Post-modernism: Imaging reality
through TV images

By Y. P. Dhawan

WHAT is at the core of post-modernism is the belief that the very project of modernity with its trust in truth and reason is faulty. Post-modernist thinkers are sceptical of the supremacy of reason and their critique is chiefly directed against metanarratives of progress and enlightenment. This is because after the student revolution of 1968 in France and other political developments in the Third World it became clear that the possibilities of emancipation are not open to mankind in anything like the way it was imagined by elder European thinkers.

As Harvey has put it, post-modernism is a new structure or mode of feeling, a special manner of experiencing, interpreting and being in the world which has undermined modernist sentiments. For post-modernist thinkers thought is not equal to existence as human beings are fragmented and decentred and are unable to project themselves into actual possibilities in time. Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard were all Marxists at one time, but they all came to a similar conclusion in their philosophical investigations. They came to the conclusion that there is no subject of history, that the human subject is dead and any belief in linear progress, technology, science and reason is just an illusion. All the three thinkers mentioned above are suspicious of Marxist and Freudian philosophies (and these are two of the most influential metanarratives of modern times) to unmask prevailing forms of distortion and domination in society.

The complaint against Marxism is that it cannot resolve social contradictions and against philosophies of enlightenment they level the charge that these are terroristic — terroristic in the sense that they legitimise the suppression of differences among different races, nations and cultures. Lyotard happens to think that society is a series of language games and no language game is superior to another language game. For him all languages have equal validity and for any one language to regulate other languages is terror. Lyotard exclaims: "Let us wage a war against totality. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one." In place of reason, progress, order and enlightenment post-modernist thinkers put indeterminacy, fragmentation, heterogeneity and difference.

Baudrillard wants to invert the priority of use values in the Marxian approach by arguing that use values and needs are only an effect of exchange values. Baudrillard doesn’t find much use for such central Marxist concepts as production, mode of production, productive forces and comes to the conclusion that the age of production has been replaced by the age of signs.

According to Baudrillard "codes, spectacles, models, images and the interplay of signs become the organising principles of contemporary life in advanced capitalist societies." The surprising thing is that these images and signs (television has a primacy among the media in producing these images) don’t refer to anything outside themselves; they have no referent.

Baudrillard further says that the new world is characterised by hyperreality: "from now on signs will exchange among themselves exclusively, without interacting with the real." What it means is that it is not reality but images which regulate social life. All the traditional criteria of value vanish in the seductiveness of images. Everything becomes indeterminate; everything becomes undecideable.

All the grand narratives — Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist, Freudian — were centred on reality which was seen to lie outside the philosophical or psychological discourses themselves; but today what Lyotard and Baudrillard can grasp behind reality are only images and signs. Signs openly proclaim that there is nothing behind them; the image "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum." In advanced western countries — and the process is underway in Eastern countries as well — there is a short-circuit of reality by an endless proliferation and reduplication of images. Everyday reality in the western world has become pervaded with a new type of reality represented by television, advertisements, video, computerisation, the Walkman and cassette decks in automobiles etc. Today, there is no strict division between high and popular culture as the modern man, who may have his basis in the media, higher education, finance, advertising, merchandising and international exchanges, is as much interested in jazz, art films or new Hollywood cinema as in Derrida and Foucault.

The problematisation of reality in post-modern society comes from the fact that the very surface of reality is largely made up of images or signs. Reality has been transformed and made flimsy by pervading images.

All post-modernist thinkers agree that reality itself is characterised by chaos, contradiction, flimsiness and fragmentation and, today, it has become difficult to believe in the idea that our lives can be ordered into a significant unity by logos or reason. Post-modernism has reached the conclusion that reason for us can no longer be a source of illumination as it was for previous ages in which philosophy Enlightenment was widely seen to be in accord with reality. This epistemological change is at the root of post-modernist revolution in thinking. In Foucault’s philosophy there is a noticeable shift from the Same to the Other and the urgent need of human thinking in our times is to view reality from the perspective of the Other. Students of Foucault know that his primary interest as a thinker was to develop a counter discourse — technically called a discourse of non-discursive language — in which the voice of the Other, who had been subjugated and dominated in history, could be heard. The beginnings of post-modernism can be located in this counter discourse.

According to Foucault discourse emphasises the point of view of the Same, the autonomous, rationally self-consistent individual who evolved out of the philosophies of Descartes and Kant. Discourse, which is principally associated with the names of Descartes, Kant and Hegel, is characterised by light, by reason, by logos, while counter discourse is characterised by darkness, by the exclusion and historical neglect of the Other. The Other is a figure of madness, of sexuality, of desire, of death and bears strong resemblance to Freud’s unconscious. Foucault’s fame principally rests on the fact that he become a theoretician of the Other’s existential plight in life.

By admitting madness, sexuality, desire and death as the central subjects of counter discourse, Foucault embarked on a new kind of theoretical investigation which gave us a profound understanding of how lunatics, prisoners, prostitutes, homosexuals and all others who have been marked by the nightmare of rejection and non-identity have been systematically subjugated and dominated by the imperialist psychology of the Same.

For the post-modernists, a paradigm change in modern thinking is provided by the aesthetic realm. Susan Sontag was among the first writers in 1960s to differentiate between an aesthetics of sensation and an aesthetics of interpretation. She claimed that "in a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. It is simultaneously the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow of meanings." She argued for "erotics of art" against "hermeneutics of art" and wanted a work of art not to be a text but another sensory thing in the world. The quarrel between Habermas (who is the foremost rationalist thinker of the modern West) and post-modernists is largely a quarrel between communicative/substantive rationality and the sensual — aesthetic realm.

Habermas’s criticism is that in the works of French writers the aesthetic realm is not sufficiently related to the social. According to Marxists and Critical theorists post-modernist thinkers are a political and have little concern with contemporaneous social struggles.

What is the need to show off?
By Suneeta Chahar

IN life one comes across thousands of people over the years. Some of them are forgotten because one does not meet them often or because they do not click. And there are others with whom you develop a rapport within one meeting only. But there are some painful relations which you have to endure. One goes through the torture of putting up with them because you do not want to be rude while listening to their bragging. If one happens to respond with proper exclamations, the ordeal can last for hours together. Your facial muscles start aching with artificial smiles but the other party is quite oblivious to the torture inflicted on you.

Many a times people brag about how young they look, how people mistake them for being unmarried inspite of their having children, or, say, how people comment on their youthful looks. This reminds one what Washington Irving, an American author, had to say about looking young compliments. He says: "Whenever a man’s friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old." Many people try to hide their age which makes one wonder, why do they not accept the fact that they are ageing? Everyone has to grow old sometime, then why not do it gracefully?

So many times people try to show off their style of living. They talk about their chauffeurs, domestic help or their expecting things befitting their status. Sometimes it is below their dignity to sit in a taxi, or a particular kind of vehicle. For instance, one of our friend’s wife in Bombay refused to travel in her own chauffeur-driven vehicle.

Some people like to talk about the number of domestic servants they have hired to show their status, and most of the times they have no other topic of conversation but the behaviour of servants. One often wonders why do they have to talk about this subject. Is it not obvious? Are they not employed because they are required to do those jobs? If yes, then why talk about them? If no, then sack them because the other person is not interested in your household affairs. If one is interested in someone else’s servants, or running of home, then that shows their status or standard, because they do not have anything better to discuss. Generally, while trying to show off people tend to give themselves away rather than impress the listener. And why must we try to impress? What is the need to impress? Are we not confident enough of ourselves to be accepted as we are?

In some people the urge to show off is so strong that they fail to assess the situation. They do not realise that the other person might be much more experienced, cultured or suave to even show that the ‘show off’ is just being tolerated. It’s pathetic at times. One starts thinking, looking at them jabbering away, what precisely are they trying to establish? Is it their insecurity or naivety? Why is the person full of so much self-importance? Is he trying to sell himself as an expensive or exclusive commodity?

The world is full of such upstarts. Why doesn’t one realise that through one’s behaviour and how one conducts oneself one conveys everything. One does not have to drop names, or brag about possessions, or style of living, or be loud in one’s behaviour.

Many people feel nice when others recognise them and bow before them. They feel that they are great because they are so well known. But do they realise that even a dus numbri is well known and looked at with awe by most of the people he comes into contact with?

All this makes one reflect on a quotation by an English novelist R.S. Surtees. He said: "The only infallible rule we know is that the man who is always talking about being a gentleman never is."