"I'm SO over postmodernism"

Some people think postmodernism is a load of rubbish. Why is this?

Do some internet research into some of the arguments against postmodernism and post a personal response to this idea as a comment to this blog post BY THE END OF THE LESSON (not shouting, really.)

READ THIS ARTICLE BEFORE YOU START - what do you think the author is saying about postmodernism and why?

Snorting Barley – postmodernism, Charlie Brooker and Nathan Barley 

Mark Ramey introduces the cult satire that takes the P out of Post-modernism

Unless you’ve been walking around with your eyes nailed to your eyelids, and your head encased in a slab of tarmac you can’t but have noticed Charlie Brooker waging righteous war on our idiotic postmodern culture. Brooker’s weapon of choice is savage satire unleashed on the media using a full armoury of print, TV and web-based content. Along with occasional colleagues and kindred spirits like Chris Morris (The Day Today; Brass Eye; Four Lions) and Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It; In The Loop), Brooker is fighting against facile postmodern surfaces and dumbed-down media practices. It is a war against an enemy secure in its profound, self-satisfied emptiness – a war against ‘the idiots’.

Perhaps inevitably, he is losing. As Brooker himself notes: ‘Man the life boats. The idiots are winning’ (The Guardian, 7.4.2008). The fight he is staging is, nevertheless, a magnificently futile gesture: a Mac-hating, sofa-bound David versus a Goliath armed with a satellite dish and iPad. However, unlike Mike Tyson’s flabby, pathetic cameo in Hollywood’s 2009 idiot-triumph The Hangover, Brooker can still deliver a punch and a line: a lethal combo that can cripple pretension and deflate egos. And 2005’s Nathan Barley, a six-episode C4 sitcom written by Brooker and Chris Morris (who also directed it), remains the moment war against the enemy was formally declared. Fans of Brooker’s earlier online work and journalism may disagree; but then anything as mainstream as a ‘toned-down’ sitcom would always distance hardcore fans and so it proved: Barley is a cult.

As is usual with anything touched by the hand of Brooker and Morris the satire is so sharp its victims often fail to notice the cuts until too late. Brass Eye (C4, 1997) provoked an outcry at its infamous 2001 spoof on the media-amplified moral panic surrounding paedophilia. Brooker was one of the writers of the show, which was clearly ahead of its time, as indeed was Morris’s 1994 news spoof, The Day Today (BBC2). Nathan Barley was a glorious failure because it too was ahead of the zeitgeist. The insular London-centred media world it satirised has now become our world. The ‘rise of the Idiots’ that Brooker warned us about in the show’s first episode has now spread beyond the radical-chic of the London-based media hubs. The idiots are everywhere.

The rise and rise of Charlie Brooker

Nathan Barley, the eponymous poisonous heart at the show’s centre, describes himself in hyperbolic terms as a ‘self-facilitating media node’. Brooker isn’t a media node but he isn’t far off it. After taking a Media degree he got a writing job on PC Zone magazine in the early 90s and in a recent interview for an online video-games trade magazine, MCV, he agrees that he was the lucky one who escaped the ghetto that was gaming journalism:

I think it’s like a nerdy stink of shame that hangs around me … the TV critic that plays games. (Oct 2009)

His passion for the New Media led him to develop an online parody of the staid TV listings magazine Radio Times. Calling his guide, TVGoHome (1999 -2003) he continued in the biting satirical tradition of Chris Morris to produce listings for fake shows that were surreal, pretentious, sexually explicit, vulgar, banal and, here’s the point, all quite recognisable. For example there was Daily Mail Island – a reality TV show where ‘normal’ people are marooned on an island and only given access to one media source, the hysteria-mongering rag, The Daily Mail. Needless to say their right-wing tendencies are inflamed as the series progresses until at one point a teenager caught masturbating is sealed into a coffin filled with broken glass and dog shit, and thrown over a cliff. Brooker’s satire is never subtle.
It is in the online archives of TVGoHome that we can still find Nathan Barley’s first appearance, in a new fly-on-the-wall documentary series, bewitchingly titled, C*nt. The show is described as:
…following the daily life of Nathan Barley, a twenty something wannabe director living in Westbourne Grove. This week: Nathan meets Jemma for lunch at the Prince Bonaparte and receives another cheque from his parents. (14.05.99)

Later episodes detail the Barley we will come to hate:

an odious twenty-something toff and media wannabe (11.6.99)

…who finds himself writing a barely literate monthly column reviewing leftfield websites and genuinely starts to believe his endeavour makes him a worthwhile human being rather than a meaningless strutting cadaver… (25.6.99)

In another episode we meet Nathan’s peers after he lands a regular DJ spot in a venue in which loud-mouthed members of London’s self-appointed young media elite strut about like a pack of trainer-obsessed peacocks, ordering expensive beers and braying insincere, ignorant horseshit at one another over the sound of Nathan’s utterly pedestrian mixing.

And finally in the edition of 12.11.99, ‘the Idiots’ are born:

While visiting the office of a new media design agency run by a school friend, Nathan Barley joins a small group of upper-middle class twenty-somethings as they gather round a monitor to snigger and point at a web site displaying photographs of wolves fucking the bodies of mutilated prostitutes.

Brooker on screen and page

In 2000 Brooker co-founded a TV and online production company, Zeppotron, which is now part of the mighty Endemol empire. Zeppotron produces most of Brooker’s TV work plus the quiz shows 8 Out of 10 Cats; You Have Been Watching (Brooker-hosted) and the Brooker-scripted, BAFTA-nominated, Big Brother horror satire, Dead Set (E4, 2008). Brooker also began writing a TV column for the Guardian in 2000, ‘Screenburn’, which has led over the years to a number of book-length collections such as Dawn of the Dumb: Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline (2007). Brooker’s topical insights and witty cultural commentary plus a flair for presenting naturally led to TV work. Media-savvy shows like Screenwipe, Newswipe and Gameswipe are anchored by his pervert-next-door, guerrilla-style delivery plus a deadpan deconstruction of the media’s worst excesses. And just when you thought his head couldn’t get any bigger, in 2009 Brooker won the British Press Awards for Columnist of the Year and The Best Newcomer at the British Comedy Awards. Arse.

The life and work of Nathan Barley

As we have seen, Nathan Barley (Nicholas Burns) is a wealthy idiot who has found like-minded idiots to interface with in the media playpens of trendy East London. He is a

webmaster, guerrilla filmmaker, screenwriter, DJ and so convinced that he is the epitome of urban cool that he is secretly terrified he might not be, which is why he reads the magazine style bible Sugar Ape. (Zeppotron biog)

Sugar Ape’s reluctant star columnist, Dan Ashcroft (Julian Barratt of The Mighty Boosh), is one of Nathan’s idols but Dan despises Nathan and all of his feeble-witted kind … the idiots. Episode 1 swiftly sets up the conceit that Ashcroft has penned his greatest article to date, ‘The Rise of The Idiots’: unfortunately for him the very people it aims to pillory think the article is cool. Here’s Ashcroft in his own words:

Once the idiots were just the fools gawping in through the windows. Now they’ve entered the building. You can hear them everywhere. They use the word ‘cool’. It is their favourite word. The idiot does not think about what it is saying. Thinking is rubbish. And rubbish isn’t cool. Stuff n’shit is cool. The idiots are self-regarding consumer slaves, oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality. They sculpt their hair to casual perfection, they wear their waistbands below their balls, they babble into hand-held twit machines about the cool email of the woman being bummed by a wolf. Their cool friend made it. He’s an idiot too. Welcome to the age of stupidity. Hail to the rise of the idiots.

Now for the fun stuff! Postmodernity is said to characterise our age and if you are a student of Media Studies then you have probably hit your head against the term with such ferocity that an intellectual coma has swiftly followed. Ouch!

Nathan Barley and postmodernism

For brevity’s sake and without collapsing into the impenetrable mire of such theorists as Lyotard and Baudrillard, I understand postmodernism to describe an intellectual position typical of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The postmodern world of this period is one in which the ‘grand narratives’ of Marx, Freud, organised religion and the modernist impulse of scientific discovery have all run out of epistemological steam: we have stopped believing in their deep and epic truths. One effect of this in terms of cultural products like film and TV is a heavily ironic and detached sense of engagement with the work or text: ‘creatives’ no longer see themselves as tortured souls wrestling truth from their medium; now they are ‘facilitators, installation artists, entertainers or ironists’. Their purpose now is to play with truths, to break down the barriers between the text and the reader, the TV show and viewer. New buzzwords like ‘interactive, self-referential, inter-textual and hybrid’ reflect this distrust of rational statement in favour of a playful delight in surface meanings. How natural then that gossip magazines, reality TV shows, celebrity culture, prankster TV, unreconstructed sexism, reflexive genre homage and infotainment (to name but a few postmodern manifestations) should now dominate our cultural lives as they did five years ago, the prescient life of Nathan Barley.

Add to this postmodern brew the digital revolution, increasing globalisation and the triumph of consumerism (despite the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s) and we have the possibility of mass-producing ‘the idiot’. But maybe now Dan Ashcroft and his nemesis Nathan Barley can help us.

Nathan is ‘a self-regarding consumer slave’. In other words he enjoys his own image; he is a narcissist – and there’s plenty of them on YouTube and Facebook. Nathan is also a punter who thinks he is free to buy, but is actually conditioned to consume. As Brooker later comments in his infamous ‘I hate Macs’ article (Guardian 5.2.2007):

If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that ‘says something’ about your personality, don’t bother. You don’t have a personality. A mental illness, maybe – but not a personality.

Consumption as lifestyle choice is literally and metaphorically a manufactured lie and the idea that we can ironically consume is a fantasy – wages and debt and waste are not ironic, they are real. The only irony in consumerist values is the tragedy that consumption never satisfies: fast food, fast TV, fast news, fast facts. Fast is the new black … on crack!

Ashcroft (Brooker’s alter ego) also reminds us that idiots are blind to their ‘uniform individuality’. Apple put the ‘i’ into pods, pads and phones and ‘we’ all bought into it. A postmodern world is meant to blur boundaries, emphasise difference, explore hybridity and the margins; but in fact we merely walk around in a circle and end up staring up our own sphincters or into the face of a Z-list celebrity.

In my view, modernism’s utopian quest, ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before,’ may be flawed but it certainly isn’t over. If it was, Brooker’s satires wouldn’t work – and they do. We recognise the banality of so much of postmodern surface culture – all sheen and self-confident noise but something which, like a Happy Meal, ultimately lacks substance. It is like one of the idiots in Nathan Barley who uses the valediction, ‘Keep it foolish’. This throwaway line reveals a depthless problem with postmodernity: it is so afraid to say anything (uncool) that it says nothing (cool) and so plays into the hands of the vacuous idiocracy.

So next time you look into a self-proclaimed, postmodernist’s ironically twinkling eyes, ask yourself this question: is he or she an idiot? In a world without rules, there is only nonsense and then only the idiots make sense. Only an unfashionable critique of postmodernism’s negative impact will start to arrest its influence. Fight the fight people. Brooker needs our help.

Mark Ramey teaches Media Studies at Collyers College, West Sussex.

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 32, April 2010.