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Lecture 1 Modernity and Postmodernity
Since the Renaissance, humanity has made its world over again in its own image in ways unprecedented throughout the preceding millennia of human habitation of the planet. Science and the advance of technology that it fosters have progressively empowered human beings’ own fashioning of their world beyond their wildest imaginings. This human advance upon the material grounds and substrate of its own existence over time undermines objectivities such as “nature” or “things themselves” and even “reality.” By the time we get to the postmodern world that many human beings inhabit today, our lived-in, physical environment is, in crucial ways, for the most part culturally produced. This changes the whole orientation of human beings to their world as the reality in which they live. This reality is for them no longer something solid and immoveable, as if it were given in the nature of things. It is rather produced by human activity: what counts as real is produced as an effect of humanly concocted instruments and operations. Reality is not given independently of human invention and industry, but has been assimilated into the human world as one of our ideas or perceptions, or as a certain quality of our experience. To this extent, reality itself becomes virtual, a production or an effect or appearance of reality generated out of the arts and industry of human beings.
A symbol of this predicament, celebrating and exploiting it, might be found in the Opry Land Hotel in Nashville. Guests, as they exit from their hotel rooms, are enveloped by a vast indoor simulation of luxuriant nature. Nature itself turns out here to be technologically generated. This is true on a larger scale of the cities in which we live. We are kept constantly surrounded by human productions and enmeshed in their operations. We are transported everywhere by machines within a realm totally fabricated by human engineering. We remain mesmerized by phenomena that are electronically simulated. Hong Kong with its ubiquitous elevators and escalators, its plastic-encased pedestrian bridges and moving walkways and interconnected skyscrapers that colonize the sky, its transportation and communications networks, its dense commercial ferment and infrastucture, its neon landscape of flashing advertisements and video screenings in the street, is an epitome of this modern urban experience. The propensity to completely supplant the natural by the artificial is what leads modernity to the brink, where it precipitates into postmodernity. This happens at the point where the very difference between the natural and the artificial itself becomes just another artifice and is thereby undermined.
Reality—or things as they really are—is traditionally presumed to be different from how things appear and are constructed, but just that difference collapses if it is apprehended as itself another construction. There are artificial constructions in any perception of reality that we can articulate—our language itself imposes such artifices. As soon as we reflect on the difference between the real and the artificially constructed, it is no longer a given but an artificially constructed difference.
The difference between the human and the natural was clear for modernity, and the progressive of humanization of the world as materially given traced out a clear direction for progress. The project of modernity was to shape reality into conformity with human wishes and ambitions—to make raw nature into a work of art. But when the underlying substrate supposed to be reality has been completely absorbed into this process of production, it is no longer clear what the direction of progress is or who is mastering what or whom. Without anything outside human subjectivity and industry to be worked on and gradually made to conform to human purposes, the very idea of homo faber, man the maker, enters into crisis. The idea of the human depended on relations to something other; the human was not simply posited in itself. The basic postulates of modernity, concepts such as freedom and the subject, presuppose always some kind of distinction between an objectivity, which is given, and an autonomous subject exercising its liberty in relation to the resistance of an objective world. Once this tension gives way, through the total triumph of the subject, which no longer finds any resistance or anything at all outside itself, notions such as freedom and subjectivity collapse or implode. The very success of human freedom in totally mediating the recalcitrant material of the world that it works with results in the liquidation of human subjectivity itself. With this liquidation modernity flows unstopped into the shapes of the postmodern era.
Just as the objectivity of the world is gradually undermined by its appropriation for human uses, so that it becomes subjectified and reanimated, perhaps even “reenchanted,” as certain postmodern voices claim, so subjectivity finds itself invaded by objectivities that it cannot control. In a postmodern era it is no longer man or the human subject that is realizing itself by rational activity. Impersonal structures of administration or economics can be seen to dominate all human activities. The desires of the subject are themselves artificially produced by manipulations of the advertising industry driven by its own imperatives of profit. A dehumanization of the subject opens up from within its own immanent sphere of self-determination. The modernist story of steady amelioration of the conditions of life through progressive domination of reality by human freedom reverses into a story of dissolution of the human and of subjection to impersonal forces of domination.
The technological progress in the wake of the resurgence of humanism since the Renaissance is crucial to the story of modernity as the conquest of ever greater human autonomy. The supplanting of the natural by the culturally produced world is basic to modern and postmodern realities alike, their common generative matrix. All this is what we might call the culture of reflexivity. The human being finds itself reflected everywhere in the world it has produced by transforming the environment by which it is surrounded. (We will return to this issue of reflexivity and humanism at the end of these lectures.) But the clearly positive valence of this progress of reflexiveness for the modern era becomes equivocal in the postmodern era: It is no longer clear who or what is in control of the prodigious transformations of the world that human activity has set in motion. The powers that dominate the world seem to dominate humanity as well, and from within, so that they cannot even be resisted. On this basis, new questions arise.
Is this humanization of all reality to be seen as the goal of evolution? Or does it entail the exclusion and repression of some necessary otherness to the human? In other words, What are the ethical and value implications of humanity’s attempt to found and ground itself, remaking the world around it to suit its own purposes—or at least constraining the circumambient universe to bear the scars of transformation by humanly unleashed powers? Postmodernism has raised these questions, thereby calling modernism and its ideology of unlimited progress and of human completion through its own creative, demiurgic, formative powers into question. Especially post-structuralist forms of postmodern thought elaborated by Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Irigaray, etc., have been obsessed with the claim of the Other.
Certainly ecology and other political and religious movements in postmodern times have raised their objections to the unlimited hegemony of the human. But, at the same time, there is another postmodernism that tends more to be the continuation of modernism than to place it in check and to question it. There is a postmodernism that entails complete erasure of the Other, effacement of any trace of otherness whatsoever. The total system of the World Wide Web and the consumer capitalism that brooks no boundaries for the expansion of its global markets evince no qualms and are restrained by no pieties in the face of “otherness.” Perhaps we should mark a further split and admit that there are both serene and troubled versions even of this sort of postmodernism that is comfortable with extending the modern project of conquering the world for human purposes (as opposed to the questioning sort of postmodernism, which is already one clear alternative).
Whereas modernism and some forms of postmodernism typically celebrate the progress constituted by such all-consuming “human development,” and conceive of human activity as perfecting the materials of nature, making the environment friendly and serviceable, some postmodern thinkers are bothered and even obsessed by certain ambiguities of this process. Taken to the extreme, the progress of development undermines its own basis, cannibalizing and altogether obliterating nature. The underlying material support for any human activities whatever can be degraded and destroyed by this activity itself.
In the typical modern and postmodern perspective, one tends to lose touch with any ground and root outside human, technological production. Modernism is a movement of development and mastery of the natural world. Postmodernism goes even further in this direction and projects a world of pure artifice without any reference or basis and grounding in nature at all. Reality is transumed into simulations and itself becomes just the mirror image of human artifice. There are no longer any original presences that are not produced in evident ways by representations. Reality disappears into its simulations, becoming purely virtual. This can be seen as the continuation, but also as a collapse, of the project of modernism. Indeed, the idea of shaping the world in the human image is shattered as impersonal forces of system and chaos supplant humanism. Carried far enough, human conquest of the world ends up by absolutizing certain finite human powers, and at this point the development of progressive modernism becomes its own undoing. The positive powers posited by human activity no longer work to shape and order another world, natural or material, in which they are ensconsed. Unchecked by any external and resistant world, these finite powers mistake themselves for infinite and attempt to tyrannize one another. There is nothing recognized as given, and so they must create the whole world out of themselves, but this entails conflict with every other likewise unchecked, finite power.
In this manner, the foundations of human cultural productions and constructions tend to be corroded by their very development in extremis. The limits within which the development of human culture made sense and could be shown to be a positive progression are exceeded. Progression appears no longer true or real, nor to be clearly distinguishable from regression. It may still be possible to affirm the surpassing of such outmoded values as truth and reality, so as to reinsert the more complicated developments back into the modernist narrative of continuing progress. But such affirmation and optimism and the grand récit of progress may also be rejected as outmoded. A mood of peering anxiously into the inscrutable, without any comforting narratives of linear progression at all, is more characteristic of the postmodern. Beyond the inevitable consternation it causes, this loss of a sense of direction and of progress can also be exhilarating. The mystery of existence is rediscovered. The world may become “reenchanted,” and we become “strangers to ourselves.”
This suggests how postmodernism follows the development of modernism to its furthest consequences and results in certain reversals and in some respects a reductio ad absurdum of the hopes and program of modernism. Elimination of any alien reality outside of human making and culture results in a wildness appearing unaccountably from within: we become unknown even to ourselves. This is the opposite side of the coin from the absolute banalization of human life produced by technologization that reduces even human beings to meaningless, mechanical activity. Poles of opposition such as subject-object, apparent-real, given-made collapse when human creative power and shaping activity makes everything over into its own image. Of course, there is always some sort of a support, some material basis for this activity, and forgetting this sets it up to come back in unexpected, perhaps unconscious ways. What had been treated as exterior to humanity now turns up as a dark, shadowy side within its own all-encompassing activity. This exteriority discovered as arising from within is for some interpreters a rediscovery of the religious. A radical otherness to or of humanity is recognized as the continuation of the experience of the sacred or divine, especially as it was known in premodern times. At this stage the divine still wore strange faces that had not all been made in the image of man. Postmodern religion can recover a sense of the numinous as it was experienced before the humanization of God through anthropomorphic, so-called revealed religion.
Mark Taylor’s Two Mutually Opposed Postmodernisms
Mark C. Taylor, in “Postmodern Times” (and elsewhere) distinguishes between a modernist postmodernism and an alternative, “poststructuralist” postmodernism. Modernism is understood by Taylor as the enactment of the outlook first reached by German idealism and fully articulated in Hegel’s system, which in effect achieves total consciousness of reality through its complete and total representation, its being defined as fundamentally an object for a subject. Human activity as Spirit finds itself in everything as the principle of all reality. This is a rigorous and systematic working out on an intellectual level of the postulate of human autonomy--of the human subject as the only maker of its own world—that is realized in Western civilization eminently through technical and technological advances. It is the prolongation of the project inaugurated by Descartes and his program of science based on the conscious subject (“I think therefore I am”) as Archimedian point for leveraging the whole universe. Heidegger would later designate this as the age of the world picture (“Die Zeitalter des Weltbildes”), where reality is equated with a subject’s representation of the world.