In Search of a Hybrid:
Have Modernism and PostmodernismConjugated?
By Michael R. Brink
1995
" Postmodernism… to some it's an excuse to pile together oodles of wild and crazy décor; to others, it's another example of the weakening of standards and values; to others, a transgressive resistance to the sureness of categories; to others, a handy way to describe a particular house, dress, car, artist, dessert, or pet; and to others it's simply over. "1 Barbara Kruger
The battle lines were drawn in the 1950s and '60s. The theologians clashed in the '70s and '80s. Now it's the '90s, and art historians stand poised to deliver the death blow to post modernism.
One such attempt will be made soon by William Innes Homer. The working title for his new book is " Modernism, Post-modernism, and Neo-modernism: Paradigms for the '90s." He is confident that his new book "… will change how people look at the world, how they will think about the present, and how they will define the future."2 These are lofty goals to be sure. But, while we await his revelations on neo-modernism, a curious hybrid of modern and postmodern origins seems to be emerging.
An understanding of this hybridization is not easily attainable. The prefix "post" suggests a period of time that follows a previous period of time, which has ended. Yet the modern/postmodern debate enfolds around concurrent philosophies of communication, representation, and evaluation.
A condensation of these major conflicts follows, and is helpful in the appreciation of the factors that have contributed to the inadequacies of both modernism and postmodernism.
For the purposes of the following discussion: "Modernity" will represent a strong current in western thought that began with the "Enlightenment" in the 17th century; "Modernism will represent the movement in the arts that began around the beginning of the 20th century. "Modern" will be relative to one of the above contexts and "post" will refer to that which comes after.
The totality of meaning, or a sign that signifies a limited number of objects or subjects is a tenet of modernity, and has been a major focus of post modernist theory. In order to combat the authority that would determine a single or limited meaning for a particular "sign", the postmodern theorists have developed the concept of simulation.
The simulation is a lever used by postmoderns, which picks away at the cracks in the foundation of modernity's determinisms. Truth and reality are under scrutiny.
A real or actual object or subject is represented by a sign. The sign signifies that real or actual object or subject. The sign may be arbitrarily chosen. The sign however, does not have to be represented by the real or actual object or subject. Both sides generally accept this premise.
To simulate is to give a false appearance of reality. Whether or not a sign represents reality or simulates reality is always in question. Jean Baudrillard uses an allegory of a person that claims to be ill, to illustrate this: "To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. One implies presence and the other absence. But, the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign. Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and make believe he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some symptoms."3 This simulated illness would be manipulated to create the measurable image of illness in the patient. As follows, the image of illness would be the simulated sign of a real or actual illness. Simulations are ultimately manipulatable to ones end. This precept calls into question whether any sign can be discerned to be real, or the simulated product of the manipulator. A simulation is opposed to its representation of reality or it would be real or actual.
For postmodernism, the "image" is the sign that represents or simulates the real. The hierarchy of the "image" is as follows. First, the image is the reflection of a basic reality(Good). Second, the image masks and perverts a basic reality (Evil). Third, the image masks the absence of a basic reality (Sorcery). Finally, the image bears no relation to any reality (Fantasy); it is its own "Simulacrum"4
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth that conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true. Ecclesiastes
Modernity is based on the metanarratives of the "Enlightenment". A metanarrative is the idea that all can be grasped through a single theory. Metanarratives have the effect of creating homogeneity and repressing difference. To J.F. Lyotard, the opportunity for the abuse of metanarratives is inherent and immediately suspect. "I will use the term Modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metediscourse… making an explicit appeal to grand narrative…".5 This is not only to say that the "all encompassing" metanarratives are suspected residents of the "simulacrum", but that all science legitimated by them be labeled "modern" and reside there as well. This is meant to include the concepts of scientific method and logocentric systems. Since this postulate is in itself all encompassing, the foundation of postmodernism cracks. If all metanarratives of modernity are suspect, so must the suspicion of those who doubt them.
Any sign, either representative or simulative, may be labeled factual, and used to support metanarratives by opposing points of view (models). The facts do not seek out the model by themselves; all models pick up the facts. Even the most contradictory may be true. In the image of the model, from which they come, all facts are true. No models claim to be determinant.6 This is a reversible continuity.
For Baudrillard, a discourse does not have to follow from point to point in a linear fashion, but may proceed in either direction in a circular discourse which can swing around and prove the original with its opposite. What is originally opposed may be perpetuated in this manner. "It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary, proving the system by crisis, proving art by anti-art…".7
These are an encapsulation of the means of persuasion, which have accompanied us through the post W.W. II era and its increasingly global and plural times. The persuasive effects of modern metanarratives have been waning. Indeed, one would have to return to a more isolated and separated order for such exclusive determinisms and totalities to outweigh the more inclusive and non-deterministic order of postmodernity. To be sure, it is not being said here that this cannot happen.
The critical discourse in art during the '70s and '80s constitutes the opening up of "postmodern theory" (this term is used here to describe the previously encapsulated version of the means of postmodern persuasion) throughout our culture. Modernism's tenets of reductive, isolative, and transcendental empiricisms have been eroded. "Today… modern art is beginning to lose its powers of negotiation. For some years now, its rejections have been ritual repetitions: rebellion has turned into procedure, criticism into rhetoric, transgression into ceremony. Negotiation is no longer creative. I am not saying that we are living the end of art: we are living the end of the idea of modern art."8
The modern experiment to bring to society art, science, and morality has once again been challenged by society which rejects its repressive tendencies toward totality. Remember that Art for Art's sake, Impressionism, Da Da, and surrealism have all been involved in the battle, and have had their lasting effects. Postmodernism may be no different, as the traditional modernist critics sharpen their pencils to dissect, observe, assign, determinize, and then historicize a "postmodern revolt", which will naturally, linearly, and pitifully have failed. The reemergence of the modern paradigm or the "neo-modern", may signal the return of the pendulum.
Jurgen Habermas has created three categories of conservatives: the old conservatives, the young conservatives and the neo-conservatives. "This typology is like any other, of course, a simplification. But, it may not prove totally useless for the analysis of contemporary intellectual and political confrontations. The old conservatives do not allow themselves to be contaminated by cultural modernism. They observe the decline of substantive reason, morality in art, and differentiation in science with sadness, and recommend a withdrawal to a position anterior to modernity. The young conservatives recapitulate the basic experience of aesthetic modernity… they step outside the modern world… they justify an irreconcilable anti-modernism. The neo-conservatives welcome the development of science… to carry forward technical progress, capital growth, and rational administration… with the confinement of science, morality, and art to autonomous sphere… separated and administered by experts. These are all conservatives who support the basic tenets of modernity, yet adopt other pretenses from modernity's detractors: The old conservatives, premodernism; the young conservatives, anti-modernism; and the neo-conservatives, postmodernism."9
Postmodernism is under attack. Robert Huges' article, "The Purple Haze of Hype" (Time Magazine, Nov. 16, 1992), expresses a sadness in the decline of art in the '80s, while drawing parallels between the death of Jimi Hendrix and Jean-Michel Basquiant. In Peter Plagens' "Say No to Po-Mo" ( Newsweek, Dec. 26, 1994), It seems to have been the fault of all of these "French intellectuals" and the "young American artists who love them". These examples generally revolve around character assassination, blame assignment, and some direct insult.
But, serious conservative analysis is also taking aim at postmodernism. In "The Snapshooters of History", Steve Edwards creates a minefield of critical thought. He sees the "left" as having established aesthetic power. "whilst the kinds of differences of which postmodernist speak might be a fine democratic ideal, the problem remains how to face a highly organized, disciplined, and and motivated state with a hippy notion of spontaneous difference."10 He says that the politics of pluralism do not include differentiation: "…none of these differences is any more fundamental than any other. Each is equally productive of meaning, while any attempt to elevate some over others is repressive."11 He suggests that differences should be evaluated: "While philosophical theories cannot be proved, they can be tried out in practice. But, this necessitates long duration's if research programmes are not to be abandoned at the first hurdle… we need to concider theories in relation to various possible contingencies. "12 He claims that postmodernists are deluded: "…postmodernists are blind to the historical determinants of their own discourse… they misrecognize their dilemmas, their imaginaire as the (post) modern condition…they misread their ability to produce a discourse which fastens on to the real as the impossibility of realism… their crisis is the crisis of knowledge."13 He describes the structural shell of postmodernism as an unstable "machine of power" or a "total mechanism", which would collapse under its own weight if it weren't for the "ad hoc escape clauses" that protect them from their own logic. He points to world economic integration, the near global spread of capitalism, and technical advances as the undaunted nature of modernity, and aesthetic modernism need only wait for postmodernism to self-destruct.14 Edwards encapsulates postmodernism in an anti-modern shell, in order to prove modernism. The "left" has a "motivated state" and a "machine of power", and yet is ready to collapse of its own disarray. It won't be any hindrance to the slow creep of modernity. He doesn't offer any metanarratives, but postmodernism must constrain itself to experimentation. It seems that postmodernist theory has had its effect on Edwards, and has categorized him as a neo-conservative. Or has it?
Edward's analysis casts a light on the paradox, which surround both modern and postmodern. Their antagonists have afflicted the neo-modernists. They at times take on an image that is not a reflection of the basic realities of modernism. The postmodernists, espousing non-determinacy, have never claimed to be an entity. "The notion that we can build up to a complete or… total view of postmodernity would be an anathema."15 With both of their foundations cracked, they lean on each other while they attack one another. They retain their own characteristics, while utilizing the others. They are both hybrids; they are of mixed origin.
Self-preservation has required aesthetic experience to reign in both modernism and postmodernism. "Nothing is more unfitting for an intellectual practicing what was… called philosophy, than to wish… to be right. The very wish to be right , down to the subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down."16 Simple survival has prompted artists to make their work have value (monetary) and acceptability (in the marketplace).
The category "Art" has become entirely contingent and arbitrary. Work is actively or passively constructed or deconstructed. Originality and appropriation, authorship and textuallity, representation and simulation may be separated or combined at will or within constraint. The marketplace (critics, curators, spectators, and buyers) will make the determinations of value and acceptability.
This has been the experience of artists from the '80s to the present. Marcel Duchamp's "new thought for that object" has evolved into a "new thought for art". William Innes Homer's new book promises us a new paradigm, neo-modernism. Could this new paradigm be a hybrid of modern and postmodern theory? The answer is with us.
Citations
1. Kruger, Barbara. Arts and Leisures. New York Times, 1990.
2.Brace, Eric. William Innes Homer: Rethinking the Present. Art News, No.4 May, 1995. p 256.
3. Baudrillard, JeanJaques. The Precession of Simulcra. Art and Text, No. 11, Sept 1983, p 84.
4. ----I bid. pp 257.
5. Lyotard, Jean. The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge. 1979. (trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi) Manchester University Press, 1986, p xiii.
6. Baudrillard, op. Cit. P 264-5.
7. ----I bid. pp 266.
8. Paz, Octavio. Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry From Romanticism to the Avant Guard.
9. Habermas, Jurgen. Modernity versus Postmodernity. New German Critique, No. 22, Winyer, 1981, pp 10-1.
10.Edwards, Steve. The Snapshooters of History: Passages on the Postmodern Argument. Ten-8 International Photography magazine, UK, No. 32, 1989, p 10.
11. ----I bid. P 10.
12. ----I bid. P 10.
13. ----I bid. P 12.
14. ----I bid. P 14.
15. Lyon, David. Postmodernity. University of Minnesota Press, 1994, p 11.
16. Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia.
Bibliography
Books
Cheetham, Mark A, and Linda Hutcheon. Remembering Postmodernism: Trends in recent Canadian Art. Oxford University Press, 1991.
Lyon, David. Postmodernity. University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Rosatti, Howard, ed. Postmodern perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art. Prentice Hall, 1990.
Wallis, Brian, ed. Art After Modernism. The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984.
Periodicals
Brace, Eric. William Innes Homer: Rethinking the Present. Art News, No. 4, May 1995, p 84.
Edwards, Steve. Snapshooters of history: Passages on the Postmodern Argument. Ten-8 International Photography Magazine, UK No. 32, 1989, pp 2-21.
Huges, Robert. The Purple Haze of Hype. Time, 16 Nov. 1992, pp 88-90.
Karmel, Pepe. Out of the Getto. Art News, No. 4, April, 1994,pp 144-150.
Kruger, Barbara. Voicing Today's Visions.
Mc Evilley, Thomas. A Time to Choose. Art Forum, No. 6, Feb. 1994, pp 128-9.
Miller, Stephen. A postmodern Age: What is it? Current, No. 8, Jan. 1994, pp 128-9
Plagens, peter. Say No To Po Mo. Newsweek, 26 Dec. 1994, pp 120-21.
Richard, Nelly. Postmodern Disallignments and Allignments of the Center/ Periphery. Art Journal, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp 57-60.
Shusterman, Richard. Bk. Rev. (Jamison, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitolism.) The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, No. 3, Summer, 1992. pp 254-8.