Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
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At the back of this impulse is, of course, the refusal of the modernist search
for ‘truth’. On the one hand, postmodernism resists it, because the definers of
‘truth’ can be shown to be less than ingenuous about their motivations and,
anyway, there is so much disagreement among the ‘experts’ themselves that no
one believes there is any single and incontestable ‘truth’ to discover any more.
On the other hand, postmodernism objects because it is evident that definitions
of ‘truth’ easily turn into tyrannies. To be sure, nothing like the communist
regimes which ordered people’s lives because the Party best knew the ‘objective
realities of the situation’, but still each of us will have experienced the imposition
of others’ judgements on ourselves. Hence at school we will have had to read
Dickens and Hardy because definers of ‘literary standards’ had deemed them to
be worthy of inclusion on the curriculum (while ruling out popular science fiction,
romance and westerns). Again, everyone in Britain will have some experience of
BBC television as that which cultural custodians had thought worthy of production
(lots of news and current affairs, the classic serials, ‘good’ drama, a limited
range of sport, appropriate children’s programmes such as Blue Peter). And a good
number of readers will have encountered the restrictions imposed on their homes
by planners and architects, most notably perhaps those of us brought up in
municipal accommodation.
Against this the postmodern mentality celebrates the fact that there is no
‘truth’, but only versions of ‘truth’, making a nonsense of the search for ‘truth’.
In its stead the advocacy is for difference, for pluralism, for ‘anything goes’. A
consequence is that the modernist enthusiasm for genres and styles (which at
one time or another would have served to situate worthwhile art and to help identify
good taste) is rejected and mocked for its pretensions. From this it is but a
short step towards the postmodern penchant for parody, for tongue-in-cheek
reactions to established styles, for a pastiche mode which delights in irony and
happily mixes and matches in a ‘bricolage’ manner. An upshot is that postmodern
architecture happily clashes received styles, famously ‘Learning from Las Vegas’
(Venturi, 1972; Jencks, 1984), perhaps combining Spanish-style woodwork with
a Gothic façade or a ranch-style design with Venetian facings; or postmodern
dress will contentedly put together an eclectic array of leggings, Dr Martens
boots, Indian necklace, waistcoat and ethnic blouse.
Perhaps most noteworthy of all, postmodern culture abandons the search for
‘authenticity’. To appreciate this better, one might usefully list a series of cognate
words that are recurrent targets of those taken with postmodern culture: the
‘genuine’, ‘meaning’ and the ‘real’. Each of these terms testifies to the modernist
imperative to identify the ‘true’. It is, for instance, something which motivates
those who seek the ‘real meaning’ of the music they happen to be listening
to, those who look for an ‘authentic’ way of life which might recover the ‘roots’
of the ‘real England’ (or even of the ‘real me’), those who desire to find the ‘true
philosophy’ of the ‘good life’. Against all of this postmodernism, perversely at first
encounter, but perfectly consistent from a starting point which rejects all things
modern, celebrates the inauthentic, the superficial, the ephemeral, the trivial and
the flagrantly artificial.
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