Postmodernism and Poststructuralism in Literature

In what ways do postmodernists and poststructuralists complicate our understanding of ‘reality’ and its representation in literature and culture?

Postmodernism is a shift of emphasis from content to form or style; a transformation from reality into images’[1] which is what will be explored in the following essay and also the ways in which postmodernists and poststructuralists complicate ‘reality.’ Focusing on how it is represented in culture. The theorists that will be focused on in regards to exploring this question are Derrida and Baudrillard with emphasis on the gulf war.

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Jacques Derrida is ‘one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time’[2] Through his intervention texts are perceived in a different way, he discusses the ‘conflicting relationship between an authors expressed intentions […] and what the text actually describes.’[3] Paying attention to ideas that are ‘inconsistent with its overt statements.’[4] Therefore, his theory of deconstruction brings to light ‘[the] suppressed textual conflicts concerning what is ideal, primary or original’[5] he focuses on the hierarchies between ‘speech and writing; and nature and culture.’[6] An important term when discussing Derrida is differance. Differance ‘arises from his appropriation of Saussure’s concept of the sign’[7] It is used in relation to the oppositions between ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ because differance is neither present nor absent but instead ‘it is a kind of absence that generates the effect of presence.’[8] The term is neither ‘identity or difference but a kind of differentiation that produces the effect of identity and of difference between those identities.’[9]

Derrida invents this term to show the ‘alternative understanding that refers to the passage of the infinite, endless differentiation’[10] Differance means both ‘to differ and to defer’[11] Therefore, it is the unresolved deferral of the identity one might have ascribed to a particular term’ for example an entirely fixed meaning for the word dog never definitively arrives.’[12] Derrida’s famous statement ‘there is no outside of the text’[13] does not mean that there is anything in the world but words on a page or books because Derrida ‘redefined’ the term text. ‘text’ means the indefinitely deferring movement of differentiation.’[14] Rather than Derrida asking ‘what is there,’ he interrogates the tangles in which we become entwined when we ask what there is.’[15] Human beings tend to ‘project something original which is represented or hypothesized by them, this is referred to as ‘origins’ which is ‘already enmeshed in language’ [16] The way we talk about ‘origins, and what is secondary to them, produces the ‘effect’ that there seems to be an origin.’[17]

Derrida always depicts origins textually and it is suggested that ‘there may or may not be a beyond to the plays of language’, the replies to his famous statement ‘there is nothing outside of the text’[18] are mostly in agreement that there is ‘surely ‘something’ outside of the text such as blood, rain, trees, and bodies’, they believe that Derrida ‘denies ‘reality’ in favour of ‘words’[19] this response to his statement misunderstands what Derrida means when he refers to ‘text’. For him, the text means ‘differance, spacing, relationality, differentiation, deferral, and delay.’[20] By saying that there is nothing out of the text is stating that there is always relationality and differentiation but whatever is imagined as ‘reality,’ it is argued that differentiation is critical.’[21] The critics that object Derrida’s theories, they suggest the feeling of anger and emotion because emotion is not a ‘text’, some critics do defend Derrida but still fail to grasp what he means, for example, they state that it is ‘impossible to describe anger without metaphors [and] linguistic meanings- we have always entered the world of language, ‘[22] and that language constructs the reality in which we live in. Other critics argue that ’emotion is already differential’[23] therefore, they believe that Derrida emphasises that ‘we are always in the world of language, whether people refer to the rain or sun ‘we never stepped out of language to touch the thing itself.’[24]

However, this explanation is a misunderstanding, according to Derrida a suggestion of rain ‘in itself that I am, however, unable to experience except in the world of language and meaning.’[25] This is a ‘deconstructive way of talking because it projects an ‘original world’ that people believe we cannot access, trapped in some prison of language’[26] This raises the issue of a world that we cannot access, Catherine Belsey definition of the ‘real’, “One can only think of language as a network, a net over the entirety of things, over the totality of the real”[27] ‘the real can be a place of traumatic events that should never be confronted, even in dreams’[28] the real ‘surrounds us’ it is a condition of human beings’ but it is something that is lost to us. ‘constituted by culturally constructed images of reality.’[29]

A theorist that explores the loss of the real and the replacement of it is Baudrillard. His theory suggests that’s simulation and simulacra replaces the real with a copy, ‘no more mirror of being and appearances of the real’[30] The real disappears because it is made up of ‘miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks, and command models.’[31] Therefore, it can be reproduced multiple times, ‘it is nothing more than operational. Thus, it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary [so] it is no longer real at all, it is hyperreal’[32] The age of simulation begins with a liquidation of all referentials, by artificial resurrection in [a] system of signs.’[33] Baudrillard suggests that this becomes a question of ‘substituting signs of the real for the real itself’[34] this process is to deter ‘every real process by its operational double’ Baudrillard describes it as a ‘perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real’[35] therefore, the real is not needed to be reproduced ever again. He goes on to say that to simulate something is to ‘feign to have what one hasn’t’ [36]however, he suggests that to do this is not to simply ‘feign’ because feigning always leaves ‘reality intact […] the difference us always clear, it is only masked;’[37] but simulation on the other hand ‘threatens the difference between what is true and what is false between the real and the imaginary because the ‘simulator produces ‘true’ symptoms’[38] so simulation is a play of ‘illusions and phantasms’[39]

Moreover, Baudrillard’s the gulf war did not take place suggests that ‘the war that took place during January and February 1991 was a ‘TV gulf war.’[40] It is a perfect example of Baudrillard’s theory. ‘a hyperreal scenario in which events lose their identity and signifiers fade into one’[41] suggesting that the media’s representation as ‘purveyor of reality’[42]what viewers saw on the TV was for ‘the most part a ‘clean’ war with lots of pictures of weaponry, including the amazing footage from the nose-cameras of ‘smart bombs.’[43] Baudrillard insists that ‘technological simulacra neither displace nor der the reality of war’[44] instead becoming an integral part of the operation. Technology allowed ‘the boundaries between simulation and reality to become blurred’[45] Baudrillard argues that under these conditions the ‘virtual has overtaken the actual’[46] and it functions to deter ‘the real event and leaves only the simulacrum of war’[47] however, as he points out this does not mean it is ‘unreal in the sense that it does not have real effects’[48] therefore, the real vanishes into the virtual. The event of war had become ‘obscene and insupportable’[49] like every real event.

Therefore, ‘we are confronted with a virtual apocalypse, a hegemony’[50] which is ‘ultimately more dangerous than real apocalypse’[51] in turn our virtual ‘had definitely taken over the actual and we must be content with this extreme’[52] because we are no longer ‘in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of deterrence of the real by the virtual’[53] Derrida misunderstands Baudrillard by stating that he finds it ‘interesting’ that simulacra of images, television, the manipulation of information, reportage[…] nullified the event’[54] he agrees that something like this or something ‘analogues happened’[55] however, he quickly asserts his disagreement by suggesting that ‘this should not make us forget-and the event unforgettable- that there were deaths[…] that no logic of simulacrum can make us forget.’[56] Baudrillard does not deny that there were any deaths in the war, Baudrillard is suggesting that the media controlled the way in which people viewed the war, how they were exposed to it and desensitised to it through its representation. Another example of simulation would be Existenz[57]. The film ‘played with the idea that a digitally created simulation could invisibly and seamlessly replace the solid, messy ‘analogy’ world of our everyday life’[58] The film the Matrix[59] also gives an idea of a simulation where social control was nearly complete’[60] therefore, ‘by opposing the imagery with the real as two different narrative registers in the same film […] Hollywood narrative, even in the most outlandish form, asserts all the more stridently its status as ‘reality”[61]

Overall, Theorists such as Derrida and Baudrillard complicate our understanding by suggesting that what we know to be ‘reality’ is in fact not what we think. Baudrillard believes that our reality is replaced by a simulation that we have to come to accept, this simulation is controlled by outlets such as the media Derrida suggests that language does not construct our reality like critics have previously stated but instead suggests that we project an origin of an ‘original world’ which we cannot gain access to. Films mentioned above also show how we can live in a world of simulation instead of the real which we try to gain back but never achieve.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations,’ Julie, Rivkin, Michael, Ryan, Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2^nd Edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004)

Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1st Edition (Australia: Power Publications, 1991)

Belsey, Catherine, Culture and The Real, 1st Edition (London: Routledge, 2005)

Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, 1st Edition (UK: Granta Books, 2005)

Evans, Mikhail, The Singular Politics of Derrida and Baudrillard, 1st Edition (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Iwata, Hiroo, “Dr. Strange Device Or; How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Media Art”, The Journal Of The Institute Of Image Information And Television Engineers, 66 (2012), 219-222 <https://doi.org/10.3169/itej.66.219>

Sarup, Madan, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, 2nd Edition (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)

[1] Sarup, Madan, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, 2nd Edition (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)

[2] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, 1st Edition (UK: Granta Books, 2005) p.xi

[3] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 28

[4] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 28

[5] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 28

[6] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 29

[7] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 29

[8] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 29

[9] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 29

[10] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 31

[11] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 31

[12] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 31

[13] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 33

[14] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 33

[15] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 33

[16] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 34

[17]Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 34

[18] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 34

[19] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 34

[20] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 34

[21] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 34

[22] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 35

[23] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 35

[24] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 35

[25] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 35

[26] Deutscher, Penelope, how to Read Derrida, p. 35

[27] Belsey, Catherine, Culture and The Real, 1st Edition (London: Routledge, 2005) p, 49

[28] Belsey, Catherine, Culture and The Real, p. 49

[29] Belsey, Catherine, Culture and The Real, p. 52-54

[30] Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations,’ Julie, Rivkin, Michael, Ryan, Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2^nd Edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), pp. 365-337 (p. 366).

[31] Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. pp.365-337 (p. 366).

[32] Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. pp. 365-337 (p. 366).

[33] Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. pp. 365-337 (p. 366).

[34] Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. pp. 365-337 (p. 366).

[35] Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. pp. 365-337 (p. 366).

[36] Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. pp. 365-337 (p. 366).

[37] Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. pp. 365-337 (p. 366).

[38] Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. pp. 365-337 (p. 367).

[39] Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. pp. 365-337 (p. 369).

[40] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1st Edition (Australia: Power Publications, 1991) p.2

[41] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 2

[42] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 2

[43] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 3

[44] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 4

[45] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 4

[46] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 8

[47] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 8

[48] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 9

[49] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 9

[50] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 27

[51] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 27

[52] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 27

[53] Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 27

[54] Evans, Mikhail, The Singular Politics of Derrida and Baudrillard, 1st Edition (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 54-55

[55] Evans, Mihail, The Singular Politics of Derrida and Baudrillard, pp. 54-55

[56] Evans, Mihail, The Singular Politics of Derrida and Baudrillard, pp. 54-55

[57] David Cronenberg (dir.), Existenz (Alliance Atlantis Communications, 1999). Momentum Pictures, 1999.

[58] Iwata, Hiroo, “Dr. Strange Device Or; How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Media Art”, The Journal Of The Institute Of Image Information And Television Engineers, 66 (2012), 219-222 <https://doi.org/10.3169/itej.66.219>

[59] Wachowski Brothers (dir.), The Matrix (Warner Bros, 1999). Warner Home Video, 2007.

[60] Iwata, Hiroo, “Dr. Strange Device Or; How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Media Art.

[61] Iwata, Hiroo, “Dr. Strange Device Or; How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Media Art