The age of fragmentation
6.7 The age of fragmentation
In 1986, Jean-Francois Lyotard described post-modernism in terms of the universalists’ ideas of progress and rationality. He also produced a defence of the avant-garde, and proposed an historical reading of the term ‘post’ in post-modernism. He suggested that we live in a post-modern era that has three separate strands; that the ideas of progress, science and rational thought, which had for 300 years given credence to a western modernity,
were no longer applicable 38 . His main reason was that they took little or no account of otherness and its cultural differences. There was, he said, no confidence that high or avant-garde art or culture had any more value than popular or low culture. He also concluded that the possibility of separating the real from the copy or the natural from the artificial in a situation where the technologies used to produce and reproduce information have so much reach and control is limited. His argument of the opposition between post- modernism and modernism uses a basis of architectural theory that points to the fragmentation of the various sources which architects draw on to fulfil
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their roles. This fragmentation, or bricolage, uses quotations from previous styles and periods, classical or modern. This bricolage, Lyotard suggests, condemns post-modern architecture to generate a multiplicity of small transformations in the space it inherits and to give up the project of the last rebuilding of the whole space occupied by humanity. He contends that the universal is no longer applicable to modern culture. There is, he says, no longer a horizon of universalisation.
Against this, Lyotard proposes an objection to the historical understanding of ‘post’ in post-modernism. He points out that ‘post’ in the term post- modernism is to be understood as a simple succession, a diochrony of periods, all of which are distinct and identifiable. He suggests that this way of looking at progress intimates that there is a conversion in history, and that it succeeds in producing a new direction after a previous one. This concept,
he points out, is modern, and belongs to Christianity, Carthesianism and Jacobinism 39 .
The concept of modernity is closely related to this principle – that it is possible and necessary to break with one tradition in order to begin a new way of living and thinking. He suggests that we can presume that this breaking is rather a matter of forgetting or repressing the past. We do not overcome the past, but rather we repeat it.
However, it is mainly in his questioning of the idea of progress that Lyotard begins to uncover a theory for post-modernism. He states that the idea of progress as possible, probable or necessary had its beginnings in the belief that progress in the arts and science, knowledge and freedom would be profitable to mankind as a whole. However, he points out that after two centuries we are more aware of the opposite; neither economic nor political liberalism nor the various Marxisms emerged from the sanguinary of the last two centuries free from the suspicion of crimes against mankind. The development of techno-science has become a means of increasing disease, not fighting it. He says this form of development can no longer be called by the old name of progress; it is not a response to the demands and needs coming from human beings but quite the opposite, and humanity (individual or social) seems always to be discomforted by the results of this development.
He points to Theodore Adorno, who cited Auschwitz in his example of the use of science to subject mankind to horror. Mankind is divided into two parts; in the first world he is confronted with the complexities of modernity, and in the other (the third world) it is the terrible task of survival that is the
primary factor. This, he suggests, is a negation of the modern project 39 .
Media and its cultural implications
In his book The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society 40 , Daniel Bell posits that society can be divided into three parts; the social structure, the polity and the culture. The economical, technological and occupational system comprises the social structure. The conflicting demands and claims of the individual and group, which regulate the distribution of power, is signified by the polity. The realm of expressive symbolism and meanings is represented in the culture. Social structure operates economically, which is a way whereby the resources can be allocated according to such factors as the cost, substitutability, optimisation, maximisation and participation, some- times mobilised or controlled. Self-fulfilment, a desire, is recognised in culture.
Bell suggests that post-industrialism deals mainly with the social structure and its changes – the changes in the economy and in the area of occupation. It also operates in the relations between theory and empiricism, particularly science and technology; the management problems posed by changes in social structure for the political system means that society is increasingly conscious of its future and necessarily seeks to control its own fate. The political order becomes the prime mover; with the increasing importance of the post-industrial society, the components of knowledge and technology force what Bell calls the ‘hierophants’ of the new society (the scientists, engineers and technocrats) to either compete with politicians or become their allies.
Culture is challenged by the primacy of cognitive and theoretical knowledge. Bell draws attention to five specific dimensions of the post-industrial society. In the first, he suggests that the change from a goods producing to a service economy and the change in the mixture of the three economic sectors – the primary = agriculture, the secondary = manufacturing or industrial and the tertiary = services – are grouped within the economic sector.
The growing importance of the professional and technical class he groups in the occupational distribution sector. Centrality of theoretical knowledge, in that post-industrial society is organised around knowledge for the purpose of social control and the organisation of innovation and change, he calls the axial principle. The decline of the industrial worker relative to the non- production worker in the factory (that is, the control of technology and technological assessment) he lists under future orientation. Intellectual technology, which he describes as the decline of inherited power and the rise of the manager, meant that power passed into the hands of a technical intellectual elite, including corporate managers, and this he groups under the heading of decision-making.
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The main significance of the post-industrial society is the strengthening of the role of the cognitive and scientific values as basic institutional necessities of our society; the bringing of decisions into the technical and scientific area gives the scientist or economist more direct access to political power. By increasing the existing tendencies towards the bureaucratisation of intellectual work, he says it creates a set of strains for the traditional definitions of intellectual pursuits and values. It also creates a dichotomy between the technical and literary intellectual, the technical intellectual achieving the power and influence that the literary had in the past. He says that post-industrialism brings into question issues such as the distribution of wealth, power and status that are central to any society. The changes he attributes to the seeking of these values are that they are no longer dimensions of class, but have become values sought and gained by classes. There is no continuity of power; power drifts and changes depending upon two major axes of stratification – property and knowledge. The political system that is reflected in post-modernity manages the two and gives rise to elites, which are temporary in that there is no necessary continuity of power. As Bell says, there is no continuity of the family or class through property and the differential advantage of belonging to a meritocracy.
How do the products of the mass media industry reflect the changes in society broadly described with the term ‘post-modernism’? Norman Denzin takes the film Blue Velvet and suggests that it can be read as a cultural statement that locates within the small American town all the terrors and simulated realities that Lyotard and Baudrillard see operating in the late post-modern period. He suggests that the film offers clarification of the sociological, aesthetic and cultural meanings that the term post-modernity describes. It is the two features of Jameson’s perspective of post-modernity that Denzin describes; the effacement of the boundaries between the past and the present, signified in the forms of pastiche and parody, and the concept of the treatment of time, which locates the viewing subject in the perpetual present. He says that it is these films that describe a post-modern nostalgia, bringing the unpresentable in front of the viewer in ways that challenge the boundaries that separate private and public life – the sexual violence, the brutality, the insanity, homosexuality, the degradation of women, the sadomasochistic rituals and the drug and the alcohol abuse he cites as subjects being brought to the forefront in these films. He points out that the late post-modern period is all at once fearful and drawn to the concepts and ideas of sexuality and violence that these films represent, and the forms of freedom and self-expression demonstrated and presented in them. Gender stratification is decidedly pre-modern, with the denigration of
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women and the signifying of women within two categories – those of the respectable middle-class marriage or the disreputable occupational and sexual categories. In Blue Velvet the women are treated as traditional sexual objects and recipients of sexual and physical violence. These films do not simply reflect an attitude of nostalgia; they bring the past into the present. Denzin, quoting from Jameson, suggests that they ‘make the past the
present, but they locate terror in nostalgia for the past’ 39 . In these films, signifiers of the past (such as 1950s and 1970s rock music, the
signs of destruction in a Lyotard sense) mean that these films wage war on nostalgia. They signify two types of nostalgia; the safe and the unsafe. In the first place they create a comfortable illusion of adult middle-class life, which is connected to the past in an unbroken chain. These films take rock and roll, the music of youth, and suggest that if it is carried into adulthood then it leads to self-destruction and violence. By projecting two versions of the past (the one sacred and the other profane) into the present, the film Blue Velvet extends the boundaries of now further into the future, where the unreal and hyper-real are always real and not possibilities.
These films bring the margins of society into the centre of a safe, middle- class world. The dope fiends and sex perverts portrayed represent the violent margins; they are now placed in small towns next door to middle- or lower-class Americans who are attempting to live safe, respectable lives. Denzin suggests that films like Blue Velvet echo and reproduce the tensions and contradictions that defined the late 1980s. These texts locate strange, multifaceted, violent, timeless worlds in the present; they make fun of the past and they keep it alive. Their main function is to present new ways of presenting the unpresentable, so as to break down the boundaries that keep the profane out of the everyday. They take conservative stances, while they appear to exploit the radical social margins of society; with the post-modern eye they look fearfully into the future and observe the technology, uncontrolled sexual violence and universally corrupt political systems. Presented with this world they attempt to find safe regions of escape in the form of nostalgia and fantasies of the past. The small town in the USA is no longer safe in these films; the fantasies of the past have become the realities of the present.
These films make the global village even smaller; they present a landscape populated by people filled with hope who in their schizophrenic attitude know that in the end everything will turn out all right, the villains die or are reformed, male heroes transgress moral boundaries but come back home to mother and father, etc. In the end these films are about individuals and
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their fantasies, and by portraying individuals they keep alive the middle-class myth of the individual; the post-modern person still confronts the world through the lens of nineteenth and early twentieth century political ideology. This appears to be the chief function of these 1980s nostalgia films, for it seems that as the world political systems turn ever more violent and conservative, the need for textural texts that sustain conservative political
economy increases. As Denzin says 39 , ‘it seems that post modern individuals want films like Blue Velvet for in them they can have their sex, their myths, their violence and their politics all at the same time’.