1999

22.3

"Post-Modernism" popped up like wild spring flowers, and caught many of us by surprise. Had "modern times" really ended? If so, when, and why? Was this a fad, trend, or movement? Would it infect and affect popular culture? Was it merely a new name for the electronic technology—or was it much more?

The term post-modern is confusing and controversial.1  Some maintain it was used as early as the 1870s by Britain’s John Watkins Chapman, and others choose later "first" dates up through the 1960s. The common thread is that the choice depends on the different ideals and programs spotlighted. The Oxford English Dictionary (1982 supplement) gave this short simple definition: "Subsequent to, or later than, what is modern." This merely raises another question. What then is "modern?"

Modernity is often taken as the term referring to the social, economic, and scientific institutions flowering in the West during the eighteenth century (some place it much earlier) and having worldwide influence in the twentieth, There is no general agreement about "modern." The same, unsurprisingly, is true of "post-modern," but the names most frequently associated with post-modernism are Ihab Hassan, Jean Baudrillard,

* EDITORS’ NOTE: Marshall Fishwick is one of the founders of the popular culture studies movement. For a good account of his distinguished career, see Daniel Walden’s essay, "Marshall W. Fishwick: A Man for All Reasons," in Pioneers in Popular Culture Studies, edited by Ray B. Browne and Michael T. Marsden (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999).

Jean- Francois Lyotard, Frederic Jameson, and Jurgen Habermas. Clearly the center of concern has been in Europe, although there are a number of American disciples. Most have been philosophers and literary critics. One area in which it has had limited impact, here or abroad, is popular culture. Some attention has been paid to the extension of "post-modern" ideas into fields of advertising, popular music, MTV, and architecture, as in Gary Shapiro’s After the Future: Postmodern Times and Place (xi ff.).

¨

Post-modernists express a desperate need to meet the volatile and unstable elements of the new century head-on. Descartes and his cold rationalism are dead. To some historians and critics, this smacks of the rebirth of nineteenth-century romanticism, with a dash of Buck Rogers, Star Wars, culture wars, and deconstruction thrown in. In the world of Big-Think, startling new theories emerged: Big Bang, Black Hole, Chaos Theory. All this as the end of the millennium approached.

Enter the pop-music scene, the hip-hop of disc jockeys, who change styles as fast as tunes on turntables. Long live the zap-around-the-dial mentality! Add porn and corn to the Internet. All the world is at your fingertips, so use them. Break all the old boundaries. Zap-rock! Is this post-modern?

¨

Except in pockets of English or philosophy programs, post -modernism hasn’t made major inroads at most universities, In typical fashion many students, politically indifferent and fed up with false rhetoric, have shortened post-modern to "Po-Mo," and put it aside. Not so with some faculty and intellectuals, who have invented a whole new lexicon of words. They are the egalitarian avant-garde, shooting arrows from behind their academic walls. They speak of the rave scene, moral panics, and implosion, then move on the greater polysyllabic jargon: like intertextuality, appropriation, neo-polysemic, macropolitical, hegemonic, valorization, and deconstruction. They sometimes fall back on terms which emerged in the 1960s and have taken on a new life: Eurocentric aesthete, or cultural imperialism, which posit a process of imperialist controls, and blame the usual suspects — corporations, power politicians, Angle- Saxons, males, etc.

Nonetheless, the cult figure for many post-modernists Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900) is a DWEM (Dead White European Male). Jean- Francois Lyotard, the man who wrote the post-modern Bible for the faithful, The Postmodern Condition (1984), is also WEM. While Lyotard is alive, it is possible that modern history itself is now dead, as some post-modernists claim. Lutz Niethammer, for example, raises the possibility in Posthistoire—Has History Come To An End? (1992). The implication is that things are so new that all the old concerns, questions, and assumptions are outmoded. We have entered the dark regime of conceptual history. Now all the historian can do is to gather together some little stones, without knowing if they form part of a mosaic.

I side with Henri Lefebvre, whose Introduction to Modernity (1995) takes quite a different approach.2  With or without dignity, in plush or in tatters, however rapid and noisy, what we call "modern" marches on. The "modern world" is self-evident in painting, music, scientific and political life. Modernity ought to be obvious to all but the myopic, dogmatic, or completely blind.

¨

Post-modernism has been at the forefront of radical chic, but has begun to lose momentum in key areas, such as the arts. Having got attention by announcing "the death of the ideals and principles of modern art, " it began to repeat the mistakes of the earlier art world and show the same signs of fatigue . Dealers and critics complain of a lack of direction and depth. Like the rage television series of the 90s, Seinfeld, it seems to be much ado about nothing.

If there were one television show in the 90s which summed up the post-modern situation, it was Seinfeld. Somehow we felt we "really knew" the characters—Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine. They mirrored the frenetic jumbled world we live in, one which allows us to do several things at once—like drinking a diet cola, answering the phone, checking e-mail, paying bills, or talking to someone with the TV screen as a chattering backdrop. Suppose we didn’t really know what was going on in the Sein-world? It didn’t matter. It was only virtual reality. We could feel their pain painlessly. They lived in a synthetic community, in which life is one trivial thing after another. So just go on to the next thing. Watching the show week after week, we knew what it’s like not only to live but also to feel vicariously—a post-modern virtue.

¨

Drawing heavily on French post-structuralists like the Jacques—Derrida and Lacan—post-modernists attacked stereotypes, repetition, and media domination, but have often ended up stereotypes themselves. They have become like the very things they set out to oppose. Hence this headline in the September 16, 1990, issue of the New York Times: "As It Must To All, Death Comes to Post-Modernism."

Death has not and will not come to the underlying causes that birthed and shaped post-modernism, born out of a desire to change, to discredit, to react against the present. This urge and ferment for change—a kind of metamorphosis—goes on constantly. Key words are new, radical, and post. There will always be a New Deal, a New Freedom, a New Frontier. They are part of our heritage, and our dream.

¨

So well we may ask, with Shakespeare, what’s in a name? Doesn’t a rose by any name smell just as sweet? A baffling question. What causes isms to become wasms? Where do the new names, the new isms, come from? Who named today’s twenty-somethings "Generation X?" Will the tag stick or is it already changing?

Steve Fuller raises an essential question if one wonders how post-modern popular culture should or will become, in an essay called "Does it Pay to Go Post-Modern If Your Neighbors Do Not?"3  There are serious doubts (especially among scientists) about the overall well-foundedness of the post-modernist project. Post-modernists flourish only in intellectual environments where they are the dominant, if not the only, ideological voice, Fuller points out . That is certainly not the case with popular culture, centering on entertainment rather than abstract ideologies. Might "Post-modern Pop" be a contradiction in terms?

¨

Cyberspace, like Post-Modernism, has become a growth industry. In the 19th century, critics said that everything that came loose went West. In the late 20th century, everything that comes loose gets into cyberspace—and a dozen hucksters wait to extol and expand it. Sometimes even multi-million-dollar satellites float off into nothingness. Recall the case of Galaxy IV.

Of course there are enormous advantages that come with the new technology, and they must be given their due. It’s hard to see how we can predict tomorrow’s temperature, get a few rocks from the moon, reserve an airline ticket, or find out if there’s water on Mars without the new gadgetry. But considering the billions it takes to accomplish these feats, one has to ask: it is really worth it? How did we get along for thousands of years without those rocks, and the answer about Mars’ water supply? When does the Information Overload become intolerable?

We are standing on a new virtual "Dover Beach," reminding us of Matthew Arnold’s real one: "And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night."

We must not come as sentimentalists, obstructionists, or Luddites. Just as Canute standing on the seashore could not halt the incoming waves, we know that our culture is committed, body and soul, to what many believe to be a New Utopia. The changes wrought in recent years are dramatic, drastic, and (in some cases) irreversible. The consequences of these changes have only begun to emerge. No one can predict what they will finally be.

¨

We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re on our way—like the old Red Ball Express, hurtling down the track with the throttle wide open. Theories of energy, matter, space, and time are in flux. What was once simple has become incredibly complex. Everything nailed down has come loose. Information fights disinformation, smut doubles with glut. Millions of terminals send messages with the speed of light. Anything and everything goes. Data data everywhere and not a chance to think!

Communication is becoming compunction—the linking of computers, fiber optics, satellites, and the new Toy of the Month. Once all the world was a stage. Soon it will be a screen.

¨

Who benefits from new technologies, mergers, and buy-outs? Will a new overclass usurp much of the power? Will those unfamiliar or hostile to the new electronic wizardry become a new underclass, underemployed, undervalued, and unemployable?

Revolutionary changes are always frightening, especially for those raised in the earlier print culture. We know how earlier technologies such as the automobile, television, nuclear power—brought grave concerns. Those concerns were justified. The automobile, television, and nuclear power plants have raised problems few if any anticipated or understood. The earlier naive euphoria has disappeared. We are perplexed and polluted; bewitched and bewildered.

We can’t halt the flow of information, nor deny the many obvious technological advantages. New "wonder drugs" work: we have advantages undreamed of even a generation ago, We also have new questions.

Is bigger better? Is biggest best? Who will arbitrate and regulate the Electronic Revolutions and the media? Who will protect our basic privacy? What is too slanderous, libelous, or pornographic to be available to everyone? Do our doctrines of free speech and free press fit today’s world?

Where to draw the line between the silly and the significant, the truth and the hype, the new and the neurotic? Add these to our post-modern questions. Don’t expect easy answers.

¨

The 1990s found the modern world in a style free-fall—borrowing, bending, crunching, and bunching odd parts to make the Old Boys scream. Mix and Mash for a Zap. No wonder people who had thought of popular music as jazz, rock, country western, soul, and rap scratched their heads and asked: "What the hell is this?"

I got an earful of "this" when a new rock group called "Southern Culture on the Skids" invaded our campus for an "End of Exams Blowout" concert. The name was well chosen. Loud and lusty, they blasted us with music they described as "hillbilly-surf-mexicali-rockabilly." One of the spectators, having enjoyed a good amount of artificial stimulus, called it "low-down-dirty thunder that’s straight outa-the-sewer blooze." Reactions to the concert were mixed. Everyone conceded that this was indeed post-modern, and post lots of other things. We were not surprised to discover later that the lead singer had been inspired by watching bugs.

Another example is typical. In 1989 a concert for the famous French post-deconstructionist Jean Baudrillard was staged at the University of Montana, where he lectured. Entertainment featured Eugene Chadbourne, star of a pseudo-New Wave band whose best-known song was "Take the Skinheads Howling." The concert, according to Thomas L. Dunn, was "post-punk picturesque at its finest."4  The concert featured a new instrument — a rusty old garden rake with guitar strings, which produced noise, strange chords, and odd static. Sweating profusely, the heavy-set Chadbourne leaped off the stage and managed to crawl under it. Somehow he connected his musical rake to the stage — thus "playing the stage itself." Cheers broke out and intensified. Almost everyone stood up, whistling, stomping feet, trying to figure out what would happen next. Baudrillard continued to sit.

¨

What is behind this radical break in the way some young people think, sing, perform? Instead of condemning, we should try understanding. Are we witnessing the breakdown of what used to be called "reality" in the face of revolutionary new technology? Can we see the same tendency in other contemporary forms—such as the new science fiction writing?

I think we can. Stanislaw Lem is a pioneer in the field. He believes personal identity and objective reality are gone forever. In Futurological Congress, Lem’s hero is caught in a cloud of hallucinogenic tear gas . He perceives future societies organized entirely around drugs. "Pharmacocracy" has replaced democracy, so the whole world has become a "virtual reality." The distinction between manipulated and natural feelings has simply ceased to exist. We have decided to stay forever in Plato’s cave.

Another interesting example of post-modern speculation is the work of Philip Dick. In his book titled Ubik, the ancient boundaries between egos collapse, and biologists discover what is called "half life." The dead are not really dead. They are frozen in "cold pack" (as Walt Disney is reputed to be) and are electronically connected with each other—and with the living. In effect, what we now call "death" has been eliminated. Paradise regained!

The main characters in Ubik are dead throughout much of the story—yet "tuned in" to the living. Sometimes they start to fade out. Science has a solution—a special spray can bring them back to life. If it doesn’t work, could you linger in a quarter life? A new version of purgatory?

Absurd science fiction, one might say. But might all this be metaphors of the hazards we face in the days ahead?

¨

What then to make of all this? A fad, trend, or movement? A sign of new life or a death rattle? Will it lead to greater understanding— or like so many labels and slogans, will it disappear into the Black Hole?

Click on, click off. We are in a new age, playing new games, seeing through a glass darkly. Even before Gen X had a firm place in our thinking, it gave way to Gen Y. We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re on our way.

When an old mythology disintegrates, a new one originates— along with new heroes, To discover a new mythos, we must create and participate in it. That is what we must understand and promote. Heroes, like Proteus of old, take on all manner of shapes and guises. Our post-modern world has negated past heroes and created new environments of impersonal and invisible power—new patterns, new space, new hype.

We find ourselves in a free-fall, borrowing, bending, and mending, having lost agreement not only about former heroes, but also about leaders, methods, and "the canon." The new technology has upended the old cosmos, moving us at the speed of light from reality to virtual or hyper reality. We live in Plato’s cave, isolated by celluloid, cathode tubes, and clicking computers. The foundation of traditional authority has been deconstructed. All we are left with is a pile of rubble.

From that rubble we must construct another and better world. It may be more regional than global, more compassionate than competitive. The message is clear: change with the times, but never forsake our past! History must be revived and revivified. It must also be expanded to include those identities produced by our new emphasis on gender, race, and ethnicity.

Myths and legends that served us for centuries have disappeared in cyberspace. We must work hard to find both mission and meaning in our tumultuous time—look for and welcome new views of who we are, and who we want to be. This may not be as hard as some think. The yearning for meaning—closely tied up in our myths, legends, and folklore—is always with us. Recall one of the early lines in the first book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis: "There were giants in those days. . . ."

The new heroes and heroines will be more than technocrats, sweep-stake winners, professional athletes or get- rich-quickers. They will not depend, like so many of today’s leaders, on spin doctors and doctored polls. They will tell the truth and spite the devil. They will stand for what made us "the land of the free and the home of the brave" in the first place.

Hasten the time.5

Marshall Fishwick
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 14061

1 The use of the term post-modern has generated its own problems. As the literature grows, so does the confusion. If anything, "post-modern" is harder to track and pin down than "modern." ` Here too we face many electronic sources and the Information Glut. The prevailing cliché is that we have massified. If that be true, a good introduction is the popular anthology of James Wilson and Stan Le Roy Wilson — Mass Media Mass Culture: An Introduction (New York: McGraw Hill, 1998). Another favorite topic is the Millennium. Ray Browne and I set forth our thoughts on that in Preview 2001+ (Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1998). The best insights on post-modernism came years ago from Marshall McLuhan; his best book dealing with that is Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (Don Mills, Ontario: Longman, 1972). From there the trail leads every which-a-way. Of the numerous post-modern bibliographies, two particularly useful and comprehensive are included in Gary Shapiro’s After the Future: Postmodern Times and Place (Albany: State U of New York P, 1990), 333-349, and Margaret A. Rose’s The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1991), 286-297.
2 Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity (London: Verso, 1995). His argument that modernism is far from dead is impressive.
3 Steve Fuller, Essay 16 in Shapiro, 273 ff.
4 Thomas L. Dunn, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: New York U P, 1999), 160.
5 In our fast-changing society where the world alters as we walk post-modern on it, some of the best material on today’s post-modern globalism is in newspapers and magazines. Six such articles have been central to my thinking and writing: Mery Galanternick’s "The Media Business: What is Playing in the Global Village" (New York Times 26 May 1997: C8) ; Richard John Neuhaus, "The Internet Produces a Global Village of Idiots" (Forbes 2 Dec. 1996); Alia Ghandour, "Global Village or Global Pillage?" (Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy, Winter 1996); Phillip Hammond, "Gods in the Global Village" (Social Forces, Sept 1996); "From New Criticism to Cultural Pluralism: The Southern Legacy of Marshall McLuhan" (Mosaic, Sept. 1996); and Margaret Keaveney, "Building the Global Village" (Migration World Magazine, Feb1996). Of recent books I have found Glen Fisher’s American Communication in a Global Society ( New York: UNESCO, 1997) particularly useful.