‘Let me tell you what postmodernism isn’t.’
This was the reliable beginning of just about every Stupid lecture on the postmodern condition I attended in the 1990s. This made it very difficult to know what to do in exams. And when you mentioned this to your Stupid teacher, they would say, ‘Ah—the text is just like life! Decentralised and confusing with no real purpose.’
But the fuckers still made us do exams.
Look. I got so annoyed by this I am just going to break all of the rules of postmodernism and tell you what it is rather than what it isn’t. Because it’s a useful term to describe some stuff that has, quite justifiably, gained a reputation for maximum bullshit.
Postmodernism might be used to refer to two things. (At this point, all the postmodernists say, ‘But it is so many more than two.’ They can fuck off.) The first thing it refers to is the current era. That’s quite simple. It’s just called postmodern because we used to call the period modern. It describes a period in time characterised by certain things. Which mostly involve increased complexity and the failure of the Enlightenment to deliver on its promise of enlightening.
The second is the ‘practice’ of postmodern philosophy. My favourite of these guys is Jean Baudrillard. My least favourite is Jacques Derrida. In the habit of postmodern confusion, we’ll go with Jacques.
Derrida is the deconstruction guy. What is deconstruction? Every lecture I ever attended started with, ‘Let me tell you what deconstruction is not.’ I’m not going to do that. Instead, I am going to show you deconstruction. Here goes.
On 8 January 1992, US President George H.W. Bush vomited on the prime minister of Japan. Well, he didn’t actually vomit on so much as around PM Miyazawa. The video is blurred and it is hard to assess exactly how much the guy was showered in free-world sick. What is clear from footage is Bush barfed more copiously than in the recorded banqueting of any statesman since Seneca took notes from the long tables of Rome. (Soon you will see what I’m doing. I am taking an arbitrary moment in history—8 January 1992—and elevating its importance. I am taking little details and blowing them up in order to show you, as deconstruction does, that everything is meaningless! Yay!)
Within days, the incident was widely documented and analysed. This alleged product of intestinal flu was broadcast on ABC in the US and parodied the following week on Saturday Night Live. It was later referenced in The Simpsons when a fictionalised Bush threatened Homer he would ruin him ‘like a Japanese banquet’. It appeared in a USA Today roundup of The 25 All-Time Most Memorable Meltdowns and would enter the Japanese lexicon: Bushu-suru is slang still used to convey the act of public vomiting in Japan.
I remember hearing that a satirical play and a painting were inspired by the executive chunder. That there is no hard evidence these works exist does not diminish the plausibility of their creation. Which is to say, as one’s parents often will at a gallery: they’ll make art about anything these days. (Okay. I have stopped deconstructing for the minute.) The man often held responsible in intellectual circles for legitimising art about vomit is Derrida. Or, to be more general, the man often held responsible for legitimising everything is Jacques Derrida. The guy whose most quoted sentence is ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ or ‘There is nothing outside the text’ (in Of Grammatology) was, himself, a vomiter on the emperors of reason.
Nothing. There is nothing outside the text. There is no God, no reason, no taste and no morality. There are only words, words, words which, in turn, only relate to other words. This statement is helpful to an understanding of the two previously mentioned things: both the postmodern era and the philosophy it spewed.
No one finds Derrida appealing, and if they say they do, then they are ill or they are liars. Let’s just start our painful date with Derrida in understanding that the declaration ‘There is nothing outside the text’ means: all meaning is relative to other meaning. And therefore meaningless. It is all just text; or, it is all just words we utter and pointless discourse we make.
This idea is pretty hard going. And unfortunately, once you see what he is saying, it is also pretty hard to dismiss. The repercussions of saying that all meaning can only be compared against other meaning are great. It means that there is no dependable truth, morality or ethical way to govern. This is an immense break with the past. But, as we will see, it is one that is currently being enacted in my Stupid deconstruction, which now begins again.
In 1992, the year we repeatedly visit, Cambridge was one of many storied universities that honoured this important man. Not everyone was pleased about his honorary doctorate, and a number of academics wrote a letter of protest to The Times of London, beginning, ‘M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.’ It went on, ‘M. Derrida’s career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s and his writings continue to reveal their origins in that period.’
If I am not mistaken, these guys are calling Derrida a dirty hippie. Such was the man’s infamy in 1992.
There are plenty of ways we could write about postmodernism other than using Derrida, the dirty hippie. But if George H.W. Bush has taught us nothing else, it is not to overstuff ourselves.
There are many postmodern philosophers we could greedily consume here. But we need to be picky or we might be sick. I actually did chuck before an exam in the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University in 1992. Postmodernism actually made me spew.
So, we have confined this buffet to two simultaneous courses. We have Derrida as the primary way to understand what is meant by postmodern philosophy, and we have the year 1992, in which George H.W. Bush vomited on the prime minister of Japan and I vomited on the flagstones of the university quadrangle.
In the interests of declaring my bias—itself a Derridean habit—I should say that I liked Derrida a lot at university, upchuck notwithstanding. This is chiefly because (a) he was very fond of cats, and (b) he was, and is, so difficult to understand, it’s quite acceptable, if not actually useful, to give up the chore of understanding him and say, ‘Ah, Derrida . . . so playful!’ and have your peers not think of you as an absolute tool.
This helps to explain why people who did not ponce about doing cultural studies think that Derrida is a tool. The point is, he’s not a complete tool. But given that people like me, and curators of art shows with vomit as a central theme, spent the better part of the 1990s saying, ‘Ah, Derrida . . . so playful!’, it is perfectly reasonable to think of the man and his work as a waste of good French.
There is a lot of good postmodern thought to read. But if we have to choose one guy, let it be Derrida—for three reasons. First, for the sake of brevity. Second, Derrida is currently enjoying a lack of popularity; I therefore conclude you may be less disposed to boredom in reading the name of a man currently resting in theory’s lavatory. Third, Derrida ‘invented’ deconstruction.
And, even overlooking that ‘deconstruction’ is one of the most abused words in the philosophical vocabulary and can often be seen on menus or in colour magazines on Sunday preceding the names of actresses who offer glimpses of themselves no more candid than ‘sometimes I don’t feel that pretty’, it also permits us to ‘deconstruct’. Which is to say, focus on an arbitrary thing.
Like, The Year My Non-Vomit Streak Broke: 1992.
So I am selecting a postmodern way of describing postmodern thought and postmodern life. You might find it useful to get an understanding of the thing called deconstruction, if only because you can dismiss it in the future as Stupid.
Deconstruction is often used to mean a revelation; a kind of stripping back to a foundation. Woody Allen famously misused it in the title of one of his worst films, Deconstructing Harry. Here, Harry is ‘deconstructed’ through Allen’s customary lens of psychoanalysis. We see Harry’s dreams and his past and this is not at all Derrida but Freud. It is true that deconstruction is a way of investigating a text—and text can even mean a person. It is also true that deconstruction, like the talking cure, might employ methods like wordplay or concentrating on elements of a thing normally considered unimportant. But it is not true that deconstruction, unlike psychoanalysis, strives to get at any sort of truth. Because, and this is where you might justifiably spit at the page, deconstruction does not believe in truth. I’ll tell you what deconstruction does believe in (spoiler: nothing!) in just a little while. But we do need to look briefly at the long history of the death of truth.
I have about as much time for the claim that there can be no truth as I do for middle-period Woody Allen. Which is to say, it’s depressing and it’s not very useful. In the absence of truth, we may as well just all pretend we were always totally fine with Woody shacking up with Soon-Yi.
(DECONSTRUCTING AGAIN!)
Allen, quoting the poet Emily Dickinson, said of his 1992 separation from Mia Farrow, ‘The heart wants what it wants.’ It is only in matters of the heart that I can accept such absolute relativism. The heart is permitted to bang out its independent truth. Everything else, as far as I’m concerned, has a responsibility to truth beyond itself; to truth outside the text.
While it is Stupid to call Derrida Stupid, I am actually going to say that I believe that he is wrong. There is something outside the text. I think as an assessment of life as it is currently lived, his deconstruction is pretty much spot on. But I think that as a grand theory of how meaning has always been and will necessarily be, it is probably the most depressing thing I could imagine.
I am so angry with Derrida for saying that life is necessarily meaningless that I am going to give some meaning to his.
Derrida was a French Algerian philosopher who was born in 1930, set Anglophone philosophy aflame in 1966 by declaring the death of meaning at John Hopkins University, and died in 2004 shortly after he had written about feeling embarrassed to be naked in front of his cat.
Deconstruction is not a set of instructions, necessarily. It is not a way to look at the world, but it is the way in which the world reveals itself to us; or the way the world, to use the maddening phrase of Derrida, is ‘always-already’.
In other words, he’s saying we’re fucked. Or rather, always-already fucked. Always-already fucked.
It’s true that a lot of the language of postmodernism is really hard to follow and/or take in with a straight face. It’s my hope, though, that I have done some of the heavy lifting on your behalf and that soon we’ll move towards an understanding of something that is not, actually, all obscurantism and does serve to describe the current shape of the world.
I believe in truth. This is not an extreme statement. Unless, of course, you are a devout postmodernist in which case, it’s heresy. But for the rest of us, there is at least the idea of some foundation on which we can rest our knowledge.
But it’s slipping away. With or without Derrida.
Still, for some people, a deity is the foundation of all knowledge. But it is often and quite compellingly argued by His critics that God has ceased to function in the way that He once did, even to those practising religion. The ‘common sense’ of humanism is now shared by most people who believe certain secular truths to be self-evident, such as man is by nature reasonable or has a particular essence.
In recent years, superstar atheists like Richard Dawkins have been making much of humanism as a thrilling new way to live. Dawkins, who had started to get antsy by 1992—when he wrote in the New Statesman: ‘Religion is no more than corrupted software of the mind. God sits in people’s brains like a virus’—borrows heavily if selectively from the humanism of Kant and other theorists of the eighteenth century. He just gussies it up.
Some of us also borrow from the truths of the nineteenth century. We don’t have to be socialists to believe Marx when he tells us that the foundation of being is to organise the materials necessary for life. We might believe Nietzsche when he tells us it is the ‘will to power’ which is, more or less, the drive to live. Then Freud tells us it is the drive to have sex and then, later, the drive to die that is at the foundation of everything. And then we meet a whole lot of guys who think it is the need to make meaning through language and there is always something and so it has been back and back and back since Thales, who believed in the sixth century BCE that the foundation of all life was water.
I believe in truth; or I believe in several truths, including some of Kant’s reason, some of Marx’s economic determinism and some of Freud’s foundational psychiatry. But when I start watching the serpent of truth slither through history, I get a little nervy and cover my eyes in case the truth-snake changes shape again. The problem is, Derrida did not cover his eyes and went on to intellectualise the slippery end of truth. The truth wants what it wants, he says. And then, without a minute’s warning, we have no foundation, nothing to believe in, and suddenly, Mia Farrow is no longer anywhere in sight.
So what Derrida wants us to believe is that the truth has not just died but that it never lived. We are no longer made of water, souls, history, reason, money or an id. We are nothing.
Derrida says we have always been nothing and it is with this that I cannot bring myself to agree. But I can agree that his deconstruction is a good enough snapshot of the increasingly meaningless era in which we currently live a bold new Stupid.
Derrida says that our understanding of existence is structured in terms of oppositional pairs. He says that these oppositions are structured with one half being understood as dominant and the other being understood as subordinate. These might include man and woman; good and evil; reason and emotion; speech and writing. Our entire principle for organising reality is structured in this way so that we can point to anything and look at it in terms of what it is not. This could include the quality of being Australian. This is actually a particularly good example because Australians usually describe themselves in terms of what they are not: an Australian is not un-Australian.
An Australian is not American. An Australian is not a communist. An Australian is not unfair. An Australian is not easily angered.
We define Australian-ness by looking at what it is not. This is how we organise all meaning: in relation to what it is not. But those other things against which we are writing the ‘text’ of being Australian are themselves defined in terms of what they are not. So an Australian is not American who is not English. And an Englishman is not a Frenchman who is not fond of bad food. And on it goes, until the bad food ends up being eaten by President Bush the Elder, who deposits it on the Japanese prime minister, who is not American but who is covered in vomit that has now acquired meaning throughout the world. Or at least as much meaning as anything can have because, baby, it’s all relative.
Derrida, I have neglected to mention, was a linguist and had studied the traditionally understood relationship of the signifier, or the word for a thing, with the signified, or the thing. It had been previously supposed that the signifier bore a static relationship to the signified; that when I said something was Australian’ it was clear what I meant. But Derrida proposes that what I mean never becomes clear and is always (and already) a case of articulating absence when I say Australian. The signifying chain depends only on itself for the production of meaning and there is nothing that is truly Australian, just a whole lot of things that being Australian isn’t, which in turn are things that aren’t other things that bear any relationship to anything outside the chain.
A common reaction to this is ‘bullshit’, because it seems so obvious that Australian is a knowable quality that exists independently of the word that describes it. But then, when you try to explain Australian with Derrida’s hypothesis in mind, you might find yourself, as I did, in freefall.
We have always thought of language as an instrument of meaning. But with Derrida, we begin to suspect that the opposite is true: meaning is the servant of language.
In the beginning, there was the word. And then there were just more words. And now, there is nothing outside the text.
As he advances toward complete meaninglessness, Derrida becomes more of a sickening threat. He challenges, quite convincingly, the idea that there is nothing in our minds before language and that language is not something we make to fit our needs but we are something for language to rest on.
There is a passage on meaning I remember reading in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando before I was old enough to realise I was really bored by Virginia Woolf: ‘There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.’
Orlando, by the bye, is a lady-man lost in time. I couldn’t really say as I didn’t finish the book and the movie with Tilda Swinton was out the day I went to hire it. But it is a book about the fragile nature of identity and gender; at least I said so in my deconstruction exam. And I think this observation saved me from a fail. The book is certainly full of the idea that people are made of the things that constitute their opposite.
We don’t wear clothes; they wear us. We don’t use language; it uses us. Our identity is a performance; an effect of all the oppositions in the world. If we try, like the hero/heroine Orlando, we can move beyond the idea that we, or anything else, is one thing and allow the parts of the thing that we are not to become more present.
Orlando would be an example of a conscious deconstruction.
But deconstruction happens all the time. According to Derrida, we are always-already involved in deconstruction. Deconstruction is something one can perform deliberately, but even then, one is simply making explicit that which was already implicit. So deconstruction is something that we necessarily perform in the creation of meaning. You’re talking, baby, you’re deconstructing.
This practice of uttering meaninglessness is neither good nor bad; although it is presumed to be healthier, I guess, if it is clearly identified. At a very basic level, deconstruction is the admission that there is no foundation to meaning. So it finds another way to explore the foundation of meaning. It meanders when it is intentional because that is all anyone can ever do. (Not that ‘anyone’ exists, maybe, as a unified speaking subject.)
Deconstruction remains a minor pastime of literary scholars who will privilege a small part of a text. They might take the subordinate or suppressed element in a binary pair (say, the girlish fragility of Ahab in Moby Dick) and blow it out of all proportion. You could, say, really study the creation myth of Terminator which has a man going back in time to give birth to a future Eddie Furlong and make the entire movie about men feeling alienated from the process of childbirth instead of the apparent meaning of the film which is, of course, that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the greatest man-bot of all time.
This stuff is fine in literary criticism. And it is, for me, fine as a critique of our times. But the idea that meaning is always (and already!) a closed system more powerful than Skynet is just too much for my tastes. I need to see life as a possibility lived beyond the singularity of language.
Everything is equally meaningless? Always? And already? I haven’t got a great argument beyond ‘fuck that shit’, but you may be pleased to know that other well-regarded thinkers, including Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, do. To be honest, I don’t have the intellectual temerity or rigour to try to understand these guys’ refutation of Derrida. Because Derrida, who ‘playfully’ describes deconstruction mostly in terms of what it is not, makes it difficult enough to understand what he is saying without throwing some extra continental philosophers onto the grill.
Everything is meaningless. There is nothing outside the text.
This sort of relativism is quite dreadful not only for the pessimistic headache it confers—if nothing has any meaning, then we might as well just smoke a bowl and light it with the pages of Plato’s Republic—but because it forces us to assess everything in the world as having equal merit. Even the very Stupid.
Derrida may currently be unfashionable. He was highly influential, though, and made a significant contribution to Stupid in the areas of literary and cultural studies and the thing we now call ‘journalism’. Even people who couldn’t tell you his name are influenced by his methods.
High school students of English will now ‘read’ Big Brother as a ‘text’ that has, apparently, all the richness of Shakespeare. Well may you ask WTF. Now, I earn a partial living as a television writer and have a keen interest in defending good interpretations of reality TV. I actually don’t believe that an erudite reading of mass-media entertainment is necessarily a bad thing and not just because it pays my rent. I know that a critical reading of television can provide a good look at art and anyone who doubts this should read Clive James. But what I don’t believe, and I am now underemployed and alone among my peers as a result, is that television is very often a good way to make statements about the society that produced it. When you allow yourself to believe that a bunch of drunken twenty-somethings living under surveillance in a fake house in the middle of a theme park can produce something as meaningful as Titus Andronicus, you’re fucked.
And we are fucked. A colossal amount of ‘commentary’ with the belief that everything is meaningful is spewed into our brains daily. People say that ‘positive’ homosexual characters on television show that homophobia is disappearing, but figures on suicidal ideation and homelessness among queer youth ascend. People say that skinny models make women starve themselves, a claim that has all but been refuted by those who specialise in eating disorders. People say that in a time where everything is meaningful, we can look to anything for meaning.
This is the impulse of cultural studies: to look for evidence of whatever you fancy in whatever you have at hand. In my view, this is a kind of Stupid that has all the gravitas of glitter-and-glue craft collage. You use materials at your immediate disposal to make a pile of shiny shit that is work better left for five-year-olds. It is not a ‘pure’ expression of Derrida but is still very much in his debt. Derrida made it okay for people to privilege the overlooked elements of a text and he must take some responsibility for the cheap French franchise that goes on in his absence.
Pretending that it has social justice as a central concern, a new writing that ‘calls out’ evil or praises progress in low entertainment has become common and perfectly acceptable. What was once the work of art critics has become a central political project, even for politicians. In 1992, G.H.W. Bush’s vice-president made a speech about moral values. Of the television program Murphy Brown Dan Quayle said, ‘It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.’
In a longish and madly racist speech, Quayle talked about poverty. He did concede that poverty was, in part, the cause of poverty. But, he said, it really had more to do with poor morals as exemplified by Murphy Brown. Of black America, he observed, ‘There is far too little upward mobility.’ And this was not because people didn’t have access to money. Rather, it was ‘because the underclass is disconnected from the rules of American society’.
So Murphy Brown, the whitest fictional woman in America, was responsible for poverty. After all, she was the one who enjoined members of America’s black female underclass to have children out of wedlock. It was Murphy who devalued the American father and it was not economic conditions that forced him into unemployment or that tore apart traditional family structures.
Dr Anne Summers, an Australian feminist academic, popular writer and political adviser to the Keating government on women’s issues, has a similar understanding of the culture. Having freshly delivered a speech on how ‘misogynist’ depictions of then Australian prime minister Julia Gillard on the blog of an unemployed cartoonist engendered ‘misogyny’, Summers was interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald on the matter of some urinals in a high-end Sydney restaurant that were shaped like mouths. The urinals, by the way, were modelled very clearly on the Rolling Stones logo; if porcelain could be said to have a gender, it was male. The urinals, in fact, are still installed in a Rolling Stones museum in Germany. They remain undisturbed in a homosexual men’s club just a few kilometres away from the high-end Sydney restaurant. But the fact of their maleness did not stop Summers from calling the latrines ‘misogynist’ and suggesting to others via Facebook that campaigning for their removal was worthwhile work.
There is nothing outside the toilet. There is nothing outside Murphy Brown. For the right and for the left, the culture can show us what is wrong better than, say, actual statistics can, because it’s all relative. Neither Summers nor Quayle are the sort likely to concede to the impact of Derrida, but it is here as clear as urine. In a world where everything is held to be of equal weight, we are free to be crushed by the heft of a bold new Stupid. This postmodern century is one that holds all ‘text’ as equally influential and celebrates the democratisation of intellectual merit; or our enslavement by the feudal lords of Stupid, depending on how you choose to see it. These days, every child wins a prize. Even Dan Quayle and Anne Summers, who are hailed for the courage of their Stupid. These days, the scandalous blog post is held to be as worthy as the most cautious journalism. These days, political news is no more significant than celebrity news. These days, one’s self-esteem need have nothing to do with one’s real-world achievements. These days, the average is elevated and the excellent is met with a ‘meh’.
Derrida is, in some part, responsible for a meh-world that can no longer be arsed using the energy required to declare, ‘This thing is more important than that thing.’ He describes a world where meaning is only ever relative to other meaning and where there is no central meaning. Now, as we will see, Derrida gives us absolutely no hope of escaping from the dreadful truth that there is no truth.
But sometimes what Derrida sees is a fairly accurate picture of a world that causes some of us to throw up our hands and say, ‘Nothing means anything anymore’. My chief problem with Derrida, save for the fact that he enabled people to make stupid arguments about sit-coms and urinals, is that he says meaning is always absent. I believe this absence is real but it is an event that belongs to the present.
Whether or not you agree with Derrida’s view, and the broader postmodern view, of nothing meaning anything, you might concede that ours is a world from which meaning has largely drained and continues to drain apace. A loss of meaning is a pretty serious event. And it is for this reason that Derrida’s difficult-to-understand but impossible-to-shake-once-you-do theory of meaninglessness is worth our attention.
I want you to think about our very common avoidance of meaning for a minute. Think about how we are inclined, as a mass, to remember George H.W. Bush as a man who vomited on a prime minister and not one who was silent on apartheid, noisy about war and who drove US citizens into poverty in proportions unmatched for thirty years. And then had his deputy blame it on television. Think about how Bush’s detractors would rather remember him for an instant of embarrassment at dinnertime and not his policy; how his supporters would rather think of him as the great foreign policy president who was so conscientious in his diplomacy that the poor old guy was sick on a prime minister. Here, we shun real argument by letting comedy and tragedy stand in for facts.
We are eager to love or hate, to worship or deride. But we are rapidly losing the inclination to examine our reasons for such strong emotions. This doesn’t mean we are by nature lazy and stupid. It just means that the once reliable chain of meaning that would tell us that this instant is important and this instant is just a guy vomiting is wrapping around itself. There is nothing outside the text, the vomit, the urinal or the sitcom.
We get quite het up about things. We sling insults around like ‘hater’ and we tell people with whom we disagree to ‘go die in a fire’. We are easy with hyperbole and we say that we ‘love’ and ‘worship’ people with whom we agree. Certainly, as we’ll discuss in a later chapter on compassion, we are given to very grand emotion. But we are now more rarely inclined to make passionate intellectual criticisms than we are to react to presidential emesis. When it comes to problems that require understanding that transcends ‘good’ or ‘evil’, we will shrug because, hey, it’s all just relative. A vomit is as good as a complex critique in an age where it’s all more text.
The vomit begins to reveal a little more about what is meant when we talk about the postmodern era. There is a lot more ‘text’ being generated and fewer ways to sort it. There is no centre to our conversations and our knowledge because everything acquires the appearance of having equal weight. And so everything has acquired equal weight. Starved of the nutrition provided by real meaning, we gorge on any junk. We’ll even take vomit. Urinals. Cancelled sit-coms. There is now an acronym to describe the anxiety that one might overlook something important: FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. One can live in FOMO. Or one can accept that one cannot possibly know the difference between important things and trifles. Becoming Stupid in a world where there is increasingly ‘nothing outside the text’ is a pretty valid reaction. Sometimes, it is better not to react than to react and say something Stupid. I am a very talkative person and it took me many years to realise that one could simply not investigate all ‘text’ all the time.
•
I remember as a young woman visiting southern California and being unable to detect meaning in the easy grunts of its citizens. I remarked to a liberal American with whom I was doing business that she must be pleased about the Clinton Administration’s plans for universal health care. ‘It’s awesome,’ she replied in a way that could have been exhausted or cynical or glad. A few days later, I was in a bar and news of Rodney King, the African American victim of a vicious beating by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, was being discussed again on the television (the riots which followed this brutality, by the way, were described by Quayle as the work of Murphy Brown). I remarked to my host that such things were awful. ‘It’s awesome,’ he replied in a way that could have been exasperated or mocking or delighted.
What did they mean? I didn’t know what they meant.
The word ‘awesome’ hung in the smog above Los Angeles for the duration of my stay; it became fused in my memory with the wheeze of the hydraulic ‘low-rider’ cars I saw crawl along the city’s great boulevards and the hiss of the faulty Viper roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain. It drifted out of a broken machine and into the dirty air where it stayed and made no sense. ‘Awesome’ had become waste.
I was lost in this decentralised, postmodern city that fancied itself as a relaxed paradise of smooth rides and enlightened Americans but to me looked, rather quickly, like a hell of dented vehicles and people who couldn’t commit to an idea. When the Qantas plane left LAX for Sydney, I looked down until the city was lost in smog. ‘It’s awesome,’ I said. And I wasn’t even sure what I meant.
Los Angeles is, in the most literal sense, awesome. Or it was at least to Australian eyes shortly after 1992. Most obviously, it is a place whose primary business is producing the appearance of meaning and it was, in fact, on entertainment industry business that I first visited.
I travelled to Los Angeles to interview the musician Courtney Love who was, at the time, extraordinarily famous, and when one approaches celebrity, as I once did often, one can feel very postmodern. Which is to say, I think it must be very much like a tour of a nuclear power plant. On the approach, you feel a little nervous to be visiting the place where dangerous energy is born. You imagine you feel the hum of the plant and you wonder—most particularly if you are interviewing Courtney Love—if you might not visit on the very day the core melts. You have a sense of the deterrence of the place at the same time as you feel excited to be visiting its centre. And then you get there. And there is no hum and no evidence of the thing of which you were so afraid. It’s a tiny thing that doesn’t look as big and explosive as you’d hoped and feared, and you can’t help wondering what all the fuss was about. But you never doubt for a minute that this centre, that doesn’t feel at all like a centre, is the centre.
I should say that Courtney never showed; her husband, Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana, whom she had married just eighteen months before in 1992, had committed suicide. This left me alone for most of a week on the margins of a tragedy, which I was trying to find meaningful, looking for Los Angeles’ centre.
Los Angeles has no centre. It is difficult to navigate and even when one has a driver—and Courtney’s record company had provided me with one—the car moves slowly through wide streets and even wider freeways that are only differentiated by the amount of money they cost to build. Classless California where Anyone Can Make It has visible signs of both wealth and poverty but is democratised by the pace of the traffic. Rich and poor alike spend much of their time stuck in cars. Los Angeles is a really inefficient place whose residents have given up on civic activity because it takes too long to get there (even though Angelenos will always insist that travel time is twenty minutes). Los Angeles is too big and too individualised to make any shred of sense as a city.
I am not the first person to try to describe depthless postmodern life through the murk of Los Angeles. Thousands have talked about the meaninglessness of its entertainment industry and how its appetite for profitable mediocrity creates zombies. Hundreds have commented on the primacy of the automobile and the way in which one finds oneself always on the way to something and never actually there. Dozens have written about its theme park attractions and how these are, if not just as real as the city itself, then actually there just to give us some kind of reassurance that what is outside them is, in fact, real.
Of Los Angeles’ Disneyland, French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote in Simulacra and Simulation, ‘Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real.’ Literary critic Fredric Jameson has a sense that he has not yet evolved to the postmodern future as glimpsed in a popular LA hotel. Its mirrored external walls reflect the city back at itself and its entryways are unmarked. It suggests a continuity of a city that doesn’t exist and it defies the guest to find his way to rooms that are, he writes in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, dark and miserable bins in contrast to the light-box lobby. The hotel destroys the ‘capacities of the individual human body to locate itself’ and there is nothing outside the hotel, or the text. The hotel is Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the hotel.
This is what comes to us after the modern era of certainty, centrality and efficiency. It’s a time of doubt, confusion and systems that have begun to break down. Jameson observes that the boutiques of the hotel are, like everything else in the place, impossible to find. The place was built as a last-gasp architectural statement that would attract visitors and shoppers in droves. And it does. But no one can find the fucking entrance and even if they do, the boutiques behind it are invisible. Capitalism, like everything else, has begun to take place in a world that can no longer accommodate it.
These are not metaphors but accounts of an actual experience of postmodern life in Los Angeles and in the world. There are, as people will often say, no longer any rules. Things move very fast and appear to lead to nowhere. No one can even find the fucking shops. So of course there is no hope for the survival of meaning.
These are interesting times but these are devastating times. As one system (say, a global economy) eclipses another (a domestic economy) we are stuck using old rules to explain new practices. And when these rules don’t really work to explain and govern the new systems, one of the many casualties—and these include workers and marriage and living close enough to one’s school or work to walk there—is meaning.
So we give up and say FML or FOMO or we continue using old routines to explain new stories. Or, if we are quite unusual, we do what Derrida did and say, in a very complex way, that meaning is all bullshit anyhow.
Eventually, Derrida would return to material concerns. He and his cat enjoyed many conversations about ethics before his death. In the meantime, the great thinker left the world just a little worse off than he found it. With a new language to describe the crisis in meaning.
Personally, I believe this crisis will play itself out. I believe that at some point, people will become so sick of conversations about nothing that they will vomit on the new, radical emperor and let us know, as is their wont, which philosopher best described their movements into a time that demanded reality.
For the minute, though, we are very much enamoured of life trapped inside Derrida’s ‘signifying chain’. Matching sign for sign, we declare our disdain for unsound lavatories and sit-com characters with the use of an awareness ribbon. We use an unreal thing to condemn an unreal problem. We draw rainbows on the pavement to signify our support for sexual difference that we actually want to make the same. We change our Facebook avatars to ‘increase awareness’ of a paedophilia that everyone already (and always!) condemns. We say a black president is a ‘symbol’ of ‘hope’ and don’t really seem to mind that the most progressive thing he ever did was write legislation that would make health insurers more stinking rich than they had previously dreamed.
We are caught in a ‘playful’ game of deconstruction that I really don’t think we can blame Derrida for entirely and one, I think, that would have surprised even him with its savage and self-reflexive meaninglessness.
I used to like postmodernism at university. And then, one day, it really happened.
HR