The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), was an important precursor to Postmodernism and Poststructuralism. Whilst investigating Greek tragedy, he noticed a distinction between life and art, that he described as the Apollonian, representing order and harmony, versus the Dionysian, encompassing chaos and emotions. His main premise was that the fusion of Dionysian and Apollonian “Kunsttriebe” (“artistic impulses”), formed dramatic arts, or tragedies, and he emphasised that by combining these two elements we can seek to form a “Primordial Unity”, to discover a sense of metaphysical solace or connection with the heart of creation. By rejecting the concept of “disinterestedness”, Nietzsche also advocated for an aesthetic appreciation of life through active seeing and interpreting. He hoped that if an Apollonian formalist could embrace the ambiguity of Dionysian, they would be able to see content beneath the messy visible surface that a “detached” gaze cannot reveal, and thus engage with the hidden depths of works of art.
Michel Foucault:
The French philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), primarily addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how societal institutions use them as a form of social control. By linking, power, knowledge, and body, he that power is exercised rather than possessed, that it can be productive (as well as repressive), and fills a need of the present as an omnipresent social phenomena. He rejected objectivity as the sole criterion of truth, and placed great emphasis on the importance of multiple perspectives. His long-standing interest in Surrealism arose from the differences between “resemblance” and “similitude” in paintings, such as Magritte’s “This Is Not A Pipe”. Resemblance relies on a hierarchical model that relates to an original model in the real world (text to reality), whereas similitude propagates itself through small differences (text to text). Breaking this system of representation showed that both texts and images circulate around “the ghost of the thing-itself”.
Julia Kristeva:
The Bulgarian-French philosopher, Julia Kristeva (1941-), challenged Modernist notions of originality and artistic genius, by furthering the notion of “intertextuality”. She believed that every text is an intertextual “mosaic of quotations” drawn from other texts (signifying systems). Therefore, the attribution of meaning is shifted from the author to the reader, who contextualises the work within a larger network of relations between other texts. This interconnection between similar or related works of literature creates an “interrelationship between texts” and generates related understanding in separate works. These references can influence the audience’s interpretation and grant new layers of depth to a text, based on the reader’s prior knowledge and understanding. By showing that the meaning of a text does not only reside in the text, but is also produced by the reader’s own relation to other texts invoked in the reading process, Kristeva showed that meaning is a dialogue, mediated through “codes” imparted by both reader and writer.
Jacques Derrida:
The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), considered texts as being constructed around elemental oppositions to which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. He saw that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language, and questioned the presence of meaning in itself (“objective”) and/or for itself (“subjective”). However, Derrida called this binary opposition a false notion of “the metaphysics of presence” and sought to deconstruct the notion of essentialist “deep structures”. By coining the term “Différance”, to mean “difference and deferral of meaning”, he showed that writing is never able to be neutral or transparent, since the definition of words are reliant on other words, which can be different in meaning. These excavations of instabilities within a text, open it up to a range of possible meanings and interpretations, and through this deconstruction can either subvert, or even undermine, an author’s stated purpose.
Jean-François Lyotard:
The French philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), analysed the impact of postmodernity on the human condition and argued that we have outgrown out our need for “grand narratives” due to the advancement of modern techniques and technologies. He believed in a gap between language and experience, that could not be completely accounted for through discourse, so an extralinguistic experience, in the form of the aesthetic, was a crucial necessity. By using the feeling, sensation, and desire, within works of art to bridge this singularity, he revealed the limitations of discourse and grand narratives. This revealed “the sublime” phenomena, which broke established rules and consensus, by representing what is “other” and what cannot be represented. By disorienting the viewer and blurring the boundaries of discourse, he showed that the mind cannot always organise the world rationally, and some objects are simply incapable of being brought neatly under concepts.
Jean Baudrillard:
The French sociologist, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), sought to examine the relationships between reality, symbols, and society. In particular, he focussed on the significations and symbolism of culture and media involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence. He claimed that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, to the extent that human experience has become a simulation of reality. A simulation is a copy of a copy that is so removed from its relation to the original that it becomes a simulacrum that can stand on its own as a copy without a model. These simulacra that construct our perceived reality have become the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is, and are rendered legible. Baudrillard called this phenomenon, the “precession of simulacra”, and believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra, and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society, that all meaning has been rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable.
Fredric Jameson:
The American literary critic, Fredric Jameson (1934-), viewed postmodern “scepticism towards meta-narratives” as a "mode of experience" stemming from the conditions of intellectual labour imposed by the late capitalist mode of production. He argued that postmodernity's merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole was the result of the colonisation of the cultural sphere, which had retained at least partial autonomy during the prior modernist era, by a newly organised corporate capitalism. Since parody (which implies a moral judgment or a comparison with societal norms) had been replaced by pastiche (collage and other forms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding), he believed that the postmodern era suffered from a crisis of historicity. By separating the art object from its context of production or immediate history, Modernist Formalism glorified the artist, whilst simultaneously isolating them from cultural contexts.
References
Barrett, T. (2008). Why Is That Art?. New York: Oxford University Press.
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