Postmodernism is pretty much a buzz word now. Anything – and everything – can be described as postmodern now, the design of a building, the samples used in a record, the layout of a page, the collective mood of a generation, cultural or political fragmentation, the rise of blogging and crowd-wisdom, anything that starts with the word “meta”. But what does it mean?
In art, where it all began, it’s a style of sorts, ironic and parodying, very playful and very knowing. Knowing of history, culture, and often knowing of itself. Postmodern art and entertainment is often self-conscious. It calls attention to itself as a piece of art, or a production, or something constructed. A character who knows they are a character in a novel, for example, or even the appearance of an author in their own book.
Overall, postmodern art says there’s no difference between refined and popular culture, “high” or “low” brow. It rejects genres and hierarchies. Instead, it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness, and cross-crossing referentiality.
The idea is: let’s not pretend that art can make meaning or is even meaningful. Let’s just play with nonsense.
All of this springs from the discovery of a new relationship to truth. In a postmodern perspective, truth is not a single thing “out there” to be discovered. Instead truth must be assembled or constructed. Sometimes, it’s constructed visibly, from many different components (i.e. scientists gathering results of multiple studies). Other times, it happens invisibly by society, or by cultural mechanisms and other processes that can’t be easily seen by the individual. So when someone “speaks the truth”, what they are saying is actually an assemblage of their schooling, their cultural background, and the thoughts and opinions they’ve absorbed from their environment. In a way, you could say that their culture is speaking through them.
For that reason, it becomes more accurate and safer, in postmodern times, to assemble truth with the help of other people, rather than just decide it independently.
A clear example of this is the scientific method. Any scientist can do an experiment and declare a discovery about the world. But teams of other scientists must verify or “peer-review” that truth before it’s safe to accept it. The truth here has been assembled by many people.
All the time, though, there is an understanding that even this final “truth” may well just be temporary or convenient, a place-holder to be changed or binned later on. (Well, that should be the case. Even scientific discoveries have a tendency to harden into dogma.)
If you accept this key postmodern insight, then immediately it becomes impossible for any individual to have a superior belief. There’s no such thing as “absolute truth”. No one “knows” the truth or can have a better truth than someone else. If an individual – or a group, organization, or government – does claims to have truth and declares that truth to you, they are likely to be attempting to overpower and control you.
Confusingly, these kinds of entities are known as “Modernist”. Modernity is all about order and rationality. The more ordered a society is, the better it functions. If “order” is superior, then anything that promotes “disorder” has to be wrong. Taken to an extreme, that means anything different from the norm – ideas, beliefs, people – must be excluded or even destroyed. In the history of Western culture this has usually meant anyone non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual and non-rational.
This is one reason why tension still erupts between holders of “absolute truth” (say the Church) and postmodern secular societies or between an entity like an undemocratic government which seeks to control its populace and the internet, a truly postmodern piece of technology. This is because postmodernity has a powerful weapon that can very easily and very quickly corrode Modernist structures built on “old-fashioned” absolute truth: deconstruction.
If all truth is constructed, then deconstruction becomes useful. If you deconstruct something, its meanings, intentions and agendas separate and rise to the surface very quickly – and everything quickly unravels.
Take a novel for example. You can deconstruct the structure of the text, and the personality of the characters. Then you can deconstruct the author’s life story, their psychological background, and their culture and see how that influenced the text. If you keep going, you can start on the structure of human language and thought, beyond that, a vast layer of human symbols. Beyond that … well, you can just keep going…
Belief systems and modernist structures protect themselves from threats like deconstruction with “grand narratives”. These are compelling stories to explain and justify why a certain belief system exists. They work to gloss over and mask the contradictions, instabilities and general “scariness” inherent in nature and human life.
Liberate the entire working class. Peace on Earth. There is one true God. Hollywood is one big happy family. History is progress. One day we will know everything. These are all grand narratives.
All modern societies – even those based on science – depend on these myths. Postmodernism rejects them on principle. Instead it goes for “mini-narratives”, stories that explain small local events – all with awareness that any situation, no matter how small, reflects in some way the global pattern of things. Think global, act local, basically.
So a postmodern society, unglossed-over by a grand narrative, must embrace the values of postmodernity as its key values. That means that complexity, diversity, contradiction, ambiguity and interconnectedness all become central. In social terms that means a lack of obvious hierarchies (equal rights for all), embracing diversity (multi-culturalism), and that all voices should be heard (consensus). Interconnectedness is reflected in our technology and communications. In the 21st century anything that cannot be stored by a computer ceases to be knowledge.
That’s the goal anyway. There are pitfalls. Runaway postmodernism creates a grey goo of no-meaning. Infinite consensus creates paralysis. Over-connection leads to saturation. Too much diversity leads to disconnection. Complexity leads to confusion.
So in the midst of all this confusion and noise and diversity, without a grand narrative, who are you? Postmodern personal values are not moral but instead values of participation, self-expression, and creativity. The focus of spirituality shifts from security in absolute given truth to a search for significance in a chaotic world. The idea that there is anything stable or permanent disappears. The floor drops away. And you are left there, playing with nonsense.
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