Synopsis
of Class: January 25, 2001
We spent most of the class discussing the characteristics of our current postmodern
age, aided by Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum
in his essay, "The Precession of Simulacra." As Baudrillard suggests,
in the era of simulation "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication,
nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for
the real" (2). In such an era, Disneyland serves, according to Baudrillard,
merely to dupe us into believing that our everyday reality is, in fact, real
when it is not (when it is in fact constructed by media culture, by convention,
by models, by signs): "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make
us believe that the rest is real" (12). Examples in our own culture of the same
breakdown in the distinction between fact and fiction: Mad City, Wag
the Dog, Strange Days, Johnny Neumonic, The Net, Lawnmower
Man, The Truman Show, Ed T.V., Pleasantville, Dark City,
The Matrix, etc., etc.. (The Matrix even directly quotes Baudrillard
at a number of instances and Neo happens to hide his hacker programs inside
a hollowed out copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.) Do these
movies constitute popular culture's effort to deal with a fundamental change
in our experience of the world? Could it be that we are seeking "reality" in
shows like MTV's Real World or Fox t.v.'s many "reality shows" or
Survivor and Temptation Island precisely because we have lost
a sense of reality in our everyday lives? If this is the case, what effect does
the simulacrum have on our representation of the Holocaust?
When I asked you to outline the characteristics of our postmodern age, these
are the elements you identified:
- A
BREAKDOWN OF THE SEPARATION
BETWEEN HIGH
AND
LOW CULTURE:
This point was made in an earlier class by Nicole
Genovese. She suggested that, whereas modernism tends to a certain elitism
in its questioning of all mass-market forms, postmodernism tends to break
down the distinction between high and low culture, and will often use modernist
strategies (self-reflexivity, irony, avant-garde critique, experimentation,
symbolism, the breakdown of narrative sequentiality, the questioning of subjectivity)
but will incorporate them into highly popular forms (film, novels, comic books,
etc.).
- ECOCIDE: a world of
total urbanization in which nature has been in some way destroyed or over-run
("ecocide"), a result, Ann Blakley suggested, of science's desire to control,
dissect and regulate the natural world. Examples in science fiction include
Bladerunner, Neuromancer, and The Matrix.
- VISUALITY AND
SPATIALITY: a
new emphasis on visuality and spatiality, as E. J. pointed out.
As Jameson puts it in his Postmodernism, "The crisis in historicity
now dictates a return, in a new way, to the question of temporal organization
in general in the postmodern force field, and indeed, to the problem of the
form that time, temporality, and the syntagmatic will be able to take in a
culture increasingly dominated by space and spatial logic" (25). A perfect
example, of course, is Maus' reliance on spatial and visual presentation
of the Holocaust.
- A BREAKDOWN IN
NARRATIVE LINEARITY
AND
TEMPORALITY: a resulting breakdown in
narrative linearity and temporal historicity, as Dale Fresch suggested. Jameson
compares this postmodern experience to that of the schizophrenic: "With
the breakdown of the signifying chain,... the schizophrenic is reduced to
an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of
pure and unrelated presents in time" (27).
- ISLANDS OF
INTENSE EMOTION:
instead of narrative, temporal chains, Dale suggested, we are instead left
with "islands of intense emotion," resembling addiction. Once again,
Dale thus anticipates Jameson, who writes: Once historicity is destroyed,
"the present of the world... comes before the subject with heightened
intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, here described in the negative
terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one could just as well imagine
in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinegic
intensity" (27-28).
- DRUG CULTURE:
yet another manifestation of the desire to escape "the real" and of Dale's
"islands of intense emotion."
- DISORIENTATION:
a sense of disorientation which is manifested in the very process of reading
some postmodern literature. This (often spatial) disorientation is a common
element in postmodern architecture.
- IRONY AND
PARODY: a tendency
to see everything from an ironic perspective, to distance oneself from the
very genres, styles, and stereotypes that one nonetheless invokes. The question
that will be debated between Jameson and Hutcheon next week is: given this
ironic and parodic self-distance in today's culture, are we presented with
something positive (a real critique of the culture one satirizes) or are we
seeing a form of mere capitulation (an irony without bite, without political
purpose)?
- A QUESTIONING
OF OUR OWN
IDENTITY: Do we each have any essential consistency
or are we merely being produced as conventionalized, mass-produced copies,
determined more by the mass market than by internal consistency?
- SOLIPSISM: a sense
of separation from others. A good word for this condition is "social atomism."
We are left, Stephanie Adams suggested, with a sense of incommensurability
between individuals, a sense that we have lost our connection to any heartfelt
community. Slacker culture may be a manifestation of this malaise in the postmodern
condition.
- LATE CAPITALISM:
a reliance on mass-market models of immediate gratification and consumption,
as Nick Duley suggested.
- SPEED: a reliance also
on new machines directed towards speed, as Nick added: 1) speed across space,
thus further collapsing our sense of time and opening up larger and larger
spaces to view; and 2) speed of fulfillment, reducing ever further the time
between desire and gratification.
- DIGITALITY: a reliance
on digital culture, which may be leading us to a change in our understanding
of reality as radical as the change that occured in the movement between oral
and literate cultures. To help explain the momentousness of these changes,
I began with the following question: "What is a tree?" As Colin Cole most
ably responded, a tree is an organism with bark, branches, and leaves. A taxonomy
of different examples was given (ash, oak, etc.), categorized by conifer and
deciduous kinds. Photosynthesis and oxygenation were mentioned as important
aspects of a tree's life cycle, and then different uses for trees were mentioned
(paper, construction, shade, etc.). The class unanimously agreed with this
definition. I then explained that studies of those oral cultures that still
exist in the former Yugoslavia have asked the same question of non-literate
people. Surprisingly, there too the response to the question was, for the
most part, unanimous and yet completely different from our own: a tree is
like a man whose arms reach up to heaven but whose roots are caught in hell.
Why this incredible difference in response? Can we not even agree on an issue
as fundamental as the answer to the question: "What is a tree?" Well, the
REASON we, in a literate culture, can all unanimously agree with this definition
is that we automatically turn to our communal literate sourcethe dictionary,
which structures our experience of the world through the conventions of science
and taxonomy (hence the class' use of such scientific language as "organism"
and "oxygenation," terms that clearly suggest that individuals were drawn
to language of a different register than quotidian speech). In an oral culture,
there is no written source to which people can turn; there are instead only
oral stories: Daphne, for example, who, in Greek mythology, is turned into
a laurel tree when she is on the verge of being overtaken by the God, Apollo
(or whatever oral tale may be being referred to in the oral culture of the
former Yugoslavia). If something like writing could have led to such a drastic
change in our perception of the real world, what changes in our perception
are being effected by our newest technological revolution in communication:
digitality?
- THE
SIMULACRUM: So much are we tied to our representations,
that they take over from reality. Could it be that, as many postmodern critics
have theorized, there is no real "there" for us to grasp, since
all of our perceptions are automatically structured by conventions, orders
of meaning, genresin short, ideologies. According to these critics,
there is no getting outside of ideology. To be confronted with the true materiality
of the worldsomething that may only happen when we are confronted by
our own deathis to suffer debilitating trauma. To quote a contemporary
psychoanalytical critic, Jacques Lacan, "the real is impossible."
When Stephanie Price offered that science nonetheless does offer us a tangible
reality to which one can always turn, I suggested that the scientific revolution
of our own age may go hand in hand with this fear of our loss of connection
to the real. After all, according to quantum physics, it is, indeed, only
our perceptions that ultimately determine the position of sub-atomic particles
(which otherwise exist in a plurality of positions in the same moment of time).
Could it be that quantum mechanics is itself being enabled by the postmodern
condition, which has allowed scientists to explore notions that would have
been considered mad only decades ago? In the same way, Einstein's theory of
relativity is just as much a product of the modernist emphasis on contextual
understanding and individual perspective (or modernism's belief in the relativity
of all belief), just as Newton's theories of thermodynamics are mirrored by
an eighteenth-century society that valued order, equilibrium, balance, and
perfection.
We finished with the next obvious question: In what ways can one
say that Maus is postmodern? Also, in what ways does postmodernity affect
our ability to represent and remember the Holocaust? The answers to this question
will surely take up a good portion of our next class period.
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