Literature Developed by Mind under the Attack: A Critical Unsealing of War Narratives
Abstract:
This paper will attempt to investigate how World War I caused Modernism and how that abolished textual continuity as in Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Woolf, harmony in music as in Schoenberg is throwing back a fragmented and disillusioned mind which created an art. Special attention is paid to depict how the fragmented society after war led Picasso and Braque to pioneer Cubism in painting. The War time, however, is not confined to a singular significance but would differ across the subjects and hence symbolism created rich suggestive poetry rather than explicit signification which will be explored in the works of W.B. Yeats. Surrealism is excavated by taking up the paintings of Salvador Dali. Freud feels the urge of such historical necessity to come up with his results and I will try to show how psychoanalysis influenced the creations of Joyce and Woolf. The paper will also reinvestigate and prove Beckett's absurdist writings that after World War II the very centre of value judgement in humans had fallen into the abyss of nothingness, bringing us to the postmodern world. Attempts have also been made to show how precisely Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of German Marxist, Derrida and Lyotard gauge the psyche of the postmodern world.
Keywords: absurdist, fragmented, Psychoanalysis, Surrealism, Symbolism
Introduction and Discussion:
The evolution of Modernism - the cultural and literary movement that emerged in the early 20th century was intimately bound up with the shock and experience of the First World War. Modernism was an attempt to find new ways of capturing experience and identity, ways that would prioritize the individual and the interior mind and push the boundaries of language and form to its limits. The focus was on experimentation and abandonment of the fixed point of view, driven by restlessness with regard to the traditional structures of 19th century realism. The chaos and devastation of the First World War - which saw a massive loss of life on an unprecedented scale - sent writers and artists struggling to find new forms of representations, new ways of expressing an experience that had shattered a continent. At about this time, Ezra Pound wrote ‘In a Station of the Metro’ and helped initiate the poetry of Modernism. For if this was not “the first modern poem” it was certainly among the first: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.” (23)
The connotations of the image “apparition” encompass a wide range of thoughts. It implies that the people who are appearing suddenly and getting out of sight just as fast at the station, are like spirits of dead persons, symbolizing that the modern man is spiritually dead. He is deprived of spirituality and aesthetic sense and disconnected or broken off from nature and ultimately from his creator. It shows that he has become an automaton. The modern man is a “hollow man” in all. Let’s examine Ezra’s skilful use of the startling metaphorical comparison of human “faces” with the “petals” on a wet black tree branch. The branch stands for social structure and petals symbolize people. Here the “bough” is black, pointing towards its unhealthy structure and showing that it lacks inner strength, vigour and vitality. It means that the social set up is decaying in the modern age. The branch is wet because the sun does not shine much over it; therefore, the petals on it are dull and lifeless and so are the people of the modern society. It is a sharp criticism of the modern lifestyle that has led towards the loss of feelings and sentiments and made the people appear as ghosts. Their dehumanization makes them look like ghosts. The traditional idea of a plain, unbroken writing with an outright meaning has been rejected here. The two disjointed lines are as if thrown at us one after the other randomly having no coherent connection or unity between the two. Eliot in his ‘The Wasteland’ pictures a tragic, degenerative facet of humanity living in a fragmented, post-apocalyptic world after World War I. The fragmented nature of ‘The Wasteland’ is not merely a stylistic element or an effect that a reader perceives from the poem but most importantly a principal concept of Modernism reflecting the fragmented and disillusioned mind of the modern man and even the artist who is creating the work. In the first part ‘The Burial of the Dead’, the speaker describes the scene that he sees as “a heap of broken images”. Similarly, at the end of the poem, the speaker says, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”(431).
Thus, from the beginning to the end of his reflections, the speaker of the poem is aware of the fragmented images that he sees in the land. To the modernist, the world is a fragmented place and reality is too disjointed and confusing to understand; he continually tries to “[grapple] with disjointed elements [as] a defence method of sustaining things that are being lost or destroyed” in modernity. Thus, the disconnected images and ideas in the poem demonstrate that the modern world is fragmented and also that the modern desires to escape from the despairing condition of his society. Clare R. Kinney presents this notion of deliberate and purposeful disorder in terms of the progression of plot in The Waste Land. Understanding the role of the narrative in the poem is important because “difficulties with maintaining ‘connections’ within the narrative process . . . reflects the stylistic, syntactic and semantic dislocation” that is characteristic of modernist literature and thus modernist philosophy. According to Kinney’s study of the narrative form within “The Waste Land'', the poem “offers the reader fragmentary, half-buried glimpses of a goal-directed plot.” (Kinney 278) While the lack of coherence in the poem obscures the meaning, The Waste Land simultaneously seduces the reader into a search for the linear progression of conventional plot that it lacks. The fragmentation within the poem is not merely intended to create chaos and confusion; it emphasizes and intensifies the struggle and agony of the speaker by communicating a sense of desire for linearity and structure in his perspective. This intentionality underlying the scattered form of the poem also explains the seemingly unrelated and fractured images, metaphors, and allusions throughout the poem. The implicit and subtle yet desperate desire for coherence and progression causes the speaker to “constantly [entertain] different methods of ordering and containing its language”, hence using a plethora of varying sentence structures, rhythms, and allusions all within one poem. Even in the seemingly chaotic and nonsensical composition of the poem, Eliot had a strategy and purpose in communicating and implying the desperation and agony of the modern man. Ultimately, however, despite the speaker’s desire for order and pattern, searching for meaning in the modernist world, the poem shows, proves to be futile. The disjointedness in the poem “exhibits not formlessness but a passion for form, largely unfulfilled.” (Kinney 280) What he is ultimately left with is absurdity and confusion instead of a logical and orderly plot. As the title of Kinney’s essay, “Fragmentary Excess, Copious Dearth: The Waste Land as Anti-Narrative,” suggests, the relationship between the form and content of the poem can be summarized as the paradoxical coexistence of “dearth and excess.” (279) While the poem is characterized by a sense of lacking— “missing parts, missing links, missing climaxes— [it is also] characterized by copious augmentation and restatements”. Despite the speaker’s attempt to construct order and meaning with an abundance of fragmented ideas and phrases—despite the excess—he is nonetheless left with a sense of absence, lacking, or, according to Kinney’s terms, dearth. The closing lines of the poem demonstrate this unfulfilled and futile effort. The relationship between the final lines and the rest of the poem is analyzed in Mary McGann’s study of the poem; the fragmented yet “brief moments of illumination lead into the final epiphany, which reflects the method of the entire poem”. At the end of his reflections, the speaker attempts to find a sense of resolution and order. However, despite this attempt, his thoughts are still fragmented and his words still obscure and ambiguous. He quotes the nursery rhyme: “London bridge is falling down falling down falling down,” communicating a sense of decline of a prominent modern city in Europe. Even after his search for structure, reason, and meaning, the modern man does not see the rebuilding of the “Unreal City” but sees its decline and decay. The speaker’s last vision in the poem is that of the fragments of the city that have fallen down. Thus, as McGann argues, the poem traces the disordered and chaotic image of the world through the speaker’s fragmented thoughts and ends with a vision of fragmentation and the realization that the world remains disjointed and chaotic. The final two lines of the poem also appear obscure and cryptic. The closing line, “Shantih shantih shantih,” which means “the peace which passeth understanding” reflects the fact that the speaker does not find security and meaning in the Unreal City but in another ancient religious text Upanishad. Eliot, in his notes on the poem, remarked that “What the Thunder Said” contains the theme of “the present decay of eastern Europe” (“Notes” 52). Because of this decline and decay, the speaker does not find resolution within the city, or the development of western civilization, but he turns to an ancient eastern religious text. Instead of quoting the almost identical expression from the Bible in Philippians 4:7, “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,” Eliot deliberately includes this line from the Upanishad, a Hindu text. This turning away from the religion and mindset that gave security to the western world to an ancient eastern religion emphasizes the futility and failure of Western society in providing security and a resolution for the modern man’s confusion and doubt. At the end of his search through the fragments of modern thought and society, the modern man finds his efforts and the society around him to be ultimately futile and meaningless.
In Ulysses the absence of linear, narrative, sequential chapters and insistence on a broken episodic order initially puts the reader off balance. The first episode’s chronicle Stephen Dedalus’ awakening and preparations for the day. With the fourth episode, the reader is again at 8:00am but now with Leopold Bloom. Contrary to the traditional novel, Ulysses is composed of overlapping episodes, sharp and fragmented, resembling an early Cubist painting or Bergson’s theory of time constituting a fusion of moments. The stylistic tone of the narrators varies from episode to episode to keep the reader off balance. These opening lines give a glimpse of the changes in narrative voice: From “Aeolus,” “IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS” (116); From “Lestrygonians,” “Pineapple Rock, Lemon Platt, Butter Scotch. A Sugarsticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of creams for a Christian brother” (151); From “Scylla & Charybdis,” “Urbane to comfort them the Quaker Librarian Purred: -And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister?” (184); From “Wandering Rocks,” “The Superior, the Very Reverend John Conmee S. J., reset his smooth watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps'' (219); From “Sirens,” “Bronze by Gold Heard the Hoofirons, Steelyrining Imperthnthnthnthnthn” (256).
These contrasting and differing voices of the narrators create abrupt shifts throughout the novel, sharply defining each episode against the other while each episode carries on the various storylines of Bloom and Dedalus. Besides the overlapping episodes and simultaneous viewpoints, Joyce also adjusts grammatical and storyline devices. In Ulysses, he makes abundant use of interior monologue. Without quotation marks or indentations, the narrator’s voice collides with the character’s interior thoughts, creating a text in flux that the reader must ride. An example occurs in the opening scene with Bloom, as Joyce moves from narrator, to Bloom and the cat speaking, to Bloom’s inner thoughts seamlessly, without grammatical inscriptions. These switches are so common in current literature that we likely fail to appreciate their advent. Only perhaps Flaubert and Proust had attempted writing like this, but they did not attempt to construct the mirrored labyrinth that Joyce managed - the labyrinth of the modern shattered mind which was under attack of the consequences of war. Again, this seamless inner monologue reflects the experience of duration as described by Bergson. The use of dialogue in literature had been carefully denoted by quotation marks alerting the reader to a shift in voice. Joyce’s inversion of traditional form is displayed in his use of stream-of- consciousness found predominantly in the last episode, “Penelope,” which operates as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. With sparse punctuation and rarely any paragraph breaks, this episode spans forty-five pages with fragmented thoughts as: “Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending laid up with a sick” (738). Perhaps here there is an obvious tie to Freud’s thoughts on how we assess information and how we think through associations. The effect of a woman’s private thoughts running without grammar, without censor in literature, not subversive literature, was unprecedented. Joyce delightfully wrote of the experience of Molly Bloom climaxing, her enjoyment, her fantasies, and the flow of her menses most likely because he wanted controversy.
Perhaps Joyce’s best attempt at simultaneity is found in the central “Wandering Rocks” episode. The episode, composed of eighteen scenes with overlapping characters, actions, and locations, challenges the linear nature of language. The scenes wind the reader through Dublin with various minor characters in the novel. Interestingly the change of perspective through Dublin creates a labyrinth to follow. Part of one scene is mixed into another and, in some cases, occurrences that have transpired in earlier episodes or will take place in future episodes are depicted. In the first scene, for example, the viewpoint comes from Father John Conmee, who is leaving his office for his habitual afternoon prayer in the country (219-24). Amongst many, them passes a one-legged sailor who asks for alms and he sees Corny Kelleher “[chewing] a blade of hay” (219-21). In the second episode, Corny Kelleher view is depicted, “chewing his blade of hay . . . [he] looks idly out [and sees] Father John Conmee [stepping] into the Dollymount tram” (224-25). In the third episode, the perspective of the one-legged sailor is presented. He is still seeking alms and he “bays” to an open window “---home and beauty”; the blind is drawn and “a card Unfurnished Apartments slip[s] from the sash . . . a plump bare generous arm shone, was seen, held forth from a white petticoat bodice and taut shiftstraps” (225-26). Much later in the book, we learn this plump arm belongs to Molly Bloom, who is then preparing for her rendezvous with Blazes Boylan. As critic Jo-Anna Isaak points out, “Not only are figures fragmented and dispersed in the way they would be on a Cubist canvas; they are also multiplied and presented from different angles simultaneously by reflection and refraction” (79). The divided portions of this episode gain momentum through their varying lengths coupled with the increasing number of overlapping characters. In the end there is a swirl of events occurring concurrently and, thus, a whole instant of Dublin time is presented but only understood conceptually. The overlapping of sequence and time in “Wandering Rocks” creates a conceptualized sense of simultaneity. The relativity of perception as described by Einstein was permeating the humanities. The fragmentation and stratification of urban life affected Joyce. He fought against the inherently linear structure of language. According to Litz, “Joyce’s work on Ulysses is characterized by a growing conflict between his aesthetic ideal of ‘simultaneity’ and the consecutive nature of language” (Art 56). The idea of simultaneity formally expressed through language seemed impossible. But according to popular theories of time and space at Joyce’s time, this simultaneity could conceptually occur and Joyce managed such a feat. Much like Cubist images, which are void of grand content, the emphasis in the “Wandering Rocks” episode is on the miniscule, mundane, and perhaps, insignificant moments in these characters’ day. Such a focus on the microcosmic dimensions of existence had not been given in a literary work previous to Joyce. The episode does not add to the plot or create any momentum for the story, but serves as an example of Modernist fragmentation and cinematic experience. Life is experienced piecemeal and may or may not add up to something in the end.
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the constant flow of the narration filtering in and out of the characters’ internal lives retains the sense of movement essential to the life-spirit: when the narrative lifts from the character in a specific moment, the character resumes internal movement to into another specific moment upon which the narrative lands. The narrative briefly pins characters to specific stylized and dramatized moments of internal life following the flow of external movement. The narrative remains fixed on that moment only briefly before flowing to another moment experienced in the context of another external influence of the same or another character. When the series of moments are taken together, there emerges a succession of snapshots portraying internal character in jerking motion. And this essentially is the state of the modern war-torn mind. The following quote from Woolf’s ‘Modern Fiction’ (April 1919) is the most pertinent at this point of our paper:
“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.” (35)
Throughout the novel, external events or objects operate as a portal to the internal mind of a character as the narrative conveys the influence of external movement on the internal motion of the mind. In the novel’s morning, an airplane flies overhead; onlookers look up simultaneously and stand transfixed gazing into the sky in a trancelike state. This external spectacle has excited the minds of crowd, as it fades and they resume motion, the narration delves into the impressions the plane left upon several characters: The narrative enters into Septimus’s perception of the plane; for him the plane is a unknown language: “So thought Septimus, looking up, they are signaling to me. Not indeed in actual words; this is, he could not read the language yet.” (Woolf 234)
The narrative continues, briefly bringing to light the fleeting impressions of others; for an old woman it reminds her of what she had not been able to do and what men could; for a labor, “an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol of man’s soul; of his determination to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory”. The narrative, in this scene, takes a snapshot of the internal structure of characters as he/she reacts to an externally introduced spectacle. The airplane is an extreme example of pinning internal motion in place to convey the mind in one moment of time; generally, the narrative offers a series of internal moments of a character strung along by external movement, such as Mrs. Dalloway’s morning walk through London to buy the flowers. As she walks, her internal animation follows the pattern of the external sights she sees: the traffic, the park, Hugh, the shop windows. Throughout her walk, the narrative constructs a clear connection between external stimuli and the flow of Clarissa’s mind, exerting a precise control over the meeting of a flow of external objects and the mind so that the two align but in a rigid and not quite true manner. The movement of the narrative meets in pulses the internal movement of the character, more closely connecting the narrative’s internal flow with the internal flow of the character’s life. This is a perfect example of Woolf’s adoption of the stream-of-consciousness technique. But the inner-life of the characters is not allowed complete freedom, always stepping to the rhythm of external motion.
Mrs. Dalloway moves closer towards the point of balance between narrative movement and character internal movement, and the movement of internal character that emerges is jerky and strung along by external and internal narrative movement.
In the field of music, Arnold Schoenberg was a pioneering composer treading an uncertain path. Born in 1874, Schoenberg eventually concluded that the late Germanic Romanticism of his youth, with its hold on tonal (that is, major- and minor-key) harmony, had become an exhausted language. In several crucial pieces, starting around 1908, he slowly tried to find a new, atonal language. He set about composing in a language unbounded by the traditional expectation that music would hew to consonant points of grounding; he said he “emancipated dissonance.”
In the years 1907-1914, Picasso and Braque worked so closely together that their works from this period are sometimes difficult to tell apart. Through this artistic collaboration, Picasso and Braque invented Cubism, a new style of painting that shattered traditional forms of artistic representation. Both Picasso and Braque called into question conventional ideas about art as the imitation of reality. They initially drew inspiration from two key sources: works by Paul Cezanne and African art. Paul Cezanne’s use of fragmented space and ambiguous forms and the geometric shapes and figures apparent in African art, particularly African masks, paved the way stylistically for their development of Cubism which would mirror the then fragmented society. Together, Picasso and Braque developed a distinct Cubist style. Picasso shifted his focus from narrative imagery to pictorial design, while Braque channelled his creativity towards his use of materials and textures and the manipulation of light and space. Picasso and Braque defined certain aspects of Cubism including distorted figures and forms and a monochromatic colour palette of browns, greys, and blacks. They simplified figures and objects into geometric components and planes that may or may not add up to the whole figure or object as it would appear in the natural world and simultaneously depicted different points of view on one plane, suggesting a flat, two-dimensional surface.
Cubism arguably began with Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and George Braque's Houses at L'Estaque (1908), and the name was initially applied as an insult—like many of the names of avant-garde movements—by a critic when he was discussing Braque’s Houses. Cubism has been understood to have two phases: Analytic and Synthetic. During the Analytic period, Picasso and Braque progressively broke down three-dimensional objects into fragments—corresponding to an object’s appearance from various different viewpoints in space—until they came close to entirely abstract artworks. To understand the speed of this progression, look at the difference between Braque’s Houses (1908) and Picasso’s Portrait of Art Dealer Ambroise Vollard (1910). It is these works which are best-known as Cubist. The fragmented planes in Picasso’s Nude Woman also project toward the viewer, appearing to spill out of the picture plane. The artificial lines point to disparate points beyond the viewer, reflecting the multiple viewpoints and, in effect, a simultaneous whole. But this whole is not necessarily created on the canvas. Can one clearly see a nude woman in this painting? Most likely not. Where is the woman’s head? Where are her feet? Merely staring at the picture will not bring these elements out. The whole is created through the assemblage of sharp contours and cubes in the viewer’s mind. Thus, the image is completed in conceptualized space if only for a brief moment. The viewer is not drawn into the painting as with the Last Supper but is confronted with immediacy and energy from the spilling, overlapping, and fragmented planes.
Yeats, a symbolist in the modern tradition, believed that artists must employ ancient symbols because of the multiple meanings such symbols evoke and because of their relationship with the Great Memory. The war time world couldn’t have a singular significance but would differ across subjects and hence Symbolism created poetry of rich suggestiveness rather than explicit signification. As his art grew to maturity, Yeats' symbols became more and more complex and personal. This complex nature of symbols is manifest in the poems included in The Tower and The Winding Stair group of the poems. The Tower symbol partakes of both traditional and personal character. It was a tower of real physical existence where the poet lived for some time, and at the same time it is used as a symbol of loneliness and isolation, a secluded place of retreat for the poet. In ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’; the tower hints at the poet's vision of the dark and dismal future of humanity. All these associations and suggestions associated with the tower, make it a symbol of high complexity. While they add to the richness and elegance of the poem they also add to the perplexity and bewilderment of the reader. The complexity of symbolism is no less intriguing in the Byzantium group of the poems. Such intricacy of symbols increases the obscurity of Yeats' poetry. As Yeat’s powers attained maturity, his symbols acquired richness of associations, evocative quality and intricacy and Symbolism enabled him to make his vision and traces concrete and substantial. Only in this way he could convey to his readers a definite picture of his vague, fleeting sensations and experiences. Symbolism helped him to express the richness of man's deeper reality, something mystical.
Salvador Dali strove to capture hallucinatory subject matter in a realistic, meticulously detailed style, creating the illusion of a tangible dream-world. Dali’s approach inspired other artists to the extent that it became the dominant form of Surrealism. Dalí was convinced that his imagery must be based on a visually interpretive metamorphosis of reality. Using what he referred to as his “paranoiac-critical method,” which he began to develop in 1929-30, he cultivated “irrational knowledge” based on a “delirium of interpretation”. Rather than shy away from the traditionally taboo realms of terror, lust and revulsion, Dali used these as lenses through which subjects could be distorted into endlessly rich, symbolic themes. He sought to disassemble reality and reorganize it in a way that revealed the mind’s most secret workings: “I believe,” he wrote, “that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible … to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality”. (Honour and Fleming) As part of this approach, Dali systematically focused on imagery that he found disturbing, upsetting or perversely fascinating, and as a result, many of his iconic images are enriched with insect-based visual metaphors, often representing flaws and other disturbances. Insects appear in many examples of Dali’s work, including pieces such as ‘Honey is Sweeter than Blood’, ‘Un Chien Andalou’, and of course ‘The Persistence of Memory’. Many of Dali’s paintings contain quite intimate sexual imagery, ranging from abstract to anatomically specific, often accompanied by scatological and putrescent themes. Roving insects enhance this foundation. These insects - most frequently ants, flies and grasshoppers - have been linked to expressions of ephemerality and self-loathing. Psychoanalysis was the result of Freud’s “scientific” intention to disregard any hierarchy that religion or metaphysics or ethics or tradition had set up concerning the activities of consciousness. It may well be true to say that this had been the first such attempt in the history of man's efforts to know himself against the backdrop of the ‘The Wasteland’ he was living in. There is for psychoanalysis no pre- established order of the psyche. Psychoanalysis is imbued with the suspicion that everything, every tatter of a dream, every scrap of memory, every seemingly arbitrary association our thinking makes between this and that, may be of hitherto unsuspected significance within the economy of the soul, just as we have already examined in stream-of-consciousness technique applied both in ‘Ulysses’ and Mrs. Dalloway. Thus we find how Psychoanalysis had influenced the stream-of-consciousnesses method in modernist literature. ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was the response to the Second World War which had brought in a sense of despair and futility in human society. In the conventional drama there was a neatly constructed plot having a linear progression. But in the Theatre of the Absurd, the whole idea of plot is debunked. Martin Esslin in his ‘The Search for the Self’ writes:
“Waiting For Godot does not tell a story; it explores a static situation. ‘ Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.” (Esslin 47)
Estragon and Vladimir are in the belief that Godot’s coming may change their fate, and so they wait but this waiting amounts to nothing as Godot never comes. This waiting being associated with the terrible sense of arrested time brings alterations in the passage of the subjective times of Vladimir and Estragon. Time weighs heavily on their minds and consciousness as they are waiting. They are subjected to ennui or tedium and do everything possible to pass time. The absurdist abide by the principle of minimalism. Their stage setting shows only which are absolutely necessary like a mound in a drab, deserted place, a road whose ends are unknown and a tree which has shed all its leaves comprises the setting of ‘Waiting for Godot’, all together propagating the idea of nothingness. Beckett uses bathos all along and situations lacking specificity bringing about tragic uncertainty. Words are used but language loses its meaning because of the absence of gestures and also because of the absence of the physical presence of the equivalent reality meant by the word.
A ditch! Where?
Estragon: (without gesture). Over there. (Beckett, I, p-74)
This is an element of the absurd. The play foregrounds failure of communication, language, loss of speech. Words are cut off from their translation to actions. The first utterance in the play by Estragon sets the keynote of the play: ‘Nothing to be done’. (198)
This is the outburst of nihilistic pessimism where there is the realization due to experience that all our efforts and pursuits to find meaning, or purpose or the address of a definite destination to be reached will lead us nowhere because after the destruction wrought by World War II the very center of value judgement in humans had fallen into the abyss of nothingness, bringing us to the postmodern world.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote “Dialectic of Enlightenment” following the atrocities of World War II. In the introduction to "Dialectic of Enlightenment" Adorno and Horkheimer set forth their goal as an attempt to figure out why “humanity has sunk into a new kind of barbarism instead of shifting into a new state of the human condition”. (Adorno and Horkheimer 202) They saw Nazism and Fascism as phenomena that stems from the destructive dialectic of enlightenment which caused the west to be taken over by instrumental rationality. According to them, fascist totalitarianism is the most extreme conclusion of western enlightenment. The dialectic of enlightenment is perceived by Adorno and Horkheimer not just in its historical context of the 18th century, but rather in the broad sense of the human attempt to enforce order and meaning on reality, to try and understand the world for the purpose of taking over it, an attempt driven by western rationality for centuries. They argue that by the rational conquest of nature man has attempted to quell his fears from it, but this attempt has led the dangerous developments. The fear driven violence directed by man towards nature has also led it to be directed towards other humans. The rational program of the enlightenment was an attempt to establish man as a differentiated and independent subject from nature. However, the main thesis of “Dialectic of Enlightenment” is that this program involved man taking over its own nature and the repression of urges, feelings, desires and so forth (note here the application of Freudian thinking to culture). Moving away from nature has thus led, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, to a state in which the principle of oppression has taken over all of human life. This oppression is manifested in the limits of human rationality which has become, as it were, "a one-track mind" designed for the sole purpose of subduing and exploiting nature, humans included.
Now in this postmodern backdrop the main thesis of Derrida's position can be stated in the following way. Western philosophers have been mistaken in their belief that being is presence, and the key to understanding presence is something along the lines of substance, sameness, identity, essence, clear and distinct ideas, etc. For, according to Derrida, all identities, presences, predications, etc., depend for their existence on something outside themselves, something which is absent and different from themselves. Or again: all identities involve their differences and relations; these differences and relations are aspects or features outside of the object - different from it, yet related to it - yet they are never fully present. Or again: reality itself is a kind of "free play" of différance (a new term coined by Derrida); no identities really exist (in the traditional sense) at this level; identities are simply constructing of the mind, and essentially of language. Thus, this gives us an insight into the postmodern psyche and its workings.
In order to elaborate these points further, it is helpful to distinguish in Derrida's work between two realms, the realm of reality (or of différance), and the realm of identities (or of predication and presence). Derrida believes that there are no identities, no self-contained presences, and no fixed, settled meanings at the level of différance. Further, the realm of différance is non-cognitive; i.e., it cannot be fully captured or described by means of any set of concepts, or logical system which makes objects "present" to the mind. Derrida makes this point well in ‘Margins of Philosophy’: “It is the domination of beings that différance everywhere comes to solicit . . . to shake . . . it is the determination of being as presence that is interrogated by the thought of différance. Différance is not. It is not a present being. It governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority . . . There is no essence of différance.” (Derrida and Bass 36)
Yet, according to Derrida, although the realm of différance is noncognitive, it never occurs without cognitive knowledge (the realm of presence). This is because our contact with it in human experience, our involvement with it through language, always takes place by means of concepts. And this is simply to say that all knowledge is contextual in the sense that the relations of an object in any system of objects or meanings are always changing (differing), and hence meaning (i.e., identity) is continually being postponed (i.e., deferred). The realm of différance is appropriately conveyed or expressed in philosophical works by means of metaphor because it is the nature of metaphor to signify without signifying, and this illustrates nicely Derrida's point that an identity is what it is not and is not what it is. Derrida skilfully employs many different and often striking metaphors to make this same point repeatedly: margins, trace, flow, archi-writing, tain of the mirror, alterity, supplement, etc. We must now consider what all of this means for the task of evaluating particular worldviews. To relate all of this to the issue of worldviews (especially the worldview of traditional philosophy), and to express these points in more down to earth language, what the postmodernists are saying is that no particular worldview can claim to have the truth. All worldviews can be called into question (including the worldview of deconstruction itself). The reason all worldviews can be called into question is because the meanings which are constitutive of a worldview cannot be known to be true objectively. This is because there is no objective knowledge. All knowledge is contextual and is influenced by culture, tradition, language, prejudices, background beliefs, etc., and is therefore, in some very important sense, relative to these phenomena. So, the job of deconstruction is to challenge and call into question all claims to objective knowledge by illustrating alternative meanings and "truths" in any particular worldview, which are really there whether the adherents of the worldview recognize them or not. And these alternative meanings will undermine the worldview in question, because they will be different from, and often opposed to, the original, "objective" meanings claimed for that worldview. Thus, we see the postmodern world to be in an unstable condition with no ultimate objective truth to hold on to.
The term “postmodern” came into the philosophical lexicon with the publication of Jean-François Lyotard's ‘La Condition Postmoderne’ in 1979 (in English: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1984) As the 1970s progressed, Lyotard moved towards considerations of justice that could discern among different regimes of intensities, but only once we acknowledge the changes in the era in which we live. The Postmodern Condition begins by defining the postmodern as “incredulity towards metanarratives”, which is fitting given that it is a report on knowledge in the contemporary age. Lyotard means that modernist considerations of education as slowly developing and emancipating human beings in terms of a common project where all forms of knowledge ultimately cohere has fallen away and that we are left merely with “little” or regional narratives at odds with one another. He writes:
“I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse … making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth … I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” (Postmodern Condition, xxiii–xxiv)
This is the overarching theme of the book, which also takes up the crisis of legitimation in the sciences, which often must use extra-scientific narratives to attempt to place themselves above other kinds of narration (the arts, novels, philosophy, and so forth) as the final arbiter of truth, and hence is one of the last metanarratives of modernity. The problem, Lyotard argues, is that the sciences face two crises: one of representation, that is, that it cannot be held naively that its models present to human subjects an accurate view of the objective world, instead of paradigms in which only certain views of the world fit and which, within a few years, can be completely overturned. Like any other particular kind of knowledge, e.g., a religious or philosophical text, science is unable to move to transcend its particular modes of discourse in order to claim anything beyond its own sphere of competence and the rules by which its language game is played. The second crisis is that science and other forms of knowledge are being put to the “technological” or “operativity” criterion (Postmodern Condition, xxv). In this way, the gaining of scientific knowledge is not an end in itself, but is in service ultimately to economic motives that will make certain processes more efficient and others redundant. The narrative of The Postmodern Condition moves along two temporal periods, one being modernity and its adherence to certain metanarratives or means of organizing society’s chaotic mix of different language games, the other being the computerization of knowledge that occurred from the 1950s forward. This would become what is now called the “information” or “knowledge” economy, and Lyotard is one of those political thinkers who recognized a changeover from state-centered forms of liberalism to the neo-liberal, laissez-faire deregulation of economies just before the Reagan and Thatcher victories in the United States and United Kingdom. This computerization of knowledge has not just sped up how knowledge is transferred, but what we think knowledge is, especially as the sciences are put almost wholly in service of supplying patents and know-how for corporations. Lyotard avers that the old model of the learning of knowledge as a means for making citizens and free agents of individuals is falling away as knowledge is exteriorized from any particular individual knowers, and what is considered knowledge will only be that which can be translated into computerizable language.
“We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned”, he writes, “and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility” (Postmodern Condition, 4). Where before nation-states scrambled in competition for resources, what is now at stake are “informational commodit[ies]”, small packets of information to be gained and traded under conditions where maximal efficiency is given absolute privilege (Postmodern Condition, 5). Universities, then, will soon give up their roles in providing training (what the Germans call Bildung), instead preparing their students for becoming managers and creating these packets of information. No doubt, Lyotard was not the only one to see these changes coming, but his prescience is notable nonetheless. At the same time, since multinational corporations are best suited to commodify information at vast scales, the nation-state will lose its central political place and indeed purposely abdicate its role in managing national economies. This reduction of knowledge to that which is easily translatable and understandable, of course, is what drives globalization, and the leading economies, as Lyotard notes, will not be those engaged in manufacturing traditional commodities but instead those created and utilized through modern computing. Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. (Postmodern Condition, 5)
One need only see the decimation of the U.S.’s rust belt communities and the outsized economic and political role of Silicon Valley and the banking sectors in London and New York as proof of Lyotard’s claims. But these changes have another effect as well: these centers adjudicate what knowledge is, and one need only witness often fruitless attempts by humanities departments to prove themselves valuable to employers in the digital economy as evidence of this. Lyotard offers that the postmodern, as he sees it, ought to look for what is irreducible to commodification, that which is unpresentable within the “realism” of today (Postmodern Condition, 73–9). That which is taken to be real and most natural is the formation of knowledge in terms understandable by capitalist economics and its modes of efficiency. Lyotard, then, argues for forms of avant-gardism that seek what is unpresentable in the present. Books by James Joyce (1882–1941), no doubt, can be treated like a commodity like any other, but open up onto a plurality of meanings. One could read Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) in the service of having dinner party pattern, but such postmodern works ultimately evade any simple meaning to pass along in such idle chatter. Here is how Lyotard famously defines the postmodern more positively than being merely a disbelief in metanarratives:
postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text. (Postmodern Condition, 81)
In sum, while there is a heterogeneity of language games through which we pass, artists, writers, and philosophers make moves within those language games—say those said to govern what a novel is—that disrupt and open those language games to what “will have been”, as he puts it. That is, they open up new ways of thinking that are unpresentable in current language games. “Terror”, as he understands it, is “a fantasy to seize reality”, that is to colonize or totalize all other language games and their future possibilities under the regime of one language game (e.g., the technocratic language game of efficiency [Postmodern Condition, 67]). On this flip side of this terror are those that are “witnesses to the unpresentable”, who wish to “activate the difference” beyond and between the plurality of language games that make up postmodern societies (Postmodern Condition, 82)
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