This blogpost was inspired by Jean Baudrillard's ideas about postmodernism. The reason I choose this topic for my fourth blog post is because it's one of my favorite philosophical insights. The world of philosophy is sort of like an ocean full of junk, with the occasional good fish to catch, and postmodernism is one of those philosophies that sticks with me. It offers valuable insight in a historiography that I feel is cluttered with nonsense. ;)
Note: This entry is unfinished
"Postmodernism refers to the state of culture where media is produced in such staggering quantitates that it has crossed the boundaries into reality itself and hyperreality prevails."
So postmodernism refers to a state of culture. What is culture? Culture consists of arts, ideas, intellectual expressions of society and more. Traditional culture included art, poetry architecture and but contemporary culture also includes TV, advertisements, Youtube videos, Music videos, Social media, popular foods, and so on.
Culture is how we interpret and give meaning to reality around us, and it answers big life philosophy questions such as "what does it mean to be human?" "How should we live?" "What is love"? Our culture sends questionable messages to society. Culture creates meta narratives: which are totalizing conceptions of the world around us, truths which which modernists may suggest would tie up what's wrong with the world and the paths around fixing them.
Some of these influences could negatively impact people's life choices, teaching values such as materialism and hedonism, as can be seen watching certain reality TV shows for example. Because of the plethora of subcultural influences, there are many different directions culture can take us in, rather than one uniformed culture attitude. Because there are so many different social and cultural attitudes, this can sometimes lead to confusing situations.
For instance, a person who's used to goofing off with their friends who's suddenly surprised when they goof off towards the wrong person because they're met with a bitter scornful reaction. This has quite a lot to due with the dissonance of personality, influenced by differing social or cultural attitudes.
Post modernism also refers to a skepticism of grand narratives, a skepticism of totalizing truth. This may sound extreme, but take for example the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings in the 1950s. He had his own notion called language games, explaining how language games explore how language can legitimate power.
For example, in case and common law. Common law is set by precedent, so when a judge makes a decision that decision informs a decision another judge makes in the future. In 1991 the court of appeals and house of lords ruled in R vs R, making it inadmissible for someone to cite their married status as an excuse to commit rape.
Roe vs Wade in the u.s made it illegal to deny women abortion rights prior to third trimester. But judges making these decisions didn't establish them on the basis of moral grounds. Instead, to decide what's legal or not they looked at previously existing law and ruled based upon that precedent, setting precedent for future judges who will then make decisions in similar cases.
This goes to show how high culture and popular culture bare no real differences, and are both socially constructed. One can look at the bolero at the opera in the same way as finding nemo. The skepticism of meta narratives comes from the growing distance language games place between truth (defined to the real world) and truth (defined solely in relationship to pre-existing language). The legal system can be seen as a representation of morality.
The judge stands in the place of morality, but a judge becomes more distant from the thing they're representing. They don't look to the referent (morality) to make decisions, but they look for a representation of that representation. The growing gap between the representation and referent becomes greater with each landmark decision.
Donald Trump could be viewed as a post modernist president. He's a millionaire while most of his followers are working class, but because he talks like a working class person and tells his supporters what they want to hear, many of society embrace him as one of their own. He also ignores science, favoring his own hunches and alternative facts.
There are three distinct stages of culture that he outlined and those are as follows:
Pre-modern culture (before the 20th century)
There was a lot of art, theater, music. These are high arts. Painter sculpturers and writers looked at reality and represented it within their understanding of it, which at the time was religion. Christianity drove the arts and architecture mapped out how to live, and these things answered important philosophical questions. Jean Baudrillard calls this a grand narrative: an overarching ideology or meaning applied to reality through culture. High art gave a consistent message, a message of the church.
Next came the industrial revolution stage, where culture saw rapid advancement with increased technology. The modern movement was born of the age of reason and logic, where institutions used science to provide reason. The improvement of technology made it easier for people to learn about more abstract concepts, so the monarchs and religious figures took a backseat, and had been replaced by the intellectual arts and progressive beliefs that challenged previous ones, the separation of church and state, science, and new forms of media became more widespread.
People began to identify with concepts such as patriotism, capitalists, communists, fascists. Art began to challenge conventions. When it comes to media such as film, characters and writing are used to portray actual real life concepts. Concepts that are representations of something real. Baudrillard called these representations of reality 'simulations' adding a new layer of believability to the concept in question.
During the middle of the 20th century
Particularly after world war 2, after witnessing the horrors of that period, people became more skeptical towards the culture they understood. There no longer became a unified system of ideals and people were then left to find meaning their own meaning and purpose. All of the dictators during during world war 2 were legitimized by their own meta narratives, which interpreted the world through a truth they used to legitimize their power, and society became more skeptical towards these notions.
A new generation is brought up surrounded by mass produced images. This is the era of post modernism, where structure is replaced with endless choice, leaving people to find their own identity and philosophy. Ads are ubiquitous, inescapable, on television, on the internet, on billboards outside, on the radio, and so on. Post modernism affects all of the media around us.
In this world, reality is made up of cultural representations everywhere, so new culture products reference to other pieces of culture, meaning we're creating copies of copies. Culture is then no longer based on its original reference, but instead based on cultural products we experience in the world around us (simulacra) - a simulation of a simulation.
Look at the image of a burger king burger and compare it to the real thing. The 'fake' burger tends to look attractive, delicious and symmetrical. The real burger in contrast looks sloppy and unappetizing. This is an example of hyper-reality, when your vision of something is a fictitious copy of reality.
For another example, ask someone to draw an image of a princess, and they would very likely draw an image of a princess from a Disney movie because people are more familiar, or more connected to simulated princesses with hyper conventional features than to real life princesses. Thus you have a drawing of a copy of a copy, taking inspiration from something merely inspired by reality.
Even the very image of a real life princess hasn't always been the same, but has been polished and refined over centuries with different cultural expressions. A European princesses today bares little resemblance to her 14th century counterpart. Take a look at the below for instance:
Pictured below is Anne (Of Brittany), a 14th century duchess.
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Princess Diana, Princess of Wales (20th Century)
Disney Princesses
As you can clearly see, Anne wears a strikingly different headdress and dress to the one worn by Princess Diana. However Diana's refreshed image bares a more familiar resemblance. The princesses we've come to know by animated films resemble contemporary princesses while still embodying different characteristics altogether as well, and most drawings of princesses model that simulation.
Culture according to Baudrillard no longer becomes based on the original referent (reality), but rather cultural products become simulations of simulations themselves (simulacra) - a big mess of intertext, where culture is inspired by culture. We borrow from culture to make meaning.
For instance, in the new John Lewis Christmas advert, the same narrative of a boy befriending an alien is used as in that of the 1980s film ET. This is indirect intertextuality. We reference media when we make new products.
Hyperreality is when we are unable to distinguish between simulation and reality. Ask someone from Europe or Asia a questions about how much they know of for example, American culture, and there's a good chance their entire understanding of American living comes from movies and TV.
Our image of many things comes out of movies, accepting simulation as fact. We see simulations on TV and social media websites and are often unable to distinguish between what's real and what's fiction. A model on Instagram who uses apps to alter their appearance to look more attractive according to society's beauty standards would be another example of hyperreality, because an untrained eye wouldn't be able to tell that the image has been modified to be more inline with the socially constructed idea of what's considered attractive.
Because hyperreality causes us to no longer be able to distinguish between what's real and what's fiction, it could harm us in ways that we don't realize. Social media sends us many different interpretations of reality, it can even sometimes cause us to believe that the unattainable in the norm. There are so many conflicting messages it can be difficult to tell what's truth or fiction.
So many competing voices (conservatives and liberals, religious and areligious, an eye for an eye and peace, materialism vs modesty etc) that many people become lost in the sea of disconnected cultural signifiers.
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