PMS - The Postmodernist Syndrome

By Tine Byrckel

"The task of overcoming the seventeenth-century worldpicture is only begun" (H. Putnam 1987)

In the beginning was the word¬and since our consciousness began to be formed by that story, mixed with and strengthened in time by Plato's metaphysics, the word has at even intervals had the power, and on certain occasions almost absolute power.
I would like, in this non-academic essay, to address some enormous topics¬postmodernism, language, art - and femininity¬and I will do so in a sort of investigation into whether the "feminine" has anything special to contribute to an aesthetic that is seriously post-modern.
We have only barely begun on an actual reckoning with the modern. There is no doubt that, in our thinking about the world, humanity and human cognition, we stand before, or in the middle of, a necessary dealing with the modern view of the world. This view of the world really took form around the seventeenth century, at the same time as the construction of the new science and its monopolization of cognition. The question then becomes whether we have in the philosophy that calls itself, or is called, postmodern the actual reckoning with modernity. I am convinced that it is not in the neo-nihilist form that so-called postmodernity has taken that a true reckoning is taking place¬first and foremost because this postmodernism stands with its feet planted in the very same mud in which the modernity it professes to reckon with stands.
Perhaps I have already suggested how weak the concepts both of modernism and postmodernism are. This naturally makes the discussion very difficult¬especially since there is often something Janus-like about the concepts: just when you believe you stand confronted with the face of postmodernity, you find yourself looking straight into the eyes of modernity. Neither is it any secret that the concepts appear to mean something different in each of the various "fields": philosophy, visual art, architecture and literature. Therefore when you apply a philosophical reflection to another field¬in this case visual art and, even more precisely, feminine visual art¬the potential for confusion would seem to be total. It appears nevertheless to be worth the effort, especially since postmodernism appears to be dying down even before it has gotten started¬who feels like hearing about it anymore? This could, on the other hand, be said to be yet another symptom of our not having lifted our noses from the modernist track in a constant search for the latest new idea¬in an almost obsessive-compulsive fear of not being in the avant-garde.
However: we are far from finished with postmodernism; we have barely begun! Major problems hinder us from making serious progress in our understanding of the world. In the first place, we must find some way to set aside concepts stemming from the old view of the world. Metaphysics is therefore an affair that is most often disregarded in advance; it is a kind of rising above oneself. It is of course true enough that we cannot fly. However we can jump, and each time we jump we can move the rug a little. The other reason is of course that you have to have one or several good reasons for changing your understanding of the world. And it involves on the one hand criticism and on the other hand utopia. You go far out on a limb if you claim that this is necessary, however the tendencies toward dissolution in philosophies that claim to be revealing (apocalyptic)¬whether it be Nietzsche's or Baudrillard's¬still need to tell the world why we in fact must dissolve the previous metaphysics. If you generalize concepts such as illusion or false conciousness, the concepts lose their meaning. Illusion presupposes truth or reality, false conciousness presupposes true knowledge. So unless we are to view these philosophies as merely a consequence of an inescapable masculine destruction-drive (we are taking the machine apart just to see what's inside), I have a very hard time seeing how nihilism can go hand in hand with the recommendation that we do away with the previous metaphysics. An attempt to abandon the truth will therefore always be seen as pointless destruction¬and that is, in fact, something other than de-construction. To quote Derrida, it is in fact an honest search for an even greater truth that takes place in a deconstruction: "The value of truth (and the other values associated with it) has never been disputed nor destroyed in my writings, but only inscribed in a stronger, broader and more stratified context." So it is possible that a proper postmodernism includes a critique of the "great stories," especially those of enlightenment and the belief in progress, however it does so precisely because they cannot be true. Postmodernism does not necessarily exclude a concept of truth, a distinction between true and false¬or, for that matter, fiction and reality¬unless you really entirely reduce the world to TEXT, which certain outspoken thinkers cheerfully permit themselves to do. From where does this extraordinarily great faith in language come anyway?
One can say with confidence that THE WORD, the concept, language has been the great philosophical meeting point of this century, no matter on what side of the channel¬or ocean, for that matter¬you find yourself. The problem has certainly taken on a variety of appearances. Making a very rough division, one might say that, on the Anglo-American scene, describing the world¬the object (the famous ash tray)¬has become a problem, while on the continent¬as part of another philosophical tradition¬the problem has centered on the subject. Even if the two approaches do not appear at first glance to have much in common, one has to say that the result from both sides has been a tendency toward radical dissolution. The investigation of the subject resulted in its disintegrating as a category, whether it was under the direction of structuralism or psychoanalysis, while the investigation into how one can designate the object led to its being problematized as an ontological entity. Parallel to this, we find an artistic counterpart¬which possibly has a genesis entirely its own within "greater" modernity, and which thus characterizes modernism in an art-historical sense. Modernism is worried. It investigates the dissolution of the subject and the object with esoteric concern¬and recognizes it in industrial society and the industrialization of art, and it is in the pointing out of this catastrophic dissolution alone that true art exists. With respect to this concern, aesthetic postmodernism is, so to speak, the place where the unconcerned begins: you permit yourself to like, to enjoy, this fractured subject and object, which you observe uncritically from all sides. In this sense, postmodernism is thus merely a change of attitude to the very same condition: we lean back in our seats and enjoy the tragedy of the fractured world. But is this radical enough, or is isn't it merely one more strategy in the modern world to renounce concern and become enjoyers?
An essential condition for the construction of the modern view of the world was that the perception of facts was radically separated from the perception of values. The valuable was not an actual characteristic of the world, but something that people projected on the world. The cognitive, the aquaintance of the actual world, has to do with objects (especially those "discovered" by physics), while all affective qualities, ethics and aesthetics, merely appear to belong to the world. We were given a clear distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive. Art was thus, as an aside, separated from cognition along with the entire area that had to do with feelings. Cognition did however have something to do with empiricism and rationality.
It has proven to be characteristic of the modern view of the world that art is always in some kind of opposition to cognition. One of the first movements of this kind was romanticism, in a kind of embrace of modern science's exiling of the subject, it went along, so to speak, with the exile: what was interesting could be found on the side where feelings and values had been relegated to¬you might even say that it was there where the truly real could be found. On could say of romanticism that it spoiled its chance to be really anti-modern, but is it really so certain that the scientific view deserved this negative acceptance?
When the perception of the nature of the world in a certain sense only concerns the "outer" world, we arrive at the very old philosophical idea that human perception is a re-presentation of reality. We form an image of reality¬often distorted by deceitful senses, but which our mind/soul/consciousness is capable of correcting after all, since the soul is entitled precisely to privileged access to reality or the world of ideas. Before the modern era, the notion of human perception included, not only our ability to perceive the factual, but also a direct access to, and perception of, both moral and aesthetic values. In other words, human beings were viewed as standing in a fairly total cognitive relationship to everything in this world, and in that sense, of course, we resembled God a little bit, and that little bit was called soul.
When language became the philosophical optical instrument, all of a sudden representation taking place via language¬THE WORD¬is privileged. If at the same time, however, we relinquish the privileged access to the truth that our likeness to God guaranteed us, we suddenly have no method to determine which of the representations is the true one¬our discourses become multiple, as the text fetishists Baudrillard and Lyotard put it. It is thus once again the potential plurality of these networks (discourses) that occasions postmodernism's happy pluralism. A sudden side effect, or perhaps we should call it more of an historically experienced natural consequence of this view, is that to the extent to which it has turned this pluralism into the subject's free choice of perspectives, we then have the re-discovery of romanticism. Without at all having determined whether or not this variety of postmodernism is a possible philosophical position, this neo-romaniticism appears at least to be thriving out in reality. There, people have also begun to dig its historical advocates out of oblivion: Schiller and Schelling. Pluralism has become an aesthetic affair with a thinly veiled underlying belief that there remains a reality from which to depart. For any semantic account of where an individual discourse takes its meaning from is still lacking.
Part of the postmodern trend revolves around a Kantian terminology, not least in order to speak of art again at all¬and to describe some of the (serious) feelings to which (serious) art gives rise. One can easily understand why Kant is a good choice, if you wish to mediate the subject and the object and, at the same time, understand the structure that unmistakably appears to be present in cognition (Oh, I realize that this is a hurried presentation of an enormous area of philosophy; it should be understood as an outline of a real critique).
As far as I can see, this is preventing, to an eminent degree, a contemporary aesthetic from finding its thought. Kant's philosophy is the philosophical hypothesizing of the Newtonian view of the world¬the "modern" world-view par excellence, for better and for worse. And what appears as "remains" of his transcendental analyses ought rather to be viewed as symptoms of the insufficiency of an entire metaphysics than as objects for all further thought on these areas.
For a long time we did not have the experience to reach out over the Kantian categories. But if it is at all meaningful to speak of philosophical experience, and if this philosophical experience is not merely a free-floating entity in relation to other areas of experience, then we know that Kant's categories are only applicable systematically and to a limited degree, and that their uncovering of being is accordingly symptomatic. The symptoms are, as in any other case of sickness, characteristic, and they characterize a number of classical philosophical problems central precisely to modern philosophical thought. This thought is again engendered by a particular scientific view of the world. And this view of the world does not make sense anymore. If you are willing to go out on a limb and say that someone knows something, then there is an entire field of experience within science itself (of the strictly physical variety) but also within mathematics, linguistics, and semantics, etc. that has abandoned this view of the world.
In its return to Kantian aesthetics, it becomes clear that a great deal of what could have been a profound post-modernist de- and reconstruction of the conditions of experience in fact finds itself only on the surface of philosophical experience. We continue, among other things, to believe that human experience is a network that is laid over the world, the "Ding an sich," (world in itself) and that representation can thus only reflect the characteristics of the network. Thus there are, it is true, no methods by which to determine which of the representations is the right one. The specifically aesthetic is then¬to the extent to which it is sublime¬one or another feeling, necessarily without a concept, in the gap between the network and reality. Of course there are still artists who continue to enjoy art's being emotionally exiled in this way to a misty outpost in a cognitively undifferentiated landscape. I get the impression that they make a virtue of it. Not only is it that way, but it is also mixed into this entire non-cognitive nightmare along with a notion that it ought to be that way.
We have not moved the rug very many centimeters with this thinking, and we have in particular not taken advantage at all of the potential that lies partly in pre-modernist thought but also in the challenges that modern thought has raised. One could say that we are not even taking the Kantian sublime seriously if we leave the abyss where he found it. It is not at all there where we find the truly great dizziness. It is not at all enough to proclaim the multiplicity of discourses or categorizations, and thereby the impotence of cognition. The truly sublime can be found on the very edge of the cognition we have now attained, not to be anachronistic.
Instead of taking on the difficult task of determining or clarifying what human cognition consists of, we have merely abandoned cognition altogether. With the discovery that the distinction cognitive/non-cognitive cannot at all be rigidly imposed on our experience, we have spread non-cognitivism over the entire area. And when we stand groping around in the absurd darkness of radical dis-sensus, we are backing ourselves into a little narrow Kantian parking spot: the sublime, in order to find a profoundly irrational, romantic encounter with actuality on the border of complete dissolution.
In the beginning was the word, and now they want us to believe that the world exists in the heterogeneity of discourses, and that we cannot even determine which of the discourses is the right one. All we can do is to stand on the edge of the discourses and take note of the boundless incomprehensibility of the world.
The true challenges to modern thinking lie in the investigation of how cognition, meaning, language and understanding are possible, when our picture of how these are possible has turned out to be wrong. Yet an abandonment of the modern view of the world does not at all necessarily imply the relativism or nihilism of meaning that certain postmodernist thinkers enjoy propagating. It seems that our disappointment in the fact that the foundation of human cognition is other than what we expected has led to the conclusion that there is no particular cognition at all. I believe that we should instead follow up on the point that the definition is so different from the one we inherited along with the causal baggage from the eighteenth century¬and that "representation" is a metaphor that places itself within the very same frame of causality, with its postulation of inner and outer, subjective and objective. The problem is less the multiplicity of representations than the very idea that re-presentation is possible. The problem is that we view language as an image (images) at all, and at the same time turn the comprehended into our exclusive access to the world. Thus there is suddenly no way out of language, and it is that fact that thinkers such as Baudrillard and Lyotard, among others, have pointed out. But it is not necessarily a fact¬although it can of course be viewed as a kind of philosophical-sociological fact¬that this is the situation. It can also be viewed as a philosophical trap toward which not least modern thought has steadily been leading us. From this perspective, postmodernist thought in its most common present formulation is a "reductio ad absurdum" of modern thought.
Wittgenstein, who is of course often invoked in connection with postmodernism, defined language in his Tractatus (6.341) as an almost Kantian network, however it was precisely the image-theoretical content¬language as depicting, relatively but determined axiomatically, an underlying reality¬that Wittgenstein renounced in his later philosophy of language. In this, he took a radical departure from the theory of representation (image theory) as a condition for meaning. His considerations regarding rules demonstrate that even the simplest identification/re-presentation cannot depend upon anything resembling a mirroring, neither in the form of a reflection of an "object's" metaphysics (nor physics, for that matter) nor in the form of a rule of projection via a quasi-platonic pre-established entity such as, for example, a linguistic rule. It cannot be emphasized enough how radical, and at the same time extremely difficult, Wittgenstein's considerations regarding rules are¬not least because their implications are so broad: they have consequences for general empiricism, since they criticize any notion of (unproblematic) ostensive definition: pointing at something. They have consequences for rationality, since they demonstrate that the automatic rule¬a rule that, so to speak, operates autonomously, and which one can therefore only obey¬is an illusion. This has ramifications for mathematics as it is traditionally understood. The cogito¬Descartes' majestic, lonely thought¬is also affected¬as is, in a sense, all traditional subject thinking (a rule that is precisely not a rule, if it is, as a matter of principle, inaccessible to others). I would also claim that all notions of structure, not least in the form of traditional semiotics, are also affected¬there are quite simply no systems that merely ARE. This does not, however, mean that rules do not exist (or meaning, for that matter), nor that we can just make them up ourselves. In no way does it mean that the individual subject can determine his or her discourse¬the considerations regarding the following of order can, on the other hand, be viewed as the fundamental pillar in the argument against the possibility of private languages. It merely means that the ontology of the rule is surprisingly different than expected. Wittgenstein states that a rule is established, comes into being, derives its existence, in practice. We use language, and it is thereby established. However we do not use it merely truth-functionally¬as he assumed in the Tractatus¬we use it in a number of other ways that can be termed language games. We know a great deal, and truth is established in language games around this knowledge. But there is no point in standing up like Moore, when he wished to disprove skepticism, and saying that we know this and that. And there is as little point in standing up like Lyotard and Baudrillard try to do and, as linguistic-philosophical analysis, stating what we do not know or can not determine. If a guy stands up and says that he knows he has two hands, we consider him as just as big an idiot as if he stands up and says that he does not know whether he has two hands. There is a common rock bottom of knowledge that conditions meaning and understanding. Wittgenstein wants to reject skepticism as a possibility, but not the meaningfulness of language.
To remain with the reckoning with image theory, one can thus say that what Wittgenstein rejects is re-presentation, and with that we come into direct contact with presentation. Understandable discourse occurs within presentation. Language is participation in presentation¬it has in no way the character of reflection. And skepticism¬also in its postmodernist version¬often arises where we believe we can recognize that there are several possible representations of one and the same thing, and that we are not able to determine which of them resembles it best.
Wittgenstein does not state¬using Borges' popular metaphor¬that we are in a labyrinth. In order to know that you are in a labyrinth, you must be able to see it from above. When you are in a labyrinth, you cannot know that it is a labyrinth; you just try to get out of it. There is a particular type of overview of this kind that is meaningful neither to seek nor to predicate, because it really makes no difference. The important difference between Wittgenstein and Nietzsche¬which one can emphasize in passing in light of the postmodernist re-use of them¬is that while Nietzsche states that God is dead, Wittgenstein shows that the guarantee the He had apparently constituted for the great agreement between image and reality has never been necessary. The activity of language is of another kind.
What are we supposed to do with that insight? Not very much, in Wittgenstein's opinion. This insight in fact abandons neither truth, meaning nor criticism; it removes neither history, ethics nor aesthetics. It renders impossible certain metaphysical ideas regarding what the foundation of these elements can be at all.
Our problem is not that none of us can manage to take the place of God¬and from there see reality and the truth (the ideal representation) of it. Our problem is the recognition that it is not even possible for God (I am not saying anything about the actual existence of God). Even God must assume a certain standpoint in order to have one at all. Hilary Putnam, in connection with a classical geometric example concerning the metaphysical status of points/borders on a Euclidian plane, states it in this way: "it is my view that God himself, if he were to go along with answering the question 'do the points really exist, or are they only demarcation?' would say 'I don't know', not because his knowledge is not all-knowing, but because there are limits on the extent to which a question is meaningful."
So far I have not spoken about femininity at all. I want to offer the excuse for my hurried review of the modern by saying that it was there I wanted to go. I hope that I have at least arrived at a thorough problematization of any primitive identification of anything at all in this world¬we have not figured out where reality is, and I think that is rather pleasant. What this does is to abandon all trivial assumptions about what woman is. Oddly enough, one of the most radical refutations of reductive gender identifications is Elizabeth Badinter's attempt to define masculinity in XY. What is always interesting in Badinter is the historical overview that is always capable of relativizing apparently firm categories. And it is in any case a fact that in our entire history it has primarily been men who have had THE WORD. This has of course enormous implications for a number of theories and structure-formations. Being defined as feminine on a biological level turns out to be almost less threatening than when the definition takes place within, for example, psychoanalysis¬Freud and Lacan. For when you begin to figure out what you (the subject) ARE, it always turns out that you are a man. Whether we are dealing with penis-envy as constitutive in a heavy-handed manner as in Freud, or the role of the Phallus in the establishment of the symbolic order in Lacan, we bear witness to a furious identification of woman as "the other" (in relation to whom the man so conveniently can understand himself), and of the feminine as being a kind of undifferentiated, wordless morass¬the absolute opposite of the WORD, which is thus also coincidentally the history of the entire metaphysics of the western world. And then you are supposed to be so grateful anyway when the postmodern thinkers are of the opinion that feminine is of the good¬since it is precisely the unstructured, deconstructed, category-defying that has been enthroned¬even among the male thinkers. At the exact moment when women have gradually begun to speak, and gradually are to begin contributing with investigations into what this world is, "she" is categorized as the blessed, wordless "other." Is there anyone who shares my suspicion that this woman is man's dream¬one more time¬and that it might instead be characteristic of the fact that the entire western world's (male) metaphysics is tired of talking: is tired of itself? I am in no way convinced that we have exhausted the investigation of what humanity is, and not at all: what we wish it to be. I am convinced that there is something that is specifically female experience, not because women are of a decidedly different ontological constitution than men (human beings), but because she, as a body, has entirely different possible experiences (not least in the extremely overlooked area of reproduction). Especially because these reproductive experiences (to create, give birth and raise children) have forced her down into other types of experience than men's. This applies both on the subject-constitutional side (an area that psychology has surprisingly not taken advantage of), but certainly as historical experience as well. And it is in any case something that demands criticism and utopia to make progress with. And what is needed least of all is a new romanticization of the feminine, which is a real danger in a certain postmodernism. On the other hand, I did promise to offer a suggestion for what women artists have to do in a true postmodernity, that is, in the tough work involved in constructing a view of the word different than the modern, which is in any case a sinking ship.
Let us therefore return to art, return to aesthetics, return to mimesis. What I want more than anything is a great step backwards¬which perhaps will lead forward¬to forget the exiling of art from experience, and once again to make aesthetics what is was originally: a science of perception, and thereby also a science of directly perceptible experience. Then we would escape both the beautiful and, somewhat, the science of art, and art's narcissism. Philosophers have a very difficult time not talking about Plato and Aristotle, and one of the reasons is that you can use them, hanging in the air, while you move the rug. In Plato mimesis was a question of representation, and the role of art was to search for the ideal representation. And in Plato this naturally means representing the world of ideas as clearly a possible, to wrest, so to speak, the material image from the actual idea. Perception is a hindrance to, rather than insight into, understanding, and the representation of the ideal can fundamentally take place in thought as easily as in art. In Plato, art is profoundly unnecessary.
In Aristotle, the mimetic is not mere imitation. Or rather, every imitation is an interpretation and thus a creation. What is so interesting about Aristotle in relation to the modern Kant is the way in which his vast systems of categorization and universals are grounded in the material, and how we therefore directly experience the interrelation of things in what appears before us. In Aristotle, creation and insight into the universal are thus not radically different in nature. Perception and cognition are not opposed, and the thing itself is not, in the most literal sense, an invisible and intangible affair. It is neither placed radically beyond our senses nor our understanding, and neither is what we see and touch a weak reproduction of a heavenly idea. From this perspective, creating art is thus creating a particular type of perception¬but not one that stands in opposition to other types of perception. Thus we have here a place where art is necessary by virtue of its being perception, but where the tools of perception are material rather than conceptual and without the latter fact's needing to be contradictory.
We also have here several of the elements that appear to be of urgency to a veritable post-modernistic thinking: material perception as equally valuable as conceptual, because the ambiguity of perception can just as well agree with reality as the unambiguousness of the concept (the word); the disinterested as an illusory characteristic of perception, since engagement (or point of view) is the condition for visuality or understandibility at all. It is beginning to be clear that a number of characteristics that until now have always been placed as a burden on women¬evidence that she was not on the same level as man¬could prove to be a part of a broader and more complex view of the world. A strategy for involving this feminine would then be to view it as the excluded, the non-masculine, "the other." The feminine will then stand as the corrective for the "masculine" metaphysics. But I believe that the purpose in cultivating this insight continues to have something to do with the searching for the truth¬rather than searching for femininity. There is only reason to replace a patriarchy with a matriarchy if it is better or more right. As a woman I have great misgivings about accepting this "other" as being woman. It reminds me more of an elf that moves along to every dualistic construction of the kind that has become a part of the common metaphysical furniture of the past 300 years. If I were a man now, I would be truly sad about being for the most part excluded from having a place in the new reality. But WAIT!¬how was it now that we were supposed to tell the difference (did anyone notice how easily we slip back to: biology?)
There is naturally no manual for the role of art in such change. I believe that the wave of politically correct art inscribes itself naturally into that kind of dynamic, because there is no doubt at all that as many different descriptions/demonstrations of the human/the world as possible are necessary in order to break up a one-sided, imperialistic and false view of the world. The role of the woman artist can be to play her "role." There is much that indicates that this is precisely what "great" women artists are doing right now. But one of the great problems with revolutions and utopias and politics is of course that you must not forget what it was you wanted to do. And if it was to dance, then why not begin right now?
Aesthetics is the science of perceptual experience. Perceptual experience has been well and thoroughly unrecognized in a world of words.

I have intentionally avoided the mass of references that perhaps would "prove" this wide-ranging text. For a broad discussion of postmodernity and femininity, I can recommend the anthology "Køn og moderne tider" from tiderne skifter. For a critique of a certain postmodernism, one can read Christopher Norris's book Uncritical Theory, Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1992). It is difficult to be introduced to Wittgenstein in any easy way; Ray Monk's newly translated biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: Geniets forpligtelse from Gyldendal is excellent, and in Danish there is also Om vished with an introduction and commentary by Jørgen Husted (philosophia). Attempts to confront eighteenth century metaphysics are numerous; I have been inspired by Hilary Putnam and John Mcdowell, which unfortunately cannot be found in Danish translation. Elizabeth Badinter's book X,Y-om maskulin identitet ( ?) is truly instructive. And if you want to read a good and recent example of what one might call semiotic naturalization of gender identification, see Per Aage Brandt's contribution to the anthology Øje for Øje (Det kongelige Danske Kunstakademi 1994): "Køn og begær - blik og billede."