8.7 The Aesthetics of Postmodernism

Postmodernism (Fr. postmodernisme — after modernism ) — a concept reflecting structurally similar phenomena in the social life and culture of the world during the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century , and often interpreted as «that which came to replace modernism». It is used both to characterize a post-non-classical type of philosophizing and to designate a complex of styles in the visual arts. Postmodernity is a condition of contemporary culture that includes a distinctive philosophical position expressing a (non-)formal antithesis to modernist art, as well as the mass culture of the contemporary era .

The concept of postmodernism (after the modern) denotes the principal direction in contemporary philosophy, art, and scholarship. The theoretical basis of postmodernism lies in the views of French poststructuralists and neo-Freudians. The term postmodernism was first used by R. Pannwitz in his work The Crisis of European Culture (1917). It was subsequently applied by A. Toynbee to designate the stage of development of European civilization contemporary to him (the mid-twentieth century). In the philosopher's view, the age of postmodernism begins its reckoning from the 1920s, and its characteristic features are a departure from tradition, distrust of reason, and human helplessness before the world. From the 1960s onward the term postmodernism came to be widely applied to define stylistic innovations in literature, architecture, and the other arts, as well as changes in the socio-economic and socio-political spheres. However, postmodernism acquired the status of a scholarly concept only in the 1980s, thanks to the work of J.-F. Lyotard, who extended the discussion of postmodernism into the sphere of philosophy [9, p. 37]. In his work The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard characterizes contemporary society and culture through the notions of the "post-industrial society" and "postmodern culture." He defines the postmodern condition as an incredulity toward metanarratives, and treats it as the atomization of the social into a turbulent web of language games. The latter arise from access to the totality of information at any given moment, and their consequence is an inexhaustible linguistic reserve of possible judgments.

Postmodernism is preceded by two fundamental philosophical methods — poststructuralism and deconstruction. The leading philosopher of postmodernism, Jacques Derrida (although he himself does not accept the concept of postmodernism), regards deconstruction as a mode of the artistic transformation of philosophy grounded in the data of the humanities, aesthetics, and art. Researchers note that what is at issue is not so much destruction as reconstruction, a re-composition undertaken in order to grasp how a given totality was constructed [22, p. 17]. Derrida does not consider deconstruction a method, since each of its acts is unrepeatable and singular. The essence of deconstruction is a play with the text, a play of the text against meaning. The goal of this play with the text is the post-text, that is, the destruction of the meaning of a philosophical text, the production of its indeterminacy, which brings philosophy closer to the art of postmodernism. Destruction is regarded as a path to the birth of invention, and a characteristic feature of this is the rejection of truth, which comes to appear as a kind of fiction. The process of deformation rests not on reason but on intuition, on the language game as an end in itself. Deconstruction is considered the foundation and the condition for attaining a new artistic language and new styles of art, and is therefore a matter within the competence of aesthetics. For Derrida, art, and literature in particular, is a distinctive withdrawal from the world — not into the otherworldliness of utopia, but into the middle, into depth, into pure absence.

Deconstruction in postmodernism is, in a certain sense, a borrowing from avant-garde art. Here the idea of creation takes on a profaned form: it is a creativity preceded by destruction. This approach can, in a certain sense, be traced back to Romanticism, in whose aesthetics subjectivism is brought to the fore and the irony of the artist (a destructive factor) acquires multilayered content. The aim of deconstruction in postmodernism is seen as the transformation of the values inscribed within the system of anthropocentric humanism, stripping them of their claims to scientificity and aesthetic substance. Deconstruction must yield artefacts that are intelligible to its contemporaries and answer to their expectations. The purpose of deconstruction, in Derrida's view, is not the destruction of meaning as such, but the manifestation of the degree of autonomy of language with respect to its own conceptual content — an appearance comparable to a telephone's "hello", which signifies only "hello" [22, p. 21]. Deconstruction produces not chaos but a new configuration of the philosophical-aesthetic field, in which a presence of absence arises, forming a text woven of quotations and creating a new spatio-temporal field. The scholar's shocking pronouncements are aimed at breaking out of the customary field of philosophical thinking, so as to plunge into the element of the text and, amid a loss of meaning and understanding, attempt to arrive at new meaning. Derrida's logic is a flight from the world, but not into otherworldliness — into pure absence.

Various aspects of the aesthetics of postmodernism were worked out by the French structuralist T. Todorov (Symbolism and Interpretation) and the Italian semiotician U. Eco (The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and others). Eco sees the possibility of reviving plot under the guise of quoting other plots, of rethinking them, and of an ironic play with them, combining problematic depth with entertainment. He regards the labyrinth as a symbol of culture, and postmodernism as just such a model of it, one lacking a center and a periphery, an entrance and an exit. R. Rorty formulates the concept of neopragmatism, in which the deconstruction of classical philosophy and aesthetics by a certain kind of ironist serves as a mode of creative self-realization. The search for truth as such is eliminated as a goal, and in its place, as a kind of goal, arises the language game as a means of realizing creative freedom. Hence the criterion of culture is not facts but merely artefacts, since life itself is a fantasy that weaves a web of linguistic relations. A pronounced feature of postmodernism is the loss of the subject, since its place in artefacts is taken by various impersonal structures: flow and desire — G. Deleuze and F. Guattari; irony — R. Rorty; transgression and eroticism — J. Baudrillard; abjection — J. Kristeva, and others.

Artistic phenomena take on the character of simulacra in the absolute sense, that is, as a loss of any connection with reality — pure convention, a mock-up, an empty form that has taken the place of the artistic image. The role of this concept within the aesthetics of postmodernism is so substantial that it seems legitimate to define that aesthetics as a whole as an aesthetics of the simulacrum, notes N. Mankovskaya. The grounds for such an understanding lie in the fact that simulativeness most adequately reflects the ambivalence of postmodernist artefacts, whose playful nature is an ironic copy of a shadow.

The theory of the simulacrum, associated above all with the name of Jean Baudrillard, developed in parallel with Derrida's theory of deconstruction. The philosopher uses this concept in a protestant sense, resorting to a critique of aesthetics and of the consumer society. The simulacrum is characterized as a pseudo-thing, a substitute for an agonizing reality. Important in the context of the theory of the aesthetic is the opposition between the aesthetics of the beautiful (the classical paradigm) and the postmodernist aesthetics — an opposition not in the latter's favor. The foundation of classical aesthetics as a philosophy of the beautiful is artistic imagery, and the object of art is inner transcendence, depth of content, and inner truth. The subject of creation in classical art is the bearer of a creative imagination capable of forming an artistically perfect totality. Postmodernism, or the aesthetics of the simulacrum, is characterized by artificiality, contrivance, and the demonstrative character of the artefact, which is devoid of inner vitality.

V. Bychkov, analyzing the regularities of non-classical aesthetic consciousness, defines it as post-culture, in which an explosive breakdown of culture has begun, above all in the aesthetic-artistic sphere. Among its characteristic features he counts a rejection of the traditional traits of European art — wholeness, imagery, non-utilitarian character, aesthetic essence. In their place come artefacts, art projects, and objects of simulation, and simulacra of every kind have replaced the image and symbol of traditional art. A typical feature of post-art has become the abandonment of its principal function — the aesthetic one — and most contemporary art practices no longer contain any aesthetic-artistic core. At the same time, tracing the history of the formation of post-culture, the philosopher regards it as a certain preparation for the creation of a new reality — the virtual one. Within it a situation may well arise in which a supra-intellectual game with the values of all cultures becomes possible — a kind of glass-bead game akin to the phenomenon described in Hermann Hesse's novel. This is its elitist variant, realized in the philosophical-aesthetic and aesthetic-artistic texts of thinkers on the level of M. Heidegger, R. Barthes, H.-G. Gadamer, G. Deleuze, J. Derrida, and others. A second tendency, in the philosopher's view, may be defined as an environmental approach, one that makes it possible to organize the space of a person's everyday environment and leisure at the level of creating psycho-energetic fields: performers and spectators. Today it is almost self-evident that, over the course of the entire past century, scientific and technological progress and, in particular, many leading philosophical movements, the humanities, and artistic-aesthetic experiments have worked, tacitly, toward a global reshaping of the human psyche, mentality, and sensibility, in the direction of preparing humanity for entry into the virtual world of networked being.

Unlike classical aesthetics and its conceptual apparatus, according to V. Bychkov, a new aesthetics is being created that it is appropriate to define as non-classical, or nonclassical — likewise its conceptual apparatus, which is an alternative to the concept of "the aesthetic" in its classical understanding. In non-classical aesthetics the object is left undefined, since it lacks a semantic and energetic center. Nonclassicism manifested an essential transformation of the object of aesthetics down to the zero level (annihilation), the retirement of the traditional aesthetic categories, and the introduction into the actual sphere of aesthetic (or near-aesthetic) discourse of a considerable number of concepts, most of which, in classical aesthetics, were not merely marginal but, in the first instance, often did not fall within the aesthetic field at all. Among them one may name such notions as the labyrinth, the absurd, cruelty, everydayness, corporeality, the thing (thing-ness), the simulacrum, the artefact, eclecticism, the gesture, intertextuality, hypertext, deconstruction, and others [6, p. 82]. The principal aesthetic characteristics used to define an object within non-classical aesthetics are the notions of the play principle, irony, and the ugly. The critic is inclined to think that nonclassicism opens perspectives for the formation of a new stage of aesthetic theory in the twenty-first century, one that might be called post-non-classical aesthetics. Agreeing with the author as to the reality of this phenomenon, one is forced to acknowledge: the aesthetic has lost its object — art — substituting for it false values, or anti-values, and sees its purpose in mocking everything that, throughout the history of humanity, was established as a source of the development and self-formation of the spirit in its uniqueness — Value and Truth, the Good and the Beautiful. The spiritual crisis arises within postmodernism not as an object for analysis of its causes, nor as a search for ways to avoid the destruction and scandalizing of culture, but as an acknowledgment of reality and an attempt to work out thought within the bounds of a cultural absurd, born of a sense of the absurdity of being, in which the creative spirit has lost its value.

Thus, the aesthetic theory of the most recent period is marked by a diversity of approaches to understanding the essence of the aesthetic and of its object — art; the sources of creation and the subject of creation — the personality of the artist and the peculiarities of his creative skills; the essence of the artistic-creative process and the purpose of art in social life and in the spiritual world of the individual. The analysis has shown a qualitative change in the characteristics of this field of research over the period from classical aesthetics to modernism and, from modernism, to postmodernism. The rejection of the aesthetic-artistic values worked out by humanity over the course of history is characteristic both of the aesthetics of postmodernism and the art of postmodernism (nonclassicism), and of post-culture as a whole — evidence of the formation of new, post-spiritual practices that cultivate the absurd and the ugly. It is true, however, that in the realities of post-culture, where the debased becomes the norm, researchers are still inclined to find a rational core. The principal purpose of contemporary mass art, in the view of G. Mednikov, is not the satisfaction of artistic and spiritual needs but the solution of practical, everyday tasks of adaptation: the relief of psychological tension and of the conflictedness of being, the search for models and means of self-identification [25, p. 48]. This finding meets with no objection, but requires clarification as regards the content of reality itself, in which the individual feels random and unsettled — a reality whose truth is the absurd and the ugly as its aesthetic characteristic, and whose adaptation is directed toward overcoming the good principles in a person for the sake of the evil ones. The same kind of adaptation is required with regard to the ugly, and consequently demands the overcoming of beauty as well — manifesting a rejection of the need for self-perfection and a repudiation of the values that contain such a possibility. Postmodernism thus attests to a crisis of the spirit of European culture.