I have never been sure which is most insufferable – the term “postmodernism”, the intellectual fashions that grew up around it, or the supposed culture it purports to describe. Probably all three equally.

Paulo Freire wrote, towards the end of the 20th century:

There is a lot of fatalism around us. An immobilizing ideology of fatalism, with its flighty postmodern pragmatism, which insists that we can do nothing to change the march of social-historical and cultural reality because that is how the world is anyway. (1)

He went on to see neoliberalism as the most dominant version of that fatalism and argued that it narrowed educational objectives to simply adapting the student “to what is inevitable, to what cannot be changed”. (2) This limited aspiration not only applies to education. It is currently part of the zeitgeist. It also recalls Francis Fukuyama’s idea of Western-style liberal democracy as the final form of human political aspiration. (3) This was based on guesswork about the significance of the end of the Cold War, and on the observation that the disappearance of the Second World (the Communist bloc) left the Third World in general thirsting to be like the First (“the West”, mainly America), and that there was no further frontier once liberal democracy had been achieved. The few Marxists or genuine progressive radicals in the most obscure show on earth (postmodern discourse - that is) would doubtless object that it is unfair to equate cultural theory with neoliberal ideology. And so it might be. There’s a lot else that it might be equated with, most of which stinks too. My point, however, is that whatever the intellectual preoccupations of postmodernism may be (and all that has come after) at academic level, in the social, cultural and political spheres it now amounts to a form of quietism disguised as incisive and rather clever analysis. In terms of conscious engagement designed to coax a better world into shape it leads precisely nowhere. For the most part it doesn’t even believe it can.

“Incisive analysis”, in any case, is the wrong description for a field which is routinely discussed in fiercely abstruse language – syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships, metonymy, simulacra, differance (“difference” a la Francais, that is), nearly all Lacan, Madonnology (the study of Madonna), deconstruction and the death of the author - not to mention all those irritating brackets (brackets) and quote marks which college lecturers represent as two sets of bunny ears, forefingers and middle fingers wagging in a gesture redolent of that grating knowingness that characterises the whole field. The relentless vacuity of such jargon renders any pretence of social engagement still-born. Whatever individuals think, many of them doubtless sincere, so much postmodern and cultural theory, like an endless set of convoluted Russian dolls, has a deterrent effect and is about as disengaged as it is possible to be. If you urgently want people to understand what you have to say you write it in language that is half way comprehensible. For example, the slogan of Friends of the Earth, “Making life better for people by inspiring solutions to environmental problems”, feels light years away from post-speak. Or there is Amnesty International’s website which announces: “We stand up for humans wherever justice, freedom and truth are denied.” No problems of clarity there then.

Granted, every subject, every field of research, every occupation, and every subculture has its own technical terms and jargon. The jargon here, however, stands guilty as charged of three basic crimes. One, its users generally display an inability to explain it: even beginner’s guides tend to end up impenetrable. Two, it really is exceptionally arcane. And three, post-speak actually obfuscates what boil down to a few simple propositions which, if expressed in plain language do not sound half so profound.

When all the postmodern, post-structuralist, deconstructionist, theories are subject to comparison and analysis, stripped of their jargon and made to talk straight, they suggest one simple proposition. That is: normative humanism (the idea that there are human universals) is now replaced by cultural relativism (the idea that there aren’t). For example, the linguistic end of postmodernism and its related “isms” shows how relative, fragile and provisional language is and yet how, never the less, it forms our concepts and consciousness. Elsewhere the roles of reason, meaning and identity are shown to be constructions which, therefore, can be deconstructed. This leaves everything in a state of flux in a philosophical framework in which there can be no universal or bigger truths. Indeed, the very word “truth” is unfashionable and should only be used with “quotation marks” (a)round it. The more you look, the more you see yourself looking. Even the idea that there is a Self that is doing the looking is called into question. This would appear to be a somewhat unsubtle rerun of the Buddhist idea of anatta - “no self”.

Perhaps the most explicit and easily understood idea in the postmodern lexicon, and maybe the most important, is Lyotard’s proclamation of the demise of metanarratives. These are the grand, overarching myths, stories or belief systems which, being assumed to be absolute, can and do motivate entire cultures, and are religious, philosophical or political. (Close inspection shows how close together all three really are.) All the world’s religious “isms” are included, all political ideologies, as well as supposed myths such as those of progress or historical necessity.

All this flux and uncertainty leads to the typical postmodern statement, rife in the arts and literature, ironic, knowing and detached. The typical account (is it a metanarrative?) is that at some point (there’s always a debate as to exactly when) the modernist worldview gave way to all that referential, parody, reinvestigation, identity politics, multiculturalist, absence of future, manifesto or programme, pleasure and construction of shifting selves through consumption and choice, and the blurring of distinctions between so-called high and so-called low culture.

I am not convinced that the post-1960s period should be seen in this way. I do not deny the changes that happened, especially decisively in technology. I do not deny the cultural and artistic differences from classic modernisms which emerged at this time. I do not deny the political complexity of the politics and society after the Cold War, or the new depths of consumerism, capitalism and its popular culture which has a strange way of hooking even the most resistant. I do deny that the break was so fundamental as to require the appellation post with its implications of superseding the modern or acting as its post-mortem. Certainly in the field of the arts there is a clear continuity with modernism rather than a fundamental and decisive break, entirely new languages and new concerns.

Perhaps this depends on the view taken of modernism itself. A good starting point sees the various strains of modernism (there was no single strain) as a response to modernity. The confusion created by the similarity of the two words (modernity/modernism) is renowned and continues to cause muddle – in many a student essay, for example. Putting aside the fact that in the longest historical perspective the modern period begins with the demise of the medieval period, modernity is the new world which began to emerge perhaps as far back as the mid 18th century, but certainly by the mid 19th century in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of scientism and the changes in thought and worldview which gathered around these. In the 19th and 20th centuries it included that familiar but still mighty list of changes to life from the light bulb to space travel. Factories, the new working class, noise, steam, trains, new technologies, electricity, the growth of capitalism and an all engulfing popular culture are all part of the picture. Modernism - in the arts, architecture, philosophy and political ideas – was a cluster of contributions and responses to this new world.

Some saw the new world as an exciting place which pointed to an even more exciting future. For all he opposed the degradations it brought about, Marx for example, in the 19th century, saw capitalism as progressive in the sense that it had created a new world, and thus new possibilities – notably socialism. From a different standpoint entirely, and even in some cases veering towards fascism rather than communism, the Italian Futurists (1909 onwards) embraced the noise, speed and even the violence of the new world. Other responses in the arts included different forms of abstraction, contemplative or dynamic, and all those forms of expressionism whereby the emotional inner life of the artist, composer or writer was thrust into the forefront. Movements in the modernist arts can generally be related to one of these three – futurism (the general idea rather than the specific movement), abstraction, expressionism.

What linked all these tendencies so that now, from our 21st century vantage point, we can lump them together as modernism? There are two major types of “glue”. First, as we have seen, they were all responses and contributions to modernity. These responses did not necessarily cohere. We have seen that they ran a spectrum from vehemently pro-modernity as with the Futurists to a preference for what the sculptor Brancusi called “the essence of things”, a sense of both penetration and renewal which the likes of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth found in the contemplation of Nature. Modernism could be hot or cool. Arising from this diversity of attitudes and aesthetics came those preoccupations of modernism in the arts such as a constant striving for the new, simultaneity, collage, assemblage, a posture of manifesto, multiple viewpoints, and new orders. Thus modernism’s responses to modernity are, at this level, highly diverse. What links them is the second answer to my question, their sources.

Modernism typically sought inspiration from four sources: the primitive, the folkloric, the occult, and the oriental. Every modernist artist and thinker relates to two, three or all four of these. They serve as antidotes to the new world, but also as ways of expanding and exalting it. The primitive referred to the supposed primal fire of pre-civilization which, so the idea went, could re-emerge as a dynamic power in the modern world as in Picasso’s references to African masks in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring or Marinetti’s glorification of machinery as embodying primal forces. The folkloric represented a supposed lost unity of Man and Nature. The oriental introduced the exotic as well as evidence of an ancient wisdom from elsewhere which, by implication, was pressed into service to comment on modernity. And the occult suggested realms not susceptible to scientism, the measurement and quantification typical of some aspects of the new world. All four sources suggest hidden, esoteric, intuitive forms of knowledge that were presumed buried or lost touch with by modernity. Despite the varied backgrounds, upbringings and political views of modernist artists, all four sources were ultimately anti-bourgeois or, at the very least, suspicious of the wealthy middle classes in whose interest the status quo existed and the range of highly conservative attitudes that resulted from this interest.

This view of modernism is the one I find most useful. This is partly because the sources and preoccupations it refers to remain and continue in the arts. The fabric has not been shattered. We are not “post” it. For example, despite the disappearance of an avant garde there are clear agreements in the world of the arts as to what is and isn’t cutting edge, even though that edge may now as blunt as a rusty razor. The major change here is that the anti-bourgeois nature of early modernism has disappeared. The differences between exhibiting in the 1863 Salon de Refuses and the Saatchi Gallery are obvious. Even so, the search for the new, now recast as a preoccupation with novelty and superficial innovation, remains. A list of so-called post-modern elements actually pioneered by modernism includes simultaneity, collage and bricolage, assemblage, use of new technologies, multiple viewpoints, the increased fetishization of the individual artist, multimedia and multidimensional performance events, the appropriation of elements from everyday life, chance, art as affront, conceptualism and so on. More importantly the four major sources of modernism (primitive, folkloric, oriental, occult) are now so deeply ingrained in the structure of thinking and feeling about art and life in general that we live with them constantly without necessarily knowing it. That historical process whereby a new idea originates on the margins and is eventually sold on the high street has happened in innumerable ways with the nuts, bolts and impact of modernism.

What has changed is that new forms of discussion, generally known as postmodern but breaking down into various subdivisions (semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism et al) since the end of the 1960s began to penetrate deeply into the cultural, social and political spheres. Various reasons for this come to mind. One involves some kind of grand disillusion with the fact that the new, fairer world for which the counterculture of the 1960s stuck out its neck didn’t happen. Certainly some of the initial salvos of postmodern thought aimed to deal with why, and tried to show what we had instead. Rather like the elaborate sour-grapes of 17th and 18th century German Pietists when faced with the fact that the outside world was not as they would wish it, there was a retreat into theory and contemplation. The arena for ideas was, in this case, not the church but the universities, and certainly not the streets or workplaces. This isn’t the whole story, however.

The post-modern concentration on style and surface was a reflection on the disappearance of the future. If progress was exposed as a myth, as many argued, this was partly because any semblance of Utopian thinking had disappeared, a condition that was later intensified by the collapse of the communist world. Few would have pretended that communism as enacted in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was really the Utopian socialist society that Marxists and anarchists alike had looked forward to. Yet while it, as a different system with a different worldview, existed somewhere, no matter how imperfect, the idea that capitalism was the only possibility could not be advanced. Depth, in the arts as elsewhere, was always either vertical – looking inwards – or horizontal, meaning aspirational or applying critique. Something extraordinary, call it magical, happened when there was a genuine and almost mysterious symbiosis between the two, as in Beethoven or Dostoyevsky. Once the horizontal, aspirational or linear dimension became absent the only options left were an intensification of the vertical, looking inwards and talking about oneself, or endless referential gestures that treated the past ironically and knowingly – the realm of the non-stop “quote marks” and incessant (brackets). For the former see, for example, in Tracy Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), a tent with the names of all her sleeping and sexual partners to date appliquéd inside. For the latter – well, irony and knowingness defined the field. It was everywhere. And still is.

One of the starting points for the postmodern critique of culture and society after the 1960s drew attention to the dominance of mass media and popular culture – the mediatized or media saturated society. But that had been the case for much of the 20th century. It was the basic motivation behind the Frankfurt School of thinkers in the 1930s. It was part of modernity almost from the outset. Even when I was a little kid the despairing expression was that children were becoming “square-eyed” because they watched too much telly. The proposition, hidden in much postmodern discourse, that people can’t tell the difference between the mediatized version of reality and reality itself is preposterous. Sports crowds for live events continue to be massive, and the big screens at cricket matches, for example, don’t mediatize the event to the extent that you might as well watch it on Sky TV in the pub. People continue to go to pubs and clubs and restaurants and coffee shops. They meet, they talk, they discuss, they banter. People sight-see, go to art galleries and gigs. They may try to imitate culture heroes seen on TV on in the pages of magazines, and their imitations may, at worst, even suggest that they’re fooled by the power of imagery and celebrity, but this does not amount to not knowing the difference, an assertion that is just plain insulting. Note that it is always everyone else who has had the mediatizing wool pulled over their eyes, not the postmodern scholars. And in any case, one is tempted to say “what’s different”? What’s different, that is, from any time in the last hundred or more years? There have always popular role models and culture heroes for many years. Popular and street literature of the 19th century has little other than Jolly Jack Tars, pretty ploughboys, jolly miners and milkmaids fair. But I shall move on to my final points.

The destruction of the New York World Trade Centre’s twin towers by flying aeroplanes into them, was the watershed which should have kicked the cultural relativism of the post-speak era into touch. Simply, if all viewpoints, all identities, all meaning and differences, are constructions and are therefore at some level equal (if fragile) then there is no essential reason why 9.11 should not have taken place and no means to apply any critique to it. Those who carried out those acts, it can fairly be said, had their own worldview and ethics constructed, as post-speak would insist, according to perceptions based on the conditioning power of language, as well as on their understanding of structures of power and knowledge as they affected them. Whatever they intended, however, according to the theory, should be nullified by the fact that they created a text, a globally media-visible huge act of violence, in response to which we, as “audience”, may read our own meanings, none of which should be privileged over any or all others. In the kind of plain terms that postmodernism shies away from, no one meaning of 9.11 (or anything), including that of the terrorists themselves, is any better or worse than any other. Any criticism or abhorrence should therefore be seen as grounded in the ethnocentrism of the West and a consequent valuing of the liberal democratic worldview over all others. In effect, in order to abhor 9.11, along with all acts of terrorism, you have to have a view which you see as superior to that of the terrorists. But this is not possible without some kind of myth, metanarrative or ethical view which, on some level, is as fragile as that of the terrorists themselves.

This is, in fact, the case. A principled position sees terrorism on any scale as unacceptable. This does not preclude an understanding of the blurred and problematic edges between it and apparently legitimate acts of war. Such a position may understand why groups of highly motivated people (the terrorists) from the so-called Third World feel the way they do about the First World and America and Britain in particular, but never the less draws a line at 9.11, bombs and suicide bombing, kidnapping, piracy and hijacking.

At deeper academic and arcane levels postmodern philosophy may not (surely) adopt a hands-off, neutral approach to such questions of violence, ethics and politics, although it might claim to recognize the irony, impermanence and contradictoriness of its own position. In terms of lived impact in the world, however, its extreme cultural relativism easily flips from the philosophical neutrality of all-viewpoints-are-constructions to the oppressive, coercive equality of political correctness. A student researching children’s songs recently alerted me to the existence of Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep. Pass the sick bucket…

But I fear I may have fallen into their trap – too much verbiage, too little conclusion. What I really want to say is that the whole intellectual edifice is useless and urgently needs jettisoning and replacing with something more useful. What that could be may be beyond my ken, but I do have a few cents-worth that I feel are worth tossing in.

No metanarratives is, of course, a metanarrative. Only the brain-dead can exist without them, although this can be what it feels like after wading through some of the most convoluted examples of postmodern scholarly prose. If all viewpoints are partial, not impartial, rather than regard this as evidence for the inevitable impurity of all thought, and rather than perpetrating the fiction that all views are thus equally OK, we are free to abandon any search for truth and to seek instead what is valuable. All those big issues that dominate the world stage give us a clear reason for this: ecological crises, climate change, sectarian conflict, poverty, urgent global health issues, the excesses of consumerism, and the obscenely huge inequalities of wealth engendered by capitalism whether globally or nationally.

Whereas in the past the idea of a kinder, more equal, more cooperative world was an inspiring option which appealed to a sense of fairness, we have far less options. We may have no alternative but to get our narrative straight, to make it healthy and life-giving, and to deliberately construct such a narrative if that’s what it takes. Even if it is granted that the word postmodern still describes some powerful aspects of our society – especially of the roles of mass and popular culture, postmodernism as such is now a dated response, and one that that was always inadequate. It would be good all round if postmodernism, which was always typically ironic and thus distanced and therefore tended towards the unengaged, now gave way to a shift towards a sense of genuine responsibility. This would require of us more, far more, than giving to charities, or to annual good cause stunts like donning a red-nose and pretending to care about children, Ethiopia or whatever, and in the meantime actually promoting the careers of obscenely overpaid celebrities, sportspeople and pop stars. Live Aid, the mega-rich singing for the mega-poor is no role model for a genuine sense of responsibility.

Responsibility is also more than choosing from the range of apparently non-exploitative or ecologically friendly consumer goods now available, although gestures like this are perhaps a start. It involves a relationship with the future, one which is compassionate in the best (not the worst, Western, mangled) Buddhist sense. This is not easy. Humans have it in them to love and cherish the past, and possibly the present, rather than the future. We could think of many examples of impressive philosophies which have been based on the past – such as Hegel’s dialectic, a historically based construction whose general thrust was to validate what was then the 19th century present. Marx’s effort to stand Hegel on his head used the past to explain the present but was clearly not in love with either. His philosophy was most substantially based on the future, a better, fairer future, an outlook which inevitably draws forth the accusation of being utopian. This, whatever you think of Marx or Thomas Moore, is a better model for responsibility than today’s charitable conscience-saving flag-waving absurdity.

To associate utopian idealism with impracticality or pie-in-the-sky is the knee-jerk response of the terminally unimaginative, the pusillanimously pragmatic, of those who are not really alert to whatever is really urgent. We need a revival of utopian thinking, and if it needs tempering with pragmatism that’s fine. A visionary with intoxicating ideas working with an accountant actually makes for a good team despite the incomprehension they may have for each other. Today we have plenty of accountants but fewer and fewer visionaries.

It would be good to think that the grand story of humanity involves an aspirational move from a real past, via historical presents, to a cherished future. In such a formulation the ancient world, with its panoply of gods, goddesses, demigods and animism, might represent a worldview dominated by past experience of Nature, including humans. The placation of gods via offerings, libations, rituals, obedience and surrender was key in the attempt to control an uncontrollable world. This sense of the past persisted in the medieval worldview but was firmly held in check by doctrines of the present which were given a sense of urgency by projections into the celestial future. The future, in this formulation, of course, has nothing to do with this earth. Modern sensibilities (and here we can extend back to the 15th and 16th centuries were gradually more earthbound, and strongly rooted in the present. This part-way explains modern humanism and atheism. Modernity and modernism alike, in the 19th and 20th centuries, were strongly centred in the present, although the religious background to the work ethic made sure that this was always a struggle for those who had only their labour to sell. Postmodernism will doubtless turn out to be a mere blip in the development of the modern world from a culture of constant production, capital, consumption and globalism to its next stage. Impossible though it is to even grasp, never mind predict, the complexities of even the very short term future, I sincerely hope that an element of what I might call Precipio becomes a major force in worldview. By this I mean anticipation, reading warnings, hope, possibility, danger, the perils of unacceptable risks, and a commitment to continuing life – these sound so much more useful and inspiring than simulacra, deconstruction, or differance (pronounced in French, that is).

(1)Freire, Paulo: Pedagogy of Freedom, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, p. 26
(2)Freire, Paulo, op. cit. p. 27
(3)Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press, 1992.

Sam Richards