Postmodernism: Modernity Cranked to "11"?

Joe Carter compares “postmodernism” with Nigel Tufnel’s Amp (in the parody “This is Spinal Tap”) that goes to “11” — the point being that “postmodernism” is illusory and merely represents a “hyped up” modernity. Since I’m a guitar player, a Spinal Tap fan, and at least a casual student of the “emergent” movement, the analogy intruiged me.

My initial thought was that “postmodernism” is illusory if you define it to be so, just as “11” on a guitar amp is illusory if you define it as “10” by a different symbol. If you define “postmodernism” more precisely, however, it isn’t illusory at all. There certainly is meat to critiques of foundationalist epistemology, for example, whether or not you ultimately agree with those critiques.

Likewise, an amp that dials to “11” may well be different than an amp that uses the traditional limit of “10.” In fact, “10” doesn’t represent a fixed volume, tone or wattage; a 1970 100 watt Marshall head driving a 4×4 stack of vintage Celestions at “10,” for example, will pump out more decibles at different timbres than, say, a 15 watt Gibson tweed combo on “10”. So “11,” in a given context for a given amp, could have meaning.

My effort to frame this thought, however, isn’t nearly as eloquent as Peter Epps’ brilliant comment to Joe’s post. As Peter concludes, “[t]he postmodernist sets the amp at eleven, and enjoys the show.”

I hope Peter can forgive me for reproducing his comment in full in the extended entry below.

Comment to Joe’s post by Peter Epps:

“Joe:

I’m a serious critic of modernism, as anyone at the intersection of “Christian” and “19th-C Brit Lit specialist” is like to be. . . . and I think there’s a good reason no one defines this clearly, and that you’re part of the problem (this time).

First, the zeitgeisty, breezy use of the term “postmodern” is irritating to the folks who actually want to do the serious work in the field. Second, there are a number of reasons that “post-structuralism” as a rigorous exploding of the conventions of philosophical discourse is “meaningful activity,” and it definitely does exist. That the analytic-leaning philosophers don’t like it is no more surprising than that those same thinkers don’t like Heidegger or any other representative of the Continental strain in the past three hundred years or so.

Here’s the matter, Joe: are you going to suggest that those of us who use the critiques of post-structuralist thinkers as ways to encourage modernism to self-destruct are *wrong* to enjoy the dissolution of modernism? Wrong to dance on its grave as moral realities intrude on its proceduralizing, progressive mythos? If so, your critique that postmodernism is just modernism amped-up is going to fall flat.

Let’s take your analogy on its face, though. Two things leap out. First, there is no real reason the amp should have stopped at ten, eleven, twenty, or two hundred. The dial’s markings are arbitrary; only its physical travel’s correlation to the voltage allowed across the rheostat has any real impact on the sound. Second, if the eleven has been just marked on a dial which only goes to ten, then in fact the eleven *is not* merely an extension of the ten; it is a new thing.

And, oddly, I think this is where postmodernism has “reality.”

As I’ve said before, to be postmodern you must first be modern. That is, one cannot arrive at postmodernism from any other position than that represented by modernism.

Postmodernism is *not* a new thing, it is the self-destruction of an old thing. The only thing which makes postmodernism describable is that it is the self-destroying modernist’s *becoming conscious of* and *espousing* that destruction. The process of that coming to awareness, of the modern thinker’s realizing that the only remaining meaningful modern activity was the willing demolition of modernism, describes an arc through Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, with stops and digressions aplenty along the way (destruction is not orderly, and does not keep neat maps).

The distinctively post-structuralist turn is to embrace the act of writing as the intrinsically destructive act to modernity, to realize that modernity has always already been doomed by its being written, by the way its very assumptions are framed by the remoteness of human authority, and the pseudo-revelatory representations of the text. Sooner or later, the deferred “reality” of the modernist text may assert itself, and/or the deferrence may become so obvious that people notice the difference.

This is happenning in countless, very practical, ways. When the TV news gives us moral guidance by deciding how we should be enraged today, the manipulation is subject to our not noticing the difference between representation and presence, the degree to which we are eliding the distance between the TV screen and the camera–both literal and contextual distance. The emergence of the blogs and the greater and greater dissonance between the “objective” and the “biased” is, in fact, a *defining* characteristic of our age.

So is the inability of any number of important and powerful people to see the difference between the propaganda about a Bolton or an Owen or a DeLay and the realities. Similarly, the UN. etc.

And let’s not forget the famous “That depends on what the meaning of is, is”–actually, a very modern moment; the *scenario*, though, was illustrative of the demolition of modernism, as the procedures and the facts are trumped *explicitly and without protest* by arguments from polls. Similarly, the voting arguments.

When you look at the rapidly growing irrationality of the Left, and the overall dissolution of our public discourse, you are seeing modernism unravel.

When modernism unravels, the unravelling has a name, and it is postmodern.

When the thinker in the era of modernism’s self-destruction embraces that destruction, and signs up to pursue it through writing the modernist text into its grave (i.e., by carrying forward the self-destructive dissoluteness of modernism in every direction), that embrace has a name, and the name of the game is post-structuralism.

When someone sets out to engage with the written text through an understanding that the writing is being done to unwrite the text’s apparent meaning, the illusion of self-contained autonomous truth in a bunch of ink marks, that critic is engaging in post-structuralist hermeneutics.

If you will, modernism is like an amp hooked up to an old set of speakers that can’t handle more than half the wattage the amp can put out. The guitarist has to remember not to turn the amp up too high, or he’ll blow the speakers, so he never goes past ten on a dial up to twenty.

The postmodernist sets the amp at eleven, and enjoys the show.

Enjoy,
PGE”