The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond

Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new
paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new
technologies and contemporary social forces.

The terms by which authority, knowledge, selfhood, reality and time are conceived have
been altered, suddenly and forever.

somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-
structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the
relationships between them.

Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme
importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish
him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the
degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the
democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of
the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).

Let me explain. Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before

which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were
problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor,
which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individuals action the necessary condition
of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or
parts of programmes, all texts, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by
the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and
emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a
telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).

By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist unless the
individual intervenes physically in them. Great Expectations will exist materially whether
anyone reads it or not. Once Dickens had finished writing it and the publisher released it
into the world, its material textuality its selection of words was made and finished,
even though its meanings, how people interpret it, would remain largely up for grabs. Its
material production and its constitution were decided by its suppliers, that is, its author,
publisher, serialiser etc alone only the meaning was the domain of the reader. Big
Brother on the other hand, to take a typical pseudo-modern cultural text, would not exist
materially if nobody phoned up to vote its contestants off. Voting is thus part of the
material textuality of the programme the telephoning viewers write the programme
themselves. If it were not possible for viewers to write sections of Big Brother, it would
then uncannily resemble an Andy Warhol film: neurotic, youthful exhibitionists inertly
bitching and talking aimlessly in rooms for hour after hour. This is to say, what makes Big
Brother what it is, is the viewers act of phoning in.

Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose content

increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on the news items.
The terminology of interactivity is equally inappropriate here, since there is no exchange:
instead, the viewer or listener enters writes a segment of the programme then departs,
returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which
similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within
pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies
according to the particular player.

The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its central act is
that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which
cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never
existed before and never will again. This is a far more intense engagement with the
cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or
illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement
with the cultural product. Internet pages are not authored in the sense that anyone knows
who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the individual to make them work,
like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or
through feedback on, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the
internet that you can easily make up pages yourself (eg blogs).

If the internet and its use define and dominate pseudo-modernism, the new era has also
seen the revamping of older forms along its lines. Cinema in the pseudo-modern age looks
more and more like a computer game. Its images, which once came from the real world
framed, lit, soundtracked and edited together by ingenious directors to guide the viewers
thoughts or emotions are now increasingly created through a computer. And they look it.
Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI
frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of
the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened;
pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in
cyberspace. And so cinema has given cultural ground not merely to the computer as a
generator of its images, but to the computer game as the model of its relationship with the
viewer.

Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV (yet another
unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the viewer calls to guess
the answer to riddles in the hope of winning money. It also favours phenomena like Ceefax
and Teletext. But rather than bemoan the new situation, it is more useful to find ways of
making these new conditions conduits for cultural achievements instead of the vacuity
currently evident. It is important here to see that whereas the form may change (Big
Brother may wither on the vine), the terms by which individuals relate to their television
screen and consequently what broadcasters show have incontrovertibly changed. The
purely spectacular function of television, as with all the arts, has become a marginal one:
what is central now is the busy, active, forging work of the individual who would once have
been called its recipient. In all of this, the viewer feels powerful and is indeed necessary;
the author as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets
the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant, unknown,
sidelined; and the text is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and by its
instability. It is made up by the viewer, if not in its content then in its sequence you
wouldnt read Middlemarch by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you might
well, and justifiably, read Ceefax that way.

A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality
TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be
reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less
attractive entity. Ceefax text dies after a few hours. If scholars give the date they
referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so
quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form;
printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by
destroying their essential, electronic state. Radio phone-ins, computer games their shelf-
life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no
memory certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which
informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-
modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no
sense of either past or future.

The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as Ive hinted.
The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which beget and which end
life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of
contemporary cinemas technical effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in
comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, a
shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert.
Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can adapt them for meaningful
artistic expression (and then the pejorative label I have given pseudo-modernism may no
longer be appropriate), for now we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing
almost nothing of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value anything which human
beings might look at again and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time.

The roots of pseudo-modernism can be traced back through the years dominated by
postmodernism. Dance music and industrial pornography, for instance, products of the late
70s and 80s, tend to the ephemeral, to the vacuous on the level of signification, and to the
unauthored (dance much more so than pop or rock). They also foreground the activity of
their reception: dance music is to be danced to, porn is not to be read or watched but
used, in a way which generates the pseudo-modern illusion of participation. In music, the
pseudo-modern superseding of the artist-dominated album as monolithic text by the
downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the
listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fans creation of compilation tapes a
generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan
has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music, rendering the idea of the
album as a coherent work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete.

Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and other performing
arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes
have participation built into them.

The pseudo-modern text, with all its peculiarities, stands as the central, dominant,
paradigmatic form of cultural product today, although culture, in its margins, still knows
other kinds. Nor should these other kinds be stigmatised as passive against pseudo-
modernitys activity. Reading, listening, watching always had their kinds of activity; but
there is a physicality to the actions of the pseudo-modern text-maker, and a necessity to
his or her actions as regards the composition of the text, as well as a domination which has
changed the cultural balance of power (note how cinema and TV, yesterdays giants, have
bowed before it). It forms the twenty-first centurys social-historical-cultural hegemony.
Moreover, the activity of pseudo-modernism has its own specificity: it is electronic, and
textual, but ephemeral.

In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism one

phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads.

Whereas postmodernism called reality into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real
implicitly as myself, now, interacting with its texts. Thus, pseudo-modernism suggests
that whatever it does or makes is what is reality.

Dr Alan Kirby 2006