What Comes After Postmodernism?
In the early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama famously declared the end of history.
What he meant was that the neoliberal democracies championed by the West would eventually displace all other forms of governance, more or less. To ascend into a neoliberal democracy was to reach the pinnacle of human social existence.
Years later, we experienced the return of many illiberal democracies. Now we realize the absurdity behind his declaration.
Postmodernism is in a similar situation. Without even truly grasping what the movement constitutes, many insist that nothing can succeed it. Others claim that certain movements, like post-humanism, are already succeeding Postmodernism.
Are they right?
Let’s first make sure we understand these terms a bit better.
Many often confuse Postmodernism with poststructuralism, so let’s take a few steps back.
In the early 20th century, plenty of groundbreaking movements were changing the way we thought about language and culture. The most important of these movements was indebted to Ferdinand Saussure and Roman Jakobson. Both of these men belong to the field of structural linguistics, a field that attempts to painstakingly classify and categorize language.
These two figures are responsible for the creation of an important communications theory as well as the more general and widely celebrated concept of the signifier and the signified. Saussure understood any language as constitutive of a word (signifier) and the picture that word concocts (the signified).
This understanding of language was expanded in order to encompass culture wholecloth. Theorists began noticing that words were not the only signifiers. Instead, they realized that certain cultural practices can even be understood as signifiers. Roland Barthes famously analyzed wrestling as a signifier for the universal human understanding of good and evil.
Poststructuralism is a bit more complicated. It overturned structuralism on its head by saying that there’s no such thing as the signified — instead, there’s only a signifier. One of the reasons why it did that was to do away with the logic of universals. So, instead of understanding wrestling as a signifier for the signified of good/evil, it might just understand wrestling as a signifier for another signifier: good/evil. There is no signified content beyond language.
For poststructuralists, all language is self-referential. Analytic philosophers disagree with this claim. They understand a word as referring to an object or idea, and that’s why they label words as referents. Poststructuralists argue that a word doesn’t really have any relationship to an object. If you think about this, it seems fairly uncomplicated. The word cat doesn’t really have any relationship with the actual thing itself. The word cat is the word cat. It’s rather tautological. Poststructuralists refer to this as a system of differences. It’s because language functions in a way that prevents a word from meaning anything it isn’t.
Sounds complicated, right? Don’t worry, it’s even more complex than that. That’s why practically everyone has a difficult time in explaining literary theory.
That’s also why these theories were controversial in academies for the longest time, up until recent decades. Yet, even now their position in the academy is precarious.
Plenty of new movements are always emerging. Movements like post-humanism often criticize and ridicule some of the poststructuralists for their anti-realism and linguistic idealism, even though they embrace some of the same components.
Postmodernism, on the other hand, often overlaps with poststructuralism, but it’s also a movement of its own, one that has more relevance to the arts. Postmodernists believe in a world where originality and authenticity are no longer possible. In a sense, similar to Fukuyama, they think we’re at the end of history. Artists can deploy the style of the Romantic, Victorian, Edwardian or Modern period, but in doing so, one is always copying a style of art or culture that has preceded one’s period and self.
The revelations in science and language, topped with the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, disallows for any new overarching age and theme. We are skeptical of these grand overarching narratives. Jean-François Lyotard espouses this view in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In his grand study he invokes concepts like chaos theory and fractals in order to show how these ideas have undermined these so called ‘metanarratives,’ both of the scientific and Marxist strain. He criticizes die-hard empiricists and Marxists alike, as well as the believers of the Enlightenment. These narratives no longer have any valence in our age, he contends.
The fact that some of us still worship and follow a religion does not necessarily matter, nor does the belief in God matter. The point is that our age is unique in the growing incredulity of these narratives, specifically as a consequence of what he refers to as the information age. Most of these narratives have collapsed under themselves due to the horrors of the 20th century.
That’s what Postmodernism is in a nutshell. Postmodernism pretty much declares itself as an insurmountable age in virtue of it posing as being post everything Modern. Does that mean it will always be the end of culture?
That depends, many thought Fukuyama was right when he claimed the end of history for neoliberalism. It took Islamic fundamentalism and the resurgence of far-right populism to show him how dead wrong he was.
Whether or not the same can be said for Postmodernism is a different issue entirely. When regimes adopted these policies, they were adopting a style of governance that anyone can find in the history books. If artists were to do the same and create works influenced by the English Renaissance or the Neoclassical Era, they wouldn’t be putting forth cases against Postmodernism. That’s because postmodernism is conscious of all different shapes that art can take.
Go forth and make Medieval or Classical inspired art, Postmodernism says, but you will always be doing so from the present era.
