Stranger Than We Can Imagine (35 page)

Postmodernism, as the word suggests, was what came after modernism. ‘Modern’ comes from the Latin word
modo
, meaning ‘just now’. ‘Post’ meant ‘after’, so postmodernism essentially means ‘after just now’. ‘Modernism’ may not have been a particularly helpful label for the avant garde culture of the early twentieth century, but it was positively descriptive compared to its successor.

It does not help that the term ‘postmodern’ has been applied so broadly. Eighties furniture that looked like it had been designed by designers on cocaine was postmodern. Comic books about characters who discovered that they were fictional were postmodern. Self-consciously awkward 1970s architecture was also postmodern. From Umberto Eco’s
The Name of the Rose
to the pop videos of New Order, from the sculptures of Jeff Koons to the children’s cartoon series
Danger Mouse
, postmodernism claimed them all. All this generated the suspicion that the term itself was meaningless. Many attempts to define it gave this impression too.

The reason for the current dismissal of postmodernism is its relationship with academia. The romance between academia and postmodernism, it is fair to say, did not end well.

Their relationship started promisingly enough. Postwar academia was quick to recognise postmodernism, and it had a lot to say about it. Many leading thinkers turned their attentions to the phenomenon and linked it to movements such as structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction. Postmodernism began to shape a great deal of intellectual debate, particularly in American academia. French philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida became hugely influential. Yet as this process progressed, doubts started to appear. It wasn’t apparent what use all this postmodern dialogue was, for a start. It didn’t seem to produce anything
solid. There was a nagging suspicion that it might be meaningless. Few people voiced that suspicion initially, for fear of looking ignorant, but increasingly it became hard to avoid the fact that a huge amount of academic postmodern discourse was gibberish.

This situation came to a head in 1996 when Alan Sokal, a physicist from New York University, submitted an article to the postmodernist academic journal
Social Text
entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’. The article argued that reality was ‘a social and linguistic construct’ and that the development of a postmodern science would provide ‘powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project’. Sokal was spoofing the deconstructionist idea that science was a socially constructed ‘text’, and hence open to different interpretations, by arguing that the laws of physics themselves could be anything we wanted them to be. He was making mischief, essentially, and his article was deliberately absurd and meaningless. But this was not apparent to the editorial team at
Social Text
, who thought that it was just the sort of thing that they were looking for and proceeded to publish it.

In normal circumstances Sokal’s hoax would have been viewed as an attack on the world of academic publication. The failure of judgement of the journal’s editors was, ironically, just the sort of thing that deconstructionists were banging on about when they talked about science being a social text. But thanks to the amount of unease surrounding postmodernism in academia, the Sokal hoax became viewed as a killer blow not to academic journals, but to postmodernism itself.

In the aftermath of the Sokal hoax, philosophers were very quick to leave postmodernism behind them, as can be seen in the string of critical obituaries that followed the death in 2004 of Jacques Derrida, the French founder of deconstructionism. The
New York Times
headline ran ‘Jacques Derrida, Obtuse Theorist, Dies at 74’. It might have been thought that such an influential figure would have received a little more respect immediately after his death, but by then the world of philosophy was deeply ashamed about its postwar
postmodern phase, and was distancing itself from the embarrassment as much as possible.

The problem was that there was no mechanism inside postmodernism for weeding out the meaningless from the meaningful. As a result it became possible to build an academic career by sounding clever, rather than being clever. Writing in
Nature
in 1998, the English biologist Richard Dawkins highlights the following example of apparently meaningless postmodern discourse: ‘We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.’ After a few decades of this sort of stuff, philosophers had had enough. It is understandable that anyone who had spent their working life reading texts like this would have rushed to put the boot into postmodernism, once Sokal had got it to the floor.

For academics, postmodernism was like quicksand. Once you fell into it, it was almost impossible to climb out. The more you struggled, the further in you were pulled. It also seemed inherently smug and pleased with itself. As an example, consider the way that this chapter used an old video game to explain postmodernism. This was, in itself, an extremely postmodern thing to do. It was an example of seemingly unrelated concepts thrown together and expected to work. It managed to avoid being either highbrow or lowbrow. This chapter has now started discussing itself, which shows that it is self-aware. This display of self-awareness essentially demonstrates the point that this paragraph was undertaken to explain, which makes it self-justifying, which in turn makes it even more postmodern and hence validates itself further. You can see why postmodernism winds people up.

Perhaps academia and postmodernism are fundamentally incompatible. Postmodernism denied that there was an external
framework which could validate its works, yet that’s exactly what academia was: a system to categorise and understand knowledge in relation to a rigid external framework. Postmodernism’s rejection of external frameworks suggested that there were flaws in the foundation of academia. This embarrassed academia in the same way that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem embarrassed logically minded mathematicians. In these circumstances, the speed with which the orthodoxy became an insult is understandable.

But outside of academia, postmodernism continued to spread through culture, entirely indifferent to the squabbles it was causing. One arena in which we can see its influence was religion and spirituality. As we’ve already noted, the spiritual model of subservience to a higher master, who protected and threatened punishment, had been undermined by individualism. The search for replacement models was under way and, in this atmosphere, those models could not help but be extremely postmodern.

During the 1960s and 1970s it was hard to avoid the idea that mankind was about to enter some form of glorious New Age. This was succinctly expressed in the opening lyrics of Broadway’s attempt to capture the zeitgeist of the late 1960s,
Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical
. This opened with a song entitled ‘Aquarius’. This celebrated the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, a reference to the fact that the astrological constellation behind the rising sun slowly changes over time. It takes 2,150 years to move from one constellation to the next. The twentieth century had begun towards the end of the Age of Pisces, and this astrological era was coming to an end. The Age of Pisces had coincided, rather neatly for a constellation with a fish symbol, with the Christian era. But the Age of Pisces would soon give way to the Age of Aquarius, and a number of people considered this to be spiritually significant. Carl Jung was one. He wrote that 1940 ‘is the year when we approach the meridian of the first star in Aquarius. It is the premonitory earthquake of the New Age.’

This was the idea that the cast of
Hair
were celebrating. Their
opening song began with a number of astrological claims about the moon being in the seventh house and Jupiter aligning with Mars, which it claimed would usher in a period of love and peace. This sounded like a pretty good scenario. It was, unfortunately, largely meaningless. As the astrologer Neil Spencer has noted, Jupiter aligns with Mars every few months, and the moon is in the seventh house every day.

The opening lines to ‘Aquarius’, then, can tell us a lot about the New Age movement. It was hugely positive and creative, felt fresh and exciting, and was delivered with passion by wildly dressed, beautiful young people who would very shortly be getting naked. But what they were saying didn’t hold up to scrutiny too well.

The New Age movement was not noted for its firm foundations and, like postmodernism itself, it is routinely mocked for this reason. Yet to dismiss a spiritual movement on the rational grounds of factual inaccuracy is, in many ways, to miss the point. Religions and spirituality are maps of our emotional territory, not our intellect. The Christian faith, for example, uses a crucifix as its key symbol. Crucifixion was one of the most awful forms of torture in the Iron Age world, and the icon of the cross represents unimaginable suffering. The sight of the cross is intended to generate an emotional understanding of that suffering, rather than an intellectual one. Just as a joke is valid if it is funny, even though it is not true, so spiritual symbols succeed if they have emotional or psychological value, regardless of the accuracy of stories that surround them. To look at the symbol of the crucifix and question whether the events it represents really happened does miss the point.

The appearance of the New Age movement illuminates how the great perspective shift of the early twentieth century affected our emotional selves. The fact that it happened at all is remarkable in itself, since unforced, wide-scale spiritual shifts affecting a sizeable proportion of the population are historically rare. The New Age was a rejection of hierarchical spirituality focused on the worship of a lord, and instead promoted the individual self to the role of spiritual authority. This produced almost exactly the same results
in the spiritual world that postmodernism produced in the cultural world. Many varied and contradictory viewpoints were declared, leading to a highly personalised mishmash of world religions and spiritual practices. It welcomed astrology, Daoism, shamanism, tarot, yoga, angels, environmentalism, Kabbalah, the Human Potential Movement, ancient wisdom traditions and many more. Anything that shed light on the dual role of the practitioner as both a self-contained individual, and also part of the wider whole, was on the table. New Agers were free to take what they wanted for their personal practice, and to reject the rest. They became spiritual consumers in a marketplace of traditions. For those who kept faith in the existence of absolute certainty, it was all incredibly annoying.

The nature of many New Age traditions often required practitioners to keep a number of contradictory worldviews in play at any one time. This was evident in the Western adoption of T’ai Chi, a Chinese martial art that consists of sequences of slow, precise movements. T’ai Chi, as many Western studies show, does work. Daily practice brings about many mental and physical benefits, from reducing blood pressure to increasing flexibility, and it is especially beneficial for sufferers of depression, anxiety, osteoarthritis, ADHD and fibromyalgia.

The way T’ai Chi works is by training practitioners to manipulate qi, an ancient Chinese concept that refers to a living energy not unlike ‘The Force’ in
Star Wars
. Qi, Western scientists will tell you, does not exist. Yet it is not simply the case that T’ai Chi produces positive results despite the fact that its traditional explanation is mistaken. For students of T’ai Chi, qi is very real. They can physically feel it moving through them during practice. Indeed, students have to be aware of it, for it is not possible to perform the exercises properly without that awareness. Western practitioners, therefore, have to accept the contradiction that their health benefits arise from their manipulation of something that does not exist.

It is perhaps not surprising that the New Age movement was so riddled with contradictions. In a century when even Bertrand Russell’s intellect was insufficient to define a system of logic and
mathematics free from paradox, it is harsh to criticise those exploring emotional territory for intellectual flaws. New Agers were attempting to understand how we could be both separate individuals and part of a holistic whole at the same time. A level of paradox was integral to the project.

New Age movements may have had a tendency to appear lacking in what wider society would consider an acceptable level of bullshit detection, but they were also an accurate reflection of where the human race found itself spiritually in the late twentieth century.

With postmodernism so widely derided, it can be hard to remember why it came about. It was not simply some embarrassing mistake, as its detractors paint it, or a foolish wrong turn that we should learn from and then move on. Looking at the breadth of its influence on recent history, from Super Mario Bros. to the New Age, it is clear that there was something more fundamental to the phenomenon than the squabbles of academia might suggest.

At the start of the century, relativity triggered a paradigm shift in the physical sciences. Einstein acknowledged that the omphalos from which we orientated our understanding of the universe didn’t exist, and that the notion that there was a ‘centre of the universe’ was absurd. The concept of one true perspective was replaced by a multitude of differing perspectives. Measurements were only valid relative to the observer.

Physicists are understandably twitchy about the theory of relativity being used as a justification for any form of cultural or moral relativity. They will stress that the lesson of Einstein is not that ‘everything is relative’, but that his work reconciled competing relative perspectives into non-relative, objective space-time. This is true, but it is also slightly disingenuous. As we noted earlier, the strange thing about what happened at the start of the twentieth century was that people in many fields, ranging across art, politics, music and science, all made a similar leap at roughly the same time. It was not the case that artists and thinkers attempted to take inspiration from Einstein and failed to understand him properly. A number of
artists were clearly grappling with the relationship between the observer and the observed, or with reconciling multiple perspectives, before he published his General Theory. If you were feeling brave you could argue that Einstein was a modernist scientist, although to do so would annoy a lot of physicists.