An examination and commentary on Hans Bertens’ explanation of postmoderism in The Idea of the Postmodern
The postmodern movement, like existentialism, has been difficult to define because of the variety of authors, the ways it has been discussed, and the ways it has been interpreted. It appears to mean different things to different people. Like existentialism, it represents both a style and an intellectual movement. Stylistically, there is something the initiate needs to “get” on a purely intuitive, aesthetic level in order to identify it or work with as a style; intellectually, it has tended to be discussed in language that is mystifying to many or most readers. In fact, the theorists behind the postmodern movement have been some of the more difficult and perplexing authors of the 20th century.
Despite the difficulties involved, Hans Bertens gives a simple framework for understanding postmodernism. His formula can be restated in a few lines that will set the reader on his or her way (perhaps after a long and bewildered search). Put succinctly, it may be characterized either (A) by a turning away from abstraction toward narrative and history or (B) by the radicalization of the self-reflexive moment within modernism itself. Each of these two points will be explicated in what follows.
(A) The Return of Narrative
The return of narrative may be most clearly seen in the case of painting. At the beginning of the 20th Century, painters such as Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky abandoned narrativity in their painting by moving away from images or scenery that can be located in history, tell a story, and may carry with them ideological and institutional weight. Religious art, images motived by social realism, or even the expansive scenery of impressionist works may serve as examples. Instead, they opted for a way of doing art that highlighted what might be considered its subjective or even psychological aspects. For some, abstraction was a way of getting closer to the essence of art itself. Kandinsky wrote of his hope that “In this atmosphere will be created much, much later the pure art which hovers before us in our fleeting dreams of today with an indescribable attraction” (“Reminiscences” 40).
But postmodern art is marked by the return of a narrative element, the need to tell a story, and precisely the kind of institutional and ideological elements abstraction sought to avoid. Yet, it reintroduces them from a critical standpoint, with an awareness of their effect upon us that sometimes acts ironically as a mirror of society. This was perhaps prompted by the revolutionary social attitudes of the 1960’s. The new social and political concerns of the era prompted forms of expression that were less interested in subjectivity or with the goal of achieving a “pure” artform in Kandisnky’s sense. In architecture, the international style office building, with its self-referential uniformity and boxy structure, was replaced by a new style that emphasized complexity, non-uniformity, and even contradiction that could be seen as “speaking to” or representing the multiple, layered narratives present in modern life.
In his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture Venturi wrote, “I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function. I prefer ‘both-and’ to ‘either-or,’ black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white. A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations or focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once” (Venturi 23). Venturi places his finger on a further characteristic element of postmodernity: the resistance to a totalizing kind of universality in favor of complexity and variety. Uniformity of the kind the international style office building manifests, which erases individual differences, began to appear less satisfying. Certainly the 20th century experienced forms false unity more than once.
Finally, there is a certain tendency in postmodern art iand architecture to speak in one way or another, to “have something to say” that may involve literal words in order to make its message clear. Sometimes the marriage of art and textuality is successful, but at other times, a overreliance on textuality threatens to get in the way of the purely visual aspect of the art. Visual art, to be successful, should achieve something more than merely present a backdrop for a political message.
(B) The Radicalization of the Self-Reflexive Moment
Bertens describes this way of characterizing postmodernism in terms that highlight its continuity with modernism (he gives James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake as an example) (Bertens 3-5). The radicalization of the self-reflexive moment in literature and film coincides with a broader trend toward turning away from straightforward narrative and representation. Bertens describes the trend toward self-reflexivity as emerging out of the mid-70’s as “engaged in in an interrogation of representation, of language, of the subject, and of the underlying liberal humanist ideology in general. A familiar example that omits the political element may be the way in which the reversal of the traditional narrative in Memento (2000) brings on an interrogation of one’s sense of self in relation to the world through a rehearsal of memories that may or may not be reliable. Essentially, there is a deconstruction of representation that leaves the reader questioning reality, not as such, but the way we are accustomed to piece it together and at the same time form a sense of self.
A further example is the film, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), in which the main characters, played by Jeremy irons and Meryl Streep, turn out to be actors in a film the movie itself begins with. The events of the film in which they are actors parallels closely the events of their lives to the point where the representational element in the film, the film in which they are acting, comes to determine their destinies. In the end, it is the representational element of art, rather than the events of their real lives that comes to determine their sense of themselves and their relationship. The theme invites the viewer to reflect upon the way our lives and sense of identity are shaped by artistic representation and its subconscious influences. The film shows how the self can be thought of as deconstructed in another way, become “unmasked” as a tissue of identity cues borrowed from the artistic representations of life that surround us and shape our sense of self. Click the following link to watch the classic trailer.
The representation of a film as a “film within a film,” a paradigmatic trope of metafiction, highlights the fact that our reality, like the fictional one, is a created one, a constructed one. Works of fiction are ways a world could be. Their very constructedness opens the door for deconstructing them, for recognizing that they are just narratives and, in that sense, much like the narratives we apply to our own lives, including the political, social, and news narratives that construct our sense of reality, all of which are constructed out of language. What deconstruction, metafiction, and the architectural trend toward the postmodern have in common is their way of highlighting the inadequacy of any totalizing representation of reality. Writers and film makers highlighted the ways in which our sense of what is in the world may be deconstructed in much the same way that architects began to turn against the uniformity of the modernist international style office building as a false representation of unity, as an imposed unity that did not reflect the true richness and complexity life.
Is a (C) Synthesis Possible?
The common thread underlying these two diametrically opposed forms postmodernism took would seem to be a sudden, growing consciousness of the fact of representation itself. The awareness of representation as a fundamental social and political factor shaping society and ourselves that led artists, writers, and philosophers to contemplate the meaning of the representational world of modernity. The representational nature of society had been created by advances in media technology and as it began to saturate daily life, writers such as Water Benjamin began trying to grasp its implications for the future. In this regard Benjamin might be considered a proto-postmodern theorist. But what sets postmodern art apart, in what could perhaps be considered its pure form, is not only the way that representation shapes us, but a concern with grasping the representation of reality as a system of representation or as part of a system in the same way that a sentence representing the way things are must necessarily be part of a larger system of language-a system for representing the world.
Perhaps the truly postmodern moment could be thought of as the realization that this representational system can be considered “from above.” This is postmodernism’s meta-moment that frees it from modernism’s attempt to construct reality by simply announcing that all such attempts are, like international office towers, not “realities,” but merely structures vying for acceptance as realities. This way of thinking about postmodernism makes into into an essentially “meta” way of thinking about the reality of the modern world and the development of postmodernism from the 60’s onward may be seen as the progressive growth of this kind of meta-attitude toward our representation saturated world. From pop art to McLuhan, to Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard, postmodern thinkers thought about society through the lens of representation and expanded the concept to include a new consciousness of the media, of power, and western culture’s search for meaning and truth in general and how it might be corrupted by the technological forces it let loose. Lastly, a final point of irony: whereas postmodernism is often characterized as a way of thinking that dispenses with the search for ultimately stable and final truth, it is nevertheless committed to a form of transcendence that takes our consciousness beyond modernist attempts to frame truth as an either/or. In its attempt to capture reality within a both-and sensibility, in its finer moments it went beyond mere pastiche, merely collecting representations together by dint of drawing together unconscious associations, and developed a perspective that could be characterized more positively in terms of the transcendence of opposites.
Works Cited
Kandinsky, Wassily. “Reminiscences.” Modern Artists on Art, edited by Robert L. Herbert, Prentice-Hall, 1964, 19-44.
Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture with an Introduction by Vincent Scully. The Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture #1, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966.
“Joseph Beuys – English Subtitles – How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare 1/2.” Youtube, uploaded 27 Oct 2014 (Joseph Beuys – English Subtitles – How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare 1/2 – YouTube)
“Rushdie reads Barthelme’s Concerning the Bodyguard.” YouTube, uploaded by Electric Cereal, 30 November 2013, (Rushdie reads Barthelme’s Concerning the Bodyguard – YouTube)
External Resources
Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas