LESSONS AND LIMITS
OF THE POSTMODERN PROGRAMME PROJECT
In September 1995, I launched the Postmodern Programme at Sixth Avenue website. I actively developed it until March 1999. This project taught me something useful about the hypertext medium and about my chosen topic, postmodernism. It also revealed the limits of my use of hypertext as a medium and the limits of my understanding of postmodernism. Here, I identify some of these lessons and limits.
I am writing this to close the Postmodern Programme project. I do not intend, however, that it close my mind to postmodern studies. The reconstituted website--rpr/WORKS--remains open to further postmodern reading and comment. But I will not attempt to integrate new work the way I did in the Programme.
Main findings about the Programme are as follows:
Hypertext technology had some
interesting influences on the way I thought and wrote.
There were
limits, however, to the influence of hypertext technology on the
way I thought and wrote.
Studying
postmodernism refreshed my dated understanding of the state of
western knowledge and helped me come to grips with the
contemporary situation.
To continue
studying postmodernism responsibly, I would have to narrow my
focus and specialize on some limited area.
To go to further comment on any of these summary findings, click on the appropriate green bullets above.
30 May 1999
Copyright 1999 Richard P. Richter
Hypertext technology had some
interesting influences on the way I thought and wrote.
Two influences stand out.
First, the power to make quick connections from one text to another expanded my sense of the relatedness of ideas.
We of course connect ideas in traditional, printed texts through the use of footnotes and endnotes. However, the transitions from text to text online via computer are superior in many ways to the old process of thumbing pages.
I found this to be more than a mechanical improvement. It allowed me to connect a text not to one note but to many related texts. I could create a network of related ideas and allow a reader to choose a path through that network.
Writing in hypertext, I found myself anticipating links in a network-in-the-making. This heightened my awareness of the topic and encouraged me to relate thoughts from different texts. Relatedness, of course, leaped exponentially when I linked one of my own texts to a text in cyberspace through the Internet. The Internet allowed a multiplicity of connections of ideas. It was stimulating to the mind to expand a local idea of one's own to touch an idea developed by someone elsewhere, instantly linkable online. "Web" turned out to be an apt word.
At its most effective, this process enriched my basic understanding of a subject. This raised tantalizing questions about the ability of hypertext to affect the very structure of knowledge in disciplines. I believe that these questions are rising to importance as the academic fields of knowledge absorb the influence of hypertext.
Second, writing for an instant online audience heightened the sense of connection.
The new technology creates a new kind of relatedness among readers and writers online. Writing for online appearance, I had the feeling that my text would be in instant contact with readers. Of course, it was possible that no one would really read what I wrote. That did not matter. I knew that, through the technology, it was possible. That sense of possibility was enough to create an attitude. It added an element of excitement and expectation to the old process of writing text for an audience.
This sense of "instant publication" heightened awareness of what I was writing. I think that sometimes made me write better (at other times less patiently). Yet, this sense also made me feel guilty about the rawness of some of the stuff I wrote, particularly summaries of books read.
The electronic environment is altering sensibilities in ways that we only guess at the moment. The new sense of myself writing online probably is one small bit of evidence of the Homo Hyperspace now evolving.
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There were limits, however, to the
influence of hypertext technology on the way I thought and wrote.
Hypertext offered a new way to think and relate ideas. It offered a new way to present ideas to readers. Its power lay in the inter-connectedness of texts, made possible by the technology. I had a grand vision at one point of a vast plane of thought, richly interwoven through hypertext links. It was an unhierarchical structure, which would yield meaning to anyone entering at any point and navigating on his or her own initiative.
This intellectual fantasy was overly ambitious to a fault, at least for one with my many limits. It looks to me now like a kind of Disneyland of the mind--and just as much out of touch with reality.
For one thing, at the start of the Programme, I made up a rigid categorical structure, which branched hierarchically. I based this on the barest understanding of postmodernism. This "backbone," seen in the table of contents, preordained that I would never create the flexible, "rhizomatic" plane of interconnected thought envisioned in my wilder moments.
Nevertheless, despite the rigid backbone, I developed a redundant, interlaced, never-finished network of links. It allowed me to pretend, at least, that I had begun to create that vast plane. But I never resolved the tension between the hierarchy of my table of contents and the budding rhizome of texts.
I think I could have created a meaningful intertextual plane even with the backbone intact if my will and mind had not flagged. I bit off far more than I could chew.
Moreover, the intellectual conditioning of a lifetime would not transform itself. I learned to think and write in linear form. Although I was excited over the power of hypertext, seen by George Landow and others, I could not start the life of my mind all over again at this stage. Well into the project, I began to lower expectations of myself by simply summarizing books and writing essays without systematically finding and making all the possible links to other texts.
This in the end meant that, to a considerable extent, I was simply doing old tasks of reading and writing with new technological tools; I was not using the technology to transform the structure of thought.
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To discuss this finding, I first need to separate my interest in hypertext from my interest in postmodernism. The project began as a study of postmodernism, not of information technology.
It was delightful to find that some scholars saw hypertext as a manifestation of postmodern characteristics. And I seized on that convergence in developing the ideas in the Programme. But I never changed my initial goal. That goal was to see what "postmodern" meant in the contemporary world, and, in doing so, to rearrange my personal understanding of that world. The accompanying revolution in information technology--a kind of leitmotiv of cultural change--simply added an exciting extra level of significance to the work.
I had to wait for the time to look for the meaning of postmodernism. My foundational education in the humanities ended in the 1950s--a time that has come to look like the peak of high modernist life and thought. This education did not equip me to see behind the changes in thought and sensibility that began in the middle of the 1960s--at just about the time that I came to work at Ursinus.
As a result of my 1950s education, I had a fairly predictable sense of the world and of the fields of knowledge of the time. Call it liberal humanist. Whatever else that meant, in my mind it involved purpose and scope. We lived in a world that responded to the moral purpose of enlightened people. Moreover, the universe of human knowledge, though vast and growing, had an inner coherence, even if we could not fully see it.
Implicit in these notions of purpose and scope was an unstated assumption that what we knew connected to a whole. This was not an article of faith but of understanding. The unknown portions of the implied whole could be accounted for in any number of ways by thinking people. I myself had a pretty murky insight into the mysterious other when I looked through the prism of religion. I tried to clarify the murk with an ambitious interest in the transformational functions of artistic expression. They were bridges, for me, that synthesized the known and unknown. That allowed me to believe that the world as a whole made some kind of sense for human beings.
The story of western knowledge during my adult years is to a considerable extent the story of the demolition of this liberal humanist way of thinking. In academia, the process involved an accelerating fragmentation of once-stable fields of intellectual inquiry and the rise of new categories of study. In society at large, changes registered through upheavals that inter-generational conflict fueled in the late 1960s and afterward.
As an instructor in English and an administrator with ever-broadening duties, I rode the tide of academic change without having time to reflect much on it. I favored the study of fields of knowledge arising from the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s such as black studies, women's studies, and multi-disciplinary area studies. I welcomed younger colleagues who brought fresh news from the graduate school battlefields. They brought new ways of looking at old subjects in the humanities and new theories and new fields of inquiry never dreamt of by my old professors. However, my affirmation of change came from the gut more than the head. I really did not fully see what was driving the tidal changes, exciting though I thought them to be.
I finally put administrative duty behind me in January 1995. Now I had time and leisure to address a nagging intellectual discomfort. I knew the structure of knowledge learned in my early years had changed in the course of my career. In a small way, I had even helped it to change in the curriculum of one small institution. At the same time, of course, I had lived to see the social shibboleths and prohibitions of my youth demolished. The social revolution of the 1960s and later redefined the behavioral norms in novel ways.
Yet, I knew I did not have a clear grasp of the basic shift of concepts that was generating the intellectual changes and the corresponding novelties of the daily life now being led in America and elsewhere. I set out to clarify my understanding by tackling a pile of books and articles, some on the Internet, that promised enlightenment. Most of them fell loosely under the rubric of postmodern cultural studies.
My reading in postmodernism began with historical overviews of cultural studies of the last twenty-five years. They quickly led me into threads of reading in literary and language theory, social theory, and the history of ideas. I discovered that the canon of postmodern studies was a rambling work in progress. But I began to discern a shaky shape to it from repeated references to a finite list of scholars and topics and to certain historical and philosophical antecedents.
I pursued a special interest in a particular subset--the revolution in American business practices in the environment of new information technology and the potential influence of that revolution on education. Indeed, under the banner of postmodernism, I found it possible to pursue almost any aspect of contemporary life and thought--from comic cartoons to new concepts of the cosmos. Postmodernism was coming to look like just about anything I wanted it to be.
The conceptual clarity I set out to find thus was eluding me as I tracked postmodern influences hither and thither, without getting at their roots. On one point, though, my mind became clear: postmodern studies were not just one more neat package of curricular content to add to the shopping list. Rather, they cut through the whole catalog and left no traditional area of study untouched.
My project gained some focus, finally, as a result of a brief conversation with good colleague Doug Cameron of the Ursinus modern languages department. I complained to him that my reading about the last twenty-five years of intellectual and cultural change was forcing me backward to the century-old texts of Friedrich Nietzsche. I told him I had hoped to limit my reading to recent writings. Ah, said Doug, veteran of the path I was finding, you won't stop going back until you reach the Enlightenment people; then you will have to keep going back until you reach Socrates and Plato.
It then became clear to me. Evidences of postmodernism were so commonplace in contemporary life and thought because postmodernism was a critique not of one discipline or another but of the mindset of the whole modern western world . That was the world I knew so well from my 1950s education.
My "postmodern" reading list now was growing beyond recent writings. It took in philosophers before Nietzsche, back to the ancient Greeks, as Doug knew it would. At that point, I was satisfied--and, at the same time, pretty thoroughly frustrated.
I was satisfied because I had cleared away the fog of miscellaneous impressions that arose from many texts on the subject. I had come to see that postmodernism linked in an essential way to the grand dialogue about reality that preoccupied the western "self" or subject through the ages, and particularly since the 1600s, when the modern mind became ascendant.
This insight allowed me to see particular changes--the revaluing of ethnic studies, for example--as reflections of a general shift in the way people thought the world of sense and matter came together. Personally, it allowed me, for the first time, to see my liberal humanist education, the fabric of my own mind, as a historically bound construct, questioned by nearly three decades of critical thinking. I derived ironic, if not perverse, pleasure from realizing that that critical thinking had happened under my nose while I was busy running things in one small educational shop.
But I was frustrated at the same time. I realized that my project now had become unmanageable. I would have to undertake nothing less than a systematic restudy of the history of western ideas in order to satisfy my interest in the meaning of postmodernism. To attune my ear to the characteristic contemporary note, which was one of criticism of our modern intellectual past, I would have to construct a syllabus of daunting length and rigor.
To understand Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, I would have to understand Heidegger. To understand Heidegger, I would have to understand Nietzsche. To understand Nietzsche, I would have to understand Hegel and Kant--and then Plato and Socrates, Nietzsche's principal nemeses. I would have to revisit the foundations of the Enlightenment to understand why they are in the cross hairs of postmodernist critics. I would have to follow those who are working through the contemporary meanings of Darwinian evolution in science. And so on. And such a reading agenda of major motifs would barely begin to open the way to understanding particularly interesting spurs of postmodern social inquiry--gender, gay, and ethnic studies, the celebration of "the other" in intellectual circles.
I decided gloomily: There is neither world enough nor time to attack this reading agenda systematically. I will have to satisfy myself with a miscellaneous course of reading. That will open windows on new connections for me. It will also permit me the pleasure of revisiting some texts read long ago in order to link them to postmodern issues. But this will not be rigorous enough. It will never enable me to construct an interwoven texture of insight, which could be displayed through hypertext. The Postmodern Programme at Sixth Avenue, in other words, could never fulfill my most ambitious vision for it.
I conclude, however, that the satisfactions gained from my postmodern pursuits greatly outweigh the frustration evoked by my realization of these limits. We witness at the end of the 20th century and of the second millennium in the western world, particularly in the United States, a dizzying dynamic. We use a set of concepts and assumptions about human reality that arose several hundred years ago in Europe. These concepts and assumptions still significantly shape our sense of who we are and what our world is. Yet, in the last quarter of a century, people have increasingly doubted them. They have offered us alternative concepts and assumptions that emerge from speculative inquiry; and we hear these buzzing in the technologically hot surroundings where we now spend our days.
I have come to believe that this postmodern moment is to some extent a continuation of issues about the self and reality that have been at play since the dawn of the modern age. But I also have come to feel that something unique has been happening in our minds and in the way we behave. If forced to summarize the whole issue, I would say it this way:
Most people used to act and think as if there were unchanging, universal rules in human affairs; except in the natural sciences (and even they are not wholly excepted), most people by now are less likely to act and think in that way; and that has provoked a vigorous search for new ways to confer value on human experience.
When I walk down the street today, I can feel at one moment like an alien from another world, the liberal humanist world that nurtured me. At another moment, I can feel really in step with rhythms that have never sounded before in modern western life. I think it takes both these feelings simultaneously for one to understand the significance of postmodernism. We still have allegiances to a notion of universal law in human affairs, even if these allegiances are based now mainly on nostalgia; we are functioning, however, largely as if another order (or disorder) prevails, even if we can only guess how to express it; and we are striving mightily to survive the unharnessed dynamics of change by continuing to search for concepts that will serve us. This search gives energy and excitement to the work being done today in universities.
From all this I take a kind of hope that may seem anachronistic. I think it comes from the adventure that I associate with my readings in postmodernism. The adventure produced just enough insight to dilute the ignorance I felt in 1995. It did not confer enough insight to give me a confident grasp of contemporary dilemmas. But it has made me feel that the decline of liberal humanism is not the end of the world. Indeed, as I watch the Internet change global relationships without depleting the earth's resources, I guess that there is a tomorrow of some kind. I dare to think my heirs will flourish in it somehow. God knows how--I don't. And I don't imagine I will find out.
Postmodernist thinking reaffirms that the human experiment is problematic. The sheer bravado of postmodernist thinking suggests that, without fully knowing what we are doing, we will survive yet longer, if only by the skin of our teeth.
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My readings in postmodernism rambled like the old Toonerville Trolley past many academic station stops, from literary criticism to economic theory to cultural studies to philosophy and so on. I did not stop long at any one station. I wanted to get an overview of the whole change occurring in the intellectual world over the last quarter century. This of course resulted in quite inadequate observations of the yeasty changes of thought in particular disciplines.
I could continue to ramble around among postmodernist perspectives. Indeed, to a degree, I probably will do that for pleasure, knowing it will advance my depth of understanding but little.
If I were to continue postmodern study more responsibly, however, I would zero in on some one area. I would probably focus on the history of ideas rather than on the more technical issues of philosophy or the dynamics of postmodern theory in literary, artistic, or social study. This would allow me to pursue the fascinating issue of the identity of the "self" in western culture and its "problematization" in the postmodern environment. It would also allow me to consider further the fundamental problems associated with the postructuralist vision and the loss of universal referents.
Alternatively, I could imagine choosing to concentrate on a particular philosopher whose work exemplifies the central issues of postmodernism. I have a special affinity for the work of Gilles Deleuze and his partner Felix Guattari. I have "lurked" on a deleuze-guattari discussion list on the Internet for several years. There, discussants from philosophy departments all over the world have stirred my interest. What I read of Foucault was provocative, and I could enjoy an immersion in his writings. Heidegger came to fascinate me, but I cannot imagine a happy concentration on so daunting a body of work. American scholars such as Richard Rorty and Fredric Jameson were fun to read; their outrageousness smacked of American originality. I am not sure, though, that I would be content for long if I concentrated only on one of them.
But for now, all these are just probes and possibilities. Given the limits to time and energy and my new interest in pursuing a magazine-like range of reading and writing, that is what they are likely to remain.
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