Visions of Postmodernity (2011)

Visions of Postmodernity
Northern Michigan University

Brandon Lee

The Supreme Being of the Universe opened up the book of human existence on planet Earth and it reeked of ignorance, violence, and evil.  She skimmed through the ages and found so much goodness and love that she cried holy tears.

 So it goes.

Welcome to Postmodernity – the impossible, non-definable, abstract, spectacle of the technological society.  As your host I will take you into the realms of art, music, and philosophy of the postmodern.  And for no extra cost I’ll comment on the technique of our postmodern age.  Inevitably in doing this I may hijack the concept for my own purposes.

I remember a talk with my dad.  I asked him what postmodernism was.  He said he’d have to get back to me.

A Google Image Search of “Postmodern Art” brought up a remake of Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, with the Simpsons instead of drooping pocket watches.  The original is a surrealist piece with four limp clocks spaced out over a platform and bare tree with cliffs and shore line in the background.

The parody piece has the Simpsons family limp and drooped over a similar cartoon landscape.  In the center, Homer’s face is covered by a pocket watch and laid over a spilling Duff beer bottle.  Marge and her stack of blue hair hangs off a platform, while Bart’s face is in a tree.

Girl Talk, aka Greg Gillis, is a DJ that mashes up popular songs to create soundtracks for dance parties where a hundred bits and pieces of a song are crafted together to produce a quick and constant musical assault.  His fan base started on the East Coast with (predominately) white kids characterized in our culture by stylish clothing, urban lifestyles, preferences in art and music, and partying.  Some would be inclined to call these folk, hipsters.  Girl Talk’s music was accepted into the realm of commercially-approved popular culture found in the spectacle of entertainment outlets such as television, the internet, and magazines.  As Girl Talk is running a thin line near the legality of sampling music without permission, his music is absent from bureaucratic radio waves.

Postmodern Novelty A: The Enlightenment in existential panic filmed through a cell phone posted on YouTube where the viewer cannot click past the commercial beforehand.

Jacques Derrida was a French scholar who created the philosophical exploit of deconstruction and greatly influenced postmodern thought.  My only exposure to Derrida was through criticisms by a green anarchist writer named John Zerzan.  So I checked out a book that I thought would be a simple introduction to Derrida’s theory of deconstruction.  The book is deceivingly entitled, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, as the ideas of deconstruction do not fit into a nutshell.

The book is a reprint of a roundtable Derrida was involved in followed by a much longer commentary by Dr. John Caputo of Syracuse University where he delves into the conversation at the roundtable and highlights main tenants of Derrida’s deconstructionism.    

John Zerzan publishes essays on the ills and flaws of civilization, ultimately advocating for the end of the industrial mode of existence.  That is far out.  He took the activist’s discontent with the world and injustice, examined anthropological studies of pre-civilized people and the egalitarianism many of them lived under, and concluded that the totality of violence, power and injustice in the world is the result of the dominant society.  Inevitably in doing so, he has the ability to criticize nearly everything in our civilization.

I’m listening to a band named Black Dice.  To better understand Black Dice, take techno music and infuse it with the soundtrack from 2001: A Space Odyssey video game for Playstation 4, add cut-ups of Radiohead samples played in reverse, and finally run it all through a machine that does the equivalent of a strobe to light, but with sound.

Black Dice is a freakish experience not for the mild-mannered or those with weak stomachs.  Some thoughts I’ve had while listening to them include: maybe they’re making music just to see how far people will go to listen to wild sounds or what would my parents think of this? or this shit is weird.  But it’s undeniable: they’ve got something going for them.

We are exposed to an unprecedented amount of information by the media sources that surround us.  Televisions loom on the walls of the cafeterias.  The internet is as American as sitcoms in the evening.  Any unknown person, place or thing, is available for demystifying on Google and Wikipedia and cell-phones are leaving our pockets and purses buzzing with social connectedness.  The corporations and their teams of advertising executives have Facebook pages and omnipresent ads on all screens.

Whether or not we are conscious of the flood of text and branding we see the magnitude of the symbolic is enormous relative to our human predecessors.  This visual circus means we have a fast and fragmented view of knowledge in abundance made possible by Corporate America.

So it goes.

Postmodern Novelty B: TV show, Robot Chicken, does a special with action figures of Terry Gilliam, Michael Foucault, Kurt Vonnegut, Jacques Derrida, and Andy Warhol where they are transported to the land of Tron and discuss the absurdity of the world.

Remember child, it’s not real.  This reminder to the child encompassed in a TV show or movie or video game is a metaphysical paradox for the growing mind in a postmodern culture.  With the growing number of hours we subject ourselves to screens we are blurring the lines between reality and a constructed virtual reality that runs on electricity and capital.

But it is real.  It’s a visual product that is telling a story and occupying my mind.  SpongeBob did just flip a Krabby Patty.  I did just kill two-thousand Nazi Zombies in two hours.

On a red brick wall at the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis, there is text written by an artist named Lawrence Weiner.  It is in white stencil letters and it reads:

BITS & PIECES

PUT TOGETHER

TO PRESENT A SEMBLANCE

 OF A WHOLE.

Postmodern art is characterized by a collage of popular culture, surrealism, anti-consumerist themes portrayed through text, visual subversion of consumer icons, and the appropriation of past art techniques.

   

From Caputo’s commentary on Derrida and deconstruction: “The very meaning and mission of deconstruction is to show that things – texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices of whatever size and sort you need- do not have definable meanings and determinable missions, that they are always more than any mission would impose, that they exceed the boundaries they currently occupy.”

            Nothing is as it seems.  There is always more beneath the surface; we are involved in a thriving, changing culture on a living planet.  With so many unstated premises that lie beneath all social constructions, deconstruction seeks to bring everything to light and transgress limits.  Caputo mentions that Derrida is fond of the expression, “experience of the impossible.”  And in this postmodern expression of overcoming impossibility, I understand a defining concept: the move beyond socially accepted ideas of possibility into a realm of rejection, appropriation, and invention.

            Postmodern thought is about moving beyond structures that brought us to modernity.  It may smash barriers, but it would much rather climb over them on a ladder of language.  Postmodernism reflects the state of over six and a half billion people living on a planet; challenges all that people hold dear - religion, politics, science, morality, and art – but offers very little except a nihilistic hope for our cultural reality.  For the dogmatic and critical, this thought, or some would say “non-thought,” undermines their judgments and criticisms against society or certain institutions as everything becomes relative and shifts in the mess of time.

In his essay, The Catastrophe of Postmodernism, Zerzan lists parts of postmodern thought, “Incoherence, fragmentation, relativism -- up to and including the dismantling of the very notion of meaning (because the record of rationality has been so poor?); embrace of the marginal, while ignoring how easily margins are made fashionable. ‘The death of the subject’ and ‘the crisis of representation.’”

Postmodern writing and philosophy is full of contradictions, double-speak, and phrases that must be explained or left to the reader to create their own meaning, which is a definition of ‘relativism.’  When I think of the chic, appropriation of marginal cultures that Zerzan writes of, I think of the New Age movement taking Native American traditions and conducting them on their own without Native guidance, or even serious consideration of the Native American experience of genocide and land theft.  Ignorant white hippies and progressives looking for spiritual enlightenment by practicing ceremonies that they have no connection too except that their government destroyed the original ceremonialists.  Zerzan, in his book Running on Emptiness, describes the “death of the subject” as “the end of the individual, dissolved in language.”  Language becomes the subject, the thinking author and the individual disappears.  The “crisis of representation” refers to the world of images and representations that we are surrounded by: the spectacle that composes much of our society, the eight-plus hours American spend in front of screens, and our alienation from non-human beings – a relatively new phenomenon on the timeline of human existence.

Postmodern Novelty B: Anti-depressants are becoming something of a street drug.  Unfortunately, they don’t make people happy, just not depressed.

Girl Talk takes popular songs, finds acappella versions of beats, melodies, and vocals through the web and mixes them together at a faster tempo.  Missy Elliot informs us to “get ur freak on” while the driving guitar riff from The Ramones infamous Blitzkrieg Bop provides a fitting melody.   Ludacris yells “move” and “get out the way bitch, get out the way” while Black Sabbath sings War Pigs over their guitar track along with the hand-claps of Jay-Z’s 99 Problems.  When he produces music on his computer live, he wraps the laptop in plastic wrap to avoid beer spills, allows people on stage and sometimes strips naked.

From Caputo’s commentary on Derrida and deconstruction: “For he sees deconstruction as a way to keep the event of tradition going, to keep it on the move, so that it can be continually translated into new events, continually exposed to a certain revolution in a self-perpetuating auto-revolution.”

Derrida’s deconstruction of American democracy is sensible for the changing human landscape.  It’s no debate that the American democratic government has elements of undemocratic practices.  There’s the influence of rich individuals and corporations on politicians.  There is the loud opposition of the two parties in power that is flamed by media discourse.  There is the reluctance to curb environmental degradation.  Most glaring is the undemocratic distribution of wealth within the United States borders.  The possibility of deconstructing democracy is not an attempt to overthrow the government, but reinvent it to better suit a nation of our power and living standard, to bring the organization of a country into the twenty-first century.

I listen to Black Dice because of the intriguing auditory experience.  Add some medicinal herbs to it all and the mind becomes a setting for a creatively brilliant show.

One Black Dice album is called Beaches and Canyons.  It’s best listened to loud through headphones for the panning effect.  It is split into five tracks, but the listener can barely tell when one ends and another begins.  The album progresses from chants over bubbling synthesized noises, to slow and steady drum beats onwards to the sound of recorded waves approaching a shore, to a jam of distorted screams over flute samples, finishing with guitar, drum and non-verbal accompaniment looping into the consciousness.  The bits and pieces produce an hour of noise that sounds like nothing past ears have experienced.  The verse-chorus-verse format is absent.  There is no real difference between songs except for the subtle transitions that are difficult to detect.  Tempo is relative and changing, and the musical concept of measures is forgone.  Black Dice isn’t music, it’s an orchestrated sound-scape; add psychedelics and this is the catalyst for a closed-eye hallucinated movie where the listener is the director.

Zerzan’s anger towards postmodernism is based on its ineffectual challenge of power and a civilization that he sees as insane and destructive.  He recognizes postmodern attitudes that nothing can be known as a cop-out in a time of environmental and socio-political crisis that is our way of living in the hyper-technological consumerism which sprouts from the power outlet.

I became aware of postmodernism through a negative light.  I absorbed Zerzan’s writing and came under a jaded and judgmental mindset that everything to do with technology and our divorce from nature was inherently wrong and evil.  This attitude belonged more to youth, angst and too much thinking more so than Zerzan’s essays themselves. The anti-civilization stance challenges the totality of oppression and violence in our society and it is a growing school of thought for anarchists and environmentalists.

Unfortunately, this is absurd.  Anti-civilization writers are becoming as common as internet bloggers.  They write and write and write because they have such a wide topic range.  Those who choose to fight back with fire are subject to twenty plus years for only property damage and federally paid snitches are growing in numbers.  The peaceful that choose neither writing nor fighting cultivate land and some people to live with while they know that the world is eaten up around them.  It’s a catch-22 for civilized persons against the powerful mode of existence they are embedded in.

In this absurdity, I’ve come to embrace the absurdity.   There is a time for everything and now is the time for knowing shit happens, knowing shit doesn’t have to happen, and also taking a moment to stand in the breeze and admire the sunset over the structures of civilization.

Alright son, it’s time we had a talk.  I think you’re old enough now to understand where all the current thought processes and culture comes from.  It’s called postmodernity. 

Postmodernity is culture within the complexity of our social technique, our structure of society.  Postmodernity is the internet, information, introspection, and instant integration in a virtually-constructed reality.  Postmodernity is music that uses digital mixing of songs and sounds to create a landscape for the listener to enter.  Postmodernity is a lyrical novel with short chapters, a plot enhanced by chance and a cheery feeling of you-win-some-you-lose-some hope.  Postmodernity is past all the old traditions of culture and into a realm of something oddly beyond what we thought we could do back then.  Postmodernity is the intellectual world around us in everything we see and react to on the conscious and subconscious level.  Postmodernity is the debate on the study of ideas with floods of water under the bridge of history.  Postmodernity is post-Marxist, post-Christian, post-song, post-art, post-structural and past what we thought we knew.

The Supreme Being of Universe flipped ahead in the book of human existence and printed in gold calligraphy was the narrative on how the world as we know it ends.  I am not the Supreme Being of the Universe and I do not know what happens after postmodernism, but the infatuation with language will surely present us with a new label.  Post-postmodern just sounds lame though. 

“Post-civilized,” says the black-clad rioter in the street.  “Pre-utopian,” says the excessively blinking politician.  “Post-culture,” says the stale-book philosopher.  “Post-contained,” says the naked performance artist on stage.  “Party-spontaneous,” says the Situationist at the coffee shop.  “Post-grid,” says the sustainable activist on the homestead.  “Post-human,” says the self-loather in all of us.

So it goes.