COMM 150: Postmodernism and media

There's a concept borrowed from 20th-century French philosophy that will make some of the implications of mass communications easier to understand. It's called postmodernism, and it's all over American popular culture. Sometimes it's abbreviated "PoMo" (which must irritate the Pomo Indians of northern California because they had the name first). It's hard to pin down a meaning, but in general it refers to a feeling that modern culture is falling apart. That it's gone so far, it's no longer modern anymore. Hence the word "postmodern."

You see the word used a lot in media studies. In fact, you're likely to see it just about anywhere. I just did a keyword search in Google on "postmodernism," and got 5,740,000 hits in 0.07 seconds. Joseph Straubhaar and Robert LaRose, authors of our textbook "Media Now," say the way we understand the world around us has changed:

We have moved from [a modern] era of universal laws and truths based in rational science to one in which local, particularistic, subjective understandings are more important and more valid. The postmodern view is that there is no universal truth, that what you think depends on your own experience, which depends on what groups you belong to, what media you pay attention to, what your family taught you. ... (41)

Straubhaar and LaRose go on to say what each of us thinks "is just as valid as what anyone else thinks." I think that's going too far. And they go on to suggest "instead of fragmenting into minicultures, the world is reorganizing itself for a titanic 'clash of civilizations,' pitting the United States and its allies against Islam." I certainly think that's going too far. But, hey, it's a postmodern world -- you don't have to agree with me. Or with Straubhaar and Rose.

Postmodernist philosophy can be really hard to read. A famous definition of postmodernism is by Jean-François Lyotard (pron. Lee-o-TAR), who said, "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives."

Got that?

OK. Let's try to translate it, then.

"Increduility" means you don't believe something. And "metanarratives" (which Lyotard also called "grand narratives") are the kind of myths or stories people told to try to explain the world. Lyotard said the world is such a mess, we don't believe those kinds of stories anymore. One of the most important was a belief in progress, that Western civilization was a steady series of improvements from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the present, from Plato and Aristotle to -- what? -- Donald Trump? O.J.? Britney Spears? Another "grand narrative" was the belief that science and technology will always make things better and better. Hard to believe after science brought us World War II, the threat of nuclear warfare, reality TV and really annoying automated telemarketing calls.

Dino Felluga, an English prof at Purdue who has an "General Introduction to Postmodernism" that's actually clearly written, suggests the modern era began with the Renaissance and lasted at least until World War I. In many ways, it lasted until after WWII. The modern era was a age of reason, of science and -- most important for out purposes in COMM 150 -- of printing presses and printed discourse. Some critics, says Felluga, find in the chaos of the postmodern era "a result of new ways of representing the world including television, film (expecially after the introduction of color and sound), and the computer."

One big problem with postmodernism is that it's written by academics. Not only academics but French academics. Most people find their writing difficult. Some of us find it pretentious. Andrew Sullivan, a columnist and blogger for Atlantic magazine, says the postmodernists are "impenetrable bullshit artists." But I think they're b.s. artists who have something important to say, even though I wish they'd say it more clearly.

One of the most important postmodernists for media studies is Jean Baudrillard, a sociologist and philosopher who wrote a kind of travelog called "America." (That's pronounced jahn Bo-dri-AR.) He said Americans -- and everyone else in the 21st century -- is overwhelmed with information. We're so overwhelmed, he says, we've lost sight of what's real and what isn't. I think he's got some very good insights. But I think at best, his stuff reads like a string of one-liners. I got the following from a page of selected quotes:

• Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
  
  
• We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
  
  
• Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
  
  
• Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void [the space between the stars].
  

Doug Mann, who teaches a course in pop culture at the University of Western Ontario, has the best short introduction to Baudrillard that I've found on the Internet. Mann says the Fremchman "concluded that in the postmodern media-laden condition, we experience something called 'the death of the real': we live our lives in the realm of hyperreality, connecting more and more deeply to things like television sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality games, or Disneyland, things that merely simulate reality."