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 F O R B E G I N N E R S ®

f you are like most people, you're not sure what Postmodernism is. And if this were like
most books on the subject, it probably wouldn't tell you.
Besides what a few grumpy
critics claim, Postmodernism is not
a bunch of meaningless intellectual r
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mind games. On the contrary, it is

a reaction to the most profound r
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spiritual and philosophical crises M

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of our time— the failure of the
Enlightenment. &

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Jim Powell takes the position 7
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that Postmodernism is a series & - S :;

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of "maps" that help people find v sst

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their way through a changing

world. Postmodernism for Beginners (

features the thoughts of Foucault on power and knowledge, Jameson on mapping the postmodern,!
Baudrillard on the media, Harvey on time-space compression, Derrida on deconstruction and
Deleuze and Guatfari on rhizomes. The book also discusses postmodern artifacts such as
Madonna, cyberpunk sci-fi, Buddhist ecology and teledildonics.
BY JIM POWELL
ILLUSTRATED BY JOE LEE
ISBN 0-86316- 188- X
BEGINNERS 30 j C
DOCUMENTARY
COMIC BOOK
PHILOSOPHY
US $11.95
UK £7.99 9 78086c 1 31889
CAN $15.95
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 Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc.
PO. Box 461, Village Station, New York, NY 10014
^
sales forbeginners.com
Writers and Readers Ltd.
PO Box 29522, London N 1 6FB
begin @) writersandreaders.com

Text Copyright ©1996 James N. Powell

Illustrations Copyright ©1996 Joe Lee
Concept and Design Copyright ©1996 Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc.
Book and Cover Design: Renee Michaels
Cover Art: Joe Lee

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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otherwise, without prior permission of the Publisher.

A Writers and Readers Documentary Comic Book

Copyright ©1996

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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'

—
fr/i&rd and Kcaditfr ^^
Publishing FOR BEGINNERS books continuously since 1975
1975: Cuba • 1976: Marx • 1977: Lenin • 1976: Nuclear Power • 1979: Einstein • Freud • 1960:
Mao • Trotsky • 1961: Capitalism • 1962: Darwin • Economists • French Revolution • Marx’s
Kapital •French Revolution •Food •Ecology •1963: DNA • Ireland •1964: London •Peace • Medicine
Orwell • Reagan • Nicaragua • Black History • 1965: Marx Diary • 1966: Zen • Psychiatry
Reich • Socialism • Computers • Brecht • Elvis •1966: Architecture • Sex • JFK •Virginia Woolf
1990: Nietzsche •Plato • Malcolm X • Judaism •1991: WW II • Erotica • African History •1992:
Philosophy •Rainforests • Miles Davis •Islam •Pan Africanism •1993: Psychiatry • Black Women
Arabs & Israel • Freud • 1994: Babies • Foucault • Heidegger • Hemingway • Classical Music
1995: Jazz • Jewish Holocaust • Health Care • Domestic Violence • Sartre • United Nations
Black Holocaust • Black Panthers • Martial Arts • History of Clowns • 1996: Opera • Biology
Saussure •UNICEF • Kierkegaard • Addiction & Recovery •I Ching • Buddha • Derrida • Chomsky
McLuhan • Jung • 1997: Lacan • Shakespeare • Structuralism • Che • 1996: Fanon • Adler
Gandhi • U.S. Constitution • 1999: Art •Garc \a Marquez • Dante • Bukowski • Kerouac • Tango
m
 T R B L E of CnnTEnTS

Introduction 1

Postmodernese 6

What Is Modernism? 8

What Is Postmodernism? 17

lhab Hassan 17

Jean - Francois Lyotard 19

Discourse , figure 2o

The Postmodern Condition 22

Fredric Jameson 34

Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 34

Jean Baudrillard 41

Early Writings 45

"The Orders of Simulacra” 48

In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities 64

;§
On Seduction 65

America 67

The Ecstasy of Communication 69

Modernist Architecture 72

Postmodern Architecture and Art 77

Charles Jencks 78
Lf
Poststructuralism 93

Michel Foucault ( and Baudrilard on Foucault ) 94

Jacques Derrida 96

deconstruction 99

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 1o8

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David Harvey 116

The Condition of Postmodernity 116

Postmodern Artifacts 122

Blade Runner 122

Cyborgs 128

Cyberpunk 131

Neuromancer 132
Teledidonics, Audioanimatronic Paparazzi S Nano- Rovers 134

Madonna 138

Untitled Film Stills (Cindy Sherman) 142

MTV 143

Barbie - Art 144

Blue Velvet 145 I

I
Wings of Desire 145

Postmodern Environmentalism 147

What is Postmodernism? (In Retrospect ) 148

References 158

Index 16o
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 Introduction
An arts brochure for almost
any major university might appro-
priately feature a photomontage
representing its season of cultural
offerings from around the world.
The montage might feature a
female dancer with an East Indian
head, a male Navaho left leg,
the right leg of an Afro-
American modern dancer, ft,m
a torso half - covered by f CtviSttt
ANYoHt ?
a suit and tie, and the
other half festooned
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with eagle feathers with
one arm displaying a g
5
sacred Tibetan hand
gesture, another
muscled arm 7j
pounding out a Y/ \
rhythm on a
Japanese drum,
and two more female arms in a
lyrical dance pose from India.
Contrast this cultural mixing
with the lives of most of the peo -
ple who have lived on the planet for
most of its history. Citizens of the
Middle Ages and members of pre-
modern tribal societies could live
out their years without encounter-
ing anyone with another god, a
contrary worldview, different folk -
tales, dances or myths. If they
should encounter an individual or
a society that was different, then
the strategy was to conquer it
militarily, economically and sexual -
ly; to convert it to one’s own reli -
gion; or to kill it. The very exis -
tence of the Other, the very
presence of the Other,
posed a threat to the
supposed universality
of one’s own beliefs.
In the Postmodern
age, however, it is dif-
ficult to get through a
day without confronting
many different realities.
Simply turn on the TV
and you might hear
a world music group
singing a blend of Irish love song,
Indian raga, heavy-metal anthem,
Mongolian Buddhist chant— and
all to the tune of peyote drums,
gamelans, didgeridoos, panpipes,
nose flutes, alpenhorns, sitars
and tambourines. And all these
sounds may be produced not by
the original instrument but elec -
tronically, to a danceable reggae
1
r
or hip- hop beat, and broadcast to the concert , beneath the n
worldwide via satellite to millions hood, through the earphones of
of viewers— the profits going to her miniaturized radio. She may
save the Brazilian rainforest. In be wearing jeans under her
fact, go to a traditional skirt,
fundamental- and have a belly
ist Islamic full of Coca -Cola.
wedding in Pick up any
an Egyptian New Age mag -
village, and azine, and you
the bride, sur - will find the
rounded by Mysterious
stern elders, and Unknown
hooded and veiled sold in a thousand
so that no intrud- forms— psychic channelings of
ing male gaze will pollute he disembodied spirits, Buddhist,
may secretly be listening Taoist and Hindu meditation
techniques, Native American
sweat baths, crystals and herbs,
IT S, Tvifc electronic meditation machines
fcfcM- THtMG. V
and exotic potions. Your typical
V New Ager sees no contradiction
in attending a Quaker meeting in
S o
the morning, eating a Zen macro-
biotic breakfast, sitting for Chi -
nese Taoist meditation, eating
m W
a an Indian Ayurvedic lunch, doing

3 a Chero- kee sweat before Tai Chi,

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munching down a soyburger for
:« dinner, dancing in a full- moon
witching ceremony with her neo-
% Pagan Goddess group,
r
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J
r and then coming home
1
and making love with her
New Age boyfriend accord ing
to Hindu Tantric principles.
r
All the world’s cultures,
rituals, races, databanks,
myths and musical motifs I
are intermixing like a smor -
gasbord in an earthquake.
And this hodge- podge of
hybrid images is global,
flooding the traditional
blossoming with new universes
mass media, and also Cyber -
and realities, and which is being
space— a space ever -
probed by an ever-expanding
population of cyberpunks and
V

cybershamans who— like

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electronic rats burrowing

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sideways through a
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vast interconnected
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series of electronic
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sewers, cellars, pas-
sageways, cavern s,
gutters, and tun-
c-

nels— are capable of

/ w? navigating from cyber-
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an almost infinitely inter-
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linked catalogue of codes.

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In other v / orde, we live in-
creasingly in a world of in-
terconnected differences—
r.
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 differences amplified and multiplied
at the speed of electricity. No
lA longer is there one morality or myth

<
I
- or ritual or dance or dream or philosophy
\ or concept of self or god or culture or style of
art that predominates.
The explosion of new communications technologies and
the continuing fragmentation of cultures into thousands of
little cultures has forced us to view our world as simultane-
x ously expanding and shrinking. And just as the unexplored
New World of earlier centuries had its explorers who set
out on voyages of discovery, bringing back new maps,
which were constantly being re-drawr \ as ever new
regions were probed and charted, the New Postmod-
ern World— Postmodern Reality— has its
r-
mapmakers and explorers.
The mapmakers of past centuries superim -
posed a fictitious grid upon the globe— the
meridians— the lines of latitude and longi-
tude. They charted narrow straits, far-
— flung exotic archipelagos, dark conti-
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nents, prevailing winds, waves and
currents. Similarly, Postmodern
\
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orists— have attempted to map
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1

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mix of identities, realities, cul-

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—
tures, races, gender roles,
technologies, economies, cyber -
\
spaces, mediascapes.
But not everyone thinks
intellectually about all
the changes that are
taking place.

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just LIKE ME EKPlorErs

of past cEnturiEs P

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unknown and then
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These Postmodern artists or architects simply take
note of the new mix of messages, symbols, cultures

and media, and then create a video, song, painting

or building that reflects the Foetmodern condition.

We will be exploring the thoughts of some of these

“ mapmakers” and “explorers,” these Postmodern
intellectuals and artists, in the pages that follow.

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 Male subject-positions.” This is
because, in Postmodernese,
guys no longer exist. They

^ But wait a minute! If Post-

have become “ subject - posi-
modern thinkers have some tions.” The same goes for

really new ideas mapping women. Therefore the

the contours of our times,
why haven’t I heard of these
ideas before?
Q A major reason is that Post -
modernese is such a difficult lan-
phrase “ Third World
women^ needs to be
gussified up to “ post -
colonial female sub-
ject -positions.” The
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phrase “ the way m

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books on Postmodernism are
written in this particularly ob -
be rendered as
“ the hegemonic r r
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scure tongue. (mis) represen- N

For instance— let’s suppose you tation and de/ val -
live in the 1970s, and you want to orization of.” As / V,
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say “ The way white guys treat you can see, Post-
Third World women as sex objects is modernese relies
shallow and disgusting.” upon using as many
£
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The first thing you have to do slashes and hyphens d

to translate it into Postmodenese and parentheses and

is to make the sentence stop mak -
ing sense. You do this by substi -
tuting mysterious Postmodern
buzzwords or phrases for ordinary
words that do make sense. For
instance “ white guys” can prof -
itably be replaced by the phrase
“ phallocratic and panoptic (in the
Foucaultian sense) Dead-White-
whatever other kinds of
marks your computer can
make as possible. Thus the
word “ shallow” should cor -
rectly be rendered as “a
textually (re) inscribed praxis
of pre- disseminated, (counter)
subversive ‘depthlessness.
 To be perfectly correct, your final infinite bewilderment. Then you look
translation should sound some- them in the eye, compassionately,
thing like this: “ The hegemonic and tell them that the plurivocal
(mis)representation and ambiguities of (non) meaning in-
de/ valorization of the always - herent in their question obviously
already multi- (de) / gendered subvert the possibility of your
plurivocalities and (de)cen- delivering to them the kind of
tered de/constructed cheap and iow - dovjn phallocratic,
and dialogically prob- and logocentric patriarchal hog -
V
lematized ludic simu - wallow of an answer which they are
V.
lacra of absent/pre- capable of understanding.
sent postcolonial
Q Well I’m not so sure I under-
(
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female subject- posi -
stand what Postmodernism
tions, by hyper-
is. And is it POSTmodernlSM,
eroticized and
postMODERNism , PoStmOdErN-
orientalized
•s
ism, post-modernism or
phallocratic
Postmodernism?
and panoptic
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(in the Fou-
caultian sense)
Q It has been written in all
those ways. Postmodernism— as
Dead-White-Male the “ post” preface implies, is
s subject-position something that follows modern -
discourse, is a tex- ism. However, people who think
tually (re) inscribed about such things as Post-
.
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praxis of pre -dissemi- modernism don’t agree whether
**
m• nated, (counter) sub- Postmodernism is a break from
versive depthlessness.” modernism ora continuation
_
Q What!!??
_
of modernism— or both. In fact,
they don’t even agree as to
Q And if anyone asks y what modernism is, much less
what all that means, you ji Postmodernism.
behold them with a gaze of
 Q Well, what is modernism?

Q Modernism is a blanket term

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that of a kind of non - image — a
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Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s lines:
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upon the worlA.
Q But what things fell apart in the modern era? What center
could not hold?

Q What fell apart in the modern era were the values of the 12>th
century, the Age of Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason.
Probably the main value of the age, besides reaeon, was the idea
of progress.

&
 In the 1<3th century thinkers became optimistic that by using the
universal values of science, reason and logic , they could get rid of all
the myths and holy ideas that kept humanity from progressing. They
felt this would eventually free humanity from misery, religion, supersti-
tion, all irrational behavior, and unfounded belief. Humanity would thus
progress to a state of freedom, happiness and progress.
Francis Bacon saw progress taking the form of a wise,
ethical and science - minded elite who would be the
guardians of knowledge and who,
though living outside the communi -
ty, would nevertheless influence it.
Marx also believed in
progress, and envisioned a
Utopia. But Marx’s Utopian
vision was of a per -
ect world brought
about by a mate-
rialist science.

Other thinkers,
however, were not so
optimistic. Edmund
Burke was disgusted with
0
the excesses of the French ;
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Revolution. And the Marquis de

Bade, the great-granddaddy of S/M,
explored the perversities of sexual free -
dom— painting a dark picture of human liber -
ation. The sociologist Max Weber prophesied
that the future would be an iron prison of reason
and bureaucracy.

9
 Q Well, maybe Yeats and all the
skeptics were right. It looks as if things
did fall apart. What did Science, yt

Reason and Progress get us, after all?

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The 20th century has been nothing if

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totalitarianism. And all in the name c

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Reason, Liberation, Freedom and
Progress!

Q But I haven’t even told you

about the biggest skeptic of
.
all— the German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche
had no tolerance for Enlight -
enment values. Reason? Uni -
versality? Morality? Progress?
All these Enlightenment pre -
tenses meant nothing to him.
He saw the world as the dance
of the destructively creative
and creatively destructive god
Dionysus— the dance of the
—
Will to Powei and Dionysus
was his model of how to act in
the chaotic storm of life. Any
man who acted in such a way
would be a Superman.

10
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And Nietzsche hit the 1 > / /ZVj

nail right on the head.

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not drill holes in the walls of our

houses and hallowthese hollows,
After all, many
worshipping them earnestly
20th- century Supermen have
with the words “0 my Holy Hole,
proven that you have to destroy save me!!!”
in order to create: Hitler, Mao,
No. We live in a culture
Stalin, etc. Nietzsche also pro-
that esteems presence over
claimed the “ Death of God" as
absence, icon over non- existence,
well as the death of Christian
voluptuous virgin over vacant
morality and metaphysics. With
vacuum, wholes over holes! And
one wave of his philosophical wand, .
the central symbols, institutions ^ exe we prevjous|y a
center— whether in Christian reli-
and beliefs of Western culture,
gion or in the
which had already suffered a
ideals of sci- » NOTHING
tremendous blow by the Age of
Reason, disappeared— POOF—
ence and
progress
5W?
like a magician’s rabbit into the — suddenly
dark folds of a cloak.
we had nothing.
What remained were only dark
waves of Nothingness— a Void.
Nature, however, abhors a vac -
uum, and we Westerners, unlike
£
Buddhists and Taoists, do not
tolerate voids very well. We do
11
 4
Some modernists, such as Hemingway, created works of art that
expressed a kind of passive recognition of this lack of a center. In his
short story “ A Clean,
Well-lighted Place,” v

one of his charac - «

ters, a waiter,
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reworks the /
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(SSEH 379-83)
^ r

If modern thinkers could no longer believe in a

Christian God , Christian morality, or scientific progress— if there was
no longer a center to Western culture— it was necessary to find a new
one for, after all, we don’t like voids. And it was Nietzsche— who had
proclaimed the death of Enlightenment values, God and Christian
morality— that showed the way. Although he had deprived Western

12
 culture of a center, he only did so by putting something else in its
place— not only the idea of a Superman who is beyond good and evil
but also art beyond good and evil. Thus, among all the fragmentation
and chaos, amidst everything falling apart, modern artists began to
look for some eternal value that was beyond all the chaos.
These artists adopted the heroic, almost Superhuman role of
rediscovering the essence of humanity, of finding an eternal value
beyond all the chaos, of filling in the post-Nietzschean Void in various
ways. In a world without a center, aesthetics—
.///// art— became central. Art for art’s sake! Modern
A
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.

possessed, exploring its own primary possibili-

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\N perception, memory, identity.
If Bohemian, avant-garde, experimenting
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with traditional genres and styles—
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modern artists, who brought mod-
ern art to its fullest

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blossoming some-
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preservers of old cultural forms.
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the eternal in the midst of chaos. Cubism drew
inspiration from the simple geometries of
mii

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down into their basic geometric forms. Cubist artists
i
painted, as Picasso put it, “not what you see, but what
W you know is there.”
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Impressionists attempted to create sels and fairies from

such as Manet and a new center by draw- Celtic myth and folk -
Monet broke up ing upon exotic myths lore. D. H. Lawrence,
objects in a different made known to them in his novels and
way, painting with through recent dis- short- stories filled
dabs of color rather coveries in anthro- the post-Nietzschean
than continuous pology and the trans- Void with “ primitive”
brush strokes, so as lations of the texts gods, goddesses and
to suggest the play of Eastern religions energies: the Sexuali-
of light over the sur- and tribal myths. ty of the Virgin and
faces of objects. Yeats wrote down the Gypsy, the Sun,
Thus objects in the his vision of vast, his - the Snake, the Dark -
Impressionist world torical cycles of time Skinned Native .
were not solid, but turning and turning These images drew
appeared to have de- in ever widening spi- upon the findings of
composed into frag - .
rals He saw that the Sigmund Freud,
ments of light . center could not depicting a con-
In literature, look- hold, so he populated scious mind haunted
ing for an inner truth it with heroes, dam - and split by primitive,
beyond appear- dark, erotic, violent
ances, writers subconscious
/!: \
such as D.H. urges and drives.
j ,

Eliot, James
Jovce and
.
Lawrence, T S.
mm James Joyce’s A
Portrait of the
Artiet as a Youna
sensitive youth seek - arose war machines ated Auschwitz and
ing to escape the as powerful as they Hiroshima. And there
confines of his were efficient: In Italy, were other prob-
Catholic upbringing in the war machine of lems— artistic ones.
Dublin, is based on the Superman Mus-
the ancient Greek solini. In Germany,
myth of the hero Super - wr
N\
/
M
o\ %
§
Daedelus attempting man \VN h
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to escape the Laby - Hitler’s * 1

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rinth. Thus, it has a Nazi \

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n
i

L
1

[A- - A-
myth at its center. trains ran &

One symbol that on time,

'
'

attempted to fill in delivering .V

the Void that had their human V

been left by the cargo to death i
“death of God” was camps like -.
V .

the symbol of the Auschwitz and

machine. Poet Ezra
Pound saw words as
machines. The poet
William Carlos
Williams said that
the whole poem is a
machine made up of
Suchenwald. These
camps themselves
drew upon modernist 44
planning and archi- Modern
tectural principles. art and liter -
And the Nazi war ature became
machine had its own increasingly difficult %

words. Modern archi - center— the myth of to understand.

>
It
tects thought of the Super Pace— the Modernism -
*
houses as machines superiority of blue- became High mod-
for living in. In fact, all eyed, blond members ernism. High mod-
of society was be- of the Aryan race. ernism peaked in
coming more machine- So one problem 1922, with the
like: bureaucratic, with modernism is publication of
technical, rational. that science and rea - James Joyce’s
From this kind of son didn’t just create Ulysses and
machine- like efficiency progress— they cre-
5
 T.S. Eliot’s “ The Wasteland.”
In both Ulysses and Finne-
gan’s Wake, Joyce experimented
with a stream- of-consciousness
style, plunging the reader within
the fluid, shifting free -flow of his
characters’ psyches.
Eliot’s “ Wasteland” experi-
mented with a fragmented poetry
full of literary, historical and
mythological tidbits from around
the world— depicting a soul and a
society in fragmentation and
despair, seeking reintegration, a
new center. Doth Joyce and Eliot
rejected the straightforward, and
rational flow of the story or
theme. They also rejected tradi-
tional character development,
favoring instead a fragmented
style. But this dislike of conven -
tional character development and
the celebration instead, of pri-
vate, subjective experience added
to the tendency of modernism’s
artists, assembled in small
groups in Paris, Berlin, Pome,
Vienna, London, New York,
if®
16
Chicago, Copenhagen, Munich or
Moscow, to view themselves as an
exiled, alienated cultural elite.
In “ The Metamorphosis” the
writer Franz Kafka symbolized
this alienation of the artist with
the image of a huge human-sized
bug trapped in an absurd human
environment. Such artists creat-
ed works so challenging and weird
that they could only be appreci-
ated by a narrow audience. This
only further added to their
elitist image.
Modern art, in fact, was so
far-out that it divided culture
into “ Highbrow” and “ Lowbrow.” It
excluded the middle class, who
could not understand it, and gave
rise to a kind of “ priesthood” of
scholars and critics. Their job was
and is to explain modern ism’s
mysteries. To read James Joyces
Ulysses , T.S. Eliot’s “ Wasteland”
or Ezra Pound’s “ Cantos” is an
adventure. You need a guide,
as though you were exploring
the Amazon.
 2

yi
ill 5

Then how does Postmodernism differ

from Modernism?

Q There is little agreement on the subject, partly because

“Postmodernism” — whatever it is — is an attempt to make sense
of what is going on now— and we can see the present clearly
only in retrospect.

IHAB HASSAN
One Postmodern theorist, lhab Hassan, offers a table of differences
between the two movements:

Modernism Postmodernism
Form ( conjunctive/closed) Antiform (disjunctive/open)
Purpose Play
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy
Art Object/Finished Work Process/Performance/
Happening
Presence Absence
Centering Dispersal
Genre/ Boundary Text /Intertext
Root/Depth Rhizome/ Surface
(TPL 267-8)

17
 k\ Lfl
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th
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Thus, where W Yaat6, Eliot
T
and Joyce sought to .
1

! fh deep new
restore a center, a new
V\

V
sense of purpose, a new sense of design, form
^
and depth, a new sense of primordial origin in
/ myth, Postmodernists often see no reason for a
center. Instead they favor a decentering— a play
/ of chance, antiform, and surface. According to
x mIY»
A,. T

Hassan, whereas the imaginations of mod -

ern ists such as Joyce, Picasso and Eliot were
1 constellating around new centers, new coherent
structures, Postmodernists often create, com -
pose, or paint entirely by chance— spilling or
I
" \\S

throwing paint on canvasses, randomly deter - ,

\
v \

mining the pitch and duration of musical

notes in a melody, seeking to de -define art—
n

to create non -art or anti-art. For Hassan, * !,

A
A
John Cage is a Postmodern composer who
advocates composition by chance— by
simply turning on the microphones and
recording random , everyday sounds. 5

'*
s

1b
 Q It all sounds pretty chaotic. It’s no wonder that we need
"map- makers, ” intellectuals to chart the depthless new world
without a center. Who are some of these "map- makers” ?

THE MAP MAKERS -

Important Postmodern Thinkers
Jean-Francois Lyotard

A Jean-Francois Lyotard was born in * ’

s
France in 1924 and taught in Algeria, i

Brazil and California, before becoming &

professor of philosophy at the Uni -
versity of Paris in 1965. In 1955 he
became director of the College Interna - -- o' o y
St
tional de Philosophic.
For some 15 years he was associated
with a leftist group called Socialism or Bar-
barism, which, among other things, criticized
Soviet-style communism. Although Lyotard
r.
became disillusioned with socialism and
- is.\
Marxism as early as 1964, the
row events of the student revolt
4
'SO in Paris, in May of 1965,
* XT \
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unrest.
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 Discourse, figure and dripping with desire. Like
In 1971 we much modern painting, dreams
find him are fragmented. In their attempt
beginning a to make unconscious material

C\ 1 1 long, post-
"
visual, dreams disrupt the kind of

ViA Marxist linear awareness that language

Cj J period 111 requires. The visual, figure-making
which he is given nature of the unconscious, though
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to thinking at work within language, disrupts
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order of language. This is because

philosophy, language and the arts. scious is difficult to represent in
His book Discourse, figure, argues
with the concept put forth by
Jacques Lacan that the uncon -
scious mind is like a language.
Instead, Lyotard suggests that
the unconscious is not so much
like a language as it is visual and
figural, like the figures one draws
or paints. Language, after all, is
flat, two dimensional. It represses
desire. Dreams, on the other
hand, are visual, figural, alive with
three-dimensional dream figures,
20
the figural nature of the uncon-
language.
The figural resists representa -
tion in the same sense that the
Holocaust resists representation.
At Auschwitz the Nazis would
dro\Nn out the screams of the vic -
tims in the death camps by play-
ing music loudly. Similarly, to
attempt to represent Auschwitz
in language— to reduce the
degradation, death and stench
to a concept— drowns out the
screams. According to Lyotard, it
 is therefore necessary that the feeling that there is something
Holocaust remains immemorial- Other than representation.
that it remains being that which Lyotard offers the example of
cannot be remembered— but also Masaccio’s Trinity, painted on the
that which cannot be forgotten. walls of Santa Maria Novella, in
Thus, any art attempting to rep- Florence, which displays both
resent the Holocaust should con - medieval and Renaissance ele -
tinue to haunt us with its inability ments. E3y attempting to present
to represent the unrepresentable, two impossibly different eras, the
to say the unsayable. It should painting seems to say that there
continue to haunt us with the is always an Other which cannot
be truly represented.
Another example Lyotard
offers is Cezanne’s Mont
Saint -Victoire— a simultan -
eous attempt to present
two different modes of
vision: vision with a distinct
focal center and vision which
'1
is peripheral, diffuse, indis -
tinct. Again, two heteroge-
li '
neous elements.
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 The Postmodern government. The
Q Heterogeneous? Condition report surveys the
Q Yes. Hetero-
geneous means
In 1974, the year
Postmodern novelist
status of science and
technology, and has
“ made up of dissimi- Thomas Pynchon’s become something <
lar elements.” Gravity’s Rainbow, of a bible of Post -
Poetic metaphor won the National modernism. rr

accomplishes the Book Award, “ streak - Lyotard argues

same. When I say “ my ing” became a fad in that for the past
love is a rose” I am the United States, few decades sci- 0»

ence has increas -

invoking a heteroge-
neous difference.
Mama Cass of the
Mamas and
a
ingly investigated A\\
language, linguis - !'!fl
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After all, a rose and the Papas * ' >

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my love may have very choked tic theories, y

little in common . "J 4

communications, W
Because all these cybernetics, infor-
works of art bring our matics, computers
attention to the and computer •'/ ///]
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Other, to a radical languages,
difference, they are A' - '.' ' V-
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information
political. to death storage, data banks,
on a sandwich, and problems of
X X
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and a Soviet translation from one
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computer language to
^ probe touched down
on Mars, Lyotard another. He pro -
--
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x
AS - X
;
gained international claimed that these
fame for The Post - technological changes
-— modern Condition: a would have a major
report on knowledge, impact on knowledge.
an account commis - Thus, in 1974 he
sioned by the Council predicted that no
of Universities knowledge will survive
-
i

.
* of the Quebec that cannot be

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22
s
 and storage of infor- interest, it turns out,
is not so much in sci-
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mation will no longer
depend on individuals, entific knowledge and
but on computers. the scientific method,
4. s
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Information will be
produced and sold.
per se, but in how sci-
entific knowledge and
55 s' Nations will method legitimize
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fight for
information
themselves— how
they make them-
x\ . **- the way selves believable and
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trustworthy. And at
'it
if: "
they used to
g -
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fight for terri- this point Lyotard

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tory. Information makes a distinction
. o
will zip around the between scientific
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globe at the speed of talk and narrative
i -
L ' electricity, and peo - talk. Of course he
ple will try to steal doesn’t use the

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//
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it. The role of the
state will grow weak -
\Nord “ talk.” He

uses scientific
ilili er. Taking the “discourse” and
place of
ni
states, huge multina - narrative “discourse.”
tional corporations
will dominate.
But having said
translated into com - all this about
puter language— into the direction
quantities of informa- of scientific W
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tion. Learning will no knowledge, a V'

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c . m,S
longer be associated Lyotard adds o t* Y
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with the training of that scientific 8
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minds— with teach - knowledge is not

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the only kind of i
For the transmission knowledge. His

23
 TV
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Narrative? j
.

Q Yes. I will give you some » >-

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examples that Lyotard does not

use, but which help explain his - $8*
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theory. When members of the !

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Winnebago tribe sit around a •

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fire and hear a chant of how *
•

the \Nor \d was created by ..M2 l

thought, or the Boshon- *s:
go, a Bantu tribe, A S 8S
J-
.
chant how the god * r

Bumba vomited -
forth the Moon v at the same time they legitimize
and Stars, the society in which they are told.
or when '
The teller of the myth does not
the early have to argue or prove, like a sci-
Japanese >
'
entist, when he chants the story
t
\'
heard a /

of Bumba vomiting the Moon and

chant the Stars. Merely in performing
.•

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about the the myth, in the vibrations of the
formation ' chant, the beat, the rhythm— the
of Heaven sense of natural time is dissolved
and Earth and the awareness opens to
y
from a V
y
mythic time: to narrative time.
Primordial According to Lyotard, nursery
Egg— they rhymes and some repetitive forms
are listen - of contemporary music attempt
ing to narrative, to popular sto - to enter the same space of myth-
ries, myths, legends and tales. ic time.
And such myths legitimize The chanter of the myth legit -
themselves— make themselves imizes it simply by stating:
believable— -just in the telling. And

24
 "Heve is fUe claimed that the chant has been
chanted forever, that Bumba Him -
myfU o-P Bi\mb^v self was the first one to chant

Vomifmg fUe Moov\ the chant. The myth, the chanter,

the audience, all form a kind of
a\y A fws, < s I've
^ ^ *v A social bond— a social group that
Iw
^ ^ys ke^ < if legitimizes itself through the

cU< v\fe<A. 1 will chanting of the

*
cU^\ \ f if f o you iv\
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myth. The myth
requires no
,/ i
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my fi\vi\. Usf v\. authorization or V

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legitimization
/ r
-
He t /ien chants the myth . other
I / I '
When he is finished he says: than /
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itself
The V A
"Heve e*\ As H\e
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myth
myfU o-P Bumb^. defines .
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the right
cU^i\fe<A if fo to be said and
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you is Pongo." done in the culture.

But according to
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The narrator has authority to Lyotard, scientific dis - V .

chant the chant because he has course is a different kind

heard it chanted himself. Anyone
listening gains the same authori -
ty merely by listening. It is even
of language game than nar- ^ \\
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rative discourse— than myth.
Scientific discourse cannot II

legitimize itself.

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two
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s Q Here Lyotard is drawing upon
the work of the philosopher Ludwig

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Wittgenstein. In his early work Wittgenstein

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looked for the perfect, logical language
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that could state everything with clarity

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S guage— such as telling a joke, reciting
sN poetry, or chanting the
N
myth of Bumba — he
\O

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meaningless. t
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But then he changed his mind. He t

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began to see that there are many >
v
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different language games that we

play. For instance— praying,
singing, telling jokes, gossiping,
V
swearing, making a promise, taking
a vow, pronouncing a couple man and wife, telling
a lie. Science is a different kind of language game from that of myth.
It cannot legitimize itself or validate itself by its own procedures.
In the language game of science the scientist makes denota -
fcwoo tive statements rather than mythical ones.
ft
fit
Q Denotative statements?
%
i
Q A denotative statement is one such as “‘Moon’
is a term that denotes a material body ( satellite)
* which rotates and orbits around the planet
LvV\
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Earth with a uniform and known speed and at
*
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a definite distance, according to known New-
tonian (or Einsteinian) laws.’
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26
 9
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I “ Moon” does not refer to something
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that, along with the Stars, was, at

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vomited forth by Bumba.
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The scientist, unlike the

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chanter of the myth of Bumba,
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prove his denotative HS
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must be able to
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statements about the Moon and dis Kiiiic !
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prove any opposing or contradictory 4

statements about the Moon. [ In the

19th century, this was known as the
I P? •?>
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rule of verification In the 20th century, . . 4v

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this is called the rule of falsification ]
Scientific discourse and narrative are
. A -
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different language games, and what

.
counts as a good move in one game does * JH *
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not count as a good move in the other You . o

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cannot prove narrative, mythic, knowledge

on the basis of science.
And what science cannot do is to
*
£ I legitimize its own activity It cannot.
*
\t answer questions such as: IVhy should
/ there be scientific activity in the first
*
place? Or : Why should society encour -
m

Wi age and support scientific research?

i$mm\
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According to Lyotard, since
science cannot depend upon
science to legitimize itself, it
must turn to narrative!
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27
*
 generalized critical
Q Do you mean to
intellect— in fact, the
say that NASA
very idea of an
VS
scientists, in
r
intellectual— was
order to legitimize
the moon- shot,
* tf V*
'
a product of
.
V
the Enlight-
chant the myth
V enment. Intel -
of how Bumba
lectuals were
vomited the A

called
Moon?
philosophers’”.
Q No. According to
Lyotard, science has
because
the great
In France they
were called
w/ /.
depended upon two thinkere philoeophee,
other narratives. The of the it
where they
first is political, the era, £ enjoyed great
second, philosophical. men
* celebrity and
The first narrative such prestige, and
tfi x
science relies upon as l \\ ftvv
nr:
do to this day.
l.
in order to legitimize !W

itself is

associated with the Voltaire, Rousseau, Reject religious

16th century, the Duffon, Condillac and authority! Down with
Enlightenment and the Diderot, applied rea- old things like meta-
French Revolution. The son to every area of physics, ignorance,
16th century was also life: religion, morality, superstition, intoler-
called the Age of Rea - politics, social life. ance and parochial-
son,— in France Le The idea of a place ism! Let the rational
5/ec/e dee Lumieree— in society for a kind of faculties of the mind,

26
wedded to science, mind from ignorance to account for, explain
advance knowledge to to total being. and subordinate all
ever expanding vistas! doth the French lesser, little, local nar -
Let reason unlock the Enlightenment narra - ratives. Some other
laws of nature and tive and the German metanarratives are
usher in an optimistic knowledge narrative the philosophies of
age! Let the practical are what Lyotard calls Marxism or the narra -
discoveries of science metanarratives or tive of Christian salva -
allow men and women grand narratives, big tion. Thus the narra -
to get on with the stories, stories of tive of a successful
proper business of mythic proportions— Mars expedition in
seeking happiness! that claim to be able which a 3” x 3” nano-
And happiness means rover lands on the
political freedom! Let
the happiness of hu- 4 I

manity on earth mean

.
NV

AVfSfS
f t
y/
/
/

the liberty— the liber- V T

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ation of humanity!
All this means prog- -110 Celsius surface of
ress! Let science and the planet to generate
reason bring prog-
: and transmit back to
ress and freedom! Earth digital images
Joined to this of the Mars- scape,—
French political nar- X' is a little narrative
rative of freedom is that is part of the big
a German narrative: story— the metanar -
Hegel’s philosophy of rative— of the free-
the Unity of all dom, the liberation of
Knowledge. For Hegel, humanity (French),
V
knowledge played an and the attainment of
essential part in a pure, self-conscious
the gradual evolu - i spirit— the Unity of all
tion of the human -
• Knowledge ( German ) .

29
Ik
•
i
m
S
'
 Q So paradoxically, science actually
X
depends upon these two grand narratives
for legitimization.

Q That’s right. But the problem— according to

Lyotard— is that since World War II, people no longer
believe in these two grand metanarratives. After all,
applying science and reaeon to the construction of gas V

chambers and efficient railroad schedules, the

Nazis exterminated millions of human beings. Did
these people experience freedom and liberation?
And did science fulfill Hegel’s narrative of increasing
knowledge? No. For physics has led us to the realization
that electrons can travel two different paths through S/s
space simultaneously— or pass from one orbit to
another without crossing the space in between. A paradox).
And how can we unfold the Unity of all Knowledge if our
m
thought processes are not even able to comprehend ,!! !' V

how these things happen? fi

Because of disbelief in the metanarra -
tives that had legitimized science, science
no longer plays the role of a hero that
would lead us slowly toward full freedom
and absolute knowledge.
IFF

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 Q But if scientific research is no longer about finding Truth- then
what is it about?

Q When science encounters paradoxes, such as the electron that

goes opposite directions simultaneously, it abandons its search for
decidable truths and seeks to legitimize itself through
performativity. Science stops asking, “ What kind of
A
V research will unfold the laws of nature? ” and begins
t

u vs asking, “ What kind of research will work best?"

- •
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And to “ work best” means “ What kind of

SB

\
research can generate more of the same kind
' ii

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i
of research? Can it perform? Can it produce
more of the same kind of research?” So science
is no longer concerned with truth but with per -
formativity— performing— producing more of the
o
>

Y'
same kind of research, because the more research
•* /.
M
you produce, the more proof you produce and the
s more you are seen as being right, the more money
4 and power you get.
So when people no longer believe in the metanarra -
tives that legitimize science, science is then forced
to legitimize itself — -just as the myth of Bumba

m
vomiting the Moon and Stars legitimizes itself by

r .
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i
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itself. Both science and people chanting the Bumba
chant can then say,

t V
"We Ac wU< vf we Ac, ?

because fUe
r
\Nc\y we Ac H
;
;
-.
m
1' VS ll
&
-
/
v /
t
 Then what’s the difference legitimized
between the two, after all? by the

Q The difference, for Lyotard, is

grand Hindu
narrative of
that where traditional societies the liberation V
are under the spell of one domi - v:
of the human K
•; T
nant narrative, such as the myth -M
soul through %X
of Bumba, Postmodern society is - >
•

Enlightenment. v>
. •»
a society in which no one narra -
In contrast, the 11*7 .
tive— big or little— no one lan - n
story-teller at your /W i- n
guage game dominates. In Post- local bookstore, or v
Ml

modern societies many r

visiting the children
micronarratives are jammed at your
together. And this carnival of nar-
local
ratives replaces the monolithic
school,
presence of one metanarrative. may tell
a tradi-
Q But doesn’t this mean the dis- tional <

Eskimo *
•r

appearance of our universal

or
v
& -
system of meaning? Doesn’t A

this just create a void?

Q Yes. But this void is filled in

by swirling galaxies of little sto-
Native
* T
•
*
'it
&
%
Ameri-
ries— little micronarratives. The
/8 )
can 0
\
void is filled in by a kind of story- Trick - s
telling that does not seek to ster
legitimize itself through reference tale, or % v *
to a single grand narrative out- the story *
side itself. For instance, a teller of of Papunzel letting down her long,
tales in ancient India, sitting golden hair for a handsome young
under his banyan tree, would have prince, or the story of Bumba
told thousands of stories— but vomiting the Moon and Stars—
all these stories would have been and tell them all in one sitting.
32
 A
K.
.-S
' '

• .

None of these stories seeks legitimization &

t &
c
V

••
or proof through some grand narrative. Each
story, while it is being told, is its own proof, and
r. . i *! - \

N
the proof of all the others. It is legitimized simply
75
* /

by doing what it does. / / v

Like the Postmodern storyteller’s grab bag of // >
/
stories, Postmodern society is made up of zil- Y;

wV/m
I ii
lions of incompatible little stories— micronar - >7// A
*
ratives. And not one of these little stories »: V.I
can dominate or explain the rest. 1 •«
»7

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/
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Q But isn’t
--
r

Lyotard’s story about

/
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disbelief in metanarratives
'/
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4 just another metanarrative? Isn’t he being authori-
/ V sS
\ X
&
tarian about how there can be no authorities?

\
'
N

<3*
Q Yes. Lyotard has been attacked on those
grounds. In fact, his notion that people
.A
have stopped believing in errand narratives be-
\
cause such narratives marginalize minorities
%

assumes that people universally

V\
believe in justice. And that
is a metanarrative.
N
Yet, despite its v-
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j
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-
inadequacies, Lyotard’s *

definition of Postmodernism as
v .
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A
incredulity toward metanarratives
continues to have great influence. 4 VY
v

\\ v\ v\W

Sw 33
 r? :

.
PN
Q Who are some
other map - y
^4 X
V

makers of the vW
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£
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11.

Postmodern >

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world? .. I»*
/,

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F r e d r i c|_ :

Ja meeo n .A
, \v
‘

A second influ-
3
ential Postmodern cribe movement American industrial
thinker is Fredric through nature society.
Jameson. As a and suggest ten- “ Postmodernism ,
Marxist, Jameson sion and resent- or the Cultural
is interested in the ment between his Logic of Late
relationship of the macho characters. Capitalism”
individual to the The skill of a bull- Lyotard celebrates
world of objects, fighter or trout the multiple, incom -
whether those ob- fisherman in Hem - patible, heterogen -
jects be cans of ingway reflects the eous, fragmented,
soup or multina - American admira - contradictory add
tional corporations. tion of technical ambivalent nature
Like most Marxists, skill— but rejects of Voetmodern so-
his reflections on the way in which ciety while Jameson
this relationship industrial society distrusts and dis -
always lead back to alienates people. likes it. In his fah
historical reality. Thus skill is dis- mous essay “Post-
For instance, played in leisure modernism: or
Hemingway’s prose
style— his bare,
activities, far from
industry, usually
the Cultural Lo ic
of Late Capital- ^
pared -down sen- by expatriates who ism,” Jameson
tences— can des- have alienated does not see the
themselves from

34
 >
\
* .•

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X
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Nr ? X A .> ..
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SECOND:
v m 'X -
Late CapitaW &m, monopoly capital-
'
VW
ism, during the age
which broke down
the 19th and 20th of imperialism.
Postmodern era as National markets
centuries into
postindustrial— as expanded into v<Jor \ d
definite histori-
an ebb in the tide markets. Though
cal periods.
of capitalism. these markets were
FIRST: from
Rather, he sees it based in particular
1700 to 1550, the
as an intensifica - imperial nation-
period of market
tion and latest states, they de-
capitalism. During
phase of a capital - pended upon out-
this era industrial
ist world system. lying areas for raw
capital accumulat-
Jameson was materials and
ed mostly in
heavily influenced cheap labor.
national markets.
by Ernest Mandel’s

35
*
 /T
s «
{

m \to
k
THIRD — the Postmodern phase
erupted on the world scene with the unre-
stricted growth of multinational corpora -
tions— such as Coca - Cola. This is the purest form
of capitalism yet to emerge— invading nature by
destroying the pre-capitalist forms of agriculture—
and invading the unconscious mind by advertising.
Mandell’s history inspired Jameson to proclaim
three cultural periods— in each of which a unique
cultural logic dominates:

Fivsf Is fUe o-P

The era of the bourgeois, historical novel.

o-P Mo<Aew\lsi*\
^ ec<5 v\ <A is H\e
Jameson admires modern ism because modernist culture
expressed its dissatisfaction with the world. Take Edvard
Munch’s painting The Scream . For Jameson it is a desperate
cry expressing the great modernist themes of alienation,
rootlessness, lack of identity, solitude, and social frag-
mentation.
Similarly, Van Gogh’s painting Peasant Shoes crit-
icizes an entire world of peasant poverty and misery. IK

Modernist buildings, such as Le Corbusier’s “great

pilotis” stand out as grand utopian beacons in
bright contrast to the degraded city sur- .
rounding them. They express a politically
passionate vision of Utopia.
TUiv Is H\e o-P PosFv*vo Aevv Isvn
^ < \
Postmodern cultural forms reflect the dislocation and fragmen-
tation of language communities— splintered into small groups—

36
each speaking “a curious private
language of its own, each profes -
sion developing its private code or
dialect, and finally each individual
coming to be a kind of linguistic
island, separated from everyone
else” (FCS 114).
Thus, according to Jameson,
Postmodern city-dwellers are
alienated, living in an hallucina -
tion, an exhilarating blur, a reality
evaporating into mere images,
spectacles, strange new warps in
time and space, fixated on com -
modities, on products, on images,
like the explosion of Andy Warhol’s
pop art, on flows of images stolen
from consumer culture and repro-
duced with industrial repetition,
Campbell’s Soup cans, Brillo
boxes, bottles of Coca -Cola, col-
lages of identical images of Holly-
wood stars such as Marilyn Mon -
ness with no link to any reality:
the collapse of the distinction
between high culture and low cul-
ture; masses of spectators aban -
doned to a gaze of image
addiction; TV images
stripped of reality,
leaving only a sur-
face, a simu-
lacrum, schlock, l
kitsch, E3 movies, ;
pulp Action, adver -
1
tising, motels,
Readers Digest cul-
ture; the merely deco -
rative, superficial, gra - /
tuitous eclecticism of
Postmodern architecture
cannibalizing all the archi-
tectural styles of the
past, the Bonaventure
Hotel in Los Angeles, a mon-
ument of Postmodern archi - 8

roe, all sameness, all surface— all tectural space.

depthlessness. Compared to Van
Gogh’s Peasant
Shoes, which ex-
presses a real
world of rural t
*
misery, Warhol’s *
Diamond Dust
Shoes express -
es a depthless-
i
ISs 37
 Eh- \V ‘

rr i , u
i>\\' .
•
But wait! Jameson can't get into the
v ’1
'•
v
I

hotel! The entrance is concealed! But then

he finds the entrance ! It looks something
like a back door ! He enters a Postmodern
hyperspace! He rides elevators and escalators
t **
' eternally floating up and down like giant gondo-
-

las. He views the closed cylindrical towers! He feels

m=
ET— r~
j dizzy, drowning in a bewildering emptiness. He wants
j a map so that he can map his way to the external world!
TT
^ Jameson feels that his dizziness when faced with Post-

m _X—. I•
-
i
modern culture is similar to our incapacity to map our rela -
tionship to the centerless world of vast computer networks
and multinational corporations. Postmodern theory, too, offers
no map, being more a symptom of the centerless Postmodern
mi '
f

world than a cure.

I Jameson is perhaps most well known for his distinction
! between parody and pastiche. One thing that Postmodernity has
7. X I exploded is the subject— the ego. In the age of modernity we still
/ believed in the subject— the ego.
V - “A
Artists such as Hemingway pos-
sessed a unified ego and identi-
- V:

m
•
)
i -- /6 Tl
ty— even if it was an alienated one.
-cl H . •
n
t * -
.X
•

'X --
i
And possessing an identity, they pos -

ft
\

r .. - J. -x- v
& sessed a style that could be the subject
**
of parody — you could make fun of it by imi-
yr tating it. Every year, for instance, there is a
§
#
ft 11 '
*
\ i literary contest in which writers imitate
&
m Hemingway’s style in a humorous way.
ft
¥$•

ill
>x .
-
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to

- -
j
a
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33
\ V \ V

*
 Every year we met at Harry’s bar. We drank there. And every year
was a good year. And we sat and drank and imitated Hemingway’s / ^'6
style. And we were good there .
/
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27
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But Postmodernity has fragmented language and the subject— both

have become schizoid. Jameson feels that parody and satire are only
possible in an era of healthy linguistic normality.
Q You mean like in Gulliver ’s Travels, Jonathan Swift was able to sat-
irize the abnormal language of scientific reason because everyone
knew what normal speech was like?

Q Yes. But in the Postmodern age, there is no linguistic normality.

Thus we can only produce pastiche— like an impersonator who ran-
domly starts out impersonating Bogart, and then switches, in the
middle of his line, to Marilyn Monroe, and then to Boy George or
James Dean, and then to Ronald Reagan. In pastiche there is only this
smorgasbord of quotations— like a dozen different movie and MTV
videos and television shows spliced randomly together.

39
 As a Marxist who believes that the world is run by historical
forces, Jameson’s biggest gripe about the Postmodern era is that it
signals the end of a genuine awareness of history. But Jameson
I
feels that an awareness of history is precisely what we
A now need to piece together our shattered Post-
modern language and selves, which, like Humpty
. <

Dumpty, have become

Li fragmented. It is what we need to unify the
past- present-future of the sentence— to
i K r unify our psyches and our lives.
- y
r r

I What we need is what Jameson calls an

‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping” to repre-
tt

sent our imaginary relationship to reality. What

/
we need, according to Jameson, is Marxism— a sci-
ence that can tell what is imaginary and what is
4
* real— that can recover true historical consciousness
m and normalcy.

Q But wouldn’t Lyotard say that Marxism is

Ji 27 a metanarrative?

\
Q Yes. And so you can see that not all
Postmodernists agree. In fact, Jameson
t

/ '
* seems overcome by the flow of images
in the Postmodern media— but
f N our next “ map - maker,” Jean
M* Baudrillard, seems to sug -
gest a kind of passive
surrender to this flow.
) '
v
X

r
£
 1 Jean Baudrillard
a n d t h e Death of the Real
you <nve wive<A. The passive vicftm O-P
c
Al TV, compufev> ^vevHs-
<n
4 o
r
.
Iv\g you we Uypv\ofiz.e<A by
'
i
fUe fube, by fUe obscene
A
Plow o-P Images. You v <nlse
w
' youv eyelids. A vwupivess
•V
M

is Weelihg ovev you— volup-

tuously— fUe muscles o-P Wev-
, fUe ivovy cuvve o-P Uev sUoul ^Aevs, illumme^A
v\ eck
'

<ns i-P by cool moo*\UgUt. Ue UcUs Uev scwlet Ups UVe

^
w\ wim<nl, gl< mg H\em wifk sheen o-P moisfuve, Uev e^govge<A
*
foHgue glistening if l< ps tke white feefU. SWe le< ns closer
* *
you -Peel Kev cool bve< fU, then fUe sUwpness o-P incisors pen-
*
efv< fing youv
* neck. You close youv eyes in lwguovous
—
ecstasy w\<A wwi w <nlf wifb beating Uewf.

This, according to the imagery of Postmodern theorist Jean

Baudrillard, is similar to society’s relationship to the world
of mass media, advertising, television, newspapers,
magazines. The era of mass communications
invades our darkened rooms, embracing us
with its cool, lunar light, penetrating
into our most private recesses. We
succumb to the fatal attraction,
surrendering ourselves in an ecstasy \

of communication.

\
& 41
 The thought of Jean Bau- In May of 1968— while mini-
drillard is part of a New Wave skirt-clad American
of French theory that /
women were cele-
broke on American t
brating No Bra Day
7
shores in the 70s, ’80s by burning their
and ’90s— replacing brassieres and other
the frenzy over
2
undies, while Amencan
J
former waves '
% hippies were tripping
dominated by & to “ Purple Haze,” “ Mellow
post- World War II Yellow,” and “ Mrs. Robin -
figures such as son” — Parisian youth,
S
Sartre. Just as backed by Communists and
Nietzsche once other Marxists, took to the
proclaimed the streets in a defiant and jubilant
Death of God, mood, creating something
Baudrillard’s between a carnival and a
thought declares \
revolution. Parisian universi-
the death of ties were eventually shut
.
modernity, the /V
U;*£ 5
I f*
down by the student
ft
*

death of the * «s strike, and factory

v
real, and the . workers followed
•

death of sex. suit. Production

Baudrillard and education
/
undermines deep &
IS
.ft." r came to a halt.
r
foundations of Under the threat
thought in disci- X of a radical over -
plines such as w
*8 ? ••
throw of the sys -
Marxism, semi -
otics, political * '.. VC

science, economics, religious

•
tem, de Gaulle
left the country.
By June, however, it was summer
studies, anthropology, literature, vacation time, turning the would -
film and media studies— to be student revolutionaries into
name just a few. beachgoers. The workers, encour-

42
 A HoRse
aged by de Gaulle, IS AUoRSfc
w COURSE Q Structuralism? Semiotics?
returned to their
CbOfcSE.
/
jobs— and things
were soon back
to normal.
^ sr -
ES Yes. At the same time as
the student uprising, revolu -
tionary events were taking
Nevertheless, i
place in the study of lan -
the mass conta - a; guage and culture as well.
gion of the move- The Swiss linguist Ferdinand
0
ment left deep de Saussure argued that mean -
o
impressions on ing in language is not produced
o
some of the partic - by a collection of sounds
ipants. One of these O corresponding to concepts
was Jean Bau-
drillard, who, for
/
/r
7 and things.
According to
many years to
G* Saussure, there is
come, would still no natural corre -
continue to be N
) spondence between
influenced by \ the “ sound” horse, the

*
s
Marxist thought, !,
concept “ horse” and a
but would feel horse. Rather, he theorized,
increasingly that language is a system of differ-
Marxist philoso - ences, something like the red,
phy is insufficient I
// i yellow and green
to explain life in m
m
W
lights in a
m
I
/
late capitalist
traffic signal.
V
societies. So he .
tX\
fi
began looking also //'(1/ v -v
to structuralism SA -
•
vm
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and semiotics to t
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supplement V
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Marxism. vV
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t xes jjtfr 4$ow ch>wr^
GO’yuz&

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co yvc&pC o. //
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The red, yellow and
green lights gain their
l
I r

meanings only in relation -

ship to each other. A sys-
tem of purple, blue and gold
lights would work just as well.
Semiotics extended Saus-
sure’s linguistic structuralism into
other realms: myth, fashion, the V

media, politics, religion, etc. The term

rs
t. H

“ Devil” for instance, has no meaning 0 c-

by itself. It only takes on meaning
as an element in a system of
Christian theology/myth, • /
\
where “devil” is related to
^
other concepts such as '
Wx
“God,” “ Angel,” etc.
/
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SA
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 Early Writings
Semiotics is the structuralist study of various systems of
meaning, like myths, traffic signals, language, fashion, etc. Sau-
drillard’s works combine a semiotic, structuralist, study of culture
with a neo-Marxist analysis. For instance, in his early works— The
System of Objects, The Society of Consumption and For a Cri -
tique of the Political Economy of the Sign— Saudrillard argues
that just as a young boy who grows up among wolves
becomes wolflike, people in Postmodern society, growing
up in a vjorid of objects— become more objectlike.
Though Postmodern society is based on the con-
sumption of commodities— on buying and using
./ things— this consumption can never make us happy.

.j Q But don’t commodities satisfy our natural needs?

v
V
Q object
This is not what Marx believed. For Marx, an
, before it is a commodity, has a natural
use value. A car is useful because it is plea -
f
surable to drive— because it lets you feel
r? the voluptuous curvature of the earth—
w
*5? V
.
v
8? vt
and because it transports you to vari-
,
ous places.

m i .-
c

*
iv.
'
.
V
/

.
5

45
 However, Marx also believed that example, he is buying into a
in a capitalist society an object whole system of needs that is
becomes a commodity and takes at once rational, homogeneous,
on an exchange value . The car systematic and hierarchical. The
can be exchanged for money. But purchase of the Mercedes dif -
Baudrillard saw this Marxist ferentiates the buyer socially
assessment of an object as too from people who drive Volkswa -
limiting, and supplemented it gens, and this pur -
with a semiotic analysis— ' _M chase helps

-.
\

an analysis of the
meaning of the
'
* S
j
. oa
V:
•

f/
integrate
him, system -
object. For, like traf - '
.
v
< > atically and
. ./ l‘

fic lights, com- rationally,

modities have V into a homo -
. .W *
S geneous level
meanings. In this n

analysis com - of society, a

Y Vi
modities don’t it level of society
' ft f '
just satisfy natur - U
f » in which every-
p I
IN V.
al needs— rather »
>;
Vo
n r one drives a
society creates our
W
Mercedes.
A\ v
needs. Human
(1
Thus, for Bau-
N

beings, after all, ' V

drillard, Marx did
have a deep desire to distin - not recognize the symbolic,
guish themselves from other semiotic aspect of the object—
human beings through systems the fact that when you buy a
of social differentiation. For Mercedes it signifies something.
members of tribal cultures The Mercedes, besides having a
these differences might be sig - use value, serves as a sign of
naled by the use of certain the consumer’s prestige, rank,
tattoos or feathers. and social standing. Thus con-
But in our society, when a sumption is not just consump-
consumer buys a Mercedes tion but conspicuous consump-
instead of a Volkswagen, for tion. We display what we buy,

46
conspicuously, in order to differ - by ceaselessly buy-
entiate ourselves socially. ing into the latest Hk ' r i\
And you can’t buy just one fads and trends. /2
1
V

object in order to enter a social These codes are ?gSB8r .

level, you need to buy into an just like the
entire system rules of V
67
»l
,

of objects. Thus .
jr

. . mi

when you are picking out your i \\ \

iv

Mercedes, you also need to shop

for a tennis club, an estate in an vV

exclusive neighborhood, a good grammar I.

private school for your children, a that underlie 1/

i

fashionable vacation spot, etc. A

;

a language
>
need, then, is not so much a making com - A

need for a particular object as it munication

is a need to distinguish oneself possible. The X

socially, a need for social differ- codes organize ? 45

ence and meaning.
Neither is consumption
primarily for pleasure— for it
requires immense resources and
energy. A person must earn the
money and leisure time to obtain
the Mercedes and show it off.
The effort required to do this
often demands the denial of
pleasure. Consumption, then, is
not natural— something we auto -
matically inherit from nature—
but cultural. The consumption,
display and use of objects takes
place on the basis of cultural
codes that demand we conform
commodities into hier -
archical systems of meaning
based on price and prestige. This
tiring feeding frenzy of consump-
tion, this search for being, mean -
ing and prestige through con-
sumption, causes fatigue and
alienation in the heroes of con-
sumption. Always latent in con-
sumption, then, lurks a spirit of
rebellion. Consumers reach a
point of refusal— they get fed
up and end up burning their bras
or erupting into more radical
forms of social change.

47
 X TrtlNKl 1

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“ The Orders of into a new reality, how the relationship

Simulacra” which he outlines between the real and
During the 1970s in “The Orders the simulacrum has
and 19£>0s Sau- of Simulacra.” changed through his-
drillard stopped em - tory. During the feu-
phasizing his Marxist Q Simulacra? dal era, when Guin-
leanings and was [ Simulacra, everes blew kisses
heralded as the plural; from the ramparts
most advanced the- simulacrum, of castles to Lance-
orist of media and singular ] lots in shining armor,
society in the Post-
modern era.
Qdrillard .
Yes For 13au -
simulacra are
when the feudal lord
was the symbol of
Postmodern soci- earthly authority,
copies of real ob- and the Virgin Mary
eties, dominated by
jects or events. In
computers and tele- “ The Orders of Simu-
illumined the stained
vision, have moved glass windows and
lacra,” he describes

46
 the hearts of her r.
t ©
devotees, society r> ! i
a> •

was organized by status

.
V y V
a relationship to of the
a system of fixed princess blowing
V

signs, which kisses from the // >J

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were limited in ramparts, is sig - V
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number and sup - nified by her

posedly divine. dress and by her
For instance, we adherence to the
can read in Lance - conventions of /

lot’s coat of arms courtly love. And, of

/
his social rank and course, all these
status. The social codes of behavior • V
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s <
and dress are divine-
ly sanctioned by the
nri
s\ serenely at the top
symbols of Mary and
of the hierarchy of
of Jesus shining
A y
a
I
symbols— through
stained glass
windows.
m In such societies
V, ’A

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0 < I
a fixed social space,
N A like a caste, and
56 £
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mobility between
social classes or
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castes is impossible.
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A serf, laboring in
ll
the fields, could not
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become a knight .
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Then, in the ruled like a god over his perfect
1 period of early world made possible by con-
w.
lit
modernity, from crete— which for him was like a
p 1/
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Il

V
the Renaissance mental substance. Stucco also
*. to the beginning of emerged in this period as a medi-
l
the Industrial Rev- um of Baroque art, and gave rise
olution, the rigid order of to Baudrillard’s supreme example
the feudal era broke down of this age— the Stucco Angel. It
due to the rise of the was only one more step
bourgeoisie. to plastic.
During the medieval But simulacra molded of stuc -
period the world was created co, concrete (and later plastic),
in the image of God . But in though counterfeit, produced a
the era of early modernity, new Vi/ odd of forms made of a
images, signs and symbols deathless, flexible, indestructible
were not divine but artificial material. Baudrillard sees this
and proliferated in the fields of stage of the simulacrum as the
theater, fashion, art and poli- beginning stage of /
tics as the new rising class the simulacrum—
attempted to create the the First Order
t ! \Nor \ d in its own image. of Simulacra . m 4

/
-p'' o For Baudrillard, a
'

>
}s
r)
symbol of this age
o
ft
was Camille Renault, an old 6
'
cook, turned sculptor, who lived in
V

the Ardennes and discovered the

perfect substance for reproducing
the world in his own image— Re/ n -
forced Concrete. From this he
fashioned chairs, drawers, E

sewing machines, an entire

orchestra, including violins, t

sheep, a hog, trees. Accord-

ing to Baudrillard, Renault -
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The Second Order of Simu - now become the dominant prin -

lacra appears with the advent of
the Industrial Revolution. The sim -
ulacra now become infinitely repro -
ducible through industrial mass
production. Whereas Camille Ren -
ault molded his artificial world by
hand, in the industrial era mech -
anized means of mass assembly
ciple— replacing the world of nat -
ural objects.
But, according to Saudrillard,
we are now in the Third Order of
Simulacra— the era of Postmod-
ernity— the era of models. No
longer is the simulacrum a coun -
terfeit like Camille Renault
-
’s «

I
and production enable a Renault concrete hog, or an infinite series,
automobile factory to turn out like automobiles rolling off the
masses of exact replicas of cars. assembly line— but
When photography and cinema
arrive on the scene, even art suc - THE SIMULACRUM aT
/
cumbs to the force of mechanical
reproduction. Reproduction is
governed by market forces, which REflllTY ITSELFI ! /
f 51
/
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 The presiding power in this ment, a commodi -
era is the model or the code , ty, a poll, a televi -
“ Digitality is its metaphysi- sion program, a
cal principle . . . and news issue or a po -
r N
DNA is its litical candidate,
tx

y p r o p h e t ” our response is
V. (SIM 65-04). monitored.
S
f Just as lan-
guage is gov -
Q You mean like:
- " Are you watching
erned by the
daytime TV or not ?
code” of grammar
Are you buying Pepsi or
and our biological
' ir; Coke? Are you for can-
processes are con -
didate X or Y ? Are you
<y trolled by the DNA code,
wearing Calvin Klein
our cultural life is based
or Jordache?”
on a variety of codes;
© H we have sex videos, A Exactly. And such
yoga videos, how -to tests not only restrict
manuals, cookbooks, our responses to ”yes”
exercise videos, par - or “ no” but also determine
I . enting manuals, our options, limiting the
u*
•
t

advertising, television very scope of the issues

and newspapers to and things we may choose
© provide these codes. from . Thus our lives are
These codes not controlled by a system of
only provide mod - binary regulation — where
v•
»
els but also contin- the question/answer option
»
ft ually test us. Every of the test has been re -
vy
time we respond duced to an either /or binary
•• “yes” or “ no” to code:
a fashion, an
advertise-

©
52
to
 This system of binary choices acts as a “deter -
rence model,” which suppresses radical change.

Q Well, I can see how that would happen. After t-

>

all, if we feel we have a choice between Pepsi and

Coke, between the Soaps and the Discovery Chan-
- nel, between a Republican and a Democrat,
&
- between Socialism and Capitalism— all ruled by
N
a binary, either /or— 0/1— logic— then what more
N x X
do we need?
s 1 13
Y
* Q For Baudrillard the twin towers of the *
X

^
N
New York World Trade Center symbolize this
•w
binary system. While the other skyscrapers,
built decades earlier, are singular and com -
i
pete aggressively for attention, the two N

towers stand for the “closure of the sys-

* tem in a vertigo of duplication” (SIMI36-7). I

Y :
Thus, everything becomes reduced
* to cybernetics— to a binary code that
seems to represent differences but Y
'
T which, in reality, only perpetuates
H
H this self - regulating, binary system,
which only minimizes differences as
it toggles back and forth between
it #
Ti
“yes” or “ no,” Pepsi or Coke, Repub-
lican or Democrat. V

m fl S

mm
v

s
S
I
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s

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1
Pi • V

-
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53
 Q seems to leap toward him. He
To me it seems like the film
Jurassic Park .
slams on the brakes He skids. .
Crash! The two vehicles go up in a
Q How’s that? burst of flame.
Q A second
Because Jurassic
later the crash
Park is about peo- 71

ple either passively > evaporates.

-V

Joe Player’s
accepting or refusing
to buy into being pas-
sive observers of a
spectacular, monstrous 7

\
world of simulacra, of copies, -
/

generated ad infinitum by J

means of codes. V
/

MUi
// . /
ft
l‘d
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Q That’s brilliant! But you must

also realize that your very exam -
« JiA
7

\
ple, the film Jurassic Fark, is
itself a monstrous simulacra
generated ad infinitum via a \ \

code. But according to Bau - 9

\

drillard, people inculturated

into Fostmodern society are so
surrounded by simulacra they no
longer have a choice. Consider the
case of Joe Player, an 10-year - old
behind the wheel of a car. He is on
a narrow mountain road . He is v

passing another car on a curve. <1 55b 5

He is doing 220 , too fast to C-

evade the oncoming truck that

’ 7
— f .*

54
 car reappears unscathed. He
-* 1

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floors it, racing to pass

X
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another car just ahead 5=
SB
of him. Joe Player is play- y

ing a video game. When he "

runs out of quarters he goes >

r

out into the parking lot, into his s in :

real car. Put, as he pulls out into -
traffic, it doesn’t seem real. Nor
do the cars on the road. He feels
that if he ran into them he would
just eat them like Ms. Pacman
eats dots. Joe Player is surfing
the simulacrum.
Originally simulacrum, accord-
ing to Plato, is the false copy
that overshadows our experience
of the essential and Ideal Forms.
A cocker spaniel, a German shep-
herd, or a collie, for instance,
would be, in Plato’s philosophy,
impure copies of a universal and
Ideal Essence of Dogginess.
- n
J
4
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\
1’
Put in Daudrillard’s view, Post-
modernity has overthrown the
very concept of true copy. And
this has happened in stages.
Imagine the experience of a
Christian nun in medieval Europe.
She worships an icon of the
Madonna . The icon reflects a
divine feminine reality. The icon is
a good, true copy because it is so
close to the original that in her
meditations the nun awakens to
the spiritual presence behind the
form. She could be called an idol-
ater— a worshiper of an idol.

Q.
*
t

f . P
w 55
 But the iconoclast sees things differently. She does not feel that
images reveal divinity, but mask and pervert the divine. Therefore, such
images are evil, bad copies, and should be destroyed.
A third perspective is that of the skeptic. He feels that the whole
thing is a farce. The icon of the Madonna only hides the fact that
there is no divine being— hides the absence of a divine being.
Finally, there is a fourth perspective. In the Postmodern era, icons,
images, copies— simulations— bear no resemblance to any reality. In
fact, the simulation, the simulacrum, the copy, becomes the real!

Q You mean like there are a million copies not of the Madonna-but of
Madonna- which become more real than Madonna the person?

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You see, it’s
& * like this. During the Middle
Ages there were, like, a
bunch of longbearded
*£
monks. They used to, like,
hide away in their cells,
'N .K
X /
like, y’know — and liked to
rs
*
/
/ 7 like, dip their quills into,
f
/ like, dark ink, and then
v -
t copy down the words and
t
/ k
•/
phrases, and sentences and
verses, of the Holy Word.
> > t These, like, words of
O
*
56
w Holy Writ which they, like, wrote down, were only the
outer expressions of a, like, deep Intercourse they
were having with the mystical Word that illumined their,
like, prayers. But of course, all these, like, prayers were,
like dominated, by a single image— that of the Holy,
like, Virgin, the, like, Madonna.
Today, of course, it is not like, the Madonna who
dominates, but, like, Madonna-like-mu! Today it is like,
my image that undulates forevermore, reproducing, like,
infinitely, like, there are millions of me and like, and mil-
lions of my like belly buttons, like, bouncing back and
forth before everyone’s vision as if trying to like,
decide between am I like a like Virgin or like a like
Whore, in a like, erotic stream of images that MTV
viewers, like, edit with like, Beavis and Butthead binary
brains: they like think that my image, the image of my
like, belly button, is either like, “ cool” or like “ sucks.”
It is the image of my belly button, not my belly button,
which has become the real. 99

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Q Baudrillard emphasizes his

point not with his belly button but with the
Borges tale in which the cartographers
of an empire draw up a map so
detailed that it ends up covering
the territory. In covering up the ter-
ritory, it is taken for the real. For Bau-
drillard one of the characteristics of Postmodern society is
that we are all similarly entranced by surfing the simulacra.
In the universe of Hollywood, Pop Art, TV, cyberblitz, and
the dazzling spectacle of the mediascape— signs and
images no longer bear any correspondence to the
“ real” world— but create their own
hvperreality— an order of representation that is
not the unreal, but has replaced ‘reality’ and is
more than real, more real than real .
For Baudrillard, entertainment
parks such as
Enchanted Village,
Magic Mountain, Marin
World, and especially Disne
land, with its Pirates, its Fron
tier, its Future World, its Tom
Sawyer’s Island, are the perfect exam
pies of the hyperreal. These hyperreal
worlds are presented as imaginary only t
lead us to believe that the re&t of Los Angel
and America are real. But they are not. They too a
hyperreal— pure simulacrum.
A
58
I
 Los Angeles is encircled
-
3»
by these “ imaginary sta
S

tions” which feed reality, y»

/ / /}

reality energy, to a town / <3

t' -
«
5
t .4
whose mystery is precisely ,
that it is nothing more than a
/
network of endless, unreal circula - %

—
tion, a town of fabulous proportions,
but without space or dimensions As much .
as electrical and nuclear power stations, as
much a film studios, this town, which is nothing ^2 ?

more than an immense script and a perpetual

motion machine, needs this old imaginary makeup 7
of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its
sympathetic nervous system (5IM 26) .
What Baudrillard calls the home. Here, according to the
Death of the Real arouses nos - government’s ethnologists, the
talgic attempts to resurrect the tribe could live uncorrupted by civ-
real. Baudrillard sees Watergate ilization. Baudrillard argues, how-
as one such attempt. For parad- ever, that in removing the Tasaday
ing the scandalous illegalities of from modern civilization, ethnology
the Nixon administration implies, simultaneously ignores the real
falsely, that these affronts to Tasaday— who want to remain
democracy represent a deviation living among TV’s and cars— and
from the norm— and that the create a mere model, a simu-
system of government in general lacrum of what an “ original”
respects law and morality. pre- civilized tribe “ should”
The Death of the Real also look like-
X ,4 M
inspires a proliferation of myths before No T A

of origin. Thus, in 1971, the gov- ethnology! II

/
i
d
1 H

ernment of the Philippines re- situ-

v r
ated a small tribe of Tasaday 1 y

Indians to their original jungle W/J

.
II

597
 s l 'A *
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Q In other words, this repre-
£ \

sentation of what a tribe

should look like was created
only by ethnology? 7
A Yes. And this attempt to I
resurrect the real, the original,
nificent forms, bison, mam -
has also taken place at the
moths, rhinoceroses.
caves of Lascaux in southern
Yet today 500 meters from
France. It was here, during the
the original caves— an exact
closing millennia of the last
replica of the caves has been
Glacial Age, that teeming herds
created in order to preserve the
of magnificent grazing animals
original. It has become more real
passed in waves across the than the real cave. And in the
vast post -glacial landscape,
same way, modem science
occasionally falling prey to the
recently has geared up to save
hunting tribes that depended
the mummy of Ramses II.
upon the herds for their sub- Thus, with the Death of the
sistence. And it was here, in
Real, the hyperreal takes over—
the subterranean caves, that
Disneyland, The Tasaday, Water -
primitive artists painted mag- gate, the Lascaux simulacrum—
more real than the real itself.
£6 .
And with hyperreality all the
V
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potentially political, explosive,
£ ._
*
« polar antagonisms that had
: \

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* * .** inhabited and animated the
>
-
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Real collapse into one anoth -
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er— implode— especially in the

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j j a n example?
ent-o
A
'

.
Q Suppose a bomb goes off
somewhere-Vilnius, Paris, Adis Ababa.
Bang!! Smoke blossoming above an art
museum, a government building, or perhaps an
air terminal. Rippling waves of the explosion suffocating
death screams. Splats of human flesh, flying in concert with
fragments of reclining nudes and peaceful Italian landscapes,
or government documents, or perhaps airline tickets-con-
vulsing spasmodically amid flowerings of brick or marble
dust and spent plastique, bits of eyeballs, somewhat
&
bloodshot, chasing shreds of newspaper or atom-
ized droplets of espresso, fragments of an
Elvis CD, all whirligiging in absurd,
blind circles, perverse orbits,
surging kaleidoscopi-
cally in nauseous
mutations.
-
V,
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Q Who did it?

Q That’s just the question Baudrillard asks. Leftist extremists

Right- wing skinheads? Centrists seeking to discredit the extremes?
^
Corrupt police appealing to the public need for security? The answer(s),
says Baudrillard, have nothing to do with the facts. All the media
responses and interpretations are already preprogrammed and all
orbit, whirligiging, in absurd, perverse, nauseous circles, orbiting
around the merest fact— according to established codes or models.

“Simulation is characterized by a
precession of the model, of all mod-
els around the merest fact— the
1
* models come first, and their
orbital (like the bomb) circulation
constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events.
Facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they
arise at the intersection of the models; a single fact may
even be engendered by all the models at once This antici . -
-
pation, this precession, this short circuit (no more diver-
gence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more
negative electricity or implosion of poles) is what each
time allows for all the possible interpretations, even
—
the most contradictory all are true, in the sense
that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of
models from which they proceed , in a
h generalized cycle” ( SIM 32).
v
fee
62
 al

« « «

%
*

Thus, former antagonisms, polarities,

curve back upon their opposites, intermin -
gling like the curving spirals of a Mobius
strip cut in half and then cut in half again
and again and again— spinning out spiraling
/
galaxies of representations of events, 9

positive and negative, real and simulacrum,

imploding inwards to a point of absolute
absorption— where the difference between
%
<
real and simulation disappears — implodes
into nothing.
In the hyperreal there is no reality behind
this generalized, neutralized and neutered
\
flow of codes, simulations and simulacra. In
hyperreality the model, the code comes A

first. But it is invisible— one sees only its

simulations— identical shopping malls filled
with identical television images, medicines,
lipstick, bras, condoms, foods, furniture,
images of Madonna’s belly button.

s> $V -
c

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Like the Beavis and
Dutthead episode in which ?W:*. »
C
the two, watching TV, watch t 3
4fl \

the cops break in the door and

*-
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bust them— live!— but they are too ///!
0
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glued to the tube to realize that it >

s
is they, themselves, that are being sz

busted— that the whole thing is

taking place live— that the cops and
\

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.
— • l
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the camera have busted into their living ».

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room. Life has become TV, and TV, life. .- I.

TV watches us, and we watch TV watch -

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V

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ing over us. It watches over us like O

whirligigs of DNA, orbiting around us, gov- V

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erning the mutations of the real into the Iff s

hyperreal. TV and life, real and hyperreal,
57
contract , collapse, telescope, implode into :* v
simulation.
s
In hyperreality antagonisms and polar • »
'
« r*
r f5
-
dichotomies dissolve. A generalized deterrence is generated. Atomic
war will never happen. The hyperreal media spectacle of the nuclear
arms race and the space race imploded the antagonisms of the
superpowers toward a peaceful co - existence.
And in orbit, floating freely above all antagonisms, the ultimate
end product of the space race is the cool, lunar, hyper - simulation:
the Lunar module.
In The Shadow of The Silent Majorities

Q But what other effects has this had on society?

Q In another book, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (SSM

1975), E3audrillard contends that what had been society has imploded
into a hyperconformist body obsessed so much with spectacle that it

64
 -

would rather watch TV than

take political action. It becomes C

electrified only by computer net- \

Vfi
works and electronic media — by & -
V
M '
which it is so polled, tested, and
hyped by models that it has become
inert and bored. But at the same time
it is hyper, passive, resistant, demanding
even more moonshots, rock spectaculars, mass entertain-
ments— yet suspicious and sceptical, apathetic because it
realizes that any attempt to change the system will simply be
co - opted by the system for its own ends.
All this has signaled the death of the social.
On Seduction
In his next book, On 5eduction, Baudrillard talks about love.
Courtly love, in the medieval courts of southern France in the
11th century, was an involved and elaborate ritual %
requiring the exchange of love poems, blushes
behind floral fans, eyes suddenly downcast
* after casting a sly sidelong glance, kisses
blown from the ramparts of castles,
/ implications, half unveilings, double
entendres, titillations, whispers,
Vi jealousies, adroit evasions,
\ feigned refusals, feints,
Z
fainting, half- surrenderings...

m
n
I /

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f

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65
VVP'
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Such moves in the distinct struc - i •

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\

game of courtly love ture which is

#
V A, \
\V » i

were aristocratic, discriminating,

artificial and symbol- centered on the
ic — delighting in the phallus, castration,
play of the game the name of the
itself. The game relied father, repression. tit
upon infinite defer - There isn’t any *

-T
ral— in the putting other. It serves no / * \\
V

off of actual sex— in purpose to dream Vs

prolonging the art of some non - K

and artifice of seduc - phallic sexuality !
V
lit I
tion. And for Sau- that is neither /

.'
/
drillard, seduction barred nor ( 'ft
If
I1 1 1
is feminine. marked (SED i6).
Sex, on the other Since seduction
hand, Saudrillard re- is composed of the
gards as a masculine artifice of signs and
mode— always cen- gestures, it is a form
a shoulder
tered on the phallus, of mastery over the
or breast
natural, non-artificial. symbolic universe.
beneath black
Freud was right: Sexuality, on the
lace. And it is ‘
there is only one sin- other hand, is not
only through V\\ •

gle sexuality, one sin - cultural but natural—

such seduction
gle libido— a form of mastery
that the masculine
masculine. over the real uni -
can be subverted!
Sexuality is verse. Feminine
This is hot seduc -
this seduction relies
i tion. But there is
on artifice—
\ also, for Baudrillard, a
* K
makeup, fashion,
cool seduction— the
r
%
X the display of
seduction of simu-

66
lacra— of films, radio, account. Saudrillard’s
the idols of the silver - travelogue also con-
or Technicolor forms to the more
screen— a self- recent French fixa -
seduction in which tions on such Ameri -
we seduce ourselves cana as the desert,

r
:

by immersing our - a
the American Wild
selves in a play of West, Le Jazz— mys-
signs, simulations, tifying various as-
images that escape I
’

• pects of America as
male sexuality. essentially primitive
ii s
i,

In his next book V and savage.

Saudrillard continues Saudrillard’s road
his meditations on trip, speeding past
Fostmodern culture, v
*i
endless vistas of
by taking a road R road signs, neon
trip to the most lights, empty desert
Postmodern of Post - - landscapes, motels,
modern cultures— reveals an America of
America. surface glitter, van -
America ishing into emptiness.
America rich in In fact, the title of an
In the early 19th
democracy, but poor important chapter is
century the French
in civilization. ‘Vanishing Point,”
count Alexis de
In the 1970s and referring to the
Tocqueville took a trip
1900s Baudrillard Death of Meaning,
to the New World,
the Death of Reality,
which provided mater - followed in de Tocque-
the Death of the
ial for one of his best- vilie’s footsteps, pro -
viding, in America, a Social, the Death of
known works: Democ-
Foetmodem simula - the Political, and the
racy in America. He
tion of de Tocqueville’s Death of Sexuality in
wrote that he found

67
 the Postmodern uni -
verse— these “ realities” re-
cede into a vanishing point in
J — Baudrillard’s rearview mirror on
his drive through Death Valley, In
fact, Baudrillard’s travelogue
begins with the warning one finds
on some rearview mirrors: Cau-
tion: Objects in this mirror may
be closer than they appear! ( A 9)
^ •
The realities of the pre- simu-
Jr . lacrum era vanishing like mirages
in a rearview mirror is an apoca -
lyptic vision— a vision of the end
of the vjor \d . For Baudrillard this
vision of America is the model
for the rest of the \Nor \ d —
world. Because of this America is
“the center of the world.” And
America is a desert— especially in
its cities— aplace where “ real life”
has vanished into a kind of glit-
tering, empty non - culture. And
this empty, dry, sterile, lunar
desert of astral America, the
desert of meaningful society,
empty as a TV tuned to a dead
channel— whether in its land-
scapes or cityscapes, whether in
the insane movement of joggers,
traffic and pedestrians in Los
Angeles, bodies circulating on
freeways or plugged into comput-
er circuits, whether in the utopia

^ C&V
the code for an emerging
hyperreal and simu-
lated supra -
of California, of Santa Barbara or
of Santa Cruz, the paradise of
California with its intellectuals,
modern freeways and film stars, whether
in the great neon whore of Las
Vegas, the “ wall -to- wall prostitu-
&
tion” of New York, with its
plumes of smoke like
“girls wringing out
2- their hair
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after bathing,” with its
of the black and Puerto
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Pico women” with its alluring “ Pig -
//
mentation of the dark races” with its tr
\ !
tribes and gangs and Mafia, with its vio- V-

lence— Baudrillard’s America is turbulent, primitive,

electrifying, animalistic, vital, potent, hyperreal.

0 It seems as if Baudrillard has surrendered to Post-

modern America in a kind of passive ecstasy. /
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But Baudriliard are in competition
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understanding of the
media has made him
an effective competi-
tor— a kind of cele -
brity— because his
attacks on his fellow
French intellectuals
are hyperreal specta -
cles meant for public
consumption, tending
more and more
toward a kind of van -
ishing point. For ins -
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since the impact
of technologies
made famous, by hy-
on cultures is
perreal statements
so intense.
such as “The Gulf
War never happened.”
In fact, some critics
Q That’s true. In
fact, some Postmod-
claim that Baudril- ern thinkers say that
lard, in his later work, certain science fiction
is actually doing sci - writers do a better
ence fiction instead job at describing the
of Postmodern theory. impact of cybertech-
nologies than does
Q But it seems
Paudrillard. Put that
that Postmodern
is a topic we can
theory would
return to later.
have to be similar
to science fiction,

71

Q Well, it’s all rather dizzying-
all these hyperrealities and
whirligiging simulacra. It
reminds me of Jameson be-
coming so disoriented in the
Bonaventure Hotel. What is it
about Postmodern architec-
ture that is so dizzying?
It’s a good question, because
architecture is actually the realm
in which Postmodernism began.
But in order to understand what
Postmodern architecture is, we
have to know something about
modern architecture. Modernism
in architecture began with the
Bauhaus school, founded in
Weimar, Germany , in 1919 by Wal -
ter Gropius. Here artists such as
Paul l\ lee and Vassily Kandinsky
combined their architectural
studies with courses in painting,
crafts, drama and typography.
The school believed that buildings
should be functional. They also
developed what came to be known
as the International Style, an
attempt to unite architecture,
the fine arts and mass - produc -
tion technology.
The manifesto of architectural
modernism, Towarde a New Archi -
tecture, was published in Paris in

in

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72
1923, and translated into English m
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in 1927. The author, a kind of >

messiah of Modernist architec- %

ture, was Le Corbusier, actually

the pen name of one Charles -
Edouard Jeanneret (1337-1965).
He was a well -traveled native of V
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Switzerland, who was to establish X
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himself as a city planner, archi- n
tect, designer, painter, sculptor I'fiiAifi
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tural creed. &

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name by virtue of the fact that t -
his face resembled that of a raven
(corbeau). And, just like Poe’s -
I

raven, who, in Poe’s words, said /

“ Nevermore,” Le Corbusier also

said, “ Nevermore!”
No more retro, ancient, clut -
tered, nineteenth -century styles.
No more custom. No more inher -
ited designs. No more gloomy
interiors jammed with hunches
of useless bric -a - brac, no more
heavy furniture, chandeliers, man -
tel - pieces, thick carpets. No more
elaborate bookcases, consoles,
china cabinets, dressers, side-
boards, draped curtains, cushions,
canopies, damasked wallpapers,
carved furniture, faded and arty
colors, mirrored wardrobes. No
more decoration, ornament, sym-
bolism. No more heterogeneity,
ambiguity, capriciousness, riot,
stitching together of unrelated
elements. No more garlands,
exquisite ovals, triangular doves
preening themselves, boudoirs
embellished with poofs of gold and
black velvet, no more stifling ele-
gancies! quoth Le Corbusiei —
N e v e r m o r e!

73
 Just as the prophet of liter -
ary modernism, Ezra Pound, had
proclaimed “ Make it new,” Le Cor -
busier believed that architecture
should use new materials such as
steel and reinforced concrete, and
new construction techniques. This
new architecture was to be ratio -
nal. It should exhibit a grandeur of
a mathematical order, for by turn -
ing to mathematical calculations,
it would reveal universal law— the
principles that govern
our universe. The new
architectural designs
should be intelligent,
cold and calm— pure cre-
ations of the mind—
& manifestations
s:
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If buildings can be read like
books, Le Corbusier called for a
Platonic vocabulary of pure,
absolute forms: cubes, cones,
spheres, cylinders, pyramids,
squares. All this based on a Pla -
tonic attitude that knowledge
properly resides in pure, eternal,
absolute “Ideal Forms,” which we
can know with our intellects,
though not through our senses.
For instance, it will always be
true and knowable that 2 + 2 = 4.
And this will always be true even
if there are no longer 2 + 2 apples
or oranges to add up to four.
Believing that architectural
beauty should be based on the
same immutable, eternal Platonic
universe. primary forms, he liked structures
such as the Pyramids, the Temple
of Luxor, the towers of Babylon,
the Coliseum, Hadrian’s
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villa, Constantinople’s 5anta Sophia, the Mosques of
Stamboul, the Tower of Pisa, the copulas of
Michelangelo. 3ut above all else—
the Parthenon. The Parthenon is
perfect. Le Corbusier found in it w

brutality, intensity, sweetness,

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delicacy and strength. It .
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is the climax of •"\
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precise rela -
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tionship”—
bestowing upon
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emotions of a
“ superior and
mathematical order.” . i y

Modern architecture thus

attempted to pare down line, space •5 *
and form to their pure essentials. •, * *
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If Le Corbusier has a hero it is the engi -

—
•

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s _ neer— the creator of bridges of, Atlantic

* « vjfl liners, of railways. Engineers, like Cubist
' painters, are not distracted with ornamen-
4
tation but satisfy our spirits by reducing
n
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ematical, Platonic forms. Engineers are
virile, useful. Their minds, absorbed in
mathematical calculations and the
% perception of primary geometric forms,
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are in harmony with natural law.

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- 75
 If architects could be more like
engineers, then buildings would rise with diffused electric lighting, and
up like pure creations of spirit ring- built of standardized materials like
—
ing in unison with universal order. cars, cannons, airplanes! Let great
Down with frivolous ornamentation! new utopian vertical cities, cities of
If you must have diversity then let it towers, whose immense geometri-
—
emerge from the interplay of primary cal glass facades reflect the sky,
forms! Let architecture be the cor- rise in
skyscrapers amid green
plantations of trees. Let these sky-
rect and magnificent play of such
masses brought together in light! scrapers contain the brains of the
Let light shine on the great primary nation. Clear away Paris’s narrow
streets to admit wide, noble
forms of prisms, cubes, cones,
spaces, populated with trees. Let
spheres, cylinders, pyramids Let .
homes be machines for living with the suburbs be garden cities
people can play ball, and
terraces instead of roofs, with where
garden. Let all the cities of
windows all around, without clut - -
—
ter but with built-in furnishings,
Europe be torn down and
recon struct ed in the
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without gaudy chandeliers, but
image of American
cities .
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Postmodern
By 1950, many of the elements
of this International Style had,
indeed, become international—
the simplified, concentrated lines
and forms, the emphasis on func -
tion as beauty, the essential math-
ematical harmony of pure forms,
the celebration of rational, pro -
gressive tendencies, the adoption
of new technologies and new ma -
terials, the yearning for a spiritu -
al holism of space and form, the
distaste for bazaar - like, arbitrary
reproduction of historic styles.
Yet— what it all boiled down to
waa cityscapes full of concrete and
of mathematics itself broke down
into non -Euclidean geometries
and incompleteness theorems?
And what was modem architec -
ture to do if its huge, utopian pro -
jects— such as Brazilia — flopped?
What if the wor \ d was growing
tired of failed utopias? Then the
utopian theories and the archi-
tectural projects that reflected
them would have to change— and
that change would need a new
voice. And that new
voice was
Charles
Jencks.
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glass boxes. And what was modern

architecture to do— based as it
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was on eternal mathematical har -
mony— if the supposed perfection
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ture (1977), was 1975, by the histo -

the first work to rian Arnold Toynbee
Charles Jencks attempt to thema - to designate plural-
is an architectural tize the Postmod - ism and the rise
critic who has been ern and to use of non-Western
engaged in the “ Postmodern” in cultures.
often heated the title. In the 1960s
debate between In his subse- the early roots of
modernist and quent books What Postmodernism got
is Postmodernism? started by a group
Postmodernist
architects about and Postmodern - of English intellec -
whether Postmod- ism, he traces the tuals, the Indepen -
ern architecture
history of the con- dent Group, who
should even exist. cept. Originally were fascinated
He is also a major used by the Span - with American cul-
voice in the ongoing ish writer Federico ture: TV, movies,
De Onis in 1954 to ads, machinery and
attempt to define
Postmodernism. In describe a poetic commercial culture.
reaction to mod - They created pop
fact, his book, The
ernist poetry, the collages of such
Language of Post -
term was subse- objects— the first
modern Architec -
quently used, in pop art. In America,
75
in the midst of Hip- But according the composition
pies and Yuppies, to Jencks, these consists of the
Andy Warhol artists and archi- sound of the audi-
cranked out a tects were really ence waiting for
bunch of images of Late modernists, the concert to
begin. And thinkers
mass culture: Mari- not Postmodernists.
such as Bucky
lyn Monroe, Jackie
Q Fuller were design -
Kennedy, a Camp- Late Modernists?
ing according to
bell’s Soup can.
Then, in the 1970s
Q Yes. Because
authors such as
the utopian
assumptions of
the Postmodern James Joyce were modernism.
movement became writing things, such / •

more academic and as Finnegan’s Wake, AS OHYAVR.

FACE. PLA NI
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A Faracritical Bibli - modernists— or

ography,” and the High modernists I ’ j

did. Compoeere
Postmodernist
like John Cage were
movement was offi-
writing “ music”
cially inaugurated
that nobody under - i
in theory— cele- Is
stood based on
brating writers what most people
such as William would call noise,
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the opening chord
Buckminster Fuller.
of a concert — and

. 79
s ft
 More to Jencks’s
liking is novelist
r
Umberto Eco’s
teYt IT S THE
recognition of a PUKE. 'WHO
LOVES YOU :>S
double element in
MADLY.
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Postmodernism. -
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For Jencks and V

Eco Postmodernism
is modernism

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along with a Post- /

modern relation -
ship to the past: “ The postmod -
ern reply to the modern consists
of recognizing that the past,
since it cannot really be
destroyed, because its destruc -
tion leads to silence, must be
revisited: but with irony, not inno-
cently. I think of the postmodern
attitude as that of a man who
loves a very cultivated woman and
knows he cannot ea\j to her, I love
you madly, because he knows that
she knows (and that she knows
that he knows) that these worde
have already been written by Bar -
bara Cartland. Still, there is a
solution. He can say, “As Barbara
Cart \and would put it, I love you
madly.” At this point, having
avoided false innocence, having
said clearly that it is no longer
possible to speak innocently, he
will nevertheless have said what
he wanted to say to the woman .-
that he loves her, but he loves her
in an age of lost innocence. If the
woman goes along with this, she

so
will have received a dec- styles of two different \

laration of love all the periods, it creates paro-

same. Neither of the dy, ambiguity, contradic -
two speakers will feel tion, paradox . For, in Mill *
• (<

Jencks’s view, a building

innocent, both will have
accepted the challenge is not just a building but
m r
s

of the past, of the something like a lan -

already said, which can -
not be eliminated; both
will consciously and with
pleasure play the game
of irony. .. . But both will
have succeeded, once
again, in speaking of
guage. A building can be
read like a book. It has
m fet’d
connotations and allu -
sions. It signifies. It has
\ </
meanings— and often N
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says two or more things
at the same time. m /
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love.” (ELO, PNR 67-6) Thus Postmodern r

And this fits in with architects must Yt

Jencks’s definition of be both popular Jill» 15 WA

Postmodernism as “dou- and profession- liPtAW'

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out'
ble coding : the combina - ally based. For *
tion of Modern tech - instance, the
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colorful hand- Mr/ a-
niques with something A\

else ( usually traditional rails in the

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building ) in order for Stuttgart s s\
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architecture to commu - museum appeal ar
i
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nicate with the public to the popular

at
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and a concerned minori - tastes of kids . \
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ty, usually other archi - dressed in Day-

tects” (WIP 14). Glo colors, while
A typical Postmod - its classicism— 3
ern building creates a its quotations of
double coding through pure Greek s .
eclecticism: by putting forms— appeals
together two different to the highbrow elitist.
-
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 Postmodern architecture must use both new
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techniques and old patterns. Postmodernist 3

architects are, then, not simply revivalists fate 1

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who simply bring back the past and stop j

using modernism. They use modernism J

and yet go beyond it. They
quote from the past, but
with irony. They parody the
nnn
n n n -ft o r
past. They use pastiche. n n n D n
Thus double coding, like n n n
Eco’s “ I love you madly,” n n :
/
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stages the dissonance and

play between past and pre -
n
n n n c
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n n n
sent. This dissonance can
be ironic, humorous, parod -
n n
ic, playful, allusive— but it ft
makes the “ reader ” of the
a n a
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n n n
n n n n n
building reflect. The n r\ n n

“ reader” becomes n n n n
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n n n n n
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something of an
architectural critic.
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Because of this, doing Postmodern
architecture is one way to do Postmodern theory— its double coding
makes it interesting not only to the average Joe Blow on the street
but also to fellow architects and Postmodern critics.
Even an object as simple as a teapot can be double coded. Design -
er Michael Graves designed a teapot that has simple, functional mod-
ernist lines but flaunts an ornamental bird for the whistle— a kind of
aural pun.
In 1930 Michael Graves— the same guy who designed the teapot
with the whistling bird— won a competition for his design for the Port-
land Public Services Building. It is radically eclectic and double coded—
its glass hints that it is a public space; its size and ornamental gar -
lands suggest Egyptian and baroque motifs; its use of a sculpture,
02
“Portlandia”, over the front door creates a — / r:
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playful mood . But the building was attacked

by modernists who criticized it for what they
called its lack of discipline— its jukebox-over-
sized-Christmas- package look. Supporters, on 4?”

the other hand, commented that it related to the m

nearby City Hall as well as other pre - modernist 7

and modernist buildings in the neighborhood.

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Q But why should wc even have Postmodern
architecture? \ 7M
7A

Qj Because huge utopian modernist housing .r

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projects alienated the very inhabitants they
i
were designed to house. These pianned utopias *

'

turned into wastelands of graffiti, vandalism and

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neglect. Thus in the late 1960s and early 1970s
r
they were dynamited. In fact Jencks, in a public y N

lecture, proclaimed that on July 15, )

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1972, at 3:52 PM, modern architecture to

died, as a huge housing project in St.

, f

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Louis was blown to smithereens. SrCAY) u )

Jencks just made up the date - a fact that ho reporter

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caught. Thus the Death of Architectural Modernism /

was produced simply by announcing it.
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 Modernists were
alarmed, of course,
and immediately
s began denouncing
the new Postmod -
ernism with reli-
gious fervor. But,
according to
Jencks, the mod-
ernist attacks on
Postmodern archi -
f tecture actually
/
invigorated its
growth. For instance,
when it was announced
in a column in Le Monde
in October of 19S1 that
I “a spectre is haunting
f Europe, the spectre of
Postmodernism,” most
Frenchmen just shrugged,
bit. into their croissants
and flipped the page. But
modernists didn’t simply
shrug off the announce -
L ment; their panic effec -
tively inflated the spectre
into a full -fledged move -
ment. Therefore, rea -
sons Jencks, there
must have existed
a hidden resent-
64
ment to modernism ail along.
The death of architectural
modernism may have saved a lot
of inner cities, where the mod-
ernist tendency would have been
to build Jze them and construct
more utopian housing units. What
Postmodernism offered was eclec -
tic, incremental regeneration—
that is to say, regenerating, slowly
using the mix of what is already
there along with what is new.
For Jencks modernism had
been something of a religious phe-
nomenon. After all, it declared
ornamentation heretical, and
viewed itself as the universal
International Style
using new construc -
tion techniques and
new materials, It had
51
a mission to trans-
form society.
/\ccord \ nq to
O
Jencks, mod-
ernist buildings,
such as the
Chicago Civic
Center or Chica -
go’s Lake Shore
housing units,
 <
N
- t
/1
H '
frw 5")
1972— is a book called Learn-
.
,
0
- HR :
1
VJC
r*
(
r
5)
ing from Las Vegas. This book
V
V,
0
r»
.. - t: _
"
criticizes the utopian, pro-
?9
s*,
< <\fi <vn />

gressive elements of architec -

Q
^ O V© e

tural modernism. It criticizes

1I .*i modernism’s attempt to build
-. P u.v;:•:
&
glass and steel boxes, to define
architecture as enclosed space. If
iM

space is sacred to modern ism,

then painting, sculpture and liter -
ature, mere decoration , are
opposed to pure space. Modernist
attempt to be nothing more than architects rejected an entire tra -
simple geometric forms— glass dition of architecture in which
and steel and concrete boxes— paintings, sculpture and graphics
which in their squareness say were integrated with architecture.
“ this is what I am— a square Modernist buildings
box— and nothing else.” The form had attempted
does not refer to or allude to or to symbolize
v,
mean anything outside itself. ,j nothing but
Postmodernist archi-
•
> --
A \
ideal geomet -
A
tecture, on the other ? ric forms. In
A
vv
hand, rejects such sim - idealizing the
plicity. Postmodern * •e
-
well - engi -
buildings reflect if '
neered geo-
ss
and refer to metric forms
their environment. If Le Corbusier of Transatlantic steamships,
was the Messiah of modernist American grain elevators, and
architecture, Robert Venturi, Cubist paintings, they had ended
Denise Scott Drown and Steven
up symbolizing a brave new world
Izenour are the prophets of Post- of science and technology— a
modern architecture. And their nautical- industrial-Cubist world .
manifesto, first published in

85
 Down Let the architect unauthoritarian qualities
with the become a jester! Let archi- needed for living humor -
universal ! tecture, like the pop art of ously in a society made
proclaim Venturi, Warhol and Leichtenstein, up of different races,
Scott drown and use familiar motifs— sexual orientations,
Izenour. designing non-authorita - classes and cultures.
Accept the clut- rian buildings that in - For we do live in a
ter of mixed, mass- stead of saying “I am a pluralist society, re -
culture, ornamented, square” say many things flected in mixed, glitter-
ticky- tacky, subur - .
at once Let Postmodern ing, flashing bazaars of
ban, Gingerbread, New buildings express irony, neon lights and signs
Orleans, French Pro - along with comedy, sor - on the Las Vegas
vincial and Ranch styles. row, paradox , and the Strip, the hodgepodge
Down with the archi - of contradictory, com -
tecture of space, << •
peting and conflicting
•V
form and function. styles, the roadsigns
Dring in the icons X
and billboards that
a
of Pop Art, of
f
> * whiz by in a blur of
advertising, of every- 7A
complex meanings,
day commercial ob- a roadecape / car -
jects— of Camp- scape in which the
bell ’ssoup cans > mix of symbols is
in a gallery, more important
$
••

3?
or of images from E than pure form—
comic strip art, to
*
$ E»VVi O
•
the dazzling pic -
suggest satire, sor- torial themes of
row and irony. the casinos (the
Ar ,
h
S
‘
m7,
Ss m
tf.i
4
 flamboyant Flamin- No expert. But the spec -
go, the Desert Inn, tator strolls past a het -
the exotic Tropicana P
erogeneous playground
.
the arabesque Alad - »
of multiple, vital, incon -
* *»
din, Caesar’s Palace, « v
.... gruous, chaotic, intertex -
the Stardust, like tual, allusive urban signs,
the facades of 7: meanings, orders— all ex -
•
A- -
Gothic cathedrals, ploring the architecture of
almost all sign the past.
. «

and symbol) the >

Let architecture be funl
«« w * -r
casino shopping :« | Turn staid architectural
malls like orien - .
1
4
I notions topsy -turvy! Indul -
SiiiliUtNu
tal bazaars. Las | gently embrace complexity,

pf-
*
•

t f®
Vegas Strip ip mixing images and symbols
architecture from the historical past in a
is a grabbag, pL
wmm nostalgic collage! Let image
e c Iec tic,
a l l u s i v e,
\U
».
Jft'F
7
1 I
determine form! Let develop-
ment be based on incremen -

paradoxi -
1
tal, diverse growth, rather
cal-^the Alad-
4K
- --4» . . TstfSsB than utopian plans! Let build-
din is Tudor with a Moorish facade. k ings reflect the diversity of
Caesar’s Palace is Early Christian, users and clients’ tastes! Let
Roman, Neo-Classical, Motel Mod -
erne, Etruscan and Miesian Motifs, .
* architects design for specific
persons— rather than from
signs, columns, wings, formations and some utopian, abstract concep-
floors parody and question each other. .
tion of Man Let Postmodern
The Las Vegas Strip is an inclusive m buildings fit in with the build -
order. There is no one dominant theme.
^% t
ings surrounding them!
 According to the authors of styles and languages. The AT&T
Learning from Los Vegas: building transforms the tradi-
“ The emerging order of tional glass and steel sky-
the Strip is a complex scraper into a grandfather
order. It is not the / clock topped off with a Chip-
easy, rigid order of the
urban renewal project
^ pendale broken pediment.
$ This eclecticism leads
or the fashionable to a dissonant beauty, a
‘total design’ of the disharmonious harmony, an
megastructure ...It is oxymoron, a paradox . After
not an order dominat- all, there is dissonance
ed by the expert and between a building and a
made easy for the eye. clock. But his dissonance is
The moving eye in the 8 humorous because many
moving body must buildings display clocks.
work to pick out and
interpret a variety
I l liI
r t HI ^
The AT&T building
displays an urbane urban -
of changing, jux- ism.
taposed orders” * LL. It doesn’t stand out
.
(LLV 135-6) alone. It looks pretty
In Jencks’s view, Postmodern much like other modernist
architecture displays 10 charac - skyscrapers, but it blends
teristics. Let us use Philip *v
•:*
into, mirrors, mocks, par-
Johnson’s AT&T odies and extends other
(
building in New York buildings in the envi-
City as an ronment.
example.
$ It is plu-
5 *
^ Postmodern
buildings are anthro-
ralistic — radi- . VJ pomorphic— their orna -
cally eclectic A ments and moldings
celebrating often suggest the
difference and 1
HI
human form. The
otherness.
It quotes
fi U
%
AT&T building does
not do this, but sug -
different \& gests indirectly,
^
\
V

Hu
&&
' ll1
i i
through mimicking a human arti - building also says “grandfather
fact — a clock. clock.”
HP It displays a rela - jT
There is double
tionship between coding through the jux-
past and taposition of styles—
present— grandfather clock and
grandfa - modernist sky-
7
ther clock and scraper— so that irony,
modern sky- ambiguity, and contradic -
scraper. This j tion emerge. Postmodern
putting to- buildings say not “either/or’
/
gether of but “ both/and.” The AT&T building
styles can says “ both/and” by combining
bring the
past face to
face with s

the present, j
which allows
the archi-
\
tect not
only to rec -
ollect past
\ «
1
styles but also to
parody them, to
invoke nostalgia
and indulge in the contemporary
pastiche. ( skyscraper) with the
@ There is a antique (grandfather clock),
yearning for con - the functional (office build -
tent, for meaning. ing) and the decorative
\
Instead of just (Chippendale broken pedi-
I 1«
v
*
saying “glass and ment) in an ironic double
steel box” the coding. It can mean two
things at once.

JH 89
 \ i

® Postmodern
buildings are multiva -
lent— -they can mean
many things simultane-
ously. Unlike the uni-
t
valence of modernist 1
buildings, which only /

say one thing— “I am a .

i
» .• ?•
.
V V

square” — Postmodern Many

architecture is multiva - Postmodern (
*
I
buildings yearn to
lent, non - exclusive, allu- h 4' I

sive, resonant, symbolic. return to the ab -

@ Postmodern sent center— to a
architecture reinterprets central communal
tradition. It does not space. But then X

merely copy the past but realize that there

reinterprets it. The AT&T is nothing we have in
building does not simply common to fill it with.
revive the past; it mocks 5o why not fill it with \
8
it playfully. a clock? V

Jencks defines Postmodern classicism as

a revival drawing upon motifs from Greece
and Rome. He identifies five streams of
Postmodern classicism:

Metaphysical classicism s
v s

Narrative classicism
Allegorical classicism
Realist classicism
Classical sensibility / 1
——
7, ;
i.. .

90
\ .
i Metaphysical Classicism
V

»: Melancholic classicism is a
I mode of metaphysical classi-
m cism that focuses on a return
' 111» > w, to the urban, as symbolized by
ilium 15 III the Italian city square— the
w
( timimj ID! piazza— but with a difference.
iilJ
K .' t - Postmodern architects such as
Leon Krier and Foetmodern
artists such as Rito Wolff ren -
der such piazzas melancholy—
because the piazzas are deserted. Yet, there is a
yearning for a center here— and there is a cen -
ter— but the center is empty.
Narrative Classicism
,
Traditional narrative painting depicts the
P
heroic actions of great men— -such as Socrates
drinking the hemlock. They are meant to inspire.
The Postmodern narrative painting often paints
unheroic men engaged in immoral actions.

In Paul George’s My Kent

i \
* State, a vulnerable, nude
r r
muse— symbol of freedom —
attempts to flee the scene
of students being slayed.

This genre can take on erotic and subver -

sive overtones, as in Eric Fischl’s Sad Soy, V

a lad watching a nude woman while he

steals from her purse.

91
 Allegorical Classicism
Grant Drumheller’s Lightning Thrower repeats
the pose of a famous statue of Poseidon against a (
dreadful background of what Jencks calls “ radioac -
tive gloom.” Do the flashings in the background sig -
nify a nuclear war brought on by Poseidon, Thor and
Jupiter nuclear missiles?
A sub -genre— naive realism— returns to the
innocence of Grant Wood and Grandma Moses. An
example is David Ligare’s Woman in a Greek Chair.
Realist Classicism
Realist classicism is always something of a para -
dox, an oxymoron or contradiction. In the classicist tradition the indi-
vidual particulars of a body— the hands, torso, head, etc.— rendered in
stone, were subordinated to Ideal beauty.
In realist classicism the scale is tipped
toward the ugly, realistic aspects of the
subject, which the pure classicist overlooks.
Example? Works such as Philip Pearlstein’s
Two Female Models on Brentwood Loveseat
and Fug . According to Jencks, “A parody of
sexuality is suggested by the way vast stretches of the body are
focused on, as in a Flay hoy centerfold , only to be

> v
turned into sacks of sagging meat” ( FM 127) .
fu '
; - The Classical Sensibility
Jencks finds that some artists are faithful to
a general spirit of classicism— they exhibit a clas-
sical sensibility in their works— even though their subjects are con-
temporary. Milet Andrejevic’s Apollo and Daphne, for example, retells
the Greek myth of Apollo chasing Daphne to the river, only to see her
father, the River God, transform her into a laurel tree. It is double
coded in that there is an ironic putting together of Vassar- type coeds,
a post - hippie guitarist and a classical theme.
92
Q Who arc some other Postmodern theorists?
A Well, some of the most important ones are
Poststructuralist thinkers.
Q Poststructuralist?
A Poststructuralism is a movement associated with
a wave of French thinkers: Jacques Derrida, Julia
Kristeva, Poland Darthes, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guat -
tari and Michel Foucault. Poststructuralists tend to
regard all knowledge— history, anthropology, litera -
ture, psychology, etc.— as textual. This means that
knowledge is composed not just of concepte but also
of words. Poststructuralists focus on reading the
written condition of the
text. Read in this man -
£ %
w ner, texts produce a
%
m variety of mutually
mm* V
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contradictory
m
i* r%

& * lO
y
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effects.

u /

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93
 Postmodernists also tend to
think that language and meaning
are fragmentary. We know that
Postmodernism questions the
whole notion of dominance. For
instance, it questions the idea
that one grand story can domi -
nate smaller ones. It questions
the idea that there is a hierarchy
of stories, with the grand narra -
tives on top and the smaller ones
of power. For him there is only the
micropolitics of power.
Q The micropolitics
of power ?
Q Yes— how power is exercised
in various local situations. The
prison, the hospital, the asylum,
The university, the bedroom are all
places where power relationships
are aT work. Even S/M, for
/

lower down on the totem pole.

Poststructuralism backs up Post-
a
modernism with its analysis of
language and knowledge. One of •
XXt
; #/ — -
V
the most prominent Poststruc -
^
:

turalists has been a French intel-

lectual named Michel Foucault. t

v\ \
Michel Foucault
(and Baudrillard a 3- N
s
w
N
on Foucault)
V
Q Foucault? *2
// / / v'
•i

Ej Michel Foucault was a f

/
/
ft
it
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French psychologist born in m
C3r
m
Poitiers in 1926. Fie was con - r.-
<

cerned with the relationship i

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between power and knowledge.

But he ridiculed the idea that
power is a huge, monolithic state
structure and was distrustful of .
lit

big metatheories that attempt

to provide monolithic explanations

94
 re?:* ___ espoused such local struggles.
s
But Baudrillard commands
that we forget Foucault, be-
cause his ideas about power
I 1
3 are obsolete.
j c Q Why obsolete?
:.
%I 7
1,
Because, according to
\ /
/ V
r
o Baudrillard, power is dead, dis-
V
• solved, canceled and made
Hv u £7 hyperreal through simula-
CZ&,
s =• /s
fU
tions, models, codes.
V
w In the new Postmodern
t
m
- m
V/;
universe of mediablitz, we no
'
*
*
y /s

* '
longer have power per se— but
W 'Z
»
2
something Foucault forgot
about— simulations of power. For
instance, Ronald Reagan ruled like
a king merely by posing— by offer-
ing signs of power in photo ops
Foucault, is a kind of game, a way and sound bites— rather than by
of exploring the dimensions of exercising power.
power locally. No qrand general
theory can explain how power
i
works in all these sites.
*#
Furthermore, everywhere \
X
there is power there is resis- >*
-J

>
tance. And the only way to resist
i
\

power is locally— to resist local- .

ized practices of repression.
Gays, feminists, former com - (f
I > f
munists and other margin- 6 I V
alized groups have tMr &

i S
%

95
 vl

But if ppmer is A
>
/

dead- sn is *
5

sexuality *

r )
According to Foucault sexuali- .
ty refers to talk and writing about
erotic practices, which contain rules
and prohibitions and distinguish
normal sex from perversions. But
K
according to Baudrillard, in the new *
v

Postmodern era sex is dead because

everything is sex. Sexual simulations are
l
1 S
everywhere, in advertising, in fashion, on
TV, in film. Sexuality is no longer intimate,
personal and private behavior. It is open,
encouraged , unlimited, unrestricted, man-
datory— a command to release sexual ten-
sions (built up through the sex-everywhere
display of sexuality) through sexual codes.
Thus “ Everything is sexuality” (FFH). But if every - \
thing is sexuality — then nothing is sexuality!

rv 0\ ues Derrida
Q Well, if sex is dead in the Postmodern, Poststructural
universe, then is there anything left? It seems that everything
has been destroyed.

Q And that brings us to deconstruction— the brainchild of French -

trained philosopher Jacques Derrida.

96
Q Weren’t Foucault and Bau- m
drillard French as well? Why is
so much Postmodern and Post-
structutralist thought domi- \

nated by French thinkers?

s

Q Well France, during the

Enlightenment (the 18>th cen -
t
>

>i \
t \ zr
tury), as we have already V"

talked about, really invented

i
the idea of the intellectual— v,

ft
the idea of a cerebral elite who 0

would sit back and just sort of 22

think about things. And from
the time of the Enlighten- r
ment, France has been a
kind of paradise for
•
Sti *=
V'
5

intellectuals, a place
I
/
' /

where philosophers and Y

thinkers have been regarded as
national treasures. Their books
are snapped up as readily as the
latest thriller, their disputes and
divagations are written up in most important— to be avant

glossy, mass- media magazines, garde. They rest secure in the

they appear on TV talk shows,
they get good - looking lovers and
good seats at restaurants. In
exchange for these favors, they
are expected to set a moral tone,
to buck established values, and
knowledge that what they think
today, the rest of France will be
thinking tomorrow. At times, their
wisdom even overspills French bor-
ders, flooding the greater intellec -
tual world with French ideas.

97
 For decades, on acrooe 'Europe. As we
the sidewalks outside have already talked
rC
the cafes of Paris, about, French stu -

A;
light has danced < dents, supported by
down through the the Marxists, took to
SC
boughs along the O
> *5 the streets, fighting
boulevards, playing the army and police in
over the surfaces of \
order to overthrow
objects, dappling the government. They
5

tablecloths and vari - nearly succeeded, but

* 5
ously attired torsos were eventually
;

with ewarme of quelled. Failing to

ephemeral hues. demolish state power,
rt
French cafe-goers, they became disillu -
many of them people sioned, inward - looking.
of intelligence and
JlJS&Sgm&SSSSL. rr

Suddenly exhibiting a
culture, have placed who, besides wonder - Postmodern sceptP
orders, fumbled for ing if the table is or is cism about grand
cigarettes, and found not, was to be found myths such as Marx-
it very attractive to engaged in political ism and Communism,
be able to sit at a and public affairs. In they began to commit
table and talk about recent times, up until themselves to lan -
the table and, raising the late 1960s, Jean- guage itself. Disen -
an intellectual eye- Paul Sartre defined gaging themselves
brow in the dappled the image. But then from politics, they
light, to ask if the the icon of the intel- became linguistic rev-
table is. lectual changed. olutionaries, finding
Presiding over At the same time revolution in turns of
all this table talk, young Americans were speech, and they
from the time of the tripping to Jimi Flen - began to view litera -
French Revolution, the drix, “ Fley Jude,” Hair, ture, reading and
image of the philoso - and 2001: A Space writing as subversive
pher was one of the Odyeey, a student political acts in
intellectual engage, movement swept themselves.
90
 Deconstruction say. Increasingly dis- caused many previous

French intellectu- trustful of language philosophers to be

claiming to convey reassessed, and it
als began attending
to how words say
only a single, authori- set the tone for
tarian message, they much thought to
' -
\\o \ more than to
what words
k
began exploring how come. It was some-

m
v
Y 2
l
15
language can say
many different things
simultaneously. But
thing of a disharmo-
nious chord , for his
forte was a subver-
\ 4
by the time all this sive mode of reading
.:
.

had taken place authoritarian texts,

i or any texts. This
Jacques Derrida had
emerged, in the late style of reading came
1960s, as the most to be known as
V
K
avant garde of the deconstruction. In
f!
avant garde. His lec - France, deconstruc -
\
\
ture given at the tion, kicking existen-
Johns Hopkins Univer- tialism aside, was
N

V
sity in 1966, “ Struc- suddenly much in
ture, Sign and Play in vogue. Derrida be -
s the Discourse of the came the philosopher
Human Sciences,” of the day, the new
enfant terr/b/e of
French intellectual -
' ism. And then, after
the American debut
1
\ •t at Johns Hopkins,
i
V f e*
•
-
•

-* * _ r
deconstruction and
o
1
Jacques Derrida took
' *
America by storm,
<•

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turning much of the
Western worldview
<?
topsy -turvy.
/

4d i 99
 2 Well, tell me then, what
is deconstruction?
zf J

Q Defining deconstruction is
an activity that goes against
m
t y

* /

the whole thrust of Derrida’s /

V/i
thought. Actually, Derrida has /
/
/
said that any statement such as .
t
7 / \

“deconstruction is T” automati-
cally misses the point. But
deconstruction often involves a
v
way of reading that concerns /
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itself with decentering— with

unmasking the problematic nature
! *%
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of all centers.
ft
Q Decentering? Centers? What is 'ID .i
V
1
/
/

a center? What is problematic

about one? Why should one
need to be decentered? I

Q Wall, Derrida , whan ha is not

deconstructing a text of some
difficult philosopher such as Niet-
zsche or Heidegger, writes about
centers in such abstract language, which is usually capitalized, and
that I will offer some concrete
examples. According to Derrida,
all Western thought is based on
—
the idea of a center an origin,
a Truth, an Ideal Form, a Fixed
Point, an Immovable Mover, an
Essence, a God , a Presence,
ss
which guarantees all meaning.
For instance, for 200 years,
much of Western culture has been
centered on the idea of Christian-
ity and Christ. Other cultures,
as well, all have their own central
symbols.

100
 M

Q Well, what’s
the matter mr ffl
with that? m
n

Q The problem &

with centers, for l
ft *
tie

Derrida, is that they I/ . . \

fell'll 'A
•/

attempt to exclude. In
&
doing so they ignore, J

repress or marginalize )
/
1»

others ( which become £ »*

i

the Other). In male-domin-

lil v.
,. A
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I 'ii! ! So the longing for a
ri
ated societies, man is centerspawns binary
m
central ( and woman is .a opposites, with one term
\
1

the marginalized Other, :i of the opposition central,

repressed, ignored, pushed and the other, marginal.
to the margins). Furthermore, centers want
f
If you have a culture to fix, or freeze, the play of
which has Christ in the binary opposites.
center of its icons, then i
7/

Christians will be central to

%
that culture, and Buddhists,
• /

Muslims, Jews— anybody

different— will be in the m (i <Tt

as
!
margins, marginalized,
pushed to the outside .
m
I
*?

( We must remember
t
that Derrida was born - m /

• • •i
r-
into an assimilated
Jewish family in Algiers,
growing up as a member
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of a marginalized,
dispossessed culture ).
UL

I
 reality. All other

^ Fix the play of binary

opposites? What does
that mean?
views are

repressed.
Drawing {
y
*
Q Well, the opposition
man/ woman is just one binary
such an icon
is an attempt to fix the

opposite. Others are spirit /mat - play of opposites between, foi

ter; nature/culture; Caucasian/ example, Christian/Jew or Chris
Black; Eurocentrism/ Afrocen - ian/ pagan. The Jew and the
trism; and Christian/pagan. pagan are not even represent )

According to Derrida we have in such art. But icons are jus-

no access to reality except
through concepts, codes and
categories, and the human mind
functions by forming conceptual
pairs such as these. You see
how one member of the pair,
one of the social practices-
there are many more— that 1
to fix the play of opposites—
advertising, social codes, tabo
conventions, categories, ritua
etc. But reality and language

( here the left), is privileged. The
right-hand term then becomes
marginalized. Icons with Christ
or Buddha or whatever in the
center try to tell us that what
is in the center is the only
are not as simple and singula
as icons with a central, exclu-
sive image in their middle— tk
are more like ambiguous figure
The interesting thing abou
such figures is that at first w

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see only one possibility. One
possibility is “central” for a
moment. For a moment the
figure signifies faces, but then,
because the play of the sys -
tem is not arrested, the other
view dawns, and the same figure
signifies a candle.
But suppose a group seizes
power, a group called the Face-
ists (I have deliberately made
this sound like “ Fascists” ).
They might draw eyes on the
faces. This would be an
attempt to fix or arrest the
free play of differences.
In such a situation, Candle-
ists would be marginalized,
repressed and even oppressed
>
/
r
or persecuted. The image of
the faces becomes the privi-
leged member of the original
pair. In other words, a violent
hierarchy is formed in which
the centralized member of
the pair, the face, becomes
instituted as the Real and
the Good .
Derrida says that all of
Western thought behaves in
this same way, forming pairs
of binary opposites in which
one member of the pair is priv-
ileged, freezing the play of the
system, and marginalizing the
other member of the pair. But
the figure, in reality, signifies
both faces and a candle.
 Q Yes, but how does this apply to language, to
literature, to reading? \v

Q Deconstruction is a tactic of decentering, a way

of reading, which first reminds us of the centrality
>

of the central term. Then it attempts to subvert the V

V

central term so that the marginalized term can

*
become central. The marginalized term then tem -
porarily overthrows the hierarchy.
Suppose you have a poem such as the following haiku:

How mournfully the wind of

I autumn pines. , ,

Upon the mountainside as

day declines.

\*
And suppose that for thousands of years the
only correct way of reading the poem is to read
“ pines” as a verb— like pining for one’s lost love.

O.K. But what about the other

meaning? Can’t "pines,” in the
context of the second line, switch
f
over and become a noun: " Pines
upon the mountainside?”
A Yes, that’s right. That would be
the second move in deconstructing a piece of literature—
to subvert
the privileged term by revealing how the repressed, marginalized
mean-
ing can just as well be central.

104
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Q But what good does that do?
Doesn’t this just institute a
new center? Instead of
"pines” the verb we have
"pines” the noun. Or instead
of Face- ists we now have
Candle- ists in power?
Q Exactly. Derrida claims that
deconstruction is a political
practice, and that one must not
pass over and neutralize the
phase of subversion too quickly.
For this phase of reversal is
needed in order to subvert the
original hierarchy of the first
term over the second. Dut
eventually, one must realize
that this new hierarchy is
equally unstable, and
surrender to the com -
plete free - play of
the binary opposites in a non -
hierarchical way. Then you can see
that both readings, and many
others, are equally possible.
Q Yes! Like "pines upon the
mountain sighed” (instead
of "mountainside” )!
Q. So you can see the possibili -
ties If the text were the Com -
munist Manifesto or the Torah
or the Koran or the Dible or the
Constitution, you could decon -
struct any fixed, authoritarian,
dogmatic, or orthodox reading.
Of course, such texts are much
more complex than our haiku.
They are more multifaceted,
like the drawm below.
^
T
105
 I

[f
you have a system of triangles
such as this, then you will notice that
if you stare at it, a series of configu-
rations of triangles presents itself to
your vision— one after the other. But
each so-called present configuration,
each group of triangles which seems to
be momentarily present, has emerged
out of a prior configuration and is already dissolving into a future con -
figuration. And this play goes on endlessly. There is no central configu-
ration that attempts to freeze the play of the system, no marginal
one, no privileged one, no repressed one. According to Derrida all lan-
guage and all texts are, when deconstructed, like this. And so is human
thought, which is always made up of language. He says we should con-
tinuously attempt to see this free play in all our language and
texts— which otherwise will tend toward fixity, institutionalization,
centralization, totalitarianism, exclusion. For in our anxiety we always
feel a need to construct new centers, to associate ourselves with
them, and to marginalize those who are different than
their central values.

Q I see, then. Deconstruction first focuses on

r
h
v the binary oppositions within a text- like
.
% man/ woman. Next it shows how these
A opposites are related, how one is
Ss
N regarded as central, natural and privi-
1 leged- the other ignored, repressed and
marginalized. Next it temporarily undoes,
subverts or decenters the hierarchy to make
••
the text mean the opposite of what it origi-
*v \ ' nally appeared to mean. Then, in the last
VW
v W \
V
\\
E
.
s
106
 step, both terms of the opposition are s
deconstructed- seen dancing in a free
play of nonhierarchical, non- stable /

meanings. But if language is just i

•/ s
i
\\
the free play of meanings- with no \

fixed meanings- if all texts degener- v.»

ate into the play of meanings, then

'v 1
there is no basis for political action. /

Q That’s right. In fact, many Marxists and

feminists have attacked deconstruction /
•/

I,
f
j
/

because it cannot provide a firm foundation

for political action or even political criticism. * •>

Q And if language is fragmented, then

people, who use language, must be I
somewhat fragmented too. \ I I
Q. Yes, this is what many Postmodernists theo-
rize Whereas the mental diseases of modern ism
, J|
were alienation and paranoia , schizophrenia is x \
the Foetmodern mental disease . If the sen -

tence breaks down, so does the psyche. So

does our experience of past, present and future.
Thus Postmodernism wallows in the play of meanings, it surfs these
meanings and is concerned with performance, play and process
rather than with the finished product . Postmodernism delights
in the ever -changing play of appearances, rather than with
sources and roots and origins. Which gets us to our next
Poststructuralists, Peleuze and Guattari, whose idea of the
rhizome is opposed to the root.

107
 V y

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Deleuze and
Guattari
In EhermtrH
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guat- uie haue
tari are two French Poststruc - Pnrphnrian
turalists who have had a major
impact on American thought. trees:
THpy BELIEVE. QUITE CH ,
simPLy.
IHRI
IDE SHOULD SIOP
i
/ •\
BELIEVinfi 10 TREES HjC , »CH
HOD ROOTS. H ,b / cH ,
\ J/
For, according to them, most C
of Western thought is dominated
by a structure of knowledge they
call aborescence. The way of
in
/ \ 7

knowing is tree -like, vertical. For HjC

8
CH
9
,
instance, in biology we have Lin -
naean taxonomies. 4 ( 10) -Thujene
100
 z \o VIAy:l/ m'.
A\ \ iL /

ff

.
w
ru k %
.
r* ,,

>. v:
V

urn* in
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In LinauistiH IUE haue
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it

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Chnnshnan
/ 11
's
as sentence trees
:
- Ir \
1

VP
/ \
a man 5 is honest
\
NP VP
/ \
man wise

Such trees show up not only in the fields of biology,

botany, linguistics and anatomy, but also in philoso-
phy— where we have metaphysical trees, theological
trees, gnostic trees, The World Tree, genealogical trees.
. These trees are
. H man
Cliimp iHfL'0
Cl Monkey
_ . P yem
fthodospirillum

, V v/
/ ^
L
Lru ,
Mime
hierarchical, imposing F
^ Ctinken
>
lutkey
rubrum

. ..*»
) "J ir - » -

limited and regulated

\ .
V \ / Fri y
‘ rr nit in
"y

- . > T ,na

connections between
<iew 12
xx in no
Carp
v 65 Mufxj Ixsin

/^ their components. Lamprey Sesame

1 Wheal 61
/
All such trees spread Tb
6
Sunflower

out like many branches and I

MMALS

8 stems from a single trunk—

2b
PLANTS

each steming from an original

oneness or unity.
109
 tree- 1ike because all
the various psychic
processes can be
’ 0'

;v traced back to an
original traumatic
/ .
/
event in which the
. .
V
child is separated
-s
from the mother. This
lack of the mother is
the basis of desire,
and is compensated

-imss for only by the child’s

Of course, all this
can be traced back to
Plato, whose vertical,
tree -like philosophy
proclaimed a material
world of manifesta -
tions stemming from
the “trunk” of a realm
of Ideal Forms or
Essences .
For instance,
Doberman pinschers,
German shepherds,
collies and poodles
o * > Me
*
are all material 3-OST
entry into the sym -
Dogginess is the sin- bolic order— the order
gle Platonic Origin— of Law and the Name-
the Trunk— of the of-the- Father.
tree of dogs. Poodles, Put Deleuze and
collies, etc. form the Guattari reject the
branches. idea of the Oedipus
A major tree- —
triangle of the
like structure that father - principle, and
Deleuze and Guattari of desire based on
criticize is the Oedi - lack. Desire, for
pus complex. It is Deleuze and Guattari,
instead of being
// ' ' based on lack and
'O
**,.|
SHlv
' ‘

<~5>
manifestations of
MT NAME

* .
BM.KV AST>S »1
an immaterial
/

/,• *
Essence— an Ideal
-
Form of what Plato
might call Dogginess. — 3

110
 rooted in an original
Oedipal trauma, is
I
created horizontally,
by social interconnec -
tions. And the inter-
connections between
the infant and his
surrounding society
are always in move-
ment, flowing, taking
I
lines of flight, like a
stringer of crabgrass
I
. . . like a rhizome.
So, opposed to
the vertical, tree -
like structure of
knowledge, Deleuze
III
A o
a
\
V V
) 3
V
and Guattari pro -
claim a rhizomatic,
radically horizontal,
crabgrass - like way of
knowing. Crabgrass,
for instance, is a
plant. But instead of
one central root, it
has zillions of roots,
none of which is cen -
tral— and each off-
shoot interconnects
in random , unregulat -
ed networks in which
any node can inter -
connect with any
other node.
>
m
: V.
,i/m
>/ •
V %
<
X
Whereas the tree
seeks to establish
itself and say “ to be,”
the rhizome is always
rearranging intercon-
nections, saying “and,
and, and, and . . .”
Thus the tree is
concerned with ori-
gins, foundations,
ontologies, begin-
nings and endings—
roots. The rhizome is
concerned with sur-
face connections,
lines of flight, with
the “ and.”
%
> / ! /> %
111
88 According to Deleuze and represented by judges, con M

88 Guattari, the works of the writer missioners, bureaucrats Ir .

H
I
Franz Kafka are rhizomatic —
interconnected like a maze of rat
this way, Kafka laughs the
Father— and the Oedipal
S3
888 tunnels. Much of Kafka’s work is structure— out
H. X
like a nightmare. But the images of existence.
and symbols of his dreamlike lit- In Kafka’s

88
i
88
erature do not mean anything.
They do not represent anything.
For this would entail a tree-like
short story,
“ The Meta -
morphosis ,”
JHjSSr
r
%
-• )

structure of knowledge— a verti- the main

X cal structure connecting the \r / A
meaning and the images and
JS 1J

symbols representing the mean-

8$ ing. So dream symbols do
not mean

1 anything or —
represent any -
th/ng. They are not there to be
interpreted. character, Gregor Samsa,
v
It is good enough merely to awakes one morning only to find
A
describe dreams and, in doing so that he has been transformed
88
§8 to watch how their symbols open into a huge bug. Some critics
up new, horizontal interconnec- regard the relationship between
8$ tions between other symbols. Gregor and his mother and fa -
ss
88 For instance, in Kafka’s “ Let- ther as typically Oedipal. But
ter to His Father” he inflates his again, Kafka explodes the Father’s
s
father to laughably absurd, single image into many, including
1 dreamlike dimensions, until his a chief clerk and a boss. Kafka
1 father’s singular Fatherness gets thus tries to de-Oedipalize Gre-
& so huge that it pops— exploding gor’s father. But in the end Gre-
s
into a vast rhizomatic network of gor’s line of flight fails, and like a
father - like social connections good son, he dies for his family.
s
 mm 0
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X
K Z
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It is only in Kafka’s novels X
that the rhizomatic line of flight
/
truly succeeds— especially in /

The Trial . One might expect a
novel named The Trial to have
something to do with the law.
But Deleuze and Guattari find
that Justice in the novel is not
legal but erotic. Justice is really
always one room away from him %
in the rhizomatic, rat tunnel of m
the courthouse with its crazy z
corridors and perversely connect- m
ed passageways through which K.
is led by eroticized women. Thus i /

desire. Thus, there are obscene Justice, like the courthouse and m
z

drawings in the courthouse; an desire, is rhizomatic, never reach -

ing conclusion. Kafka’s writing,
i
attorney equates being accused
with being attractive; a series of too, is rhizomatic, mapping and
1
z
suggestive toying with the structures Z

encounters of institu - 5%
s
te / 1/1 tions and % y

with sexy, x
antifamilial social m2
women; and relations. X
X
/

a painting
V
%
of Justice X'
%
as winged,
and evasive.
-
A
n
23
z
Z

K., the pro-

tagonist of I s

the novel, r».

never reach -
es Justice.
V
-- i X
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’’She” is 23
z /
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never pre ^

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 The bishop indicated is
Q Isn’t the Internet rhizomatic,
Jacques Guillot, who was exiled by
horizontal ? the Vatican to Algeria for his

Q Yes. It is non - hierarchical, hor - “ heterodox” opinions. Stuck in the

izontal. Its nodes intersect in middle of the desert— in an
random , unregulated networks in ancient diocese that for all prac -
which any node can interconnect tical purposes no longer exists—
with any other node. In this he went online, becoming the
respect Peleuze and Guattari world’s first virtual bishop.
were correct when they declared a It was a visionary author, Leo
new form of rhizomatic, horizontal Scheer, who hooked up the bishop.
knowledge. In fact, there He is quoted as saying that
is a story in the “ Instead of a metaphysical Idea
March 13, 1996 of a bishop, attached to a real
New Yorker enti- place, we would have a metaphysi -
tled ‘Virtual cal idea of a place, attached to a
Bishop.” real bishop.”
The virtual diocese, which can
s be accessed from anywhere in the
. v wor \ d , imitates the mind of God —
n I f

v
E
a horizontal, rhizomatic God . In
A
fact, the bishop, who counts
among his friends people like Jean
/
Baudrillard, complains that until
the opening of the virtual diocese,
“ The Church has been organized
\
\ vertically, when we ought to be
£ organized horizontally.” Of course,
the Church soon went online
\
% as well.
Y
1X\

•it

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s
XT
114
 N .
-7 |y It seems like yy Committed
vertical is out suicide ! But
and horizontal how ?
is in.
N\ . \

U^ es
Q He jumped
off a tall verti -
\
\
’
—
V

'7 ironic thing is cal structure

P
K\ HOW, in 1995, a building .
Deleuze com -
.«v•
%»
mitted suicide .
u 2

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The Condition of Postmodernity
5=
ri
z-

Q It seems as if his self must have been pretty

fragmented. But where does the fragmentation-of
language, of the self, and of "things"-common to both modernism
and Postmodernism come From?

Q Well, according to David Harvey’s The Condition of Poetmodernity,

fragmentation in the arts, language, and the human r
"*
psyche has come about through a change in the
/
way time and space are perceived. \ i<csj /
.
'
$ •
Postmodernism has been influenced by dra - v
*
matic differences in the way we experience - \ \ vv
v

space and time. And whenever significant : <r

changes in our perception of time and space occur, this

brings about equally large changes in the ways we represent the
world— both in the arts and in philosophy.
The history of capitalism has brought on what Harvey calls space-
time compression: There has been an increase in the pace of life. And
paralleling the increasing compression in time, space has shrunk. The
world seems to collapse inwards on us.
Put it was not always like this. During Europe’s feudal era, each
\.
feudal fiefdom was a definite legal, political, economic and social
^ world . At the center was the castle, the Lord and Lady of the
castle and the nobility. Working the fields and the forests, a
!i
IZ class of serfs were loyal to their feudal lords. Of course,
9 \m- a this feudal
world was thought to be only a reflection of a
fa cosmos ruled on high by Ood and a gang of heavenly
MS
hosts, and populated by darker characters, the crea -
m- tures of myth and folklore— witches, giants, draqone.
116
 Medieval mapmakers often
represented this world in sensu -
ous detail, almost like a painting.
In such maps, a river is a sensu-
ous flow of blue paint that cuts
through a dark forest (represent-
ed by painting in a number of
trees) — and beyond we find the
castle. A cross shining from the
steeple of the church and its sur-
rounding buildings are also all rep-
resented as they might be in a
With the Renaissance, the
principle of perspective made its
appearance. Perspectivism shifted
the angle of vision from God to /j
that of an individual human
being free of the naive super-
stitions of myth and religion, i
At the same time, the N
Ptolemaic system of map-
Si
making made its way to
Europe— a system that rep-
resented space objectively. •• V

painting. These details are seen From then on, a mathematical

from a bird’s- eye perspective, as grid— a geometric framework
if God were looking down upon the allowing viewers to actually mea - \

scene. At the edge of such maps sure distances between towns

was the end of the world— and a and oceans— would ap-
cosmic dragon waiting to swallow pear on all maps. Now, c
anyone who would dare venture since all of space, all of co
y
too close to the edge the world , could be repre- c-
SN
and fall into his sented by a geometric grid, the
. vt* •
mouth. whole globe was suddenly know-

WJM able and conquerable. Explorers,

setting out on voyages of dis-
covery, drew such maps, which
(
-
«
o
wk \ V were then valuable to - o:
¥
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merchants and J

X traders. .v

vl 4
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.V /

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17
 At the same time in every sphere of Then the 15th -
that space became Renaissance culture, century Enlighten-
chopped up mathe - In architecture, Goth- ment saw space as
matically, the clock, ic cathedrals had something to be con-
or chronometer, made been populated with quered. Maps were
its appearance. grotesque gargoyles purged of all elements
These new concep- and angels. But these of fantasy and religion
tions of space and gave way, in the Ba - and became abstract,
time were reflected roque era, to a more geometric, cold,
expansive architec - mathematical, and
ture, to the soaring strictly functional.
'/
i
energies of Bach’s
fugues and the ex -
pansive images of
/
Both time and
space became uni-
form, mechanical,
' 1

space and time in Newtonian space and

I
0
XL %
•>>

John Donne’s poetry. time. But if the whole

/
*
II /
r But this new, infi - world could be envi -
T
nite, measured sioned as uniform , if
\

-image of time and land could be laid out

(>
0
1
*
| space still reflected
/A
on a grid and divided
ft
Hi ( I•• »
God’s glory. up equally— as was
n '
\
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done in the United
States— then this
* could create the
\ X *5
V

X
I
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•
>
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\l
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a
118
 A
/

brated God’s
infinite glory but
displayed the dimen-
t
sions of a universe
‘/ that could be domi-
nated by MAN. And
t --
0 <
used by Man for his
'

own freedom . No
- v»
longer would one fear
.
*I
falling off the edge of
the earth into the
\
-
S2 V
*
mouth of a cosmic
monster.

IfSm
/ IJ V
V
r•* • ••.•.
i
*.v .
Europeans
thought that now
it there was a place in
*
* r
i;
*
'oi this conquerable
space for everyone.
Africa could provide
slaves, and other
basis for equality in whole uniform grid of continents and climes
society. It could cre- the globe. Space was could provide raw
ate the basis for knowable, and materials for the
democracy. through Euclidean imperial European
In other words, geometry, conquer - and American powers.
the view of a rational, able. Space, nature, The chronometer
uniform grid of space and the world could a \\ ov / ed time, like
and time aWov/ ed be measured, known space, to be seen as
Enlightenment and dominated. mathematical and
thinkers to envision For Enlightenment uniform. Time now
colonial and utopian thinkers this vast ticked away in a
plans that could be grid of space and straight line from the
rolled out over the time no longer cele - past to the future.

119
 n f7 7
»• <
Similarly, workers $

o
in various countries
t -
began to sympathize
* Modernism with each other, and in such an

t
WJ sawthebreak - environment, the Communist
ing up of these Manifesto, could gain an audience.
v
\V
*
uniform, linear, con - After 1850 , the major Euro -
ceptions of space and pean nations expanded globally,
time. During the Enlightenment stripping much of the space
social time and physical time had in the world of its previous
merged, had become uniform and names and uses. It became rou -
mathematical. Time had become tine for nations, cities and indiv-
progressive. iduals to be deeply influenced
But in the mid - nineteenth by events thousands of miles
century, this progressive sense away. The radio, the motor car,
of time was shaken. Many Euro - and the train accelerated these
peans who had participated in developments.
uprisings and revolutions had How could any writer, then,
had a taste of explosive time. still write a realistic novel with
Those caught up in class strug- a plot unfolding page after page
gles had a sense of alternating, in simple, step- by-step, chrono-
cyclic time. logical order?
Also, by the mid - nineteenth t
I
\ \
century, it became evident that \

economic and social time had

\
\ *
changed. With improvements in v SI *c a

transportation and communica -

tions, all of Europe was becoming
os \

\ B
X>

economically interdependent. If *
\
V

Paris should suffer a financial \

crisis, the crisis also affected

London and Berlin.
*
0
120
 n

Writers Now, in the

A
such as rT \
Foetmodern
m
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world, the
Flaubert,
% . shrinking of
Proust and V

James space has

Joyce changed the
began to /C ways that
7

capture this
" •
money and
7

IT 7, r 7

sense of commodities
simultaneous operate. Capital
time by altering is now electronically
the structures of their plots. moved around the global mar-
Einstein’s revolutionary theo- ketplace with such rapidity that
ries of relativity it has lost much of its stability
changed the per- and meaning. In our local super-
ception of space markets, we can buy French
c
and time even cheeses and wines, beers from
more. Impression - Canada , Mexico, Asia and Europe,
ist painters such as green beans from South America
Manet and Cezanne began to or Africa, Tahitian mangoes, Cali-
decompose the space of objects fornia celery, Canadian apples,
within paintings— objects dissolv- etc. Space is also
ing into dabs of light. Cubism fur - compressed
/ft
ther decomposed the object. In in the popu-
sociology Durkheim’s Elementary lations of the
Forms of Religious Life, published largest cities,
in 1912, founded the sense of time increasingly made
in social rhythms. It became up of minorities
apparent that there are as many such as Vietnamese,
experiences of space and time Koreans, Eastern Europeans,
as there are perspectives. Central Americans, Africans, etc .

121
 As space shrinks more and more, the individual quali -
ties of different spaces, different localities, grows in
Importance. Certain provinces in Franee become very
& important if they can provide a certain kind of wine
'
or cheese. Certain Pacific Pirn
nations become important if they can provide inex -
pensive labor. World capital must be flexible in order v\
to exploit all these labor and commodity markets—
must move around the globe quickly, taking advantage
of various niches. This is flexible accumulation, as
opposed to the fixed accumulation of the early 20th century, when
corporations like Ford Motor Company and their capital basically sat
in one place and pumped out cars for a relatively stable market.
Flarvey believes that the ephemerality, collage and fragmentation
of Postmodern artifacts such as books, films, architecture and art
are simply mirrors of this phenomenon of flexible accumulation.

An example of this is the movie Bladerunner, which

contains significant Vostmodern elements.
“ Blade Bunner” is a Victorian v / ord for “ private eye.’
??
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The film became a cult film— and then a kind of national A

specimen of Postmodernism. It even V

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122
& It
\
inspired William Gibson’s Although they have
I been given human emo -

«
novel Neuromancer and
the movement that has tions, they are con -
come to be known as sidered somewhat dan -

\\ \
cyberpunk.
5 lade Runner is
gerous, and as part of
their genetic program ,
about a gang of geneti- have a life span of only
cally produced humans four years.
K
' called “ replicants” who
'\ V
have been created to Q It looks as if they

\ serve as hyper- would be good short-

strong, intelligent contract workers in
and skilled slaves. a Postmodern world.
The are used “off - But are they human
world,” in the haz - beings or not?
ardous work of
exploring and
colonizing the
Q Do you remember
Jean Baudrillard’s con-
outer planets. cept of the simulacrum?

Q Sure, the simulacrum

\
W jSP is the copy that is so
close to the original
that the original is
no longer important.

123
 Qreplicants
And that’s what
have be -
the huge Tyrell Cor- Q Yes. And the Los
poration, and is in Angeles they return
come— simulacra command of the re- to, supposedly Los
that are nearly indis- productive processes Angeles of the year
tinguishable from necessary for cre- 2019, is no utopia. In
human beings. In fact ation of replicants. fact it is a dystopia,
fdiade Runner por - The replicants are a decayed, Post-
trays a Baudrillardian angry about their industrial wasteland.
world in which “ The short life span. How-
real is produced from ever, Tyrell explains to
miniaturized unite, Roy, the leader of the
from matrices, memo- enraged replicants, i

ry hanks and com - that they should /

—
mand modules and enjoy their short life
with these it can he because it is more
reproduced an indefi - intense— like a flame
nite number of times” that burns twice as
.
(SIM 3).
\»
brightly but has only
a short duration.
i
And the repli -
cants have returned Q But doesn t that
to Los Angeles, where
make them like >

they were made, in

the Postmodern
order to meet their
personalities-
maker, a genetic
caught up in the
designer named Tyrell,
rush of time?
who is the head of

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On the lowest
levelI, empty ware-
houses and industrial
plants lie half - buried
in heaps of rotting
rubbish, which are
scavenged by roaming
bands of punks and
other human vultures
living on the decaying
remains of the past . corporate offices is
On the middle
On the highest lacrum of a p)jrarn \ d ,
leVel, soaring high lost among a bazaar
above the street of Greek, Roman ,
scum, towers a high - Mayan, Chinese, and
tech wor \ d of corpo- Victorian motifs.
rate power, architec - The profusion of
ture and advertising: corporate archi-
Pan Am, Coca Cola, tecture and adver-
Budweiser. But hov- tising signs in the
ering above all the city, which com -
bines elements of
the Tyrell Corpora - New York, Tokyo,
tion itself. Hong Kong and •m i

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crowded with punks, an eclectic Postmod- referring
various riff - raff, Hare ern hodgepodge of to other
Krishna devotees, simulacra. The signs.
and other marginal Tyrell corporate
\

street folk. headquarters looks V

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N

The Voetmodern artistic What is double coding, again?

principle at work here is pas -
tiche, a series of neutral quo -
tations mimicking various
architectural styles and film
styles. Everything is double
coded.
Qj You will remember that in
architecture double coding con -
sists of using Modernist meth -
ods, but transcending them by
simultaneously quoting architec -
tural motifs from the past or
from a local culture— but con -
sciously, in a playful, pastiche -
sort of way that can be humorous
or ironic .

0,0 Q Like the AT & T building that is

at once a piece of modern archi-
tecture and a quote of a grandfa-
ther clock?

Q Yes. And double coding can

occur not only in architecture but
in just about any art form. So in
Blade Runner , everything is dou -
ble coded. There are not only
human replicants; everything is a
*
replicant. The actors replicate an
eclectic blend of movie genres and
period styles— for Blade Runner
i

126
is both a futuristic film, set 40 difference between a human being
years in the future (from the and a Nexus-6 android? What is
1960s) and set simultaneously the difference between an original
40 years in the past— it quotes and a simulacrum?
extensively from the genre of noir This question is brought to a
films of the 1940s. Some of the head in the relationship between
sets are actually sets from old Rick Deckard— a private eye who
Sogart and James Cagney movies. has been hired by the Tyrell Corpo -
Architecturally, everything is ration to act as a search -and-
quoted aiso: Frank Lloyd Wright, destroy agent in pursuit of
Greek and Roman columns, along Nexus -6 replicants— and Rachel,
with Oriental motifs and 40s a beautiful brunette replicant with
gangster set themes. Thus the whom he falls in love. She does
motive is not parody but play— not know whether she is a repli -
pastiche. It is the surface play cant or not. This causes Deckard
and display of the simulacra. Just to doubt his own human history.
as the replicants are more human After he kills one of her fellow
than humans, the simulacra have androids, Rachael is visibly dis-
become more real than the real. turbed. Deckard says “ Repli -
In fact, a main question of cants weren’t sup-
the film is, What is the dif - posed to have feelings,
ference between a but then again, nor
were Slade Runners.’
M

machine and a human

being? Replicants
and human beings V
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and computers.

At another point Decker and Q Could this, then, be another

Rachel, human and android, are difference between modernism
about to sleep together. Rachel and Postmodernism?
says, “ You’re not going to bed
with a woman .... Remember,
though, don’t think about it, just
B How’s that?

do it . Don’t pause and be philos - /

ophical, because from a philoso-

Q Well, one of the central images
phical standpoint it’s dreary for
us both.’’ modernists used to fill in the
But the movie does make us post- Nietzschian void was that

think about it philosophically. In of the machine. Perhaps Post-

fact, much of Postmodern art is modernism has just replaced
the image of the simple
just a way of thinking about the
Postmodern age. It is a way of machine with that of the Man-
doing Postmodern theory. And
machine- the hybrid of man
after all, the movie spawned the and machine.
whole movement of cyberpunk, a Qj Actually, that’s exactly what
movement that dramatizes the Donna Haraway declares in anoth-
er important Post- human, half comput- myths about being
modern essay, “A er. Haraway argues human always go
Cyborg Manifesto: that in the late back to some idyllic
Science, Technology, twentieth century, time of wholeness
and Socialist Forma - and probablyfor and unity and inno -
tion in the Late some time to come, cence, like in the
Twentieth Century.” we are all cyborgs. Garden of Eden. But
This essay is actual- the myth of the
ly a chapter in her Q But are we all cyborg is never about
book S/m/'ans, Cy- cyborgs? I don’t wholes; It does not
borgs and Women: have any look nostalgically
The Reinvention machine parts. back to some unified
of Nature. A origin. A cyborg is
Haraway uses
always a split, a
cyborg” to con-
(4

Q Well, what’s hybrid identity, a

struct a new myth
a cyborg? cybernetic organism:
about being
Q A cyborg is
a cybernetic
human. Old
a human- computer.
/

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For in our culture, we always
try to favor the words on the
left and repress the ones on the
right. But if we see ourselves as
cyborgs, then we can know that
we are always both: mind and
body, culture and nature, male
and female, etc.— fractured iden -
tities, human - computers. And, in
a way, we are. Even/ Asian woman
who, with her nimble fingers, works
in the electronics industry, as -
sembling computers, every secre -
tary whose typing speed is moni -
tored on the computer by her
boss, every check - out clerk at the
grocery store whose speed is cal-
culated by a computer, every
voter, every consumer is being
monitored by a computer — is
part of a computer — is a cyber -
netic organism. It is hard to tell
where the computer stops and
the organism begins.
Q Well, why don’t these workers
just rebel?
Q That’s one of the sentiments
that gave rise to the whole cyber -
punk movement.

130
 r

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PS
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“w \ « Cyberpunk

c Q Cyberpunk?

*
2
Yes. Cyberpunk was once considered
the most Postmodern of all Postmodern
&<
K
at •f things. Cyberpunk began as a hybrid of 60s
counterculture, cybertechnology and anarchy.
,\\Av The “cyber” part of cyberpunk indicates
'a 5
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that, like cyborg, it has something to do
with computers. \

efi.- The word “ punk” gives us a clue to

V

the attitude that cyberpunks have

1

I S
I \Y toward computer technology: hip, sexy,
violent, mind-altered, anti-authoritari-
an, rebellious, with a distaste for the
dominant lifestyles of the Peagan /
s

E3ush era.
*V Peal- life cyberpunks tend to oper-
*
ate somewhat outside the law, as they
[J > i
are opposed to the centralized use of
<
l computer technologies by huge mega -
V s
V 8// 7 t corporations and states. They are
/
A
u often hackers who use cybertechnol-
A
ogy to tap into the international
electronic grid to fulfill their own
t individual desires. A cyberpunk
>
A »\
s
4
‘v
S

* s \
guy who wants to seduce some
corporate secretary might soften
her up by softening up her soft-
wear (e.g., by altering the software in the corporate mainframe so
that it appears to her boss— who monitors her key stroke rate— that
she is typing twice as fast as she actually is).

131
 Cyberpunks, unlike hippies, are not
against technology. They want to use
technology as a means to resist the
infringement on our individual free -
doms by centralized techno-giants.
Just as Mary Shelley’s Franken -
stein warned against the excesses
5
and dangers of the industrial and
m 3
r
g
s scientific revolution in the 19th centu-
ry, science fiction writing that goes
A %
s § by the name of cyberpunk warns of a
techno-future in which humans must
fight against the technological pow-
ers of giant international mega -
>
N
corporations. But that technological
future is now!
X Neuromancer
1 \
'
The first cyberpunk novel, which
\
was inspired, in part, by diade Funner,
is William Gibson’s Neuromancer . The
story is about Case, a petty computer
*
V

I
and data thief who has stolen informa -
I

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& V

tion from his bosses. As punishment,

I
his nerve cells have been burned out.
1«
Case’s nervous system is repaired,
f
'I
however, when he is hired by a mysteri-
ous employer to perform a Big Heist.

ii
u<
He is accompanied by some hired mus-
cle in the form of Molly, a gal brimming
with bio -implants, including razors
beneath her nails. Together they steal
a computer construct.
The major adventure in the novel is
their mission to Freeland, a planet
where they are to steal an Artificial
Intelligence entity named Necromancer '
f|

with whom Wintermate (the mysteri- —

ous employer) wishes to merge so
that he may become God and take
over the universe.
The difference between 3 lade 2

Runner and Neuromancer is that

in Neuromancer the difference
between computer and human, nature V

and technology, original and copy, orig-

inal and simulacrum, has collapsed—
imploded. In fact, Neuromancer
starts out with a description
n
of nature that is in terms of
technology: “ The sky above
the port was the
color of television,
tuned to a dead
^ <
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r.
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channel” (N 3).
 And it is Case’s own repaired Cyberspace is a cyborg— a
nervous system, for instance, not merging of human and computer
some computer, which enables him capacities. And this concept of
to enter cyberspace. cyberspace was suggested to
And though everyone today Gibson one day in Vancouver, as
knows what cyberspace is, Gibson he was watching some teenagers
was the one who invented the playing video games in an arcade:
term. He did so by saying that “ I could see in the physical
cyberspace is: “ A consensual hal- intensity of their postures how
lucination experienced daily by rapt these kids were... . You had
billions of legiti- this feedback loop, with photons
mate opera - coming off the screen into the
tors in every kids’ eyes, the neurons moving
nation. ..a through their bodies, electrons
graphic repre- moving through the computer.
rsU sentation of And those kids clearly believed in
data abstracted the space these games projected.”
KB
from the banks of
every computer in
Teledidonics, Audio-
the human animatrotiic Papa-
razzi & Nano-Rovers
cs

A system. Un-
f.

thinkable com- Cyberpunk science fiction is

not so much about the future as
f plexity. Lines of
it is a way of drawing a map of
light ranged in
the nonspace what is going on today— a pre-
F

m, of the mind, sent in which data are controlled

ni
clusters of by vast technocapitalistic corpo -
"
rations. But these huge data
i

constella -
If
WiN
tions of data. banks exist in a space where TV,
v\ i
¥ • >
I \\ aw " J Like city lights telex, tape recorder, VCR, laser

2 W ,/ receding” (N 51).
I V Vi

134
 E % ¥ /
•>
>
V (as if you were a super -
*
model strutting in thigh -highs
V' / into a glitzy theme restaurant
^
*
/
:V (
y
such as the Fashion Cafe, or)
+ while engaged in noisy teledildonics
with someone of National-Enguirer-
front-cover status— someone
disk, camcorder, teledildo,
such as a distant Martian. A
audioanimatronic paparazzi,
nano- rover is an impossibly small
nano - rover and telephone are
robotic that sends back pixel
wired together like a sprawling
images from the surface of Mars.
electronic species of cosmic crab-
And so you can see the possibili-
grass. And they can be plugged
ties: the data from teledildo,
into by those with the hacker,
Martian, nano- rover and audio-
cybperpunk ethic of “information
animatronic paparazzi— all inter-
for the people.”
acting in one huge cosmic elec -
Teledildo? Audioanimatronic tronic event.

paparazzi? Nano- rover? What / ik

are those?

Q Teledildonlcs involves a
kind of computer sex in
\

which a joy-stick -dildo

\
can be animated by a
user on a distant com - ' \
. %

\ At A
A
.
- ! * •.
&
puter. Audioanimatronic \
A
paparazzi are sound-acti-
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which snap your photo ••

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135
 cVA* «•«£ 3
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Q Cyberpunk science fiction •'

seems to provide a more accu- :

* >v
s.

rate map of the contours of

these Postmodern times than
Cyberpunk zines have
become mainstream. i\ »

does Baudrillard’s theory.

MONDO 2000, a
Q That’s right. In fact, many
think that Baudrillard is really
glossy cyber-glam
60s cre-
zine, late ‘
r-
•

doing science fiction, and that ation of R.U. Sir-

much of cyberpunk science fiction ius and Queen
is really pretty good theory. After Mu “domined -
- *
•

all, Baudrillard only describes a itrix,” is

Postmodern society that passive- stuffed 's^Y
ll
ly surrenders to the sensual, with rap r /

obscene flow of hyperreality and on smart W

simulacra. But cyberpunk science drugs, cyber-

-
if
fiction not only describes a world fashion ( cyberpunks ’
of simulacra but also shows it to often wear mirror-
be a world dominated by vast shades), cyber-gossip, etc.
mega -corporations, and suggests Mondo’e popularity was
a form of resistance to the con - eclipsed, in 1993, by Wired , a site
trol these huge corporations exer - for cyberpunk authors such as
cise over us. William Gibson. Wired went online
However, cyberpunk, like Bau- in 1994 as HotWired .
drillard, has now ceased to be Web Hotwired
avant garde and is now merely hip. www.wired.coin

136
 Besides these popular maga - ern civilization in terminal decline
zines, tons of cyberpunk sci-fi has ultimately hooks up with rebellious
been pumped out. But it all sounds and tough- talking (youth /artificial
petty much the same. As Csicsery- intelligence/rock cults) who offer
Bonay asks: the alternative, not of (communi-
“ How many formulaic tales ty/ socialism /traditional values/
can one wade through in which a transcendental vision), but of su -
self- destructive but sensitive preme, life affirming hippness, going
young protagonist with an (im - with the flow which now flows in
plant/ prosthesis/telechtronic tal- the machine, against the specter
ent) that makes the evil ( mega - of a world - subverting (arti-
corporations /police states /
criminal underworlds) pursue him
through (wasted urban landscapes/
ficial intelligence/multina -
tional corporate web/ evil
genius)?”
^
elite luxury enclaves /eccentric ( SRS 164) &

space stations) full of grotesque A

(haircuts/clothes/ self - mutila - Xx 1
tions / rock music / sexual ,

hobbies/designer drugs/ ( Al (

k
telechtronic gadgets/ nasty

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hallucinations) representing
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T I

Q Well, cyberpunk just
sounds like a bunch of
boys with high- tech
power fantasies. How are
these any different from
Rambo? And what does
cyberpunk have to say
about the problems of
crime, drug addiction,
sex addiction, about
women, about ecology?
Qcyberpunk
Whatever replaces
will have to be
more earth-centered and
more woman - centered .
KWsme
Q What’s so Postmodern
about Madonna?
Q Well, for one thing, she is
quite consciously all surface,
all put- on, all dress- up, all
make-over, all simulation, all
simulacrum. She knows that
we live in an age of hype, of
hyper-reality. She knows that
simulation and ayyearance
mean more than substance
and reality. She knows that
the appropriation and
replication of the
original are more real
133
than the original. Thus she is
deliberately trivial, shallow, formu-
laic. And not only in her videos.
She realizes that “ real” life is just
show biz also. Thus she collects
her paycheck but never really goes
to work. When she dresses up as
Marilyn Monroe she does so with
the knowledge that Marilyn Mon-
roe, herself, was just a put- on, a
construction, a simulacrum, just
like dressing up in drag or vogue-
ing. Thus her dressing up as Mari-
lyn Monroe is double coded in the
same sense that B\ade Runner
and Postmodern architecture are
double coded.
Some of her critics, people like
feminists, teachers, Planned Par-
enthood, Veterans of Foreign Wars,
.
etc regard Madonna as just a
cheese -
MORE VIOHMC CeUttREt!?
cakey whore l-'Rt Mo \ . rttv , T ' M *.
dressed up
REAL POV\6 M O H O . 9
'I
in trashy junk jewelry, with / :
a hi-there belly button
©
and a fondle-my-
bra, boy-toy
attitude.
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sexual dif - \
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ference. For
WWW Madonna -
instance, it is
oIodists, on the
other hand, re- supposedly a
feminine game,
r mm gard Madonna as I

deconstructing essen -
^ tialist notions of male/
female, high art/pop art,
black / white, virgin/ whore,
fucker /fuckee, etc.
Q Deconstructing essen-
tialist notion of what?
Q Traditional gender roles
ideas of what takes
it be
masculine or feminine, are
kept in place by fixed polari-
ties— binary opposites of
not a masculine
game, to wear a
black -lace bra, with a
little bit of strap show-
ing at the shoulder. But
in Madonna’s videos men
have breasts and wear
bras, implying that they
to
, have breast envy (instead
of the women having penis-
envy), women have hard-ons,
virgins are whores, and sluts
are virgins.
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“ Displacement is at the core
of the video’s transgression where
bodies intersect in the infamous
bedroom scene. Multiple bodies
shift positions in a series of dis -
placements, while camera move -
ment simulates the fluidity of
erotic activity as it ranges over
bodies, undisturbed by substitu -
tions. Core identities surrender
to the assumption of erotic roles
in a splitting between dark and
light, male and female, gay and
straight— differences multiplied
and compounded” ( MPF i3B-9).
By deconstructing the rigid
boundaries between masculine
and feminine, man and woman,
gay and straight, Madonna’s
140
I
video Justify My Love has become
a kind of gay anthem. It blurs the
difference between sexual orienta -
tions, between gender and sex,
portraying an erotic flow of frac -
tured images that refuse to play
either the lesbian or the hetero -
sexual game, either the straight
game or the gay game, either
the black game or the white game,
either the male game or the fe -
male game, but, with a little imag -
ination and cross -dressing,plays
the hybrid, mutant, hyperreal,
lesbian- heterosexual game, the
heterosexual- lesbian game, the
mulatto - male - lesbian game,the
half - breed -female -gay- man game.
Q But if Madonna's
videos decontruct
gender, sexuality
and race, don't /

these videos- and

the whole Madonna
phenomenon- have
\

something to do
with power?

Bfantasies
Yes. Or with power tit %
%

. Natually the
,
powerless like power.
/
.

And a large part of N

v
W
Madonna’s power
derives from her ability
< •-
5
.
r' 1

’'
i
t

to produce images of
•ill

rebelling against estab-

lished powere. I3ut, X

often the only power t*

.X
*V.
Madonna fans have is '

to buy her products: V-

ff .
to increase the wealth . 53

of the multinational
entertainment corpora - 7/A

tions that have them

'

hypnotized.
141
 Untitled Film Stills something like masks, opening a letter, etc.
(Cindy concealing “Cindy’s” All of these images
Sherman face ( which is not so seem strangely famil-
familiar to us) but iar. But this is only
Q Hypnotized them? reminding us of some- because they were
thing familiar (yet, inspired, in part,
Q Yes. The flow of
media images hypno-
something we cannot by cliches from old
quite grasp). Brigitte Bardot and
tizes and conditions
Sophia Loren movies.
us. The hyperreality i
When you see one
of Madonna images of her photos, you
becomes more real think you recognize a
\

than the Madonna

wanna - bes who imi- SSI character or scene
from an old movie you
tate her. And this
> have seen. But, in
phenomenon— of f f '

.• fact, the photos do

the image being J notreproduce any
more real than the
specific scenes in any
human— is drama - movies but pull up in
tized by photographer What we see, then, our mind’s eye the
Cindy Sherman in a is not Cindy Sherman, kinds of visual cliches
series of photographs and roles women have
but an image of a
taken between 1977
passed-out starlet, a played in old movies
and I960 entitled hitch- hiker, a woman we have seen.
Untitled Film Stills .
The images are actu-
ally all of Cindy Sher-
man, the photograph-
er, herself. But we do
not see Cindy Sher-
man. What we see are
images that appear
in our mind’s eye.
These images act I
142
 0 •t s.
\

tf

*3
1» I

Thus, our moment

of recognition is only i

an illusion. Though
v
these images seem
T

to refer to something
other than them-
T
selves, they are all
surface, all depth-
lessness.

MTV that whirl by with images glow and

Another Postmod- such velocity that flicker, making the
ern artifact is MTV they have been viewer into a kind

Q Why MTV? stripped of all mean- of mindscreen.

ing— referring only
Qgeneral
Well, television, in to other images—
h
, is considered
to be Postmodern
because it is like a
the audience having
reached the point
of total saturation
m
it -

tornado of images as the meaningless

3% 143
 Barbie dolls in compromising posi-
Barbie-Art
tions, dressing them up in boy’s

^ But some of the images

do make sense. Most of the
sit- coms and soaps have
stories-narratives.
clothing, or, as the Barbie Libera -
tion Organization did, switching
the voice-boxes of Barbie dolls
with those of <3.1. Joe.

Q Q What makes
%'s

And that’s why A

> a novel or a film
MTV is considered to 7
it Postmodern?
be especially •* *•••
h
V
Postmodern. Bfi
/
A
Modernist

if
IN
%
Because for Vr :• //
N novels concern
TV
^ **w: :
most of Kg V
themselves with
SJB
storytelling— \ the limits of individ-
narrative — has been /
A ual consciousness—
the norm. But MTV is not
ft
VI
.. V how the individual
based on stories but A knows the world. In
on disconnected . .•
\ %V
f

novels such as
1

% • rae
»
'
flows of images. Then 6James Joyce’s Por -
.-.
there is subverting, a
<5 X
AV
vv trait of the Artist as
/
way of subverting the j a Young Man , the reader
&
a
advertising cam - % •v•V is plunged into the stream
* A
paigns of huge \ |^ •• & of thoughts and feelings
J

V
corporations 0
V
m
\ of a young man as he
' \
by creating paro- \
\ attempts to know the world
\ •• ••
s v
dies of their •••• around him.
messages, such *:* -

as: “American Excess:

r .
Don’t Leave Home Without if i \\
i
*
It.” This is closely asso-
ciated with Barbie-art, T'
Ki
:XA
&

the art of subverting

Barbie-ism by placing
, xit
144
 S &>DMt EAfc
WHtM \ j' s QiARLf
{ • EYE, x VIEEO.
* J In the Postmodern novel or film, how-
ever, the question is not so much
How do I know the world? but, What
1/
is a world?

Blue Velvet

t i
Consider the film Blue Velvet , for
example. It juxtaposes two very dif-
V i V
ferent worlds: a world of small-
town, middle -class high school
romance, and a world of murder and
A sadistic sexuality. It juxtaposes
>\\
‘
N
\\\ them in such a way that we do not
I
\

/
know which world is more real.

Wings of Desire
t Another film that is often
branded “ Postmodern” is
Wim Wenders’s Wings of
t s«
V Desire. Again, the film juxta -
poses two very different worlds.
The place is Berlin— international,
K\ : \ :
A
\ x:

N
cosmopolitan, filled with different
% \\
/
'rrllP‘ languages and cultures and iden -
\W’
tities. Each of these is frag-
f .
1
V
6 mented and isolated from the
.
•
others. Each man lives in his own
r private world.
.
r

11
 A

WE ARE CAPABLE OF LISTENING IN ON PEOPLE ' S THOUGHTS :

TO A YOUNG MAN CONTEMPLATING SUICIDE ; TO A DYING

MAN ON THE STREET ; TO PEOPLE COMMUTlNG I N CARS ; TO

MOTHERS AND FATHERS , L O V E R S_ A N D _C H 1 L D R E N, E V E R Y

ALIENATED , ISOLATED INDIVIDUAL HAS BECOME LIKE A

.

LITTLE STATE WHERE EACH STREET HAS BARRIERS , A N D_ A L L

IS SURROUNDED BY A N O - M A N ' S L A N D T H R O U G H _W H I C H O N E

CAN PASS ONLY I F ONE HAS THE RIGHT PASSWORD .

THE OTHER WORLD , JUXTAPOSED WITH A POSTMODERN BERLIN ,

I S REALM OF ETERNAL TIME . OF PURE SPIRIT , INHABITED

BY ANGELS . THE ANGELS CAN HEAR PEOPLE ' S THOUGHTS

AND MOVE I NSTANTANEOUSLY THROUGH SPACE . THEY ATTEMPT

TO INTERVENE IN WORLDLY AFFAIRS BY BATHING PEOPLE

IN SPIRITUAL VIBRATIONS . BUT OFTEN THEIR HELP FAILS

THE YOUTH CONTEMPLATING SUICIDE JUMPS TO HIS DEATH .

YET , BOTH THE ANGELS AND SOME OI

^T H E HUMANS ARE

AWARE OF EACH OTHER ' S EXISTENCE, OF THE RADICAL

OTHERNESS OF EACH OTHER ' S EXISTENCE .

i HI mm mm mm mm mm mm mm mm mm m

146
 Postmodern
a
n
4
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'' Q But how about in fields other
*
than the arts? What impact
4U

;•
has Postmodernism had on
the real world?
r
»Y ‘
v

* .
L

Q Postmodern thought has even

had an impact on the ecological move-
ment— and thus upon mountains, redwoods,
Jfl®' oceans, rivers and lakes. After all, Postmodernists
-R' f
t are suspicious of grand narratives— of big stories—
of utopian visions. And conservationists— the kind
I f of people with “ Save the Piver” bumper stickers—
£ dream of a utopian ecological wilderness free of
N
&
& polluting industries.
s
*
The Postmodern tendency is to dismiss
ftw
mi we i1|
' f\
the concept of such a pure utopian
wilderness as a grand narrative. And
what’s more, this big story is based on that
SAVE A TRIE evil of Poststructuralist evils— a binary
\
opposition. In this case, the binary oppo-
sition wilderness/civilization.
Put other environmentalists—
especially those influenced by
poet and eco-activist Gary Snyde
are acting out a philosophy that is
both Foetmodem and ecological,
i
ft
i !
w
f,/.
U l& *

A
147
 instead of engaging in empty
theorizing while the forests and
rivers are suffering. Snyder’s
environmentalism is based on his
long immersion in Zen Buddhist
meditation and philosophy.
The Buddhist universe, like
the Postmodern universe, is made
up of countless heterogeneous
selves with countless heteroge -
neous viewpoints. Not a utopia,
based on one vision, but a het-
erotopia based on the visions of
countless Others. And all of
these Other selves— the selves
of mountain lions, redwoods,
rednecks, conservationists and
rivers— are interconnected and
mutually interdependent. And
because none of these selves
stand alone, by themselves, with-
out all the Others, their sepa -
rateness— their Otherness— is
Empty, an Illusion.
Thus, like that Native Ameri -
can trickster figure, Coyote,
>.
v
143
Snyder’s poetic eco - philoso -
phy dances around deconstruct -
ing the seeming “ separate selves
of “ wilderness” and “civilization.”
In practice, this means dancing
between and weaving together
ecological alliances between the
“ separate selves” of \ando\Nr\ ere,
corporations, federal agencies,
forests, mountains, mountain
lions and frogs. It means, too,
that we are all members of a
mutual eating society. We both
eat and are eaten. The eyes of
the mountain lion stalking us
are our own.
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(In Retrospect)
Q So then, what IS and confusing con - passively surrender.
Postmodernism? tours of our late According to
capitalistic times. cyberpunk, it is a
Q According to
Lyotard, it has to
According to vjor \d dominated by
Baudrillard, Post- multinational cor -
do with scepticism modernism is a flow porations and the
about Grand Narra - of ultra - technological data they control.
tives; and it is about images in a consum - Yet cyberpunks advo -
heterogeneity. Ac - eristhyperreality cate a hacker ethic,
cording to Jameson, acroee a mediascape tapping into and
it must involve a way or mindscreen to using such data for
of mapping the new which we can only personal ends.

149
 7
According to ity; by looking back-
Charles Jencks, ward to the past, or
however, all these \<
X sideways to a local
\
thinkers are only culture. Thus, while
describing late * - p
using modernist
techniques, they
capitalism or YOU &
late modernism. ME SR =7 i include the Other,
If
Authentic Post- humorously, ironically
m
m or playfully, rather
modernism, he
« v< •

argues, involves dou- than excluding it. This

- /
ble coding the artis- is why Jencks writes
•

s
tic representation Post- modernism with
of modernism with ment of the Other— a hyphen: because in
something else— whether that Other these Postmodern
some Other. For, is Other individuals, times, there are a lot
as all Postmodern Other groups, Other of hybrid identities.
thinkers would admit, species, Other races, And this is something
the world is shrinking. the Other of “ male,” quite new. For, as we
There is no one dom - the Other of “the have discussed, in
inant worldview. Plu- West,” the Other of past centuries we
ralism rules. Tradi- “ Europe,” the Other of looked for some
tional, modern , late the conscious mind, Supermyth or messi-
modern and Post- the Other of the ah to unite all of
modern attitudes rational mind, the humanity under the
all rub elbows in the Other of modernism, umbrella of one over-
same culture. the Other of “our- arching philosophy.
This means that self ” or in “ourself.” The Postmodern mind
the Other increasingly Through double has given up such a
encroaches upon coding, Postmodern hope. This has led to
what had once been architecture, art and a radical change
our private space. So literature represent in how we believe.
much of Postmodern the Other, and thus We are forced to
thought has to do present heterogene- recognize that our
with this encroach - wor \d resists grand
15o
narratives as much
as individuals and
groups crave them.
That our world is a
carnival of colorful
and contradictory
worldviews. We have
come to realize that
our view of reality
isn’t as real as it
once seemed. We have
come to realize that
there is not one reali-
ty but many different,
often conflicting reali-
ties. We have come to
see that our ideas
about truth are not
eternal, but made.
The ideas that the
only God is Yahweh,
or Allah, or the God -
dess, or that some
god named Bumba
vomited the Moon
and Stars, or the sci-
entific notion that
the Moon is a physi-
cal body of such and
such mass that
orbits another physi-
cal body, the planet
i
Earth, of such and K A
such a mass, in such objective reality. And
and such an orbit few believe that any
that can be mathe - one system of
matically described, thought, any one big
or that Western med - story or theory of
icine is superior to mythic proportions, is
Oriental herbalism, or capable of explaining
that being feminine everything. Not even
equals sugar and science is objective—
spice and everything because its data are
nice, or that the Cau - always dependent
casian race is the on theory. Realities
master race — are social, linguistic
all these are man- constructions—
It
made notions. useful fictions, rela -
1
They are tive perspectives.
% inventions—
j| If the grand nar-
lit they are ratives, the master
social con- narratives, the big
structs. Few stories, are no longer
people really believable— if they
5
oC
believe have disappeared—
4 I
anymore
# in an
they have been
rep\aced by a hodge -
podge of little narra -
tives. Postmodern
people, instead of
a dreaming of the day
when all the \Nor \ d
II m
%
will be united
k
- '
3 4
under the universal
i) banner of Marxism or
' i
25?,1
i
'
r
151
Christianity or Science, are more
interested in seeing the world as
a kind of carnival of cultures— a
tribal gathering.
The shining sun of Universal
Truth and Meaning is eclipsed by
the colorful display of little dances,
little stories. Big stories are
replaced by little stories. Stories
are no longer about an attempt
to establish some sort of univer -
sal Utopia, unless it be a hetero-
topia. They do not try to prove
themselves by making universal
claims. A Postmodern storyteller
may tell in one night the Grimms’
fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel
N
and the evil witch in the
dark forest who lives
in the gingerbread
house, a Native American trickster
tale of Coyote seducing the chief ’s
daughter, and an ancient myth from
India about the creation of the uni -
verse from a golden egg. The story-
teller and the audience form a
social bond, but it is the bonding of
a heterogeneous society that can
live with the incongruities, conflicts,
and gaps between the various sto -
ries. This Postmodern society does
not mind if one story says that the
Moon and Stars were vomited
forth, and another story proclaims
that the moon and stars were cre-
ated by God. Postmodern audiences
don’t demand that all the hetero-
geneous stories add up to some
grand , global, universal total sense;
instead, they celebrate the fact
that it’s 0l\ to stop making so
much sense. Because
of the explosion of cul-
tural messages, we are
beginning to under-
stand that not only our
1
stories but also our rit -
uals, religious dogmas,
' myths, gender roles, self
ft concepts, beliefs, histo-
*
ries and theories are
cultural, social inven -
tions. We are beginning
to realize that we live in a world of
man - made signs and symbols, and
we have begun to play around with
those signs and symbols humorous-
ly and ironically so that we are not
enslaved to them. This often means
accepting a Grand Narrative, but
having an ironic attitude toward it.
Thus we may be a “quasi” funda -
mentalist Christian or Muslim or
orthodox Jew or Catholic; we go to
church or to the synagogue or the
mosque, even though we may have
some doubts about the metaphysi-
cal claims propounded there. We
may believe that our particular
vocabulary and ideas about truth
have no special claim to reality.
That people with other orienta -
tions may be just as oriented to
their own reality. Just as often
it means participating in more
than one grand narrative— being
a Buddhist Christian, for instance.
The fragmentation of qrand nar-
ratives under the pressure of
multiple, local forces has liberated
the concern for Others. Whereas
modernist writers such as Conrad
thought they could speak for
Others— for the colonized, for
Africans, for women , for the
Orient— Postmodernism’s empha -
sis on differance (irreconcilable
difference) has allowed formerly
silenced Others such as women,
gays, blacks, orientals etc. to
express their own stories in their
own voices.

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 £j -
But is this really hap
Wov
^ BETTER DO IT MY Vs/*y pening? Haven’ t these Post -
modern times produced just
5?
52
f\
as frequently what Baudril -
mi
lard describes as a prolifer -
»
>
ation of myths of origin?
Hasn’t Postmodernism seen
a multiplication of cults,
5
* such as Japan’s Sarin Gas
Sect? And since there are
so many millions of people
caught up in cults and sects
and major religions, it
seems as though there is a
need for Grand Narratives
and that the Postmodern
era has even produced a
proliferation of them. So
how does one reconcile the
Postmodern notions that
people no longer believe
in Grand Narratives, that
Grand Narratives oppress
and marginalize minorities,
that there is no Big Picture,
that there is no Deep Struc -
ture to reality (and that if
there was, the human mind
could not know it ) with the
fact that Grand Narratives
are very much in evidence?
Q Yes, that’s true. The New Age
movements of the ’60s and '70 a
spirituality, while often serious
and eclectic, tended to be
drew inspiration from a mixture narcissistic and worshipful of
of pop- psychedelic gurus such authority figures.
as Timothy Leary, rock - shamans Although many Generation
such as Jim Morrison of the X- ers reject the psychedelic -
Doors, and mantra -chanting fueled communal hedonism of the
savants from India steeped in Boomers, much of Generation X
the £3hagavad G/ ta. Baby boomer spirituality continues to circulate
by means of images borrowed
.6 from pop and rock. Thus, in the
fj. same way that a big chunk of
a

a
I.
i
Boomer ‘ 60s spirituality depend-
ed on the image - mix of the Beat-
les and the Maharishi, in the
OF
MY NAltff ‘90s, public television elevated
$ s
i .
fa
yjmcw- mythologist Joseph Campbell to
*.
;• VJA'f
2 i
I the status of sainthood; MTV
If

icons such as Madonna writhed

2 to techno -beat tracks while dan-
/

t
gling religious-chic fashion bangles
I
such as cleavage-accenting
rosaries; fashion designers drew
5 - i f
i- inspiration from Hasidic Jewish
traditionalism and Amish under -
statement; austere monastic
chant CDs hit number one on the
pop charts; angels became widely
circulated images and a topic of
-6
s.- talk shows; the highly publicized
-
c
men’s movement and goddess
movement celebrated a return to

ii »•
A\
paganism; Gothic spirituality

155
 images of body- pierc- rs
>
** «**
<

ing, tattooing and 5/M
inundated MTV; and
cyberpunk morphed
into cybershamanism.
Cybershamanism, or
technoshamanism, by
the way, is a technopagan at-
tempt to create ancient
shamanistic experiences of
ecstasy (traditionally induced
by chanting, drumming, dancing ;
and the ingestion of psy-
E= choactive substances)
A
to fill in the post-
Nietzschean Void by
inventing our own
images and grand
V narratives. Are there
any traditional grand narratives
z from other cultures that are cap-
222 able of embracing difference?
QjYes. Although the grand narra -
tives of Christianity, Islam and
Judaism have a difficult time deal-
ing with differences, there are two

= through computerized fractal major traditions— Buddhism and

S art, designer drugs, and repe- Hinduism— that can and do embrace
5 titious music that fills the the differences in our increasingly
>
~~ room like incense. Sometimes rpluralistic world.

~~ cybershamans even engage

Buddhism is democratic, cool,
2= in toadlicking, a fad started practical, inexpensive, and ( because
*
*** * *
the liberation of Tibet from China has
="=*- by a rumor that ingesting
m#

sS the venom of a Colorado become a hip cause) Buddhism is

*****
River toad is a good idea. politically correct. Postmodern peoples
Sr. -r, .
The venom, however, .is m and cultures live in a world of differ-
often fatally toxic. ences. Buddhism’s philosophy of inter -
**
*********
~~2 dependence lets us see our differences
* *
»
***
w
'*
***'*** Q
that, in the
It seems === as a vast interconnected web. In fact,
5= same way as the mod- 22: the image Buddhists use to illustrate
*< *** •*
=
= = This is that of Indra’s net. At each inter-
’

****** ernists we are trying

52 section of the strands of this vast net,
*****»
t

*£*** *
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- 22 which is the universe of different selves, is

mm
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156
 r
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a jewel— a self — which reflects all the ~£**~**=**

\
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J mmum
**• Mi *

other jewels in the net. No single jewel, ss _ == , A

J.

then, is self - sufficient. Its existence de- ~~=

«»
T
pends upon, and reflects, all the others. -2=
And so, in Buddhist lingo, each jewel is Tsi
«***« «•>»• *"r

Empty of self-existence! 2 ~*”* A

1

Q This sounds a lot like deconstruc- •**•*^

>
< v

tion. You remember the image of

**•~** w**•* **u***w*v
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the face and the candle. Each are

mutually interdependent. Neither , ll illll«t
>lH|
|

can exist without the other. f s

C'.
rr?777T7 1
wr ' ' :iM h| .
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Q Yes. And a Buddhist would say,

“ Both the faces and the candle are
Vr 7'.
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,
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Empty of inherent existence1.” "
; Vj !
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 Baudrillard, Jean
( A) Amerique. ( Fane: Graeeet, 1966).
(SED) De \a eeduction. ( Fane: Galilee, 1960) .
The Ecetaey of Communication. Trans. Bernard and CaroWne
Schutze. (New York: Semiotext( e), 1966) .
For a Critique of the Foiiticai Economy of the Sign. Trans.
Charles Levin. (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1961).
(FF) Forget Foucault. Trans. Nicola Dufresne. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1967).
(SSM) In the Shadow of the Silent Majoritiee . .. o r the End of the
Social and Other Eeeaye. Trane. Paul Foss, Paul Fatton and
John Johnson. (New York: Semiotext (e), 1963).
(SIM) Simuiatione. Trans. Nicola Dufresne. ( New York: Semiotext(e) 1963).
La eociete de coneommation. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
Le eyeteme dee objete. (Paris: Denoel -Gonthier, 1966).
Csicery- Ronay, Istavan
(SRS) “ Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism,” in Storming the Reality Studio, Larry
McCaffery, ed. (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 164).
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix
Anti -Oedipue. Trane. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, preface
by Michel Foucault. (New York: Viking, 1977).
Kafka: For a Minor Literature. Trane. Dana Fo\an. (Minneapolis: Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1966).
‘Rhizome.’ Trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton, / and C & (1961): 49- 71.
A Thoueand Fiateaue: Capitaliem and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi.
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1967).
Derrida, Jacques
Of Grammatoiogy. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. (Baltimore: John UR 1976).
Eco, Umberto
(PNR) Foetecript to The Name of the Rose. ( New York and London: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1964) .
Foucault, Michel
Diecipline and Funieh: The Firth of the Frieon. Trane. Alan Sheridan. (New
York: Pantheon, 1977).
The Fiietory of Sexuality, Volume I: An introduction. Trane. Robert Hurley.
(New York: Pantheon, 1977).
The Order of Thinge: An Archaeology of the Human Sciencee. Trane. Alan
Sheridan. (New York: Pantheon, 1970).

150
Gibson, William
(N) Neuromancer. (New York: Ace, 1937).
Haraway, Donna
“ A Cyborg Manifesto: 5cience, Technology, and Socialist Formation in the
Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborge and Women: The Reinvention
of Nature. (New York: Routledge, 1991).

Harvey, David
The Condition of Foetmodernity. ( Blackwell: Oxford, 1990).
Hassan, lhab
( TLP) The Diememberment of Orpheue: Toward a Foetmodern Literature.
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932).
Hemingway, Ernest
( SSEH) The Short Storiee of Ernest Hemingway. ( New York: Scribner’s, 1925).
Jameson, Fredric
(PCL) “ Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left
Review, 146 (1934): 53- 92.
(PCS) “ Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” In Postmodern Culture, Hal
Foster, ed. (London and Sydney: 1935) .
Lyotard, Jean Francois
(DF) Diecoure, figure, Paris: Klincksieck, 1971.
( PC) The Foetmodern Condition, Trans. Bennington and
Massumi. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1934,
first edition 1979).
Schwichtenberg, Cathy
( MPF) “ Madonna’s Foetmodern Feminism,” in The Madonna Connection. Cathy
Schwichtenberg, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).
Venturi, Robert; Scott Brown, Denise; and Izenour, Steven
( LLV) Learning from Lae Vegae. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977).

159
 A c
advertising, 144 Cage, John, 13, 73, 79
aesthetic of cognitive mapping, 40 Campbell, Joseph, 156
African sculpture, 13 capitalism, 35, 116
Age of Reason, 5-13, 15, 23-29 central symbols, 100-104, 106
Ages of Modernism, Postmodernism, Realism Cezanne, Paul, 121
(Jameson), 36-37 Mont Saint -Victoire, 21
Allegorical Classicism, 92 Christianity, 11, 12, 29
Andrejevic, Millet, Apollo and Daphne, 93 Classical Sensibility, 93
anthropomorphism, 33-39 codes, of power, 95
anti -art, 13 Communism, 19, 93
arboresence, 103-14 computers, and knowledge, 22-23
architecture, 72-32, 34— 33 consumption, 45-47
art Coyote (Snyder), 143
for art’s sake, 13 Csicsery-Ronay, Istavan, 137
as modernist response to the void, 13-14 Cubism, 13-14, 121
audioanimatronic paparazzi, 135 cyberpunk, 123, 123, 130-33, 149, 156
cyberspace, 3-4, 134— 35
B
cyborgs, 129-30, 134
.
Sach, J. 5 , 113
Sacon , Francis, 9 P
Sarbie Liberation Organization, 144 Death of the Real ( Saudrillard), 59-64
Saroque era, 113 deconstruction, 96, 99-107, 157
Sarthes, Roland, 93 Deleuze, Gilles, 93, 103-15
Saudrillard, Jean, 41-71, 95, 114, 123-24, 136, democracy, 119
149 denotative statement, 26
America, 67-69 Derrida, Jacques, 93, 96, 99-107
The Ecstasy of Communication, 69-71 Structure, Sign and Flay in the
For a Critique of the Political Economy Discourse of the Human Sciences, 99
of the Sign, 45 deterrence model, 53
On deduction, 65-67 Dionysus, 10
The Orders of the Simulacra, 43-64 discourse, scientific vs. narrative, 23-33
Shadow of the Silent Majorities, 64-65 Donne, John, 113
The Society of Consumption, 45 double coding, 31-33, 39, 126, 133, 150
The System of Objects, 45 dreams, 20, 112
Sauhaus School, 72 Drumheller, Grant, Lightning Thrower, 92
Seckett, Samuel, 73 Durkheim, Emile, Elementary Forms of
Shagavad Oita, 155 Religious Life, 121
binary opposites, 101-3, 105-7, 130, 139, 147
binary regulation, 52-53 E
“ Slade Runner” (film), 122-23, 133 eclecticism, 31-33, 34, 33
Sonaventure Hotel ( Los Angeles), 37-33 Eco, Umberto, 30
Sorges, Jorge Luis, 53 ego, 33
Sr own , Denise Scott, 35 Einstein, Albert, 121
Suddhism, 147-43, 156-57 Eliot, T. S., 14
Surke, Edmund, 9 The Wasteland, 16
burroughs, William, lb Enlightenment, 23, 97, 113-19
environmentalism, 147-43
exchange value, 46
existentialism, 99

160
F
falsification, rule of, 27 iconoclasm, 56
feudal era, 46-49, 116-17 Independent Group, lb
film, 145-46 Industrial Revolution, 50, 51
Fischl, Eric, Bad Boy, 91 International Style, 72-77, 64
Flaubert, Gustave, 121 internet, 114
Foucault, Michel, 95, 94— 96 Izenour, Steven, 65
freedom, 29-50
French intellectuals, 26-29, 97-99 J
French Revolution, 9, 26 Jameson, Frederic, 54— 40, 146-49
Freud, Sigmund, 14 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic
Fuller, Buckminster, 76, 79 of Late Capitalism, 55-56
Jencks, Charles, 76-64, 66, 90, 92, 149, 150
G The Language of Post -modern
gender roles, 159-42 Architecture, lb
Generation X, 155 Johnson, Philip, AT&T Building ( New York), 66
Genet, Jean, lb Joyce, James, 14, lb, 121
George, Paul, My Rent State, 91 Finnegan’e Wake, 16, 79
Gibson, William, 156 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Neuromancer, 125, 152-54 15, 144
Gogh, Vincent van, feasant Shoes, 56, 57 Ulysses, 16
grand narratives. See metanarratives “Jurassic Park” (film), 54
( Lyotard)
Graves, Michael, 62-65
K
Rafka, Franz, 112-15
Portland Public Services Building, 62
“ Letter to His Father,” 112
Gropius, Walter, 72
The Metamorphosis, 16, 112-15
Guattari, Feliz, 95, 106-14
The Trial, 115
H Randinsky, Vassily, 72
Haraway, Donna, 126-50 Rlee, Paul, 72
bimians, Oyborgs and Women: The knowledge
Reinvention of Nature, 129 and computers, 22-25
Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity, and poststructuralism, 94
116-22 and science, 29-51
Hassan, lhab, 17-16 Rrier, Leon, 91
“ POSTmodernISM A Paracritical bibliogra - Rristeva, Julia, 95
phy” ( essay), 76
Hegel, G. W. F., 29-50 L
Lacan, Jacques, 20
Hemingway, Ernest, 12, 54, 56-59
heterogeneity, 21-22, 150 language
and poststructuralism, 94
heterotopia, 146, 152
hierarchy, vs. non- hierarchical (rhizomatic) and scientific investigation, 22-25
thinking, 106-15 types of, 26, 52
“ Highbrow” culture, 16, 57 vs. the unconscious, 20
Hinduism, 156, 157 Lascaux caves, simulacrum of, 60
history, awareness of, 40 Lawrence, D. H., 14
Hitler, Adolf, 11, 15 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Brown,
Holocaust, 15, 20-21, 50 Izenour), 65-66
HotWired, 156 Leary, Timothy, 155
Le Corbusier, 56, 75-76
hyperreality, 60-64, 156
161
 Ligare, David, Woman in a Greek Chair, 92 New Wave of French theory, 42
logic, 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10-11, 12-13
“ Lowbrow” culture, 16, 37 non - art , 16
Lyotard, JeanFrancois, 19-33, 146 novels, modernist vs. postmodern, 144, 145
Discourse/ figure, 20
The Poet - modern Condition: a report on o
knowledge, 22 objects, as commodities, 45-47
Oedipus complex, 110-13
M Onis, Federico de, 76
machine age mythos, 15 other, the, 150
Madonna , 136-42, 156
“Justify My Love” (video), 140-41 P
“ make it new” ( Pound), 13, 74 paradox , 31, 66
Mandel, Ernest, Late Capitalism, 35-36 parody, 36-39, 62, 69, 92, 127
Manet, Edouard, 14, 121 Parthenon, 75
Mao Tse Tung, 11 pastiche, 36-39, 62, 69, 126, 127
market capitalism, 35 Pearlstein, Philip, Two Female Models on
Marx, Karl, 9 Brentwood Loveseat and Pug , 92
Marxism, 19, 29, 40, 42, 43, 45-47, 96 performativity, 31
Masaccio, Trinity, 21 philosophical narrative, 26 29
-

mass culture, 41, 76 piazzas, 91

McLuhan, Marshall, 76 Plato, 74, 110
meaning pluralism, 66
in language, 43-47 political art , 22
in postmodern architecture, 69-90 political narrative, 26-29
Medieval era, 117 Pop Art, 37, 76
melancholic Classicism, 91 Postmodern Classicism, 90-93
metanarratives (Lyotard), 29-33, 94, 146-57 postmodernism
metaphor, poetic, 22 in architecture, 76-90
Metaphysical Classicism, 91 in the arts, 5
micronarratives, 32-33 beginning of movement, 76
models, 51-52 language of, 6-7
of power, 95 meaning of, 7, 146-57
modernism, 17-16 vs. modern ism, 17-16
artistic styles in, 13-16 Poststructuralism, 93-121
meaning of, 6-16 Pound, Ezra, 13, 15, 74
vs. postmodernism, 17-16 “ Cantos,” 16
MONDO 2000, 136 power
Monet, Claude, 14 and knowledge (Foucault), 94
monopoly capitalism, 35 of Madonna , 141-42
Morrison, Jim, 155 micropolitics of, 94-96
Moses, Grandma , 92 progress, idea of, 6-13, 15, 29-30
MTV, 143-44, 156 Proust, Marcel, 121
multiculturalism, 1-4 Ptolemaic map-making, 117
Munch, Edvard, The Scream, 36 Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity's Painbow, 22
music, 24
R
Mussolini, 15
Reagan, Ronald , 95
myths, 24— 27, 32, 59
Realist Classicism, 92
N reason , 9, 26-29
naive realism, 92 reinforced concrete, 50, 74
nano - rover, 135 Renaissance, 50, 117-16
Narrative Classicism, 91 Renault, Camille, 50
Nazis, 20, 30
New Age movements, 155
s
Sade, Marquis de, 9

162
Sartre, Jean Paul, 42, 96 Wired, 136
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 43-44 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 26
scepticism, 56 Wolff, Pito, 91
Scheer, Leo, 114 Wood, Grant , 92
schizophrenia, 107
science, 9 Y
and transmission of knowledge, 22-23 Yeats, William Sutler, 6, 14
science fiction, 71, 136-37
seduction, 65-67
semiotics, 43, 45-46
sex and sexuality, 66-67, 92, 96, 135
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 132
Sherman, Cindy, Untitled Film Stills, 142-43
simulacra, 95, 123-27, 136, 136
simulacrum- ism, 56
Snyder, Gary, 147-46
Socialism or Sarbarism (leftist group), 19
space, perceptions of, 116-22
space - time compression, 116
Stalin, Josef, 11
steel, 74
storytelling, 144
stream of consciousness, 16
stucco, 50
student uprisings, 42-43, 96
subject, 36
subverting, 144
Superman concept, 10-11, 12-13
SuperPace concept , 15
T
teledildonics, 135
television, 143
time, perceptions of, 116-22
Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, 67
Toynbee, Arnold, 76

u
unconscious, the, 20
Unity of Knowledge (Hegel), 29-30
urbanism, 66
use value, 45
utopias, 36, 77, 79, 63, 119, 147, 146, 152
V
Venturi, Robert, 65
verification, rule of, 27
void, the, 6, 11-13, 32

w
Warhol, Andy, 37, 76
Diamond Dust Shoes, 37
Weber, Max, 9
Wenders, Wim, “ Wings of Pesire” (film), 145-46
Williams, William Carlos, 15
Will to Power, 10

163
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