"The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself...that which serves for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable."

As a result, the middle ground of the eternally dialectical is in fact itself made up of a series of radically multiplying subjectivities rather than a single, unifying objectivity. Within this diverse space we seek meaning in the recognition of constituents, of parts, of numerous discourses and, as always, strive to reveal and enforce a single image or key by which the postmodern Pandora's box may once again be locked.

In his introduction to Postmodernism: A Reader, Thomas Docherty identifies three main topics for a breakdown of what constitutes the postmodern. This essay will focus on the implications of hyperreality (typified in Don DeLillo's White Noise) and contemporary film within the context of the first of these three headings - the Enlightenment and it's legacy. Jean Baudrillard's discussion of the simulacra will serve as the particular focus in identifying the postmodern as the best example of the dialectical process, unifying contradictory arguments in the 'logical' (excuse my rationalism) search for a central theory of knowledge. The symbolic image and its reproduction constitute the reality of the postmodern, whose ideal is to view reality from a unique angle and thereby create a new perspective within the hitherto blinkered and singular viewpoint of the modern.

Modernism and the Enlightenment.

Modernism was itself a relic of the Enlightenment in that it's cause was the establishment of realism - of a positivist in a world that, eventually, could be demystified and controlled. In order to achieve such an end, both Modernism and the Enlightenment, to differing degrees, sought to reduce everything to a base materialism, the Enlightenment particularly:

"The Enlightenment aimed at human emancipation from myth, superstition and enthralled enchantment to mysterious powers and forces of nature through the progressive operations of a critical reason."

In the wake of thinkers such as Kant and Descartes, the modern world sought to depict the rational as the only lense through which the world could be viewed and simultaneously reflected. Thought, and critical examination of the material nature of the world in which we, as organisms on the third planet from the sun, subordinate to particular laws, themselves socio-political, cultural and physical, were subject. It became a matter of divide and conquer. The world consisted of parts, components which could be manipulated, counted, multiplied. Docherty quotes Adorno and Horkheimer, who said:

"From now on, matter would at last be mastered without any illusion of ruling or inherent powers, of hidden qualities. For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect."

Rationality, however, is in itself a particular discourse that seeks to replace the 'illusion' of the transcendent with the created power of the applied human mind, which itself is perceived as inherent within the self. Effectively, the ideals to which modern, enlightened reason subscribed were just substituted in place of the previous beliefs that they had deemed obsolete, outdated and irrelevant. Just because the power is now 'material' in that it it's based internally and is under human control rather than externally in the 'hands of the gods' doesn't mean much in that there is still no alternative language by which such a claim can be tested besides that of the rational itself - which will no doubt substantiate and perpetuate itself.

"Knowledge, conceived as abstract and utilitarian, as a mastery over recalcitrant nature, becomes characterized by power..."

Power is achieved by the possession of knowledge, but in respect to the rupture presented by Saussure's proposed linguistic signifier and conceptual signified. How does a rational modernity, while existing as a linguistic power, assert control over the 'real' when it neglects to acknowledge the conceptual signified unless it exists as a material physicality? For example, Baudrillard points out that while reality (as the realm of Being) does not require legitimization in that we can touch, taste, see, hear and smell it, the very principle of reality is harder to demonstrate. Narrative is the means by which some measure of regimented articulation may be applied to formalize and express the reality principle - but this is in itself a discourse, and therefore a reflection of the real, not the real itself. The fact is that no objective reality exists, and we must instead impose one:

"There it is: faced with a delirious world, only the ultimatum of realism will do."

Legitimizing not only knowledge itself but its form and content has become the legacy of postmodernism in that while it is recognized that "no single satisfactory mode of epistemological legitimation is available", there still needs to be a particular subjectivity that constitutes the Self in a realm of diversity. While reality in modernity was conceived of as being an 'objective' truth - a world of measures and material components that did not vary unless worked upon in order to achieve such an end - postmodernism advocates a multiplicity in which humans as individual subjectivities constitute meaning. In an attempt to maintain the existing material world, however, lest it all fall apart, there now exists a mad scramble for the legitimization of the real. Even the extreme circumstances which purvey and distort existing reality must be construed as part of the modern 'normativity'. However, within this attempt to legitimate the material, rational perspective is the simultaneous operation of the postmodern performing the opposite function in attempting to also present the unpresentable.

It is this simultaneous search for the presentation of the unpresentable and the identification of modes by which the reality principle may be reconstrued within the gradual fall of rational modernity which constitutes the paradoxical nature of the postmodern. Or, rather, the postmodern serves as the middle ground of the eternal dialectic that in part, especially now, is seen in the opposition of modernity and the conceptual 'unpresentable'. The paradox is that in presenting the world, we serve modernity by reconstituting the reality principle:

"The modern is not so much avoided as reconsidered, reconstellated."

This reconstitution is executed primarily through the creation of images of the world for mass production and dissemination within popular culture. Not in order to demonstrate the world directly, but provide the "other of the real - fantasy - to legitimize the normativity of its own practices."

Baudrillard and Postmodern Cinema Icons.

As an example of the production of images within popular culture, there is no better place to turn than contemporary film. Film has surpassed its lesser relative - television - and literature in becoming the medium by which today's society is reflected 'realistically'.

"Simultaneous with this attempt at absolute coincidence with the real, cinema also approaches an absolute coincidence with itself."

Movies today are fascinated with the representation of reality and the proliferation of particular 'icons' in which a measure of value as reflections or parodies of existing reality is invested. These images soon adhere to the progression of the image as stipulated by Jean Baudrillard:

"This would be the successive phases of the image:
* it is the reflection of a basic reality
* it masks and perverts a basic reality
* it masks the absence of a basic reality
* it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum."

An example that illustrates the creation of the simulacrum is the Alien (1979) movie series. More than the storyline of the movies themselves, which serve as the focus in analyses published in Annette Kuhn's Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, the process by which these movies - and the reptilian monsters which constitute the simulacrum in question - were created is, in my opinion, the most interesting example of the postmodern replication of images.

Ridley Scott, wanting to create a truly terrifying alien creature, sought to depict something so darkly foreign, so alien, that it had no recognizable place in the familiar world. He went to the dark genius of H. R. Giger and asked for sketches to be made up of something that would serve as his alien terror. In attempting to create the unbelievable, the truly terrifying aspect of the Other, these two men wanted to pose a reflection of the basic reality by depicting something which had no place within it - which was of the alien space. Giger proceeded to create a creature that perverted a basic reality in the respect that the model he made from his own sketches was constructed from industrial parts - from pipes, rubber, tubing, cylinders, etc. The true mask being the fact that the Alien's face was constructed upon the base of a human skull, set within this cacophony of industrial parts. The final film saw the introduction of the Alien created - the imaginary horror - into the realm of the human real. It was such a success that it required the establishment of avenues for counseling for those suffering 'Alien-shock' after their confrontation with the horror. This move in itself seems postmodern in that it almost seems an absurd and cynical commentary of the human condition. Rather than the horrors of the miserable human future which permeates the film series, audiences were most confronted by the appearance of this inexplicable creature.

Baudrillard, in both Toward a Principle of Evil and The Evil Demon of Images, talks of the creation of images as no longer possessing a fundamental morality. The postmodern carries the legacy of the rationalist, modern negation of the spiritual or transcendental in that it (albeit, paradoxically) seeks truth rather than strict adherence to a specific moral code of conduct. That won't stop the pursuit of 'knowledge'. In respect to the Alien film legacy, what was originally to be a creature functioning outside morality which exploded the convention and exposed the terror of what then could only be the unreal - the unconventional - in reality becomes an immoral image in that it is continually replicated as a vehicle for a consumer-driven capitalist reality striving to maintain itself in continuously recreating the unreal. The Alien is now a Frankenstein in that it has torn free of its master and its origins to pursue an independent life of its own. It is no longer constrained behind the ribs of the aesthetic body in which it was originally gestated. It has exploded forth and repeated itself - it has become simulacrum.

The first indication of the Alien's value as a profitably replicated image for modern reality was apparent in the sequel Aliens (1986). When director James Cameron (one of the most titanic 'bitches' of the Hollywood market) took what was originally a singularly horrific image and mass-produced it. It now swarmed over floors, along corridors, within walls and over ceilings. It had become an image which now appeared in the hundreds of thousands. The Alien was no longer the original image which had reflected, then masked and then exposed the absence of a single reality - it was now a part of a multitude of visual simulacra. The violent, inhuman and deadly aspect of that senseless violence which permeates the cinematic medium, due to be used in three sequels since the first movie, the most recent installments being Alien3 (1992) and Alien Resurrection (1997). These latter two films involved Giger fighting a legal battle for the right to be mentioned within these movies' credits as the designer of the original Alien - which was now a creature of the simulacrum. Even now Giger is credited with only the 'original' Alien design, creative license having perverted the original template he provided in respect to insignificant details, yet apparently changing the image so that it was no longer Giger's 'intellectual property'. But it is still essentially the same beast, just a little more inhuman. The latest incarnations are generated by computers for most appearances, dislocating the human in respect to the hands-on construction of the original. The puppet version for those scenes requiring the monsters physical presence were still images of that original elongated human skull meshed with rubber and industrial parts that Giger first laid eyes upon. What had changed? Now it was a creature of the mass produced cinematic imagery. It drools KY jelly from a mass of shredded condoms hanging from its jaws of PVC plastic and rubber. The image has been disseminated and is now independent of its creator and original incarnation.

But it is not only the Alien which promotes this spectacle of almost demonic bloodlust but can also be something regretfully altogether human - the serial killer. Psychopaths, such as the chilling Hannibal 'The Cannibal' Lecter in the film The Silence of the Lambs (1992), have achieved the status of gods in the postmodern imagination. Serial killers have always existed but it is only now that they captivate the populace's attention so intensely. It is through such monsters that perversion, mutilation and all manner of blood and gore have achieved a detached status as items and events which can be, and are, perceived yet never experienced. They constitute the Other world, not this one. At least, that's what the environment of the hyperreal would have us believe. If it's so much a part of a fictional world, surely it couldn't be real?

Not only inhuman monsters epitomize the postmodern condition in popular film, even humans can become living icons - images produced continuously for consumption by the masses. Part of a fantasy that in the true fashion of the dialectical maintains a sense of a singular reality by providing 'obvious' examples of the fantastic. Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garrett, authors of the Introducing Postmodernism installment of the popular series of guides, make reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger as an "icon of postmodern cinema":

"His muscle-bound physique, lack of emotion, total absence of sweat and inability to act serve as an ideal blank on which to over-write coded messages of considerable postmodern sophistication."

The simulacrum is the tool by which the hyperreal is maintained. The evil of the image is that it maintains our perception of the real - that capitalist, industrialized, self-sustaining and self-propagating society that Karl Marx sought to expose as fraudulently exploitative of the common worker in making a comparison with socialism and the earlier feudal society. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a man as well as an icon/image. The best example of this being the film The Last Action Hero (1993), in which we see three Schwarzeneggers: the actor in the film we are watching, his character in the film, and the Arnold Schwarzenegger as actor attending the premiere of one of his movies with his wife within the movie itself.

Postmodernism is the recognition that the 'reality principle' no longer holds. Modernity's goal of achieving a completely objective reality which would dominate the Western mindset has achieved little in its time but a strict positivist regime in the field of science. We have moved to the 'post-' in which subjectivity assumes the role of reality - everybody's one private one. Even more complex, as we find above with Schwarzenegger, even that one self may be represented as a multiplicity. The self is no longer a contained identity but itself a composite of several different discourses. Just as there are three Arnold Schwarzeneggers in Last Action Hero (1993), we ourselves have different identities for particular settings and contexts. Who am I at work but someone answering phones? Who am I talking to my friend over the phone at home but a disembodied voice? Who am I at university but a fellow student with his own particular story? What is my name with my friends? Is that the same name I enter into a Centrelink form in order to apply for Youth Allowance? And what does that matter to the number-cruncher processing form 4, 526 for that week before he gets to go home? Our conception of self is in itself an image, being a reflection of the means by which we construct 'self' in a capitalist, postmodern society.

"...images ultimately have no finality and proceed by total contiguity, infinitely multiplying themselves according to an irresistible epidemic process which no one today can control, our world has become truly infinite, or rather exponential by means of images...We have thus come to the paradox that these images describe the equal impossibility of the real and the imaginary."

The only way to constitute ourselves in this diversity is to appeal to the very "contagious hyperreality" which surrounds us as a result of the mad panic to maintain the reality principle when faced with the multiplication of the very subjectivity which constitutes the perceived 'whole' of our society.

The Spectacle.

Don DeLillo's White Noise places its central character, Jack Gladney, in a world which is in itself a deliberate hyperreality - that is, DeLillo has quite skillfully distilled the very essence of the hyperreal which permeates our lives and created a world in which it is in fact the dominant reality. This would be the world today if the hyperreality purveyed in mass media were in fact commonplace. Pills that can ward off a person's fear of their own mortality, bizarre extramarital affairs, shootings, huge toxic airborne events, death, disaster, mayhem, chaos and poisonous snakes. It sounds almost comical but one gets caught up in DeLillo's execution of the hyperreal. Why? Because we are used to it. Fascinated by it. Reading the newspaper, watching the news, listening to the radio, watching films - it all feeds into the fabrication of a singular modernist rationality that is in fact an example of nothing more than our desire to control the world around us.

Part of this expression for control is our desire to control those very elements of nature which threaten to destroy us. Just as the serial killer becomes trivialized as an image within postmodern film, as does the natural disaster in the popular media. In White Noise this force of nature is even more of an ironic spectacle as it is man-made. A disaster that we ourselves created that could ultimately be our undoing. The tongue-in-cheek delivery with which the actions of Jack Gladney are presented in response to the 'airborne toxic event' are classic. For example, when the cloud is first detected and speculation is rife on the radio as to exactly what it is and what should be done about it, Gladney and his son watch the specter of death through binoculars from their home, Jack describing the catastrophic event as almost a sort of delicious, fearsome spectacle of death that he has been privileged to witness:

"I put the glasses to my face and peered through the gathering dark. Beneath the cloud of vaporized chemicals, the scene was one of urgency and operatic chaos... Fire engines were deployed at a distance, ambulance and police vans at a greater distance. I could hear sirens, voices calling through bullhorns, a layer of radio static causing small warps in the frosty air...men in bright yellow Mylex suits and respirator masks moved slowly through the luminous haze, carrying death-measuring instruments... Fire and explosion were not the inherent dangers here. This death would penetrate, seep into the genes, show itself in bodies not yet born..."

Jack witnesses this horror and then hands the binoculars back to his curious son, telling him one last time to come inside for dinner. This is one example of an almost lethargic detachment from the world thanks to the infestation of the senses by a hyperreality of the mass media which has already dulled them. We are apathetic because we've seen it all before, in glorious full color and digital sound.

"The drive to spectacle is more powerful than the instinct of preservation, and it is on the former that we must rely."

To be truly amazing to us now it needs to slap us in the face. Kill one of our own. The ridiculous barrage of information which Gladney is subject to, however, is not only a part of the media which surrounds him, but his own family, talking as they do in a continuous stream of inane chatter containing an indiscernible mixture of fact and hearsay. Upon gathering at the shelter which has been set up to protect a fleeing population from the huge, airborne news-event outside, the people swap stories on what they've heard it consists of, where it's going, what measures are being taken. But nobody really knows. This isn't knowledge as modernism would have it. It's not the scientific observations and rigid measurement of a 'real' event but a fabrication that has been created from a collection of shared subjective experiences of the event in question, combined with disseminated explanations of its cause and nature.

Gladney's wife, Babette, reads various tabloids and magazines such as Ufology Today to a collection of blind or sighted elderly people, providing the most poignant example from the many forms of media detailed throughout the book of just how ridiculous the information being presented has become:

"She picked up another tabloid. The cover story concerned the country's leading psychics and their predictions for the coming year. She read the items slowly.BR> 'Squadrons of UFOs will invade Disney World and Cape Canaveral. In a startling twist, the attack will be revealed as a demonstration of the folly of war, leading to a nuclear test-ban treaty between the U.S. and Russia.
'The ghost of Elvis Presley will be seen taking lonely walks at dawn around Graceland, his musical mansion.
'A Japanese consortium will buy Air Force One and turn it into a luxury flying condominium with midair refueling privileges and air-to-surface missile capability..."

It is this comical barrage of useless, fabricated imagery that serves to provide the best example of what modern society has become - entertaining. Just as the Enlightenment sought to free humanity from the shackles of superstition, so do we now return to it in a last ditch effort to plunder its resources for new perspectives. Postmodernism is attempting to revitalize our desire for life in a world that has erected a singular self-sustaining reality that is fast losing not only speed but novelty. We're all bored as hell, and postmodernism recognizes that it is not our fault but the world in which we live in. That created (and almost fascist)and unquestionable production without end which is the process of legitimizing the real:

"Whence the characteristic hysteria of our time: the hysteria of production and reproduction of the real...What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it."

Postmodernism is the realization in the wake of modernity that it is not reality that is in question but the means by which we rationalize that world. Born from the belief that society is involved in a continuous and ultimately good progression towards a final end - history - the modern has been stripped of the very morality which presupposed such an idea. We've lost sight of a goal and now merely maintain society out of a need for security and survival in a reality which no longer serves to effectively translate the world of Being. The real is as much a creation as its fundamental opposition - fantasy. The danger is that postmodernism, in striving to "wage war on totality", is in fact maintaining modernism in the creation of images which constitute the fantastic hyperreality which serves to legitimize the enlightened rationality. In infantilising and trivialising those aspects of life which make up the unexplainable, irrational, unpresentable and uncontrollable, the existing reality seeks to sustain its own totalitarian eminence as the singular discourse within which the world as we know it is understood.

Bibliography.

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Baudrillard, Jean, "The ecstasy of communication", in Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic, pp. 126-134.
Baudrillard, Jean, "Toward a Principle of Evil", in Docherty, Postmodernism: A Reader, pp. 355-361.
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