Postmodernism

THEORIZING THE POSTMODERN

Vis-à-vis film, postmodernism has not led to a particular school or method of theoretical analysis, as for example psychoanalysis, Marxism, or structuralism have. This is unsurprising: writers on the postmodern see life and Vis-a society as fractured and recycled circulations no longer able to be summarized into unified theoretical frameworks. Theorists of the postmodern have much more so contributed to our understanding of film by unsettling the assumptions and certainties of earlier theories that underpinned how film has been conceptualized.

It is on these terms that Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1984) addresses our society. Lyotard designates the postmodern as a questioning attitude to the "metanarratives" of Western thought. By "metanarratives" Lyotard means the hegemonic paradigms for human organization and behavior, such as Marxism, Christianity, science, fascism, or language. In this basic sense his work is aligned with the fundamental tenets of poststructuralist thought. Furthermore, Lyotard's definition of the postmodern suggests that he understands the modern to be the Enlightenment project of system, reason, order, and symmetry found in the philosophies of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Voltaire (1694–1778), and John Locke (1632–1704), rather than the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artistic modernism typified by the architecture of the Bauhaus school or classic narrative cinema. Since "postmodern" has become to some extent a negative epithet used to describe naïve, ahistorical cultural products, it is important to note the attitude theorists of the postmodern take towards their object of inquiry. Lyotard, for example, views the postmodern condition as fundamentally ambivalent. He does not suggest that we are experiencing a postmodern age that has neatly superseded the modern one; for him, the postmodern does not signify the end of modernism but rather a new thinking in relation to modernism.

Unlike Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, another important theorist of the postmodern, sees its development as decidedly negative. He bemoans above all the way in which media images and signs have usurped real experience for the modern subject. Although Baudrillard focuses on television as the distribution nexus for these images, his critique of the circulated image does have bearing on the postmodern and cinema. Baudrillard reads twentieth-century history as the transition from a manufacturing-industrial society to an order based upon communication and the circulation of signs. Baudrillard claims that not only is our world cluttered with these images, but also, crucially, that these signs have become our reality. In this capitalist "hyperreality" of simulations, referentiality has dissolved; images no longer have any connection to what they are supposed to represent; signs are more real than reality itself. By this logic, Baudrillard claimed in 1991 that the Gulf War (1990–1991) did not take place. With night-vision images of bombings in Iraq and Kuwait, for Baudrillard the Gulf War was little more than a virtual video game consumable in bite-sized doses.

According to Fredric Jameson, postmodernism is characterized by its emphasis on fragmentation. Fragmentation of the subject replaces the alienation of the subject, modernism's calling card. Unlike Lyotard, Jameson sees postmodernism as the successive stage to the high-art modernism of the early twentieth century. Postmodernist works are often characterized by a lack of depth, which has been replaced by a surfeit of surface. Also distinctive of the late capitalist age is its focus on the recycling of old images and commodities. Using examples from cinema, Jameson catalogs key features of postmodern culture: self-referentiality, irony, pastiche, and parody ( Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism , 1991). He takes to task Hollywood films which pillage film history and thereby create a flat kind of spatialized temporality. Jameson refers to this cultural recycling as historicism —the random cannibalization of various past styles. For example, Jameson argues that a neo-noir film such as Chinatown (1974) simulates the past through references to older films in a way that erases historical depth—with stylistic gestures without deeper meaning—and thus fails to recreate a "real" past. The actual organic tie of history to past events is thus lost. Many are careful to call Jameson a "theorist of the postmodern" rather than "postmodern theorist" because of the clear "metanarrative" that informs his thinking: Marxism. Adopting a stance on postmodernism, so Jameson argues, means taking a position on multinational capitalism.