“Shall I Project a World?” The Postmodern Condition as Presented Through Literature, Art, Theory, and American History
This essay will explore the connections between four topics from the nineteen-sixties that have all been collected under the umbrella term of postmodernism: 1. the French post-structuralist theory of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes etc., 2. the American postmodern authors Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, John Barth, and Paul Auster, 3. the American visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol, and 4. the uncertainty surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy, as a means of historically contextualizing the movement. Postmodernism has become a rather ambiguous term due to its overwhelming size and scope, and while many introductions to the movement begin by asserting its plurality and slipperiness in regards to being defined, with this essay I will attempt to weave together a relatively cohesive narrative out of the movement’s many branches. This attempt to connect the dots into a form of grand narrative will quickly prove itself as meta to the point of self-critique, but this problem appears inevitable with the subject matter at hand.
“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives.” – Jean-Francois Lyotard
1. Connecting the Dots: Constructing Narrative in the Age of Uncertainty
The American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s first feature, Permanent Vacation, begins with a quote from protagonist Allie Parker regarding the narrative form- “this is my story, or part of it. I don’t expect it to explain all that much, but what’s a story anyway, except one of those connect the dots drawings that in the end forms a picture of something. That’s really all this is.” A rather self-aware narrator Allie is, one who knows the difference between the reality of life and the narrative form we use to represent it. When life hits us with its seemingly infinite and random array of stimuli we have one natural response- to connect the dots and project some sort of order on the world. To quote Stanford mathematics professor Keith Devlin’s study on the myth of the Golden Ratio in art, “we’re creatures who are genetically programmed to see patterns and to seek meaning.” We humans are a species that is very uncomfortable with the random and the arbitrary, and nothing comforts us quite like trying to apply our sense of reason onto everything around us. Life’s just one big mystery novel and we’re all detectives with over-sized magnifying glasses.
And because of this the mystery novel itself became a common point of reference for postmodern authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, etc., largely due to its ease of opportunity for metafictional play in regards to narrative, a running theme in postmodern fiction. After all, reading itself is a form of detective work- a case of sorting out the plot’s clues from the information of lesser necessity, and then connecting those dots to form a coherent narrative. So with these stories we have narratives about narratives, mysteries within mysteries, and reading about reading. The most famous example of this form being Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, a landmark of postmodern fiction published in 1965. In Crying of Lot 49 we find protagonist Oedipa Maas thrust into a world full of possible conspiracy in which signs all around her may be connecting and alluding to some form of underground system of conspiracy, or on the other hand, it’s also just as possible that Oedipa is just simply paranoid and reading too much into these signs around her. Therefore, the metafiction comes into play as the reader is met with the very same conflict of reading the signs he or she is presented with and being forced to construct meaning and distinguish hard evidence from mere coincidence.
Take for example the protagonist’s name, “Oedipa”, an all too obvious allusion to the mythical Greek king Oedipus. For a half century now critics have argued over possible meanings to be taken from such an allusion, however the prevailing understanding is that it is simply a red herring, a name purposely chosen by Pynchon to tease at meaning while really only revealing the inherently arbitrary nature of language. It is nothing but a coincidence in the reader’s mystery of making order out of the fragmented fictional world he or she is presented with. Of further example to the metafictional nature of the book is the following excerpt from the novel’s beginning:
“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.”
Here is the prototypical example of Oedipa being presented with a vast array of visual information and attempting to make order out of it, struggling to find a pattern and deduce some form of meaning from it. It’s the same experience that not only the reader is confronted with while reading the novel that itself contains the passage, but also that the human in the age of postmodernity is presented with: the ‘reality’ that we are all living in is fragmented and saturated by a “hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning” the “intent to communicate.” But perhaps the most revealing line in regards to this postmodern condition of making meaning out of our fragmented reality comes when Oedipa states her desire to construct a “constellation” out of the signs she continually come across, for constellations themselves serve as the prototypical example of man connecting the dots and imposing patterns on the world dating all the way back to 3000 BC (1.) They are two-dimensional cultural products of a three-dimensional natural universe, a projection of order onto a reality that seems to have none. Oedipa’s duty becomes that of bringing the world into “pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her”, even at one point writing down in her notepad what could be the ultimate question of the postmodern condition, “shall I project a world?”,
It’s important to note that The Crying of Lot 49, a book rich with conspiracy and paranoia, came out less than two years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the point in time I would argue as the historical genesis of the postmodern era. To enter the Kennedy conspiracy is to enter a seemingly infinite wormhole of possible clues, another example of a mystery where drawing the line between hard evidence and coincidence proves a murkier venture than one would expect. With the assassination of President Kennedy, we as a nation entered the age of uncertainty, an age saturated by paranoia. The American postmodern novelist Don DeLillo said,
“I think it’s true that none of my novels could have been written in the world that existed before the assassination. In my fiction there tends to be a sense of danger everywhere, of something unraveling. When Kennedy was shot something changed forever in America, something opened up, a sense of randomness, deep ambiguity. We lost the narrative thread. There was no coherent reality we could analyze or study, so we became a little paranoid.”
This sense of uncertainty taking place in America in the sixties connects directly with what was happening in the realm of theoretical discourse over in France at the same time. New theories in the fields of philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and more were developing, and as Frederic Jameson pointed out in his 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” they were becoming increasingly harder and harder to distinguish from one another. One of the primary tenets that connected the new theoretical developments in these various fields was a turning away from Western reason as a form of stable ground for building claims upon. Between Jacques Derrida’s theory of ‘deconstruction’, Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author”, and Foucault’s critique of history as a singular narrative presented as absolute truth, there was a moving away from the belief that we live in a world of coherent reality that can be defined by a singular narrative and presented as absolutely true. Every narrative has an author behind it framing the story, cropping the ‘necessary’ information from the ‘unnecessary’, and connecting those random dots into said coherent narrative. Prior to the Kennedy assassination these ideas regarding narratives seemed to be restricted to a literary theory context, and though they were certainly applicable to reality, they had never felt as potent, and of as ‘life or death’ importance.
There seemed to be no direct access to the ‘true reality’ of what happened in Dealey Plaza that day. Fifty years later people are still debating what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dealey Plaza. Whether it was the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Book Depository, or perhaps a second gunman involved on the grassy knoll, or even the infamous “umbrella man”, there is no single objective answer that we have decided to agree upon as a nation. “We lost the narrative thread. There was no coherent reality…” The dominant historical narrative the public was presented with, the Warren Report, was rather obviously constructed by a certainly non-neutral author, and as such played directly into Foucault’s idea of history as not being the objective truth it is often presented as, but rather a projection of a cropped narrative onto reality, often from a position of power. And if you do choose to disregard the Warren Report you then are faced with the infinite choice of conspiracy theories to pick from as to who committed the assassination, each narrative comprised of possible clues full of “deep ambiguity”, “outward patterns (with) a hieroglyphic sense of meaning.” Was it evidence or mere coincidence that the majority of eye witness conveniently died under suspicious circumstances?
The assassination suggested that anything was possible, a tenet of postmodernism that was certainly problematic by its opening up of such inquiries as Holocaust denial and incredulity towards basic scientific laws like gravity. Richard Dawkins, the ethologist and evolutionary biologist, critiques postmodernism for this very collapsing of historical reality and scientific evidence, claiming: “Science works, planes fly, magic carpets and broomsticks don’t. Gravity isn’t a version of the truth it is the truth, anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a fifth floor window.” But while there is no doubt that postmodernism’s rampant relativism and devouring skepticism should be taken with a grain of salt, it does not mean that the entire school of thought should be dismissed as Dawkins suggests
2. A World Inside the World: The Space Between the Image and the Real
Of importance to the delineation of postmodernism as not just an artistic or philosophical movement, but also a historical era and condition, was the proliferation of mass media through television. With television came a cultural obsession with images, and a furthering of our slippery grasp on their separation from reality. In The Crying of Lot 49 Pynchon wrote of television, “It comes into your dreams you know. Filthy machine.” A great deal of artwork in the sixties dealt with this perceptual blurring of the lines between image and reality. Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg both painted not images of the world around them, but rather images of images, choosing to screen-print images taken from print media as opposed to painting subjects directly drawn from reality. Whether intended or not it was a comment on our lack of direct access to reality as well as our inability often to distinguish reality from representations of reality. Ceci ne pas une pipe. Reality had become fragmented and distorted through representation to the point where the human condition had become what PoMo author John Barth referred to as being, “lost in the funhouse.”
In Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation he explored the relationship of images and reality in the postmodern world, arguing that reality and simulations of reality have not only blurred but collapsed into one another to the point in which we are all living in hyperreality. He asserts that reality and meaning have been replaced by images, symbols and signs, tying directly into Lacan’s theory of the Three Orders which suggests that we have no actual access to “the Real” but rather our relationship with reality is always mediated by what he calls “the Symbolic Order.” Baudrillard writes, “the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” Lacan suggests that it is language which separates us from direct access with the world, as Lawrence Weschler famously wrote, “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” And Baudrillard’s statement that “the simulacrum is the truth which conceals that there is none” draws directly from Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, his take down of logocentrism (language as the true representation of reality) laid out in his book Of Grammatology, which commented on Ferdinand de Saussure’s school of linguistics known as “structuralism.” Through deconstruction Derrida sought to show that language has no point of origin, it is a simulation of reality that holds no real rooting in reality.
The primary tenet of Saussure’s structuralism was the arbitrary nature of the sign- words have no real connection to the reality they represent, rather they gain their meaning from their position within the system (structure) of language. For Derrida however, the flaw of structuralism lied in its reliance on “a transcendental signifier”- a symbol of constant, universal meaning that acts as a point of origin for which all other signs meanings are built off of. But because there is no point of origin for language (if you look up a word in the dictionary you are only confronted with more words which lead to more words ad infinitum) language is a system that references nothing outside of itself. Signs only infinitely refer to further signs, never actually accessing the real. Works of art such as Jasper John’s False Start and Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs used these theories of semiotics as subject matter, poking fun at the space between language and reality.
Further connecting to this idea of the slippery relationship between images and reality was Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, which suggests that our identity is entirely constructed by images. He posits that our earliest formation of identity is a result of seeing ourselves in the mirror and identifying with an image of ourselves. The mirror stage induces apperception for the first time- the ability to see ourselves as objects to be viewed from outside ourselves. However, what we see in the mirror is not actually who we are, but rather a flat, two dimensional image of us.
With Rauschenberg and Warhol’s meta “images of images” we get visual examples of this mediation of our relationship with reality. Both artists also famously chose to work with images of John F. Kennedy as subject matter in their works. It should be noted that President Kennedy was the first president in this era of images, and what a first president to have in this new era. He was remarkably photogenic; it is widely believed he was elected because of his televised debate with Richard Nixon. Though most Americans never once saw John F. Kennedy in real life, almost all encountered images of him daily. As Don DeLillo noted in Libra his semi-fictional recounting of the Kennedy, “he looked even better in real life”, implying inherently that there is a “not real life” that exists in the world of photographs and images. “There is a world inside the world” Oswald says throughout the novel, a motif repeated over and over like the tolling of an iron bell. But is there a world of images inside the world of reality? Are photographs reality or fiction? Roland Barthes theory of ‘the myth of photographic truth’ explored this notion, asserting that though we perceive photographs as unmediated copies of the real world they certainly are not. There is always an artist’s hand between the image and the world it represents, a hand cropping out certain information in favor of presenting other visual info, paralleling Foucault’s theory of the presentation of history as an unmediated narrative of reality. But there is no such thing as an unmediated copy of reality, and every narrative is authored from a singular perspective.
3. The Master Narrative: The Deconstruction of the Episteme
While Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ stated that there is no singular “theological meaning” imbued in a text by its author, the negative space that idea then leaves us with is that the reader is just as much the architect of a text’s meaning as the author. We, like Oedipa Maas, are readers of the world, constructing meaning out of the text-ure of the world that our nerve endings are constantly being met with. The collaged works of Robert Rauschenberg feed off this notion, offering the viewer with various fragmented imagery, like Retroactive 1’s screen-printed images of Kennedy, NASA related space activity, medical photographs of the human form, etc., and forcing the audience to find patterns and assert a sense of order onto the world of the canvas.
Also present in these works by Rauschenberg, through their reaching for subject matter into fields as diverse as medical science, universal exploration, and historical figures, is a sense of a totality of world knowledge, a form also explored by Thomas Pynchon in his mammoth novel Gravity’s Rainbow, often considered the postmodern equivalent to Joyce’s modernist tome Ulysses. Where Ulysses sought to replicate the mode of thought of a single mind through stream-of-consciousness prose, Gravity’s Rainbow appeared to suggest a sense of encyclopedic knowledge of the world, through its third person removed narrator’s knowledge of languages as various as French, German, Spanish, Latin, etc. as well as its ability to jump back and forth between voices all across the spectrum from the highbrow language of the academia to the lowbrow vernaculars of various American subcultures. Pynchon’s narrator also has at its disposal a seemingly all-encompassing knowledge of math, science, literature, and technology made evident through its endless stream of references. This concept of the ‘encyclopedic novel’ was formulated by literary theorist Edward Mendelson in two essays from 1976 entitled “Encyclopedic Narrative”, and “Gravity’s Encyclopedia”. In short Mendelson defines the encyclopedic novel as an “attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge” and that “because they are the products of an epic in which the world’s knowledge is larger than any one person can encompass, they necessarily make extensive use of synecdoche.” The narrator of the encyclopedic novel exemplifies the omniscient point of view of traditional narration pushed to its furthest extreme as another method of drawing the reader’s eye to the gap between narrative and life, representation and reality. From a post-structuralist perspective the encyclopedic novel serves to critique the very illusion of encylopedism which attempts to present the sum of all human knowledge. It is a detournement of the grand narrative, the fictional counterpart to the nonfiction of Foucault’s The Order of Things in which he developed his theories of epistemology, the study of knowledge and justified belief. What grounds knowledge in truth, and furthermore what justifies certain narratives of knowledge over others? The encyclopedic novel is the deconstruction of master knowledge systems that suggest a god’s-eye-view of the world. As Jean-Francois Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “an incredulity toward metanarratives.”
4. We Are What We Pretend to Be: The Construction of Identity in the Age of Postmodernism
So if the author is dead, as well as the concept of an authentic and true knowledge of the world, and the individual is trapped in a perpetual sense of limbo between image and reality, then where does said individual’s conception of identity stand? It follows then that in this postmodern age of decenterized subject there is no real singular, authentic sense of identity, and that identity is a construct in just the same as the reality that forms its context. Central to this idea was Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, which although initially presented by her in a gender theory context, was also written about by aforementioned thinkers such as Jacques Derrida in regards to ideas of identity in philosophy and literature. In broad terms the theory of performativity states that there is no authentic and static conception of identity which dictates a person’s actions (i.e. “that’s not like him”), but rather that it is the inverse, and that identity is in a constant state of flux, always being shaped and constructed by our actions.
Of perhaps most importance to our understanding of the construction of identity is Lacan’s theory of the “mirror stage”. At a point between the first 6 to 18 months in a child’s life the infant will recognize itself in the mirror for the first time. While the infant could obviously see itself in the mirror prior to this, until this moment the image of itself was not of any coherence, but instead just an array of unstructured visual information. In “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” Jameson borrows this idea from Lacan of seeing the world as unstructured by language and applies it to the postmodern condition. Jameson asserts the age of postmodernity to be one of schizophrenic perception, defining schizophrenia as "the failure of the infant to accede fully into the realm of speech and language". During the mirror stage the infant first recognizes itself as an object outside of itself, in turn forming its conception of identity around not its real self, but rather the image of itself that it sees in the mirror- identity too is “lost in the funhouse”, trapped within Lacan’s Symbolic Order and Baudrillard’s simulacra.
This idea of the decenterized subject contrasts the modernist conception of the artist, in which there was a tendency to label certain artists as “real” and “authentic”, and others as “phony” or “inauthentic”. While modernism broke away from Enlightenment era ideas of objective reality, emphasizing the individual’s sense of inward, subjective reality, it also tended to place a great level of emphasis on the artist as an enlightened individual that is more “true” and “real” perhaps than other people. Abstract Expressionist painters like Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, etc. were framed as being these authentic geniuses making “real” and “honest” art. Moving away from this were artists like Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons who broke the idea of the authentic individual by living out their own identities as roles to be played. The term persona is derived from Latin in which it directly translates to the word “mask”, and artists like Koons and Warhol used their identities in the image mediated world of celebrity as tools to suggest that might not have any actual, “true” or “real” identity- that behind their masks were only masks covering an infinite regression of masks with no Derrida-esque point of origin- images of images.
Many postmodern authors dealt directly with this premise of identity as construction. Many PoMo authors used metafictional tropes such as making the reader aware of the author acting not as the “authentic” author, but rather as a constructed role being played by the author in writing the novel, and other tricks like placing the author within the novel as a fictional character. Paul Auster uses both of these tools in his New York Trilogy, a metafictional mystery novel composed of three short stories: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. In City of Glass, the first of three stories, the main character Daniel Quinn, like the real life Auster, is a mystery novelist. Auster describes Quinn as “a triad of selves” as he writes under the pen name William Wilson, but also lives vicariously through the alias of the detective he writes about, Max Work. The narrative tricks are pushed even further over the edge when this fictional novelist gets a call one night from somebody looking for a detective by the name of Paul Auster. The three stories that compose the trilogy are presented as being disconnected, but in the final one, The Locked Room, the nameless narrator reveals at the end of the story that it is he who has written the three stories within the trilogy. With these drifts in an out of fiction and reality suggesting that the wall between the two is porous or collapsible, the New York Trilogy presents us with a literary model for Baudrillard’s simulacrum.
Other authors employed this device of writing books with fictional protagonists of the authors themselves, including Bret Easton Ellis in his fictional memoir Lunar Park, and David Foster Wallace in his posthumously release unfinished novel The Pale King. Wallace began his career as a proudly self-proclaimed postmodernist, but would spend his later years avidly critiquing the various problems he saw within the movement, a subject I will directly discuss in this next and final section of the essay.
5. Towards a New Sincerity: Post-Postmodernism, Meta-Modernism & the New Sincerity Movement
In the late eighties and early nineties David Foster Wallace was one of the remaining proponents of postmodern fiction, drawing influence from the likes of Pynchon and DeLillo, writing short stories like Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way and Little Expressionless Animals that seemed to function almost solely for deploying tricks such as fragmented narratives, metafictional tropes, and parodies of political and pop culture. But around the mid-nineties he began to develop a disdain for all the ironic posturing and author-as-construction tropes of postmodernism. In 1993 he published his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction which for many cemented the ethos of the percolating “New Sincerity” movement. In it he discusses how television and advertising have raised a generation defaulted in a condition of irony, too cool and too smart for sincerity, afraid of being mocked for displaying sentimentality. A generation raised not only on the cozy predictability and comfort of happy endings in sitcoms, but also on the postmodern parodies of these narratives- television that mocks television.
And furthermore, advertisements that mock advertisements. Corporations had begun co-opting the very rebellious anti-capitalist imagery that stood in direct opposition to them- as Nato Thompson noted in his introductory essay for Mass MoCa’s “The Interventionists”, this is a time period in which Taco Bell is using the iconic image of Che Guevara to sell Americanized Mexican fast food. The Gap corporation was appropriating Jack Kerouac to sell denim. Thomas Frank wrote in his 1997 book Conquest of Cool: “the sixties are more than merely the homeland of hip, they are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent.” The images of “hipness” and “coolness” in the cultural and civil movements of the sixties, movements that were specifically anti-capitalist, were now being appropriated by multinational corporations to market products to the masses, an act known as recuperation, the very opposite of the Situationist’s detournement. Advertising agencies now release far more “rebellious” commercials that ironically mock the lameness of commercials, than sincere commercials. This is the contemporary condition of a generation raised on postmodernism. Everyone is in on the joke. Everyone is too cool for sincerity. In Lee Konstantinou’s article for Salon, “We Had to Get Beyond Irony: How David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and a New Generation of Believers Changed Fiction” he describes this condition: “at this moment, capitalism’s Cold War victory, individual irony, and philosophical antifoundationalism merged into a single discourse. Irony’s dominance could sometimes seem like the unavoidable cultural and philosophical consequence of our having arrived at history’s end.”
In the face of this overwhelmingly ironic and too smart ethos Wallace sought to find a new tone for his writing, one that married head to heart, stating, “fiction’s about what it is to be a human being”. He writes in E Unibus Pluram:
"The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal”. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows."
Does anybody know where to go once everything from language to identity to reality has been deconstructed? Making any sort of meaning out of the world after postmodernism can feel like an act of folly, but it seems this is where we are today. “Post-postmodernism.” But after all, looking for truth in the face of the absurd isn’t anything particular or specific to the contemporary condition, it’s the human condition—to make meaning out of the possibly meaningless, to project a world.
