Why Did Postmodernism End?

The other day I picked up my old copy of Derrida's On Grammatology.  Years ago, I would have been angrily criticizing Derrida in my mind as I read.  But not this time.  Now, when I read through it, all I feel is a strange kind of nostalgia, and even an affection for old Jacques.  Ah, those were the days.  It was a more innocent time, before the darkness came.  Were we ever so young?  Was there ever a time when a book like this mattered?

The owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and Fredric Jameson articulated the cultural logic of postmodernism just as it was coming to its culmination.  The watchwords of the day were "difference," "multiplicity," "eclecticism," "alternative," etc..  In Jameson's preface to Jean-François Lyotard's "The Postmodern Condition" (1979), he lauds Lyotard's refusal to be "an apologist for the system itself."  He promises the "innovation, change, break, renewal, which will infuse the otherwise oppressive system with the disalienating excitement******As Jean-Francois Lyotard put it in his subsequent essay, "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?", "Let us wage a war on totality."  Well, they did, or tried to.  But totality won.  The micropolitics of a thousand tiny struggles, as it turns out, were no match for the triumphal march of monoculture.

I've already written that the postmodern era was the Great Unrallying, the doldrums, when the wind left the sails of modernism.  Lyotard put it better, when he said of postmodernism, "This is a period of slackening."  It was a strange kind of slackening, a slackening by speeding up, by working not in serial but in parallel, by being many things at once, but it was a slackening nonetheless.  Here we have the "play" of Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences," as in a rope going slack, no longer taut, so that it has some play.  Here, too, Richard Linklater's "Slacker," a Joycean Wandering Rocks of non-narrative, or rather polynarrative, interweaving in psychogeographic dérive.

After all the crying about the famous "End of History," in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, when all serious and somber mandarins, myself included, were (either in delight or despair) soberly intoning that nothing fundamental would ever change again... what's astonishing is how briefly postmodernism lasted.  The cultural logic of postmodernism, and its vulgarized pop versions, under whatever name - slacker culture, alternative culture, lifestylism, what have you - lasted only a few years before they were obliterated.  1991 was "The Year that Punk Broke." Soon Nirvana reached the top of the charts, with Pat Smear of the Germs in tow, and BOREDOMS were playing at Lollapalooza.  It seemed that "alternative" culture was ascendant.  And then, boom, only a couple of years later, the Britney Spearses had taken over, and the alternatives collapsed like a house of cards.  After the postmodernism of Tarantino, with his multiple interweaving narratives, and no overarching plot or meaning, the Marvel Comic Universe became the Britney Spears of movies.  ("Memento" is serviceable metaphor for the impasse of postmodernism - without a stable sense of history, the subject of history is doomed to be manipulated again and again and again.)  And since then we've only had Britney Spearses of theory, Britney Spearses of politics, Britney Spearses of high art, and so on. 

In 2000, Douglas Rushkoff stood up at DisInfoCon (The Disinformation Conference) behind an altar-like podium shaped like a devil head with huge horns and declared, "What I mean to propose is that we won.  Period.  We won.  They, whoever they are, have surrendered to us.  And all we need to do now is declare victory. [...]  It's hard to be in the counterculture these days.  Because the minute we do something, they figure it out, and it's at the mall in two weeks, right?  [Sarcastically:]  And we don't want that, because it's our thing.  They're not us, they're them. [...]  They do it with money, instead of real conviction.  [Unsarcastically:] That's their way of surrendering to us!"  But of course, Rushkoff was wrong.  The counterculture had not triumphed, had not become dominant over the dominant culture.  The dominant culture had not surrendered.  Alternative culture had briefly been allowed to let off some steam, like a safety valve, and then came the clampdown (again).  The clampdown had already come years before his speech - he just hadn't been hip enough to realize it yet.

Postmodernism was a vacuum, and it was abhorred.  It was a vacuum of meaning, and meaning rushed in to fill it.  It was a power vacuum, and meaning is power.  The opportunists saw their opportunity, and they took it.

A clear symptom of postmodernism's death came when Derrida and Habermas made a sudden, hasty peace around the turn of the millennium. Habermas had been the stalwart opponent of postmodernism; Derrida its ersatz champion (though, I know, I know, it's debatable whether and to what degree Derrida was postmodern.  Whatever.  He's probably the best warrior you've got, postmodernists, so if you give up on him you might as well give up the whole game).  What made the collapse so definitive and final was the fact that none of the issues between the two academics had been resolved - they were merely brushed aside.  Neither won, neither lost, nor were they able to come to any compromise.  Everything that they had been arguing about just didn't seem to matter anymore (and thus all their books were left to the "gnawing criticism of the mice").  Why?  Because of the return of a reactionary dominant culture that made all such squabbles meaningless.  And that was a more powerful and crushing blow to postmodernism than any scholarly counterargument that could be mustered.  The twin paper tigers of postmodernism and the Habermasian rear-guard attack on postmodernism were both neutralized in one vague swipe.



Modernism implies a concept of progress, a direction for History with a capital "H", from a bad past, through a pivotal present, to a better future - or at least, so say the most boring postmodernists.  When we actually look at the record, though, it's not hard to see that there is no one modernism, there are many modernisms, and a close reading of the most intriguing modernisms reveals that they have never fit into this rigid schematism.  It certainly doesn't apply to Joyce, for instance, and it's not even a scholarly or accurate interpretation of that great villain for postmodernists, Hegel.

Nevertheless, however mistaken they may be, let's take these postmodernists at their word, just for the sake of argument.  Let's assume that modernism really entailed a schematic belief in historical progress.  That would give historical events - including events in the progress of academic theory - the weight of a triumphalist necessity.  There would be, so to speak, no going back.  Every Great Thinker would have a certain force of decisiveness that would permanently condition posterity.  (I use the word "force" in approximately the same way that Derrida used it in his essay "Force and Signification" (1963) in which he claimed that the structuralists lacked force****.)  In a very precise sense, this would mean that these Great Thinkers could not be ultimately wrong.  Yes, they might get this or that particular belief wrong, and even the general thrust of their thought might be partial and one-sided, but in the general sweep of history, even these incorrect beliefs would prove to have been a necessary and irremovable step in a progression towards an ultimate, fuller understanding.

But if that's the case, then with the advent of postmodernism, this decisive direction of history is thereby revoked.  History no longer has a direction, and this renders every thinker, and every development of thought, conditional and contingent.  Suddenly it becomes possible that there were some genuine wrong turns in the development of theory - sheer blind alleys.  Ultimately, this is why postmodernism self-destructed.  For if that's the case, then we must consider the possibility that Wittgenstein's doctrine of "language games," from which the credo of postmodernism is derived, may have been one of these wrong turns.  (See my earlier article "The Linguistic Turn was a Wrong Turn".)  Thus postmodernism is self-undermining.  It was postmodernism itself that invited in the vampiric, oppressive dominant culture which destroyed it.

Fredric Jameson famously considers postmodernism to be the cultural logic of late capitalism.  That's close, but not quite right.  It is slightly more accurate to say that postmodernism is the cultural logic of détente, and more accurate still to say that postmodernism is the cultural logic of "peaceful coexistence," though only if we understand these terms in a broad, yet slightly unusual way.  Détente refers not only to a particular phase of Cold War policy, but to a stance toward strategy of a deescalation of tensions more generally - for instance, in the relations between France and Germany in 1912, before all hell broke loose in 1914. We can point to even earlier historical examples of détente.  Maoists who tend to regard Khrushchev, after the death of Stalin and especially after the 20th Congress in 1956, to be the main exponent of peaceful coexistence, may forget that it was Stalin himself who as early as 1936 in an interview with Roy Howard was brushing off any thought that the U.S.S.R. had plans for a world revolution as a "tragicomic misunderstanding," and thus Maoists may fail to see that Stalin, more than any other figure of the 20th century, was the paradigmatic postmodernist.  (The only figure who might rival Stalin as a postmodernist is the Marquis de Sade, the premodern postmodernist.)  Yet it is true that although various postmodern individuals and movements had existed for a long time (eternally?), these elements did not coalesce into a total, airtight, subsuming environment, a cultural world system, until 1945, and the reasons for this are clear: the end of the second World War and of the reign of nazi Germany (though not of Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, or Hirohito's Japan), the world's coming to learn of and reckon with the legacy of the Holocaust, the rise of anti-colonial movements around the world, and, most importantly, the advent of the era of nuclear weaponry.  

Notice that I say that postmodernism coalesced after 1945.  Postmodernism was the era in which nuclear weapons existed but were not used - or, perhaps we could say, that this was precisely the way in which they were used.  They exist for the purpose of not using them, to such a degree that they might as well not exist.  In the postmodern age, the nuclear warhead was the eye at the center of the panopticon - the guard station that may have been empty.  They have a kind of spectral existence - no one knows how many there are, or where they are, yet we all have a sense that they're around, haunting us with the possibility of annihilation.  What if nuclear warheads don't exist?  After the collapse of the U.S.S.R., there was some surprise that they had fewer than we believed them to have - one of many times we sold ourselves the myth of weapons of mass destruction supposed-to-exist - and then came the fear that, maybe there really were as many nuclear warheads as previously believed, but some of them were missing.  Talking heads on the news worried aloud about the possibility of these spectral bombs "falling into the hands" of the "terrorists."  Postmodernism has always been about the dance of the undecidability of presence, of presence's inability to rid itself of the shadow of absence, of absence's inability to rid itself of the shadow of presence - and fundamentally, this meant the presence or absence of nuclear bombs.  During the Cold War, nuclear war was never there, and never not there.  Everything was always a moment away from being nothing.  But the moment never came.  "Wars and rumors of wars."

In that year, 1945, a book of essays by F. Scott Fitzgerald was posthumously published under the name "The Crack-Up," containing his famous dictum: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."  Nuclear weaponry ushered in the culture of postmodernism because it forced us all to become "first-rate intelligences" in that sense.  We were all forced into peaceful coexistence with other cultures, other forms of consciousness, other ideologies that were directly contradictory to our own, because total confrontation with them meant total mutual annihilation.  Thus, rather than one over-arching metanarrative, one theory of history, we are forced to accept multiple, mutually incompatible histories - at first, two ("communism" and "capitalism") and then three (the USA's version of history, the USSR's version of history, and China's) and then more and more (does the "Third Worldist" metanarrative match up with the PRC's "Three Worlds"?) as nuclear weapons proliferate to more and more nations.  How does Indian history relate to Pakistani history?  (Something something subaltern studies something Orientalism something....)

The "cultural relativism" that supposedly characterizes postmodernism is a result, at an ideological level, of the material technical innovation of nuclear weaponry, and thus the geopolitical strategy of easing of tensions that made the Cold War cold.  During the Cold War, the nuclear stockpiles were never used.  Now that postmodernism is over, there's a very real possibility that nuclear warheads will actually be once again used tactically and offensively in a hot war.  This is because the stopthink that was required to hold two (or more) opposed ideas in mind and still function is something that we can no longer afford to maintain, for a variety of reasons, including ecological.  Postmodernism was a relatively safe world.  We're going to miss it.

So much for the theory of history.  There is also, of course, a postmodern aesthetic. Why did it end?  The postmodern aesthetic can be understood as superflatness.  

Postmodern aesthetics is an attempt at pure aesthetics.  Jasper Johns' flags and targets, Andy Warhol's soup cans and images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis, and so on were images that beguiled the spectator by refusing to point to any settled meaning beyond themselves.  Robert Rauschenberg may have included a silkscreened image of Eisenhower or Kennedy in his combines but the point was not to see them as Eisenhower or Kennedy, but to see them as paint.  

Similarly, in New Criticism, 

What New Criticism and experiments like those of Rauschenberg had in common was attempt at a kind of discipline, an almost zen-like attention to the here and now, a refusal of all desire that points to a beyond.  Postmodernism was, in a sense, two movements, and the second cannot be understood except with reference to the first, for in a sense it was a reaction against it.  And yet they are inseparable.  This initial moment of postmodernism was, quite directly, a metaphysics of presence.  The second, which flowed out of the first, undermined this metaphysics of presence.  Rauschenberg's famous declaration, "It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art," really contains the entire contradiction as history worked through it.  For art does, after all, have everything to do with life, and life had a way of creeping back into art.  Eisenhower stubbornly remained Eisenhower, after all.  And the author remained the author.  The author's life wriggled back into the novel, against all better judgment.  We can feel bad about it, but we can't go back.  We are fallen.

Postmodern aesthetics collapsed, despite best efforts, because this search for a pure aesthetics ultimately failed.  Despite aestheticians' striving for purity, the material world crept back in.  We might as well give up and admit that it and we are implicated.  It is all hopelessly tangled up, beyond any ability to draw a clear boundary.  There is no escape.

I am even willing to admit that what has crept back in, despite the best efforts of postmodern aesthetes, is nature.

"Skepticism towards all metanarratives" turned out to be a dead end, an impasse.  The post-post-modern age will be characterized by a good faith exploration of metanarratives, as well as their recombination in infinite permutations, and the inventive creation of completely new metanarratives.