consequence of this redefinition of education, established
conceptions of truth are undermined, performativity and commodification leading
to definitions of truth in terms of utility. Truth is no longer an unarguable fact
and the aspiration of the university; rather truths are defined by the practical
demands placed on the institution. This development is a defining element of
postmodernism, since the replacement of TRUTH with a ‘plurality of truths’
means that there are no longer any legitimate arbiters of truth itself. The upshot
is that, to quote Lyotard (1988), truth is merely a matter of a ‘phrase regime’,
something defined by the terms in which one talks about it.
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In this respect the undermining of traditional universities (which had been
regarded as definers of legitimate knowledge) and, connectedly, intellectuals is
central (Bauman, 1987). According to Lyotard, intellectuals must pursue know-
ledge in terms of a ‘universal’ ambition, be it humanity, the people, Enlighten-
ment, the proletariat or whatever. It scarcely needs saying that many intellec-
tuals resist the rise to prominence of performance-defined expertise, scorning
those guided in the development of information/knowledge by practicality as
‘mere technicians’. Against these latter who function only within the boundaries
of an ‘input/output . . . ratio relative to an operation’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. 4), intellectuals usually aspire to research, write and teach for a wider constituency.
However, the intellectuals’ justifications sound increasingly hollow within
and without education. This is partly a result of lack of resources, the distribu-
tion of which is difficult and the inevitable squabbling demeaning. More
fundamentally, however, it is a consequence of the collapse of intellectuals’ raison
d
’
être
since at least the post-war period. The point is that it is precisely the intel-
lectuals’ claims to have privileged access to truth, to have a totalising vision,
which have been destroyed. Lyotard, the one-time communist, identifies the
collapse of Marxism in the wake of revelations about the Gulag amidst its mani-
fest economic inadequacies as especially significant in this regard. Marxism’s
claim for universal truth no longer holds any credibility, and neither do the supe-
riorities of other intellectuals, whether they be couched in terms of the value of
the classics, of history or of great literature. Today, if one argues that a particular
discipline, vocation or aspiration is superior to others, then it is widely regarded
as no more than a partisan proposition, a ‘phrase regime’ with no more (and prob-
ably less) legitimacy than anything else. As degrees in Tourism, Public Relations
and Business Administration proliferate in British universities, any proposal from other academics that their disciplines – Philosophy, English or Ancient
Civilisation – have more value because they offer students greater access to truth,
more understanding of the ‘human condition’ or more profundity is greeted with
at least derision or, more commonly, the accusation that this is expressive of an
unworldly and useless snobbery.
The solid grounds on which intellectuals once belittled ‘technicians’ have
turned to sand – and this is widely appreciated. No one, attests Lyotard, recourses
any more to the Enlightenment justification for education, that more education
leads to better citizens, though this was once a popular universalistic claim.
History has destroyed its legitimacy: nowadays ‘[n]o-one expects teaching . . . to
train more enlightened citizens’, says Lyotard (1993), ‘only professionals who
perform better . . . the acquisition of knowledge is a professional qualification that
promises a better salary’ (p. 6).
Fourth, and finally, performativity criteria when applied to information/
knowledge change ideas about what is considered to be an educated person. For
a long while to be educated meant to be in possession of a certain body of know-
ledge; with computerisation, however, it is more a matter of knowing how to
access appropriate databanks than to hold a content in one’s head. In the post-
modern age performativity decrees that ‘how to use terminals’ is more important
than personal knowledge. Therefore, competencies such as ‘keyboard skills’ and
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‘information retrieval’ will displace traditional conceptions of knowledge (and
student profiles will certify that these and other competencies have at least equiv-
alent recognition to more orthodox academic attainments) as ‘[d]ata banks
[become] the Encyclopaedia of tomorrow’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. 51).
Moreover, databanks and the competencies to use them further undermine
the truth claims of traditional elites. Indeed, they announce ‘the knell of the age
of the Professor’ since ‘a professor is no more competent than memory banks in
transmitting established knowledge’ (p. 53) and, indeed, is poorer at using that
in a versatile and applied manner than the teams
of employees that are increas-
ingly required in the world of work (and in preparation for which students will
be trained and credited in ‘skills’ such as ‘working in groups’, ‘leadership’ and
‘problem-solving’).
What all of this returns us to is the relativism of knowledge/information. To
Lyotard performativity, commodification and the manifest failure of ‘grand narra-
tives’ have resulted in a refusal of all notions of privileged access to truth. Some
intellectuals might despair at this, but, as with postmodern devotees Baudrillard
and Vattimo, Lyotard (1993) considers that this can be liberating because the
decline
of the universal idea can free thought and life from totalizing obsessions. The
multiplicity of responsibilities, and their independence (their incompatibility),
oblige and will oblige those who take on those responsibilities . . . to be
flexible, tolerant, and svelte.
(Lyotard, 1993, p. 7)
With this, yet again, we are deep within postmodern culture.
Critical comment
Each of those discussed above is a convinced postmodern thinker as well as being
persuaded that there is nowadays something one can reasonably call a post-
modern condition. My difficulty is that I can accept a good deal of the latter
diagnosis (without agreeing that this marks a new type of society), but cannot
endorse the former position, something which, in turn, profoundly influences my
response to the depiction of a postmodern condition. Postmodern thinkers do
have interesting and insightful things to say about the character and conse-
quences of informational developments. I do not think anyone can try seriously
to understand the contemporary world without some awareness of the centrality
and features of signification today (Baudrillard), without some consideration of
changes in modes of communication (Poster), without some recognition of the
diversity and range of world views made available by modern media (Vattimo),
and without some attention to the import of performativity criteria and commod-
ification for the informational realm (Lyotard).
However, postmodern thought’s dogged determination to relativise all know-
ledge, to insist that there is no truth but only (an infinity of) versions of truth, has
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to be jettisoned. Not least because it is inherently contradictory, betraying the
ancient Cretan paradox that ‘all men are liars’. How can we believe post-
modernism’s claims if it says that all claims are untrustworthy? This is, in the
words of Ernest Gellner (1992), ‘metatwaddle’ (p. 41), something that fails to acknowledge that there is truth beyond the ‘discourses’ of analysts.
That is, against postmodern thinkers one may pose a reality principle
, that
there is a real world beyond one’s imaginings (Norris, 1990). This is not to say
that there is TRUTH out there
shining its light like a star. Of course it must be
established in language since truth is not revealed to us. But this does not subvert
the fact that truth is more than just a language game. Moreover, though we may
never grasp it in any absolute and final sense, we can develop more adequate
versions of reality by demonstrating better forms of argumentation, more trust-
worthy evidence, more rigorous application of scholarship and more reliable
methodological approaches to our subjects. If this were not so, then the revealed
‘truth’ of the religious zealot must be put on a par with that of the dispassionate
scholar (Gellner, 1992), a collapse into relativism with potentially catastrophic
consequences (Gibbs, 2000).
It is this insistence on absolute relativism that reduces Baudrillard’s commen-
tary often to downright silliness. To be sure, he is right to draw attention to the
manufacture of news and to remind us that this construction of signs is the only
reality that most of us encounter, say, of events in Iraq, Kosovo or Kashmir.
However, it is when Baudrillard continues to argue that news is a simulation and
nothing more
that he exaggerates so absurdly as to be perverse. He is absurd
because it is demonstrably the case that all news worthy of the term retains a
representational character, even if this is an imperfect representation of what is
going on in the world, and this is evidenced by either or both comparing alter-
native news presentations of the same issues and events and also realising that
there is indeed an empirical reality towards which news gatherers respond. It is
surely necessary to retain the principle that news reports are, or can be, repre-
sentational so that one can, with reliability if with scepticism, judge one news
story as more accurate, as more truthful, than another. As we undertake this
comparative task, we also realise that we are engaged in discriminating between
more and less adequate – more or less truthful – representations of events, some-
thing that gives the lie to the postmodern assertion that there is either a ‘truth’
or an infinity of ‘truths’.
More urgent than retaining the principle that news coverage has a repre-
sentational quality, however, is the need to remind ourselves that the news
reports on an empirical reality. It may not do this terribly well, but unless we
remember that there is a real world we can finish in the stupid and irresponsible
position of Baudrillard (1991) when he insisted, before the shooting started, that the Gulf War (1991) never happened since it was all a media simulation or,
after the event, merely a war-game simulation of nuclear war (Baudrillard, 1992, pp. 93–4).
This is by no means to deny that the First Gulf War was experienced by most
of the world solely as an informational event, or that this was the most exten-
sively reported war until the Kosovan invasion during 1999, the Afghan War in
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2001 and, of course, the Second Gulf War of 2003. Nor does this ignore the fact
that much media coverage was – and still is – deeply partisan and even propa-
gandistic. On the contrary, it was just because the news of these wars was widely
perceived to be flawed that we may point to the possibility of representational
news being produced about it and of the possibility of discriminating between
types of coverage to identify the more reliable from the less so. For instance, it
is widely agreed that, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US media were consid-
erably more favourable towards their forces and the attack itself than were
European news media, and to this degree their coverage generally failed to ques-
tion the administration’s legitimation of the assault in terms of allegations that
Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, or to pay attention to the
destruction that was to be wreaked on Iraqis by the invading forces. This is not
a matter of opinion, but a reasoned conclusion that follows from systematic
analysis, production of evidence and comparison of the coverage in different
countries (Tumber and Palmer, 2004; Tumber and Webster, 2006). Furthermore,
leading news organisations within the United States, notably the New York Times
and the
Washington Post
, came to much the same conclusion and a few months
later took themselves to task for their inadequacies during the early months of
2003. To follow Baudrillard’s line of argument we would have to say that these
different versions amount to nothing more than different versions, with the jingo-
istic Fox News no better or worse than the reportage of The Independent
. This is
a demonstrably specious argument.
It is also deeply irresponsible. The late Hugo Young (1991) made a point
devastating to such as Baudrillard when he warned readers, during the First Gulf
War, to beware ‘the illusion of truth’ that came from ‘wall-to-wall television’
reportage. Alerting his readership to the fact that ‘nobody should suppose that
what they hear in any medium is reliably true’, he continues to identify the crucial
issue: ‘that we are consigned to operate with half-truths’ demands that ‘we jour-
nalists should hang on to it’. That is, we ought to be sceptical indeed of the
reportage, but this must make us all the more determined to maximise access to
reliable information. If we end up believing that all war coverage is equally fabri-
cated and equally unbelievable, then we are surely incapable of doing anything
about the conflicts since they are reduced to language games.
Baudrillard’s strictures on the implausibility of seeking the authentic have an
easy appeal in an age of ‘virtual reality’ technologies which can precisely simu-
late experiences such as flying an aircraft and driving a car (and, potentially,
having intimate relations) and in a society such as England where the heritage
industry is determinedly reconstructing historical landscapes. But, once again, the
problem with Baudrillard is his rampant relativism that refuses to discriminate
between degrees of authenticity. To suggest that this may be undertaken is not
to say there is some core, some eternally genuine article, but it is to argue that
one can, through critique, discriminate between phenomena to identify the more
authentic from the less so (Webster, 2000).
Finally, Baudrillard’s assertion that we are left only with ‘spectacles’ that are
to be experienced but not interpreted reflects again his disdain for empirical
evidence. It is undeniable that, in the contemporary world, we are subject to a
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dazzling array of fast-changing signs, but there is no serious evidence that this
results in the abandonment of meaning. To be sure, it makes clear-cut interpreta-
tion of signs exceedingly difficult, but complexity is no grounds for asserting that,
with interpretation being variable, interpretation itself is lost. People are not yet
sign-struck, not yet the gawking ‘silent majorities’ Baudrillard imagines.
Mark Poster echoes a good deal of Baudrillard’s assertions, and much the
same objections to his work are pertinent. In addition, however, one can remark
on features of his historical analysis. Poster’s tri-part history – oralism, writing
and electronic exchange – is deeply technological determinist and subject to the
familiar objection that it is historically cavalier (Calhoun, 1993).
Gianni Vattimo is, of course, correct to draw attention to the multiperspec-
tivism that the expansion of media can bring. Television has brought to our
homes experiences from other cultures and, indeed, from within our own society
(Meyrowitz, 1985) which can challenge and disconcert. However, a glance at the
mountain of empirical evidence must reveal the marked limitations of this
perspectivism since it shows clearly that some perspectives – notably American
and, to a lesser extent, European – are a great deal more exposed than others
(Tunstall, 1977). To say that Hollywood dominates the world’s movies, that US
television accounts for large chunks of most other nations’ programming, or that
rock music originates in the main in London, Los Angeles and New York, is not
to argue that alternative perspectives are ignored. Quite the contrary, it is easily
conceded that other cultures are noticed and even given voice here – consider,
for instance, rap music or the urban movies which might show life through the
eyes of ethnic minorities.
However, to accept that media have opened out to include other ways of
seeing, at the same time as they have expanded exponentially, is by no means
the same as agreeing that they offer ‘multiple realities’. On the contrary, it is
surely the case, as scholars such as Herbert Schiller demonstrate time and again,
that what perspectives are to be included are subject to ideological and economic
limits. That is, while some cultures may be given voice, it is an inflected one
which is, as a rule, packaged in an appropriate and acceptable way for media
corporations and, above all, it must be – or be made – marketable, something
which limits the potential of, say, Chinese or Ukrainian ways of seeing to get
much air time.
A fundamental objection to Vattimo, as well as to other postmodern
commentators, is that his account is devoid of an empirical analysis that endeav-
ours to assess the realities of media output. His point that a profusion of media
has led to inclusion of some ‘alternative realities’ is well made. However, analysis
needs to go beyond this truism, to demonstrate the variation in perspectives (and
the discernible limits placed on that which gets access to media) and the differ-
ential exposure of these perspectives. That requires, of course, a determined
analysis of power, something which postmodern thinkers resolutely ignore (even
while they proclaim that power is everywhere).
This same absence is also noticeable in the work of Lyotard, though his
account of the influence of performativity criteria and the commodification of
information/knowledge is revealing. One can readily discern, in an enormous
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range of spheres, the influence of performativity and commodification: in
publishing, where ‘how to’ and ‘blockbusters’ predominate; in television, where
the ‘ratings’ are the critical measure of success since these bring in advertising
revenue; in research and development activity where ‘marketable solutions’ are
sought by investors, where scientists are compelled to sign copyright waivers,
and where ‘intellectual property’ is protected in patent submissions. Above all, perhaps, Lyotard refocuses attention on the educational sphere, surely a quintessential, but often downplayed, element of the ‘information society’, to
demonstrate the intrusion of performativity criteria and the increased commer-
cialisation of affairs (Robins and Webster, 1989; 2002).
The main problem with Lyotard, however, is that he concludes from all of
this that the reliability of all knowledge is lost and that an appropriate response
is to celebrate our release from the ‘tyranny’ of truth. This gay abandon appears
oblivious to the power and interests that have guided and continue to direct the
spread of performativity and commodification. Moreover, were one to identify the
processes and agencies of power and interest, this would be to describe a reality
that implies the possibility at least of alternative ways of arranging matters: ‘This
is as it is and why it is so – we can make it different.’ In short, it would be to
uphold the Enlightenment ideal of pursuing an alternative, and better, way of life.
A postmodern condition?
Postmodern thought has undeniably influenced a broad range of reflection on
contemporary life, not least amongst analysts of informational matters. It has
permeated a good deal of Sociology, Cultural Studies and Communications schol-
arship where such as Lyotard and Baudrillard – and most eminently Foucault –
are frequently referenced. It will be clear that I acknowledge this contribution
and influence, though I am also deeply unsympathetic to postmodern thought.
Too often it seems smart-alec and irresponsible, manifesting a radical delight in
mischievously questioning anything and everything while being incapable of
discriminating between the pertinence of questions and qualities of evidence.
Thereby postmodernism reveals a profound conservatism, being all talk with no
consequence (other than to leave things alone), something akin to the court jester
during the medieval period. This is why Jürgen Habermas (1981) was correct,
years ago, to identify postmodernism as neo-conservative, in spite of the radical
chic appeal of Foucault and his acolytes. In addition, postmodernism’s relativism,
where difference
is everything and all interpretations are interpretations of inter-
pretations, is inconsistent, self-denying and fundamentally irresponsible. It can be
amusing, even revealing, when musing on the complexities of small-scale inter-
action, but when relativism is applied to matters such as war, militant religious
cults and the massacre of almost two hundred schoolchildren in Beslan in
September 2004 by ruthless terrorists its intellectual and political bankruptcy is evident.
My lack of sympathy with postmodern thought ought not to be taken as denial
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condition. It is quite consistent to argue that we inhabit a postmodern society
without subscribing to postmodern thinking. What may be taken to be postmodern
lifestyles are manifested in hedonistic, self-centred (and maybe even decentred)
behaviours, in scepticism about definitive ‘truth’ claims, in ridicule and hostility
towards ‘experts’, in delight in the new, in pleasure in experiences, and in a pen-
chant for irony, pastiche and superficiality. All such may be taken as indicative
and even characteristic of postmodernity.
Zygmunt Bauman (b.1925) is the pre-eminent analyst of the postmodern
condition. Since the late 1980s he has published a remarkable series of studies
identifying and examining postmodern society. Though he marshals little empir-
ical evidence, his insights into contemporary society are perceptive. Bauman
depicts modernity as a time characterised by a search for order, a society seeking
stability and control under the aegis of nation states which looked after their
citizens, a period in which there was confidence in planning, and where it was
imagined that reason would bring about greater surety as to how we might best
arrange things. In contrast, postmodernity brings instability and insecurity, a
retreat of the state and the triumph of the globalising market which promotes
freedom of choice but leaves people apprehensive about their futures, suspicious
of reason itself and noticeably of the experts who make special claims for their
own access to it, replacement of control by the state by the ‘seductions’ of
consumerism, and a need for people to live with ambivalence and uncertainty
(Bauman, 1997). This ‘liquid life’ (Bauman, 2005) is one of constant reinvention
and possibility, full of potentials but with no criteria by which these might be
judged to be achieved and hence corrosively dissatisfied at every level, from the
intimate (Bauman, 2003) to the global where faith in a better future is absent
though it is widely acknowledged that humans are creating a changed environ-
ment (Bauman, 2006).
Bauman sees postmodernity as related, if not reducible, to capitalism. Indeed,
the rip-roaring neo-liberalism that was unleashed by the collapse of capitalism
and the acceleration of globalisation is a key element of the consumer-
orientated and flexible lifestyles that characterise postmodernity. Bauman is
somewhat unclear just how capitalism is connected to postmodernity, but his
acknowledgement of the market’s continued salience sets him apart from post-
modern thinkers such as Baudrillard who present postmodernism as a break with
all that went before. There are still others who argue more baldly than Bauman
that the postmodern condition with which we live today is a product of long-term
developments in capitalist relations. That is, there are underlying features that
may be identified by diligent scholars which help account for the changes we
have come to call postmodernism.
Some such thinkers hesitate to suggest a definite historical cause of the post-
modern condition. For instance, Fredric Jameson (1991), in a celebrated essay,
refers only to postmodernism as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’. To Jameson
realist culture was a correlate of market capitalism, modernist culture (as in
Surrealism, etc.) is in accord with monopoly capitalism, and now postmodernism
is the culture with most affinity with consumer capitalism. Scott Lash and John
Urry (1987) present a similar mode of analysis, arguing that an emergent ‘service
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class’ of educated, career-orientated, individualistic and mobile people with little
sympathy for ties of ‘community’ and ‘tradition’ has an ‘elective affinity’ with
postmodern lifestyles.
David Harvey (1989b) does not hesitate to identify a stronger causal connec-
tion. In his view the features of postmodernism are the result of changes in
capitalist accumulation. Bluntly, the flexibility that we associate with contempo-
rary capitalism – the adaptability of employees, the capacity of companies to
innovate, the acceleration of change itself – gives rise to postmodern culture. To
Harvey the post-war Fordist era offered standardised products manufactured in
standardised ways; today post-Fordism prevails, offering choice, variety and
difference from an economic system beset by crisis, facing new circumstances
(ICTs, worldwide competition, globalisation), and eager to find solutions in ‘flex-
ible production’ and its essential correlate ‘flexible consumption’. Postmodern
culture is the outcome of these trends; as Harvey writes:
The relatively stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism has given way to all the
ferment, instability, and fleeting qualities of a postmodernist aesthetic that
celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodifi-
cation of cultural forms.
(Harvey, 1989b, p. 156)
Postmodernism accords, in other words, with the transition from Fordism to post-
Fordism that we discussed in Chapter 4.
Interestingly, Daniel Bell, coming from a quite different starting point from
that of David Harvey, shares a willingness to explain the postmodern condition
as, in part at least, a consequence of ‘the workings of the capitalist economic
system itself’ (Bell, 1976, p. 37). Bell suggests that the very success of capitalism
to generate and sustain mass consumption, to give people cars, fashions, tele-
visions and all the rest, has led to a culture – he did not yet call it postmodern
in the mid-1970s, but that is what it amounted to – of pleasure, hedonism, instant
gratification and the promotion of experience over meaning (Bell, 1990) which,
paradoxically, is one that is at odds with the sobriety and efficiency-directed value
system that contributed to the startling success of capitalism in the first place.
I find much of these accounts of the postmodern condition persuasive. They
offer historical analyses and bring forward a wealth of empirical information to
provide substance to their arguments. But, of course, a determined postmodernist
thinker can dismiss them all as pretentious ‘grand narratives’, with Harvey inter-
preting the postmodern condition as the working out of the inner logic of
capitalist forces and with Bell coming from a committed modernist position which
regards the postmodern as a decidedly inferior culture to what went before.
To the postmodernist these accounts are unacceptable because they
presume to see the truth where there is no truth to be found. Harvey, for instance,
claims to see beneath the surface of postmodern culture to an underlying, but
determining, economic reality, presenting a vision that is said to emanate from
his own commitment to Marxist principles and which relegates those he studies
– the postmodern subjects – to ‘cultural dopes’ because they fail to see the hidden
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forces of capitalism with the learned professor’s clarity (Harvey, 2003). To the
postmodernist Harvey’s is but one reading, one interpretation among an infinity
of possibilities, and one which is rather noxious at that (Morris, 1992).
It has to be said that none of these studies is beyond criticism, not least by
those who can indicate shortcomings, absences and even prejudices in the
authors. Thus, for example, David Harvey would concede that his book might
have benefited from a more sensitive appreciation of feminism (Massey, 1991).
However, from admission of the value of critique to endorsement of the post-
modern dogma that everything is but an interpretation is an unacceptable leap
because in between is the matter of substantive analysis. We can readily agree
that each account is partial, but it cannot be dismissed – or seen as but equal to
any other ‘reading’ – on that account, because one must demonstrate
how some
accounts are more, and others less, partial. In other words, we are reminded of
the untenability of the postmodern celebration of relativism, an assertion that
subverts its own statements in the very act of denying all claims to truth.
Conclusion
As a description of the world in which we live, the term ‘postmodernity’ has value.
Its emphasis on the ferment of change, on fluidity, on scepticism and a penchant
for irony, and on the instability of relationships captures some of the distinguishing
features of our times. The foremost sociologist of postmodernity, Zygmunt
Bauman, illuminates core elements of contemporary existence, notably the perpetual uncertainty which underlies the surfeit of choices to be made about
everything from one’s hair colour to whether to support Amnesty International.
Postmodernity as a condition allows greater appreciation of how much constraints
have been removed from our lives today compared to those imposed on our pre-
decessors, as, too, does it highlight the disturbing imperative that we must choose
how we are to live now, though clear grounds for choice have crumbled. In turn,
Bauman’s attention to ‘seduction’ alerts us to the special significance of marketing,
advertising, celebrity – the entire range of media and associated imagery essen-
tial for a time in which previous systems of control have diminished in force.
Further, the emphasis of postmodern thinkers on the sign and signification, on
simulation and inauthenticity, on the transformative power of performativity criteria applied to information and knowledge, and acknowledgement of the
import of electronically mediated information are all useful to students of the
‘information revolution’.
However, it is doubtful that ‘we are entering a genuinely new historical con-
figuration’ (Crook et al
., 1992, p. 1). Quite the contrary, most of the postmodern
condition’s characteristics are explicable in terms of ongoing, if accelerating,
trends, ones identified and explained effectively by modernist thinkers such as
Herbert Schiller, Jürgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens and David Harvey. Like
post-industrial theory, postmodernism proclaims a new primacy to information
and with it the arrival of a fundamentally different sort of society. And, also as
with post-industrialism, the proclamation cannot be sustained in face of scrutiny.
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