Postmodern Challenges to the Subject
PM 1. The postmodern subject as construct
The idea of the subject as a construct was not a new concept to the cultural sphere in the 1980s. The linguistic turn had already begun and the influence of Saussurean linguistics was visible in such influential works as Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’. Furthermore, the work of Derridean deconstruction had gained influence in prioritising textuality and intertextuality, and proclaiming that “il n’y a pas d’hors-texte”, or ‘there is no outside-text’ (Derrida, trans. Gayatri Spivak, 1974, p 158). His emphases on intertextuality and the interplay of signifiers in the absence of
transcendent meaning, in ‘Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences’ (1970), and his large body of influential work on deconstruction set the stage for 80s debates. However, as Bertens suggests, the 1980s was an era in which
Foucault’s analysis of the subject as a construct of power and knowledge was the most
pervasive influence. Foucault sets the ground for what Bertens refers to as ‘the other-determined’ subject taken up by a range of postmodern and related theorists:
[T]he autonomous subject of modernity, objectively rational and self-determined … gives way to a postmodern subject which is largely other-determined, that is, determined within and constituted by language (Bertens, 1995, p 7).
The subject as self-creating, self-constituting, and considered as operating via the impulses of an inner will, that resides within each subject, is challenged by the idea that the subject is determined by external forces. In an interview in May 1969, Foucault says:
The death of man is nothing to get particularly excited about.
It's one of the visible forms of a much more general decease, if you like. I don't mean by it the death of god but the death of the subject, of the Subject in capital letters, of the subject as origin and foundation of Knowledge, of Liberty, of Language and History.7
Foucault here specifies that the death of the subject is thus related to a new conception of the subject as an entity without liberty to act independently of the historical and social circumstances in which it is embedded: Foucault challenges the concept of the meaning-producing subject.
In the essay ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ (1998),8 Frederic
Jameson specifically refers to the ‘death of the subject’, which he qualifies as “the end of individualism as such” (1998, p 5). He provides a commentary on the position adopted by a host of theorists, who have come to consider the subject as a form of ideology. Modernism, which upheld the notion of the subject, in Jameson’s view is predicated on a “personal or private style” that is “unmistakable as your own fingerprint” (1991, p 17). He describes this modernist self as creator of a unique vision. Modernism, he says, upholds the notion of the “unique” self and private identity (1991, p 23 and p 366). He describes how a number of social critics, psychoanalysts and linguists had begun to claim that this form of individual was
“dead”, and that the subject based on the premise of individualism is ideological.
In response to this “death of the subject” Jameson provides two points of view.
The first argues that there was indeed an individual subject that emerged in bourgeois
7 As quoted in Jonathan Shaffer, The Irrelevance of the Subject: Against Subject-Sensative Invariantism, Philosophical Studies (2006). 127-87-107. http://www.jonathanschaffer.org/irrelevance.pdf 8 This essay was originally a talk, portions of which were presented as a Whitney Museum Lecture in fall, 1982.
society, that no longer exists in the age of “corporate capitalism”, with its
organisational man, its state and business bureaucracies. The second, as he puts it,
“more radical approach”, taken up by the poststructuralists, is that the individual subject “never really existed”, but is a construct. He says: “[N]ot only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is a myth, it never really existed in the first place, there have never been autonomous subjects” (1998, p 6). That is, he argues,
‘man’ or ‘the subject’ is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification… to persuade people that they …possessed this individual personal identity.” Therefore, Jameson names “the death of the subject” as a strand of contemporary thought, without actually fully aligning with this ‘radical’ version of the debate. For he
articulates that it is not important to decide which of the propositions is the most valid;
rather, one must acknowledge that the ‘old’ subjects of Picasso, Proust and T.S. Eliot simply “don’t work anymore” as nobody has that kind of “unique private world and style to express anymore” (1998, p 7). In mentioning the issue of style he evokes ideas John Barth writes about in relation to modernism when discussing the literature of exhaustion.
Baudrillard, with his hyperbolic style, is central to the postmodern dismantling of the modernist subject. In Simulations (1983a), Baudrillard elides the concept of the singular subject by writing about the ‘mass’, ‘public’ or the ‘majority’, and how these groups are impacted by the capitalist consumer media machine. In a twofold strategy of firstly, omitting to address the subject as an individual entity, and secondly writing about the obscuring of ‘reality’ by the media, he dismantles the notion that the subject has either agency or a singular identity. In this work, notions of the subject as a conformist entity operate in a number of ways within the text to present the subject as if caught in a gridlock of media messages, networks, systems and external forces. His notion of the “precession of simulacra” is discussed more fully in PM 2.
If the subject Baudrillard depicts is conceptually merged with the ‘majority’ or
‘mass’ in Simulations, in a way that indicates the subject can only conform to media views and cannot tell the difference between media representation and ‘actuality’, in a later work, The Ecstasy of Communication (1983b), while Baudrillard refers directly to ‘the subject’, this subject is even more enmeshed with the consumer order.
Baudrillard proclaims a new order in which “interiority” no longer exists. Firstly, he poses that there was a time when the subject “turned to imaginary depths” and had a
“scene”. This subject is that of modernity. However, the contemporary era, saturated by the media becomes a “proteinic” environment of networks, one in which the internal merges with the external, and the “body and the whole surrounding universe becomes a control screen” (p 127). Baudrillard writes of the body (of the subject), as merging with other bodies to become a “large soft body”.
Baudrillard reminisces about an era of alienation: the benefit of alienation was that the Other was able to be perceived: “There is no longer the drama of alienation:
we live in an ecstasy of communication”, he says. He brings up the metaphor of the schizophrenic, which at first appears to be a psychologising of the subject. Instead, however, it is the schizophrenic’s inability to filter or screen out information on which he draws. There is a forced extraversion of interiority, he proclaims. Suddenly the subject is cast into the world of the external, the world in which there is no interiority.
There is no part of the subject that is separate from the external world. He calls this the
“total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defense, no retreat’. The subject, in a sense, has no boundaries, it is the outside, it is the machine, it is the car, as he specifically argues:
It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparence of the world which traverses him without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only a pure screen, a switching centre for all the networks of influence. (1983b, p 127).
Baudrillard’s ‘subject’ is stripped of what one considers to be the subjective elements of subjectivity and is one and the same as the screening device that offers information from mainstream media.
It is noted by Best and Kellner that postmodern characters in fiction are often created to seem “empty, depthless, and aimless” in an attempt to embody “the waning of affect” (Best and Kellner, 1991, p 131). The characters in works of postmodernism often appear to offer a sense of depthlessness, as their representation does not draw on the conventions of realism, or mimesis, but rather draw attention to the status of a character as a textual creation. Robbe-Grillet’s work is an example whereby “moral, symbolic, or allegorical schemes are often abandoned in favour of surface meaning, or the depiction of the sheer ‘meaninglessness’ of random events and fractured
‘narration’ (Best and Kellner 1997, p 131). Similarly Fokkema and Bertens say that in
postmodern fiction “character, like external reality, is something ‘about which nothing is known’ lacking in plausible motive or discoverable depth” (1984, p 37).
Another version of the externally created subject comes from Julia Kristeva’s theory of abject selfhood, which provides a view of the subject that is composed in such a way that its interior offers a complete replica of the external values and attributes of the broader society and culture in which it is located:
If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, is none other than abject
…. (Kristeva, 1982, p 5).
This pulverization of the subject is another way of describing the (modernist) subject’s demise in the light of the postmodern challenge, whereby the human attempts to look within itself. There is nothing separate from the external world to identify it as separate in any way. The subject is thus a construct, and its entry into the abject state is a consequence of the fact that meaning collapses at the site of the subjectivity.
The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is racially excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses (Kristeva, 1982, pp 1-2).
Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, Kristeva talks of the individual self in a state of abjection, the result of a subject being drawn towards the place where meaning collapses. Meaning has collapsed in a context where God is not merely dead but has left a vacuum of meaning.
Ways in which the postmodern novel addresses this idea of the subject as construct are addressed by McHale, who identifies for instance, the postmodern tendency to align characters side by side with depictions of their authors as historical figures (1992, p 17). In Steve Katz’s The Exaggerations of Peter Prince, the narrator says that his character “knew he was going to die, no doubt about it, and he tossed me such an immense glare of hate that I wasn’t sure what was happening …” (Katz, 1968, p 257). The narrative might situate the characters as types from a particular historical period, as does Richard Moody in Ice Storm (1994). Characters may seem ‘depthless’
as Alain Robbet-Grillet and George Perec’s works highlight. Complex external framing strategies that situate the character as externally created can be seen in Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2006)9, in which the central character and his clone appear in the parallel narratives that comprise the novel’s structure.
2. The modernist authentic subject challenged by postmodernism’s media-generated copy
M 2. The modernist subject as authentic
The subject in modernism is associated with ideas of ‘authenticity’. The term authentic originates from the Greek authentikos 'principal, genuine’ and according to the OED, means “of undisputed origin and not a copy; genuine”. A key term in the existential literary movement, in this context it relates to an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life. Walter Benjamin’s influential essay
“Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, (1936), prioritised the term authenticity and proposed that the original artwork has an aura, which ‘withers’, or is degraded in being reproduced. He says:
The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical—reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction (1936).10
In canonical modernism the focus is not on the work of Art alone as authentic, but also rests on the status of the artist, who is responsible for the artwork’s authentic creation, and is also therefore implicated in these notions of authenticity. By inference, this figure, as well as the artistic product, becomes imbued with notions of the authentic, as opposed to the copy.
Clement Greenberg (1960), writing on modernist painting, uses the term authentic as one of the standards that it is possible to achieve through formal means (1960). For Greenberg, the idea of kitsch, which he poses as contrasting with
9 Due to the date of its publication some may argue this is a work of post-postmodernism, operates, as a neo-humanist work that challenges modernist ideas of the representation of the subject.
10 Online: accessed 09/2012:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
garde Art, offers vicarious experience and faked sensations, which “now and then … produces something that has an authentic folk flavour” (1939). Greenberg then is one of the critics who brings to the fore the term authentic as an important value in discussions of artistic modernism.
Writing on literary criticism, Trilling draws on the terms sincerity and
‘authenticity’ in his analysis of a range of literary texts throughout history (1972). Not only does he use the terms to ascertain the value of texts as a whole, but he also applies them to characters. He asks for instance whether Emma Bovary is authentic, despite her heavy influence from B-grade literature, and answers this question through a range of definitions of what constitutes authenticity. For example, a character is deemed authentic if he/she is portrayed with a constancy of passion or interest.
Similarly to Benjamin, but in application to the literature, he proposes that the dichotomy of the original and the copy is central to the reading of literature (p 95), discussing this in relation to modernist texts including Portrait. In Portrait Dedalus is portrayed as the original artist-hero, who operates in isolation from his peers and defies the strictures of the broader culture. Furthermore, Trilling’s argument associates authenticity with the elevation of the hero (1972, p 87). This theme is enlarged on in M 4 below.