Introduction to Postmodernism, Pt. 2: Psycho-Pass (Postmodernism)
See Part 1, this will assume you have. Also, spoiler warning: This will assume you've seen at least all of season 1 of this series.
We discussed what modernity is in part 1, and now we can fully appreciate what it is to discuss postmodernism. You probably noticed that modernism/modernity is very optimistic. And postmodernism doesn't seek to crap on anyone's parade (per se), but it does seek to analyze the underlying assumptions modernism makes.
The best series I can think to do this with is Psycho-Pass, partly because it wears it's philosophical - and especially postmodern - influences on it's sleeve. The Sibyl System is something straight out of Michel Fouacault. So, let's take a look at that world, and use it to analyze the things modernism believes.
One of the core things about modernity is it's attitude about "progress". Now, postmodernism doesn't have an issue with things getting better, but it would ask: "Who is, and how are they, defining what progress is?". The Sibyl System itself could be called progressive - it reduces crime to previously unthinkable levels, it gets people to take their mental health seriously, it keeps dirty cops in line; All of that is technically true, and good, provided you ignore that it does this with a gigantic surveillance state that uses anxiety as grounds for capital punishment.
The Sibyl System, we later learn, is not a neutral actor. Rather, it is a network of brains, each of which it incorporated into the system when it cannot get a read on someone, supposedly making everyone involved the ideal judge. But is systemic failure a good metric of technological progress? Is it good that the only way a system improves is by incorporating or killing everyone who, by merely existing, proves it has a defect?
And for that matter, can such a system be reliably called the kind of "expert" that modernity believes can be trusted with authority? And since it bases it's methods on people's mental well being (never mind how it might gauge that), we also have to ask if it's even a good idea to believe that mental illness or stress is grounds for the state to act.
In it's meeting with Akane, the Sibyl System engages with another argument from modernity: That such a system was inevitable and necessary, given the history leading up to it. That humanity had been aiming at a post-crime utopia, and now it has it within it's reach. But a postmodern response would be: "How true is that?".
Of course, we can concede that a society without crime would be nice (for the sake of argument let's say "crime" here refers to the really nasty stuff, as postmodernism is also quite skeptical as to what constitutes "crime"). But does it follow that all of our history was leading up to this? Though it is a deeply politicized field, history is not so much a narrative as it is a record of events. Are we not just projecting our desires onto the past to justify the present?
Postmodernism isn't a field known for offering solutions. In fact, in many ways, neither does Psycho-Pass. The point of postmodernism is to give a critical lens to look at the world of today. To say "OK, yeah, cool shit, but... is this really what's the case here?"
There is a second aspect here that ties into the “postmodern condition.” According to the psychologists Deleuze and Guattari, in postmodernity the human “ego” dissolves into cybernetic feedback loops and schizophrenic desire machines. The human being no longer has a coherent personality but only sub-personalities preoccupied with immediate gratification and the obstacles to it. According to Mark Fisher, the idea of the future disappears in favor of an eternal present.
In classical psychoanalysis, the “ego” is also the so-called “reality principle,” which not only justifies one’s needs but also weighs them against each other. While a “stubborn toddler” wants everything immediately simply because he wants it, an adult with a fully developed ego can balance his needs and forego present desires in order to gain more in the future. (Behaviorist B. F. Skinner thought along similar lines and proposed the classic experiment: “Here are two gummy bears. If you don’t eat any today, you’ll get four tomorrow,” as a way to measure a child’s mental maturity.)
Therefore: the loss of the ego (or the fact that it was never developed) in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking is, psychoanalytically, the same as the “eternal present” in Mark Fisher or the “present preference” in Austrian economics. Thus, the chaotic, never-ending Backrooms become a symbol of postmodern madness itself and of the loss of the self. The monster eternally chasing one through the labyrinth is nothing other than one’s own instincts, gone out of control.
It is fascinating that real-world architecture is beginning to resemble the symbolic chaos of the Backrooms while simultaneously exaggerating technical rationality. At root, we are dealing with an excessive rationalization of technology, while humans themselves increasingly become completely instinct-driven, irrational hedonists. In a sense, our architecture reflects the fact that in postmodernity, man has sacrificed his brain to the machine.
The machines, in the postmodern age, begin to make intelligent decisions, while more and more postmodern humans stop doing so.
Nick Land: Cybernetic Loops in the Battle Between Tradition, Human Life, and Cybernetic Carcinoma
A street in Shanghai — a place that, according to Nick Land, is a social time machine, linking future and past.
And naturally, when everything becomes interchangeable, this also tells people that they themselves are interchangeable, able to be relocated to any arbitrary point even in their own hometown. According to Nick Land’s book Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time, the city — and especially the modern city — is a cybernetic system that shuffles people and architecture as needed in order to produce the most growth and stability for itself. The modern city is a self-reinforcing process that partially escapes human control. And this labyrinthine, monotonous “Backrooms architecture” simply reveals to the individual how little control he truly has, and how much he is now at the mercy of the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
In the same book, Nick Land also discusses the so-called International Style. To put it roughly, there was a trend in modern architecture to flatten culturally specific elements and visually harmonize systems internationally. This is the second aspect of the “form follows function” maxim. Modern city architecture seeks to grow. But to grow, it must — thanks to entropy — “devour” surrounding areas like villages or incoming migrants in order to obtain new material for reconfiguration. And this cold, function-focused architecture serves to strip the modern city of the natural limits that might otherwise prevent it from consuming such material.
An intriguing argument Land makes is that the resistance to this development — the desire for a “return to tradition,” as the internet puts it — actually stems from the same impulse as the process that turns architecture into an inhuman total machine. According to Land, the process of functionalist urban growth at any cost is also humanity’s struggle against entropy, decay, and death. (Here he is surprisingly close to Heidegger.) The city, in this view, exists to reverse decay and reverse time. Its drive for growth is its survival instinct as a system, and therefore a drive to rewind the time that would otherwise lead to its decline. Hence, culturally, the city is a kind of time machine.
And especially in architecture, the striving for tradition and its preservation is also the desire to maintain one’s roots — to create a legacy that outlasts oneself and stands tall and solar for eternity. This, too, is a struggle against entropy, decay, and death. It is the very same process that describes growth into the future.
That is why Nick Land believes that cities must always be both progressive and conservative at the same time. According to Land, the forward movement must eventually always lead to a movement backward in time. (As an example, he cites the theory of hypothetical tachyon particles that, after surpassing the speed of light, are said to gain the ability to travel through time.) Functioning cities, then, are always a movement with and simultaneously against time. The forward motion ultimately becomes a flight into cyclical time, and cities eventually turn into temporally “fractured” zones where future and past coexist side by side.
Perhaps the “Backrooms architecture” of modern Western cities also emerged because this loop fell out of balance. Schattenmacher, in his videos on modern architecture, describes how architecture has lost any clear goal and has become a Trotskyist “permanent revolution” pursued for its own sake. This recalls the “lost future” Mark Fisher discussed in the previous essay.
Interestingly, Nick Land brings the Austrian theory of time preference into his theory of urban growth and its cyclicality, arguing that the city is a time machine and a means of resisting the flow of time precisely because it aims to halt man’s preference for the present. The city is supposed to encourage people not only to think of the present but to make long-term plans for the future. And Fisher, of course, claimed that the West has forgotten the idea of the future and now only seeks to preserve the present. In the literal sense, then, the West is dominated by present preference.
And according to Hans-Hermann Hoppe, tradition exists to suppress present preference and enable long-term planning. The temporal axis of the past and the axis of the future are thus interconnected. Severing one’s roots results in the loss of the future. There is no longer a “where from” or a “where to.”
The term used for the Backrooms is “liminal,” which means transitional. It is often explained by saying that a hotel corridor becomes liminal when you remove both the entrance and the hotel room — when there is only pure movement left but no destination. (And most versions of the Backrooms story include the element of lurking demons. One can never find an exit from the Backrooms, but one also cannot simply stop moving, or one will fall prey to these demons. Thus, one must remain part of a fundamentally meaningless movement.)
Mark Fisher also said that the loss of a future results in an ever-expanding bureaucracy and reforms pursued for their own sake — another manifestation of movement without direction.
But if this modern, colorless architecture leads directly to the liminal “Backrooms” effect of movement for its own sake, does that not also mean the guiding principle of “form follows function” ends up undermining itself? That the end product of “form follows function” is a system or object that is meaningless — whose function is to pretend it has a purpose, when in fact it does not?
After all, in the West there is already the phenomenon of “bullshit jobs” in administration and elsewhere, where people are hired into essentially useless roles that mostly hinder workflows.
Form follows function is not taken as seriously as it is preached.
From my own experience, it should be said that “form follows function” is a phrase especially popular among blowhards trying to sound important. But in reality, it is rarely practiced as rigorously as it is proclaimed.
An example: the previously mentioned company Apple is always associated with this slogan. But are they really as purely rational and functional as they claim to be? No. In the Frutiger Aero era, Apple was known for using lots of glossy effects and nature images. And many of their decisions make less rational sense than one might think.
For example, Apple integrates the computer into the monitor. But the monitor is usually one of the bulkiest and heaviest parts of a computer. Commodore, by contrast, integrated its computer into the keyboard, allowing users to connect to any screen or TV they could find. Strictly speaking, Commodore’s decision was far more rational than Apple’s.
And Microsoft’s decision to house all components in a “tower” that users could easily access to swap out parts — rather than buying a whole new machine every time — was clearly a “form follows function” move. Probably that is why Microsoft’s devices were derided as “ugly gray boxes only used for work” — because they were oriented towards function and labor rather than fun.
And would not the quintessential example of functional design be a Bitcoin miner — a massive rack of GPUs with cooling systems?
Even many famous Bauhaus designs, like the renowned Wassily Chair (incidentally, it is named after Wassily Kandinsky, who was also involved with the Bauhaus and whose paintings are clearly not examples of reason as a guiding principle.), were not purely based on functional logic. The steel-frame chair is more about aesthetics than utility. Bauhaus also collaborated closely with the Dutch De Stijl movement. Their iconic Mondrian Chair looks visually striking, but hardly seems comfortable to sit on.
It is also worth noting that Bauhaus founders like Walter Gropius actually wanted to break dogmas and promote free-spirited creativity. It is ironic that, after Bauhaus, especially in German design schools, the Bauhaus principles became rigid dogma. When figures like Antoni Gaudí or the Memphis Group broke with those principles in the 1980s, it was treated as scandalous.
It is likely that this new dogmatism — and the blowhards who overemphasize minimalism and functionalism — are partly to blame for the current state of things. The problem is not that people hold to these principles but that the mainstream exaggerates them. As Aristotle already observed, good intentions, taken too far, can become poison. And when today’s designers and architects seem totally blind to the fact that a large portion of their clientele openly complains about the ugly garbage they are producing, it becomes clear that something has gone wrong.
In some cases, the supposedly “functional” architecture promoted by Bauhaus and related architects has proven less functional than traditional methods. (A flat-roofed design, touted as more “functional,” ended up leaking rainwater into a house, and the owner wanted to sue the architects multiple times.) This ties in with Sigmund Freud’s idea that people usually desire things for irrational reasons and then invent rational justifications and excuses afterward. According to that logic, “form follows function” is a lie in most cases anyway.
Postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard also argued that, in postmodernity, every piece of furniture becomes more mobile, interchangeable, and multifunctional. It is no longer about the one function. This is linked to the breakdown of traditional family structures. In a modern house, there are no longer rooms for the father or the mother (or both), but instead, spontaneity dominates. There is no longer a “place of honor” at the dinner table for the “father of the house” — everything can be moved and rearranged.
This means that “form follows function” actually makes architecture even more interchangeable in postmodernity, because function becomes more fluid. People no longer have a fixed place in the system — they can be anywhere and nowhere. But in this way, they are also subjected to a kind of egalitarianism. If everyone can use every object equally, then symbolically, according to Baudrillard, everyone is placed on the same level.
Baudrillard’s analysis raises an interesting question: if, in functionalism, a room or object can no longer be identified with its “inhabitant” or “owner,” then that inhabitant or owner can more easily be removed or disappear. One no longer feels much of a sense of loss when a space becomes empty. In modernity, people no longer really have a “home.” They live in a “home” where they are, symbolically, irrelevant.
Baudrillard also makes another argument about functionalism: what would happen if a customer bought a product that perfectly fulfilled all his current needs? He would be satisfied — but would not buy anything else until the product was damaged. That is why, in Baudrillard’s view, products today can never be completely “functional.” They must always be a compromise — functional enough that the customer is satisfied and does not return it but flawed enough that the customer is willing to buy an upgrade.
“Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.”
Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.
‘Every man who meditates on these issues senses the need for decision which confronts him. If his decision is essentially romantic, it calls for a return to a relationship with a nature which no longer exists. If his decision is realistic, it points toward an integration with the coming world, an integration through which the "natural" is saved. (In the past this saving was attempted through fruitless, irrelevant "life" reforms.) Not only must the "natural" be defended against the new world, however, but also it must be regained by forwarding its growth from within that world itself. These tasks are closely related to those confronting man in his work to keep personality from dying.
These two phenomena, the not-human man and the not-natural nature, promise to be the foundations upon which the world of the future will be erected. Man will then face an existence in which he will be free to further his lordship of creation, carrying it even to its last consequences, This mastery will be open to him because he has permitted himself utter freedom: the freedom to determine his own goals, to dissolve the immediate reality of things, to employ its elements for the execution of his own ends. These things he will do without any consideration for what had been thought inviolate or untouchable in nature. He will ignore that strong sense of the sacredness of nature which had endured within mankind's earlier vision of the world.’
