Theoretical concepts in the postmodern come to us in the bright packages of very bright people; sometimes it is difficult to get free of their particular styles and vocabularies. In the following paragraphs, we attempt to avoid references to those bright people and their bright packages. We try to render what seems to us the two central (in a postmodernist mode, there's a paradox!) theoretical concepts that drive the postmodern engine. This rendering is overly simplified but, because of that, we hope, understandable. One of the delights of studying postmodernism comes from acknowledging that it is in a way an untameable subject in the end: this is rather like enjoying the misadventures of the Little Rascals, or Huckleberry Finn. Deleuze and Guattari help us to enter into this delight with their notion of the "rhizomatic" quality of postmodern reality. Simply put, they mean that one damned thing leads to another in its own fashion. So, what follows may appear tightly focused on two keystones of theory; but it rests on an assumption that we might have entered into postmodern theory from a wholly different direction.
POSTMODERNISTS REJECT MODERNIST REFERENTS TO THE UNIVERSAL
One gets at postmodern theory through the gateway of modernist theory. In so many ways, the concepts of postmodernism arose as rejections or at least as modifications of modernist theory. That which postmodernism rejects most thoroughly is the modernist theory that we deal with a reality that has an ultimate meaning or structure. When he saw the multivarious fabric of modernist expression, the modernist viewer looked not only at what the eye beheld. He also looked for the relationship of that appearance to something else, something mythic or universal or god-given, something ultimate rather than proximate in significance.
We could speculate that, as time went on in the twentieth century, the riot of expression tended to crowd out of consciousness that which it purported to represent, that ultimate something. The modernist could say, "It goes without saying that my novel creation does not stand alone. It is of course a revelation, as is all expression. Do we have to talk about that every time?" No, she did not have to talk about it every time. Indeed, it perhaps could be said that the postmodern sensibility did not arise abruptly as a clear break from an implied universalism. Rather, it might be the culmination of a gradual process of forgetting to make the connection between the proximate and the ultimate. God, from this point of view, might be said not to have died but to have been forgotten. It may have been that critical theory came along only then to explain what people already were thinking and not thinking about. --But such a speculation requires a different essay.
Whatever the historical circumstances, it is central to postmodern theory to assert that there is no ultimate significance to which experiences relate. Reality does not come from the interplay of the eternal and the ephemeral. Esthetic joy does not come from the tantalizing, mysterious aura that a particular form bears within it. The self, too, does not get legitimacy from a representative function (the child of God) or from a claim to universal uniqueness (his eye on every sparrow).
By rejecting a universal construct, postmodernism was also rejecting the consequences of such a construct. Those consequences did not come from the universal itself but from the human agents who tried to put their sense of the universal into operation here on earth. The two most important consequences of universalism were the hegemony of some and the exclusion of others. We can readily see the powerful political applications that flow from a rejection of them.
Well, someone might wonder, it's true that Tom Jefferson was a prisoner of his biases. Yet he asserted a valuable principle based on a universalist assumption--the equality of all men. Why can't we take that kernel of value, polish away its eighteenth century imperfections, so blatantly exclusionary, and have an amended principle intact. This would preserve a powerful and attractive concept within a universalist framework and allow us to use it in this postmodern era.
The problem is that postmodernism cannot accept the amended principle, however we clean it up, because it depends for its authority on a notion of the universal. Without that, it is a text like any other, to be processed like any other. Its merits will not come from its connection to the universal but from its consideration in the textual exchanges that make up life.
POSTMODERNISTS BELIEVE THAT WE CREATE OUR REALITY WITH LANGUAGE
We move by way of this example of the status of the Bill of Rights in postmodernity to the second central theory. We create with language the only conscious reality available to us as human beings. By embracing this theory, we embrace all of the strengths and weaknesses of human language itself. It delights us. It limits us. It frees us. It gives us stability, and, in the breath of the next utterance it destabilizes us. It gives us the power to create society's networks and to destroy them. What we say is what we are. (This is akin to the Hollywood nostrum, "What you are is how you look.") Language comes on the breath of finite physical beings; it keeps on flowing unto death; and the reality that we espouse flows on with it. Variety is not the spice of life; it is life. The universe is made up of what we say it is made up of. Objective truth is text, more or less persuasive. Another text will follow because breath keeps flowing.
Postmodern theoretical writing seems crazy to readers with the sense that reality, whatever it is, is not anything we decide to say it is. For them it is "out there," like a cold star. We have seen the nearly apoplectic reaction of "hard" scientists when postmodern apologists (explainers) assert that the scientists' knowledge of the real world is a wonderful linguistic configuration. "Real real real!" No, no, no, the postmodern answers. But postmodern scientists themselves are getting into the swing of the times, we suspect. Go back to a theatrical metaphor of modern science in its heyday: bit by bit, experiment by experiment, hard-won fact by hard-won fact, science was in the process of pulling open the heavy curtain that hid from human sight the complete and marvelous creation, which EXISTED--whether because of a master stroke from on high or because of the patient and all-powerful processes of evolutionary "nature." Modern science was like a stage hand, pulling that curtain open an inch at a time. Someday he would get it all the way open, and the whole truth of the world would stand revealed to humankind, a creation marvelous to behold and worthy of the applause of the patient audience.
The metaphor leads to absurdities and impossibilities that today are transparent to most people. A century and a half ago it would have seemed to make sense, and its ultimate nonsense would have escaped the dedicated many. It is the task of postmodern theory to replace such visions of reality with a wholly new approach. It does not render pointless or invalid the hard-won experimental proofs of the "hard" scientists. Rather, it denies that they are episodes of revelation. If the experiment is tight and it produces a replicable result, great. But that is not to say that we can (should) take it as a proof of the ontology of a whole universe. It is one finding. There will be other findings. They will be consistent with one another. That leads us to define reality upward rather than downward: now we have two foundational pylons on which to build instead of just one. If we work hard, we will end up with three, and so on. But they are not following a preordained plan. They simply reveal what they reveal, in small.
Critics say that postmodernist theory and its manifestation in praxis or creative expression are dominated by the concern for the grounds of being--an ontological preoccupation, as opposed to an epistemological preoccupation, which dominated modernism. When epistemology dominated, we asked how we could know what was assumed to be there to discover. Now that ontology dominates, we tell what we know about a world (or worlds) that comes into being with our utterance. Culture becomes a thing of its own. It is not reflecting something else.
You see the liberating potential in such a theoretical formulation. Creation is in our hands; it is anything we make it up to be with our power to use language.
Does this mean we can say the world is whatever we want to say and make it so? Well, in a manner of speaking, yes. Can we banish death and pain with our words? Ah, would that a theory could take us so far. The ontological reality of birth-and-death clearly limits the theoretical potential inherent in the elevation of language as maker. But the latitude is still remarkable. Birth-and-death in postmodernity does not anchor us in the superreal world of a religious imagination or an idealized culture beyond the mundane. It simply starts the game and stops it; in the interim, we make up all we want as we go along. And we escape the burden of feeling inadequate in the face of a power greater than human, or at least think we do. Humility has not atrophied; but it has its roots in our common experience, not in a grand story about our being beholden to a superior power.
The theory of language, which generates text, is the foundation for all this possibility for human action. It is a miraculously strong foundation; and at the same time it is demonstrably fragile, shifting. It is so because it anchors not in some reality other than itself but only in itself. We build castles on airy breath. When we take a breath and speak a novelty, the castles metamorphose in very air, and we are unabashed. Hard matter follows along like a herd of sheep, attentive to our words.
Combine these two keynotes of postmodern theory and you will hear the characteristic refrains of our day. They do not explain all, of course. However, if you bear in mind that together they constitute a rejection of theoretical underpinnings of traditional Western culture, they will explain much of what we observe in postmodernity.
Someone whose sensibilities developed in the modernist era must make an imaginative leap into the era characterized by these theories. The leap is made easier, of course, by the evolutionary nature of a life's experience: that person may have clung to a modernist vision of existence all through the past three decades, but the mounting evidence available to his senses had to erode its integrity, however unconscious he might have been of the erosion. Finally, when he reaches a need for conscious discrimination, what would have been an unbelievable shift thirty years ago becomes almost matter-of-fact today.
The human race seeks its own perpetuation in the end. We sometimes want to believe otherwise when we tally the human talent for self-destructiveness. But survival will always defeat genocide in the aggregate human experience. We hypothesize that the two key theories identified here have a function in the survival strategy of the late twentieth century. They function as comforting stories of the race. There are those, we know, who see in them the marks of a fallen civilization, the abandonment of a nobler story. Yet we see in them the response to the stimulus of cultural crisis. The old gods did appear to die. In order to survive, people had to find comfort in a different story. The postmodern theorists did the best they could to take the twentieth century into account in their new stories. If these stories frighten us with their instabilities and uncertainties, it is only because the conditions they are addressing have these characteristics in overwhelming abundance; and they are not readily buried with these mere strokes of syntax.
But they do retreat a little, perhaps--just as the apparitions of fearsome beasties outside the circle of the fire at the hearth became a little more domesticated when the family story teller talked through the long night.