Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
Postmodernism will have no truck with yearnings for authenticity for two
main reasons. The first is one which I have already detailed at some length: the
insistence on one ‘true’ meaning is a fantasy, hence those who go looking for the
‘authentic’ and the ‘real’ are bound to fail because there can be only versions of
the ‘real’. We cannot hope to recover, say, the authentic Dickens because we
read him as citizens of the twenty-first century, as, for example, people who are
alert to notions such as the unconscious and child sexuality which, unavoidably,
make us interpret the character of Little Nell in ways which set us apart from
both the author and his original audiences. Again, there can be no ‘true’ interpretation
of, say, the meaning of the Beatles’ songs since their meanings are
necessarily variable depending on one’s age and experiences.
If this first objection to the search for the authentic is the insistence on the
relativity of interpretation, then the second is still more radical and, I believe,
even more characteristic of the postmodern condition. This asserts that the
authentic condition, wherever one seeks for it, can never be found because it
does not exist outside the imaginings of those who yearn for it. People will have
it that, somewhere – round that corner, over that horizon, in that era – the real,
the authentic, can be found. And, when it can be discovered, we can be satisfied
at having discovered the genuine (in oneself, of one’s times, of a country) which
may then be set against the superficial and artificial which seem to predominate
in the contemporary world of ‘style’, ‘show’ and an ‘only-in-it-for-the-money’
ethos. It is the contention of postmodernism that this quest for authenticity
is futile.
Take, for example, the popular search for one’s roots by tracing one’s family
back through time. Many people nowadays go to great pains to detail their family
tree in order to trace their own point of origination. A common expression of this
attempt to establish authenticity is the return of migrants to places from whence
their forebears moved generations before. What do these seekers discover when
they reach the village from which the Pilgrim Fathers fled, the Irish hamlet from
which the starving escaped, the Polish ghetto from which the Jews were driven?
Certainly not authenticity: much more likely a reconstruction of the Puritans’
barn-like church ‘exactly like it was’, a ‘real’ potato dinner (with cooled Guinness
and fine wines if desired), a newly erected synagogue with central heating
installed and a computerised record of family histories.
You yearn to find the ‘real’ England? That ‘green and pleasant land’ of welltended
fields, bucolic cows, unchanged landscape, whitewashed cottages, walled
gardens and ‘genuine’ neighbours that is threatened by motorway construction,
housing estates and the sort of people who live in one place only for a year or
so before moving on? That place where one might find one’s ‘real self’, where
one may discover one’s ‘roots’, something of the authentic English way of life
that puts us in touch with our forebears? But look hard at English rural life – the
most urbanised country in Europe – and what do we find? Agribusiness, hightech
farming, battery hens and ‘deserted villages’ brought about by commuters
who leave their beautifully maintained properties (which are way outside the
budgets of locals) with the central heating pre-set to come on when required
and the freezer well stocked from the supermarket to drive their 4x4s/SUVs
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