1
MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD: WEEK 23
Postmodernism and Postmodernity
These early slides are to remind you of where we’ve been, and where I’m coming
from in this lecture. They are some of the illustrations to my lecture on `Modernism’
in Week 16. When you revise for the exam and put together all the lectures on ideas
that have made the modern world, it will be useful to look at these two lectures and
PowerPoint presentations–Weeks 16 and 23--together. In the lecture on
`Modernism’, I attempted a definition of terms. I said that I was going to treat
`Modernism’ as a comprehensive term for an international tendency, in poetry,
fiction, drama, music, painting, and architecture. As for dates and dating, I
suggested the closing years of the nineteenth-century, with repercussions and
developments well into the twentieth-century. As a movement, or tendency,
Modernism is usually described as reaching its peak in the 1920s. I concentrated on
the expression of Modernist ideas in architecture, because historically-speaking,
buildings last a very long time, and the aesthetic and artistic ideas they embody
affect a very large number of people: those who live in modernist buildings, and
those whose visual horizon in everyday life is made up of them. It is clear that
Modernist ideas affected architects and planners creating social housing across
Europe and North America in the post Second World War years. I suggested that
our own Humanities Building, dating from the 1960s, is a good example of
2
Modernist ideas in action, which affect every single one of us here, ninety years after
`Modernism’ is supposed to have reached its peak.
That definition of terms gives me a good foundation for today’s definitions, at
least as far as the `post’ and `modernism’ in my title are concerned. Postmodernism
is what came after Modernism. Obviously! What I didn’t do, way back in Week 16,
is attempt to distinguish between `modernism’ and `modernity’. I have to do that
today, because the title I’m working to is `Postmodernism and Postmodernity’. So it
will be useful to briefly talk about the difference between the two labels
`Modernism’ and `modernity’. (I feel as if I’m writing a version of Raymond
Williams’s Keywords! The point is that you can find these definitions and distinctions
in dozens of dictionaries of term and glossaries of social thought.) `Modernism’
describes a set of artistic, aesthetic and theoretical ideas. `Modernity’ is the label
given to the era in which those ideas were active in society and culture. By
extension, `Postmodernism’ describes a body of ideas and theories (ideas about the
world and human subjects); `Postmodernity’ was the period, or era, in which those
ideas were active, and again, affected a large number of people. Again, in this
lecture, I shall use architecture as my example of postmodernist ideas-in-action, for
exactly the same reason as I used architecture as my example when discussing
Modernism.
Please note that I have just used the past tense. I have not talked to Dan
Branch about tomorrow’s lecture on `Postcolonialism & the Provincializing of
Europe’. But I believe that globalisation, and the rise of global history, has ended the
3
postmodern tendency in the arts, humanities and the social sciences. History written
from the perspective of other societies, other cultures, other pasts, removes the West
from the centre of the stage--the place from where history is written. I am
suggesting throughout this lecture that `Postmodernism’ was a Western
phenomenon. Moreover, it was a largely academic phenomenon: a body of idea that
emerged in university departments and academic writing across the Western world.
But of course, architecture puts paid that too-neat definition, for architecture is the
way in which ideas get out onto the street, and into people’s lives.
So let’s begin to explore `Postmodernism’ as an idea. Much of what you read
on the postmodern turn suggests that it was underpinned by a turn to language as a
tool for investigating and describing all sorts of phenomena, including the human
past. The cultural critic Frederic Jameson, who has commented widely on postmodernism, says that it originated in a twentieth-century attempt `to think
everything through again in terms of linguistics’. He said that in 1972, before postmodernism really had a name. But without a label, he could see changes taking
shape in the world of ideas and theories. A central idea was that we could not know
... anything ... for certain. There was no absolute meaning, no true `truth’ that we
could find, or determine. Meaning was and is, always indeterminate. Meaning, or
truth, is not to be found in things themselves, but rather, in the relationship between
things, and that relationship was itself, shifting and arbitrary. These are strange and
abstract ideas, very difficult to get you head around until you understand the
profound affect of linguistics on scholars of the mid-twentieth century. I’ll go back
4
to a figure I briefly flashed before you, in my lecture on the end of positivism. Very
odd--to my mind at least--was the very great post-War influence of a quite ordinary
linguist of the early twentieth century, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure
died in 1913. But later, when his work came to be republished, translated and used,
what he appeared to be insisting was that the only place to find meaning, is in
difference. The book called Course in General Linguistics was put together out of his
lecture notes for undergraduate students; it was published after his death, in 1916. It
was to have very little effect until the1950s and 1960s, when the model of language it
proposed was taken up by a number of scholars from different fields, and used to
describe quite different phenomena from that of language. (Le Cours de Linguist
Générale was translated into English for the first time in 1959.) So in the 1950s and
1960s, a system of ideas, evolved for the study of language half a century before, was
taken and applied to the fields of sociology, anthropology, political science,
philosophy, and later, to history.
What had Saussure proposed to his lecture rooms of students in the years
before the First World War? First, that language works according to its own, internal
system of rules, and is not particularly connected to the external reality we think it
describes. The idea works like this: Here on this slide are three marks: c - a - t : these
marks make up a signifier which evokes the signified `cat' in the English mind. But
the relationship between the signifier and the signified is entirely arbitrary. There is
no essential reason why those three marks should mean cat. After all, if you were
Spanish, the signifier would be g - a - t - o. The relationship between the whole
5
signifier and the furry thing that purrs is therefore arbitrary as well. Each sign in the
system has meaning only because it is different from other signs: `pipe' does not
mean anything in itself; it only means something because it is not `pope' or `pip'
or `tripe' (and c-a-t only has meaning because `cat' is not `mat', `cap' or `cut' ...). `In
the linguistic system there are only differences', said Saussure. Meaning does not
reside in the word or sign, but is a function of its difference from other signs. A
central idea of the post-modern turn is that we should be much more interested in
the relationship between things, than in the things themselves. Meaning is
relational. The meaning of things, of events, of actions, lies not in the things
themselves, but in the relationships between them. Historians who have been
interested, or who have used these ideas, are sometimes spoken of as having taken
the linguistic turn. Such historians took seriously the implications of the linguistics
just described. They understand (or understood) that many things--human minds,
human societies, cultures--work like a language works: things only mean something
because of their difference from other things. Historians who took this turn believed
that we can read the past as if it were a text. By 1991, the sociologist Anthony
Giddens was ready to write a text book about postmodernism, for sociology
students and others. He said that `we have discovered that nothing can be known
with any certainty’; that history is not a story of unimpeded progress towards the
present; that it is impossible to defend any notion of progress ... .
Is the `story’ of the Making of the Modern World–that you’ve been studying
since last October—a story that you can’t really know with any certainty? You’ve
6
probably never thought that it was a story of unimpeded progress towards the
present, and if you ever have, you’ve probably also asked `whose present?’; `whose
progress?’ We are perhaps more aware of the highly specific nature of the Western
historical endeavour than were sociologists and historians of the 1980s and 1990s;
perhaps our awareness comes from these developments—postmodernism and
postmodernity--of the mid-twentieth century.
In your reading, you may find the developments described by Giddens
labelled the `End of the Enlightenment Project’. That phrase seems a useful way of
linking postmodernism and postmodernity to the whole of `Making of the Modern
World’. MMW takes as its starting place the European Enlightenment, and the Age
of (Atlantic) Revolutions. So what was the Enlightenment Project?—and is it over
now? After the philosophic and religious revolutions of the seventeenth century,
human beings rather than God came to be understood as the centre of the world.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers created new knowledge, did new
thinking, constructed new philosophies about Man, or human beings, rather than
about God. After the world-changing political events of the later eighteenth century,
liberty, equality, and freedom from oppression came to be accepted as the proper
political aims of human societies. The public sphere extended as state expanded its
arena of influence, in all Western societies. A combination of industrialisation and
developments in state power brought the classes of modern society into existence.
New technologies raised the hope that science and reason might be harnessed in
order to improve, or even perfect, society. When twentieth-century thinkers and
7
historians talked about `the Enlightenment Project' they meant all of these changes,
beginning in the late seventeenth century. And they talked about its end. Postmodernist thinkers claimed that the Enlightenment Project, the idea of the world as
meaningful and purposeful, had been challenged by key events of the twentieth
century. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the spectre of Stalinism and of
`actually existing socialism' made Enlightenment claims concerning the rationality of
the state meaningless. `State power' had come to mean totalitarianism. The end
result of the decolonisation process, experienced in the European metropole and in
the newly named Third World, was not an experience of liberty and equality.
Rather, the post-colonial era witnessed new forms of oppression coming into being.
The European working-classes may have been emancipated, in that after long and
weary struggles they were incorporated in the polity, and all Western societies
established some form of welfare state, from about 1870 to 1950. But the
emancipated worker looked very different from the working-class hero of the
nineteenth-century political imagination, being more interested in a new car, DIY,
transforming the back garden with decking and a holiday in Spain, than in political
activism and civic life.
Then, in various post-modernist accounts of this period, the whole
Enlightenment Project was dealt a further blow, in a series of political shifts to the
right: electoral victories for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1981.
These, combined with the decline of the welfare states (especially in Britain), the
decline in the traditional manufacturing bases of the West, and the shift of the
8
market, onwards and outwards, further East, further South, as global capitalism
found new markets to conquer and new classes to make;--these, and the political
immobility of the Western working class, provided a political context of defeated
progressivism, in which the only response was the playful, ironic, self-conscious
parodies of post-modernism. History had lost its point, its end and purpose. 1989
had seen the triumph of the West, the triumph of capitalism. History was - is - at and
end. Narrative itself was over and gone: the telling of all stories that have logic and
sequence, stories that explain something (explain something like historical ruptures of
the late eighteenth century) were no longer an option. Those old nineteenth-century
narratives had provided a culture of modernity. All the new `sciences' of the
nineteenth-century—biology, history, anthropology, psychology—had been the
attempts of numerous nineteenth-century thinkers to give meaning to the events.
Darwin told the great evolutionary story; the novel attempted historical explanations
of the stories it told; History itself--the discipline of History—was a nineteenthcentury development. All of them (the sciences, history, the social sciences) used
narrative to tell a story of progression. Post-modernism, on the other hand, is not
about development, progress, or the steady march of time.
Back to dictionary definitions, and my illustrative slides. Remember that I am
using architecture as an example of the way in which these ideas were understood
and experienced. Postmodernism: a word for describing the overall direction of
experimental tendencies in Western arts, especially in architecture, but also in the
media, since the 1950s. In post-modern architecture, a range of styles and
9
techniques, a range of references and period details, are all brought together in one
immensely referential statement. Postmodernist architecture is associated with a
revolt against order and reason; a revolt against representation and narrative; it
tends towards eclecticism, irony, parody, quotation and play. Uncertainty,
eclecticism and parody were understood as the very basis of art. Just as an early
modern oaste-house merges with the illustration from 1950s children’s books in the
design of a Tesco store, forms merge in digital technology, on the net, and there are
crossovers between high art and popular art. Start to use the useful word
hybridization. Late twentieth-century philosophy interacted with these artistic
movements. In the 1970s, post-modern philosophy attempted to demystify
authority, whether it is the authority of language, the authority of rationality, or the
authority of masculinity: to de-canonise and demote authority from being the takenfor-granted of the modern world.
In conclusion, I think that I think that what we have here are several accounts
and definitions of post-modernism and postmodernity. Post-modernism, as I have
described it today, is a catchall concept. It describe a heterogeneous group of
cultural trends, ways of thinking with the linguistic model, and social directions, of
the second half of the twentieth century. You can analyse it by considering a
number of social, economic, cultural and political histories, of the last fifty years in
the West. And if I put to one side the meanings derived from art and architecture,
and see those buildings that look like a pair of binoculars as a result, or expression-not a cause--of the tendencies I have been describing?—Then I think that I have been
10
talking about three main themes: I have been talking about a phase of development
an economic and social system that goes by the name of capitalism. Second, I have
discussed a culture of capitalism, that is, the ways in which human beings make and
create meaning out of the material conditions of their existence. Taking this view,
you might say that post-modernism is what people have made out of the condition
of post-modernity. The postmodern and linguistic turns are certainly also part of a
history of ideas: a social history of ideas, in which what people know (or believe
they know) gets used and reformulated into a sense of identity or self: into what they
believe they are. I think that this period and these developments are particularly
rich in evidence for future historians, of ways in which people understood
themselves as selves, as identities.