Postmodernism is a word defined by its inclusiveness. How then do we narrow it down to a digestible concept? This is probably best done by taking the reader through a few different fields and explaining the essential differences between what was modern and what is now postmodern. It may be easiest to begin visually.

The difference between modernism and postmodernism is simply illustrated in the difference between Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbão, Spain. Where Mies celebrates the aesthetic of architectural purity, enshrining the structure itself as the desirable design element, Gehry seems to playfully borrow from the architectural periods of the past and juxtapose those elements with forays into new materials and undulating, unorthodox forms never before attempted in building. Mies used exposed I-beams as an aesthetic element that unified the exterior of his monolithic black rectangles; while Gehry's exterior rejects a unifying aesthetic, embracing many simultaneously and valuing none above the others. Mies' modernism was supposed to be the end of architecture. Gehry's building comes after the end of architecture. Once we have already reached the zenith of an aesthetic true to its medium, we can begin having some fun again.

In art and photography, postmodernism is often explained as the undermining of the authority of the author and the cachet of the art object. At the same time the modernist photographs of Edward Weston or Henri Cartier-Bresson were finally being accepted in the art mainstream, postmodern photographic work was busy tearing down that very institution. The modernists had been welcomed into the artistic canon for their achievement in conveying beauty and sorrow while remaining true to the photographic medium by eschewing any painterly effects and instead pioneering the “straight” photo and print. This was an approach considered true to the medium, pure to photographic representation – no crop, no selective focus - instead, using the eye of the camera to capture the detail or frozen “decisive” moment that no human eye could.

On the contrary, by celebrating the democratizing power of photography, postmodern artists were now using photos to demonstrate the validity of anyone's views – one needn't study art for a lifetime to validate one's views of the world, you can just pick up a camera. Everyone's images - sharp or soft, painterly or straight - were equally welcome in the new anti-canon of postmodernism. Moreover, the essential reproducibility of the medium allowed photographers to appropriate other imagery and distribute images to audiences larger than any art had ever before reached. This, in no small part, helped undermine the metaphysical (and modernist) ideology of art. As Steve Edwards put it, “In closing the distance between the privileged object and its audience through mass circulation… art's bogus religiosity could be blown apart.” (1)

Now, up to this point the discussion has only revolved around modernism and postmodernism in relation to art practice. But this is not the whole story. The ideas of postmodernism ring true far beyond the confines of the professional art world. They are paradigm shifts in the way we accept knowledge. And this is where most people trip up. Steve Edwards in his essay, “Snapshooters of History” does a poor job differentiating between the quasi-absurd, anarchistic inclusiveness of artistic postmodernism and the cold and calculating, though somewhat nihilistic deconstruction of the French post-structuralists – the intellectual tradition most closely associated with the artistic movement. On the one hand, he (quite correctly) forwards substantial criticism on artistic postmodernism and how through levelling the playing field of subjectivity, it has undermined the ability and authority of necessary vanguards to pursue progressive intellectual and political change. On the other, he lumps post-structuralists in with postmodernists and accuses them of the very same things. After summarizing his argument, this paper will then demonstrate the essential differences between the two camps.

Edwards begins by describing the image saturated world we now live in. He says, “Photography constructs for us… worlds without origin or end.” (2) By using the example of the fashion magazine, Edwards says that from page to page we are shown one archetypal world after another, all supposedly available to us simultaneously: “Back and forth, one on one day, another the next. Extending in all directions, like the great nineteenth-century department stores, growing section by section, and producing ordering knowledges in the process.” (3)

Our collective cache of images and narratives has traditionally been the reference realm for literature and painting. What photography has done is tap into this realm more frequently and on a larger scale than ever before in human history. Commercial photography's role in this proliferation of images has been essential. By noting all this, Edwards is showing us that we are beginning to view reality in terms of the images we digest. Situations in our own lives remind us of things we've seen in movies; our ideal of beauty is one that we've learned in magazines. These images are all examples of Baudrillard's simulacrum – the exact copy of that which has never existed. This common directory of images is the reference point by which we gauge the events of our own lives. Its truths are fictions; they are representations of what photographers and art directors believe something should or would have looked like. Edwards continues, “We dwell inside the directory, within a set of photographs whose boundaries frame us. Our only choice is between its choices, we have no choice but to consume.” (4) As such, we begin to perceive the world around us in terms of a false, represented world that has been created for us. As Krauss said, “To perceive a landscape as picturesque is (obviously) to see it as a picture.” (5) Or, more pointedly, Edwards says, “What we experience as reality is, in reality, the reality effect.” (6) What he means by this is that since our reality is perceived in terms of representations, then to the postmodern thinker, there is no outside to representation. It is all there is.

Edwards goes on to highlight Vikky Alexander, Sylvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and the Burgin school as artists whose work is “a practice fundamentally cynical to the claims that there is a world prior to the shutter, or a meaning authorized by the artistic subject.” (7) But this is where Edwards ceases to be a believer. This is where we begin to run into problems. Like the set of roles adopted by Sherman in her film stills, the collective image bank we all share and that postmodernists use as their source material is both limited and limiting in its possibilities. At what point can this be regarded as a legitimate, all-encompassing resource, through which complicated ideas can be expressed (or at least referenced) through popularly recognizable imagery, and at what point is it seen as limiting the scope of what is possible to communicate, or what is possible to think.

In order to better understand this idea of how we order our world in terms of representations of things that never existed, it is best to refer to linguistics, arguably the origin of postmodern thought. In the first decade of the 20th Century, Swiss linguist Ferdinand De Saussure concluded that language is arbitrary. To him, language was a self-regulating system where difference constituted sense. A cat is not called a cat because of some essential “catness” that exists within it, but because we have arbitrarily assigned it that name. We know what “cat” means, again not because of some perceivable cat essence in all cats, but simply because the word “cat” is not “bat” or “can”. Saussure was not a postmodernist though, he simply proposed a theory of linguistics that other, later theorists were able to utilize and expand to our system of knowledge in general. Edwards explains:

Thus we are handed a system of knowledge which is infinitely flexible and infinitely unstable. The meaning of our signs float independently of an external or prior reality. Without an anchor, all signs always have more possible readings and none of these can be privileged over others. A prior reality or fixed objective meaning is the naïve “transcendental signified” or essential meaning which was central to modernism. This opposition is central to postmodernism in all its facets.

Now the “transcendental signified” can point to a number of things. Firstly, we have already used it in reference to an objective reality that our words, thoughts and images draw from. But this concept can also be expanded to include the dominant Western paradigm of accumulated empirical and rational thought. That paradigm is constructed through a depth model, where theories are explained by reference to prior theories which have ceased to be discourse, but accepted truth. The postmodernists reject the transcendental signified on both counts. Postmodernists would argue that over thousands of years the depth model has essentially provided us with fictitious universal knowledge. After the year 2000, is Plato's cave still the best that we can do? Are we really just fumbling in the dark, in search of the way out into the light of essential meaning? Or is fumbling in the dark all there is? This is why postmodernism has been referred to as the “flat earth theory”. Unlike modernism, postmodernism isn't the latest paradigm, built upon its predecessors, it's all there is. Herein lies the greatest irony of postmodernism and one that is included in every rudimentary introduction to the concept: it rejects totality and the meta-narrative while being one itself – albeit an odd one.

On the surface, the critique goes something like this: there can be no single great theory of everything because that represses social differences, produces a terrible homogeneity and becomes capital “T” truth, in whose name dissent and difference are persecuted. Postmodernists embrace pluralism as the way out. Moving deeper to discuss how the meta-narrative drives the older connection between sign and object, Edwards writes, “The meta-narrative has become the very paradigm of metaphysics which attempts to deny the problematic status of representation by smuggling in some prior unmediated instance.” (9) In other words, it is a sham. The guarded treasure of modernist enterprise is a lie, smuggled in to resolve the breakdown in what exactly representation represents.

So we know that Edwards rejects the meta-narrative and transcendental signified. But, as we will shortly find out, he also rejects postmodernism as a totalizing concept whose primary error is not granting room to the necessary undercurrent or avant-garde that drives forward progressive societal change. In doing so, Edwards has failed to separate the postmodern art practitioners from the post-structuralist Theorists. Edwards himself quotes J. F. Lyotard, a prominent French post-structuralist, in denying his own theories the status of a totalizing paradigm, “There is no question here of proposing a ‘pure' alternative to the system: we all know… that an attempt at an alternative of that kind would end up resembling the system it was meant to replace.” (10) What Edwards fails to notice is that the post-structuralists were demonstrative, not active. They gave us the practice of deconstruction and showed us how to use it, but never proposed a system or paradigm which was to replace the current one. In essence they showed us the cage which shapes and limits our thoughts and expressions, but implied that since we built it, we can also tear it down. While we can deconstruct anything and show it to merely be a product of the prevailing forces that shaped its author, we aren't being defeatist or deterministic in doing so. By identifying these biases, we can better overcome them. In reference to critiquing the dominant modernist paradigm Derrida wrote, "It is only to itself that an appeal against it can be brought, only in itself that a protest against it can be made; on its own terrain, it leaves us no other recourse than to stratagem and strategy.” (11)

Having already established that a central tenet of postmodernism is the rejection of modernism, Edwards goes on to show us how in fact, once art is taken out of the way, the emancipatory goals of the two actually coincide. Jürgen Habermas correctly both enshrines and discards art's role in the argument, “The idea of modernity is intimately tied to the development of European art, but what I call ‘the project of modernity' comes only into focus when we dispense with the usual concentration on art.” (12) Modernism grew out of 18th Century Enlightenment philosophers' goal of human emancipation. Originally, this meant liberation from superstition, religion and ignorance through rationalism, empiricism and science. Of course, in light of both the Stalinist and Nazi experiments, we now know that this thrust is not entirely unproblematic.

Likewise, postmodernism and post-structuralism have allowed us to question our received meta-narratives and understand expression as a product of environmental influences. In essence, the postmodern levelling of the intellectual playing field emancipates those that had been marginalized by the Western meta-narrative consensus. In fact, Edwards himself calls it “a Eurocentric reflex”. (13) And herein lies yet another contradiction. Taking for granted the triumph of the modernist and Enlightenment goal of human emancipation, we in our pluralistic postmodern era forget that “it was the Enlightenment which bred and nurtured those very values for our time.” (14)

But what does this mean for photography? Unfortunately, a lot. If the postmodern debasing of representation is accepted, then photography “would have nothing to do but deconstruct its own impulses.” (15) Taking away the essential world that is represented on film reduces photography to painting with light; which elevates the photogram to a practice with equal representational power to that of traditional photography. Nearly all photographers would have a problem with this. Luckily, this is where Edwards begins to note the continued presence of certain things that postmodernism was supposed to have done away with. For one, the avant-garde still exists; though it may be better recognized today as the anti-avant-garde. Also, the art object and the photograph still possess a privileged space. Finally, deep structure still defines our constructions of knowledge:

The postmodern rejection of deep structure renders its own arguments untestable; in effect, producing for itself a hermetic space. History is then reduced to a series of chance events predetermined by environment and social conditions. It becomes a junk store to be picked through by the cultural producer. Anything goes. (17)

Contrary to what its proponents predicted, postmodernism has not torn down everything before it. Anything does not go, though it often seems like it. Like post-structuralism, postmodernism has merely given us a set of tools with which to better inspect our accepted knowledges. This drives the radical in Steve Edwards crazy. If postmodernism debased the hyper-rationalist tendencies of modernism, yet a depth model where certain knowledges remain privileged over others still exists, why haven't we arrived at the perfect intersection of movements for radical social change to take place? The problems with capitalism (lack of congruency between expectations of continual growth and profit and our finite resources to fuel that growth) now encompass the entire planet. Why is it that the hyper-rationality of the modernist political experiment has been thoroughly discredited while the same hyper-rationality of fundamental capitalist practice continues to be the gospel carried to every corner of the globe?

The answers lie in an odd alliance between the intellectual left and the French post-structuralists that many consider to be de facto. While there is no doubting the emancipatory intentions of the post-structuralists, one must ultimately ask oneself if there really is a compatibility between progressive political commitments and the dissolution of the subject or totalising suspicion of the concept of truth. (18) In fact, it was Habermas who famously dubbed the post-structuralists “young conservatives” due to their inability to strongly advocate change.

~~~

In his essay, “Snapshooters of History”, Steve Edwards is guilty of the same thing he convicts the French post-structuralists of: debasing the existing paradigm without proposing anything to replace it. Edwards highlights postmoderism's structural problems but concludes that in fact, the canon has not been wiped out, the Great Human Project is still a go. We needed postmodernism to tear down the oppressive ivory tower but now that it has done that, we need to begin giving certain ideas more weight than others if any great, radical project is ever to take place again.

Steve Edwards argues for the avant-garde, the vanguard, the necessity of an undercurrent of countervailing tendencies. If nothing is any more or less relevant than anything else, this essential waiting place of new ideas is not accounted for. Though the postmodernists deny the avant-garde a place, it has nevertheless refused to be done away with. It is in this waiting room where Edwards sits, musing over his plans for concrete radical change and waiting for the rest of us to be ready.

notes

(1) Edwards, S., Snapshooters of History: passages on the postmodern argument. Originally published in Ten.8 No. 32, 1989. This paper references the version printed in The Photography Reader. Ed. Liz Wells, Routledge, London, 2003. pg. 191.
(2) Ibid. pg. 181.
(3) Ibid. pg. 181.
(4) Ibid. pg. 181.
(5) Krauss, R., The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodern Repetition. Published in October 18 , Fall, 1981.
(6) Wells, pg. 180.
(7) Ibid. pg. 182.
(8) Ibid. pg. 183.
(9) Ibid. pg. 185.
(10) Lyotard, J.F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi) Manchester University Press, 1986. pg. 51.
(11) Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. (trans. Alan Bass) Chicago University Press, 1978. pg. 59.
(12) Habermas, J., Modernity – An Incomplete Project. In Foster op. cit., pg. 5.
(13) Wells, pg. 193.
(14) Eagleton, T., The Politics of Subjectivity. Published in Identity , ICA Documents 6. pg. 47.
(15) Wells, pg. 190.
(16) Ibid . pg. 187.
(17) Ibid . pg. 192.
(18) Ibid . pg. 181.