Post-Postmodernism in the 21st Century: Platonic Mechanics

A certain amount of life is based on faith. This faith can be in relation to God, truth, to oneself, or a combination of the three. Such faith is a desired part of life for atheists, religious zealots, and everyone in between; despite its range and subjectivity, faith is a fundamental part of the human condition. One might question his faith in the reality of his waking life and the surrealism of his dream state, and become schizophrenic in the process. Once schizophrenic, this same individual might question sanity, then knowledge, and ultimately himself. Such an ontological dilemma is what has helped create and define postmodernism. Postmodernists embody a certain schizophrenia and an ambivalence toward ontology and other soft sciences. As a result of this endless questioning, they seem to deny faith and any ultimate truth. While there is still a current of postmodernism running through philosophy, sociology and literature today, there is also a marked difference from postmodern works that followed WWII and helped to define the movement. In the post-Vietnam, post-Cold War, Information Age, a new movement is underway. Through popular works such as Fight Club and Waking Life, one sees a philosophical shift back to modernism while still engaging stylistic components of postmodernism, such as fragmentation and pastiche. This philosophical movement marks a return to meta-narratives, metaphysical truth, and human faith.

Fight Club is based on a best-selling novel by Chuck Palahniuk, and since its release in 1999, has given a voice to disenchanted youth in the postmodern era. Stylistically, Fight Club can safely be categorized as postmodern. For example, it makes use of such devices as fragmentation of time and space, pastiche, paradox, dark humor, and irony. At the same time, however, the conglomeration of meta-narratives that infuse Fight Club causes the viewer to reevaluate his postmodern lens and perhaps engage a more modernist perspective. “The film works within a complex universe ruled by relativist values, whereas most melodramatic films exist within a Judeo-Christian or Existentialist moral universe. Fight Club throws down the gauntlet for a critical theory re-write” (Burns disinformation.com). By infusing Freudian and Marxist meta-narratives, Fight Club combines stylistic content that is postmodern with thematic truths that are closer to modernism. The same is true in Waking Life.

In the postmodern tradition, Fight Club makes good use of the fragmentation of time and space. Whereas works of modernism follow a linear and organized path with regard to plot structure, character development, and theme, postmodern works do not. Derrida was influential in this regard, through his concept of differance, “… by which he meant a simultaneous process of deferment in time and difference in space. One present moment assumes past present moments as well as future present moments” (Rivkin 258). Such deferment is modeled from the very beginning of Fight Club. In its opening scene, the film travels into the mind of the narrator, cuts immediately to another location (space) during narration, and then engages flashback (time) to establish exposition. In addition, this scene doubles as the last scene in the film. In this sense, the entire film is a prolonged “present moment” that recalls details in an anachronistic manner. Another example of this is made explicit during the travels of the main character, Jack, played by Edward Norton: “The plane touches down; the cabin bumps. Jack’s eyes open. ‘Pacific, Mountain, Central. Lose and hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. If you wake up at a different time and in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?’” (Fincher Fight Club). This search for identity is couched somewhere in the midst of an unpredictable time-space continuum. While the sense that no true identities or truths exist is a reoccurring theme of postmodernism, through Marxist and Freudian principles, Fight Club offers its viewer something that is more tangible.

The theme behind Fight Club can largely be interpreted through its anti-capitalistic rhetoric. Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, is Jack’s other half of a split personality, and is the primary device for delivering this poignant rhetoric throughout the film. For example, Jack states:
Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas, working tables, the slaves of the white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We are the children of history, man, no purpose and place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Out great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off. (Fincher Fight Club)
From a Marxist perspective, Tyler can be seen as a leader of the proletariat who is rallying the masses against the bourgeoisie. Through the acts of fighting and rebellion, Tyler seeks to awaken his followers from a false consciousness that Louis Althusser describes as being rooted in ideology. Such ideology is “a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Rivkin 693). Engaging in physical combat awakens these individuals to the truth of their existence. Later, completing acts of destruction shows their desire to overthrow the systems of capitalistic power that enslave the working masses. The crescendo of this movement lies in the final act of destruction, which involves the demolition of several banks. The idea behind this plot twist is that erasing debt will ensure social and economic equality. Such a powerful message clearly deviates from the traditional postmodern concept of subjective meaninglessness without the possibility for progress. In addition, this harkening back to the meta-narrative is seen when Tyler and his “army” confront the police chief, a primary member of the bourgeoisie in this film. Tyler demands that the chief call off an investigation, and says, “The people you're after are everyone you depend on. We do your laundry, cook your food and serve you dinner. We guard you while you sleep. We drive your ambulances. Do not fuck with us” (Fincher Fight Club). Through this quote, Tyler dismantles the bourgeoisie ideology, and reminds the police chief that labor power, a valuable commodity, is ultimately under the control of the laborer himself. In this scene, interpolation is dismantled; the “subjectee” effectively denounces his condition and refuses to submit to the elitist “subjector.” As a summation of the Marxist meta-narrative, Tyler asserts that, “the things you own, they end up owning you” (Fincher Fight Club).

At the same time, Fight Club engages its audience in other meta-narratives that, taken together, could be seen as the postmodern device of pastiche. Pastiche describes a "stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. The absence of a norm is what gives pastiche its particular flavor and flair. The demise of the modern world and the subsequent disappearance of the individual subject have provided fertile ground for the flourishing of such heterogeneity” (Boler EBSCO). In combining elements of Freud and Marx with popular culture, Fight Club provides both a stylistic and a thematic pastiche. Much of the frustration and repressed anger seen in the film can be ascribed to the characters’ coming of age in a postmodern society that is “devoid of any conviction that ‘normalcy’ exists beyond contradictory and random measures” (Boler EBSCO). The reason why Fight Club moves beyond the postmodern is that through Tyler’s rhetoric, the pastiche becomes a reintroduction of the meta-narrative. By embracing Tyler’s anti-capitalistic message as “true consciousness” and “normalcy,” the film succeeds in its “aim of finding an inner truth behind surface appearance” (Sarup). Having faith in such an inner-truth is definitive of the modernist movement, and thus Fight Club comes to embody both modernism and postmodernism. While “post-modernism is faulted for not taking a stand on issues of value” (Rivkin 355), it is clear that Fight Club does not fall into this thematic category, and thus moves beyond postmodernism. Perhaps the film serves as an example of what some call “remodernism… an attempt to introduce a period of new spirituality into art, culture and society to replace Postmodernism with the premise that the potential of the Modernist vision has not been fulfilled, and that the search for truth, knowledge and meaning should be redeveloped” (Childish stuckists.com).

Such an understanding harkens back to Plato, and his “‘metaphysical’ notion of an ideal realm of ideas that transcended or existed outside and apart from physical reality” (Rivkin 258). Contrasting with Derrida, the Platonic view on metaphysics contents that “the most fundamental or foundational components of knowledge and the criteria of truth were presence, substance, essence, and identity – not difference. True ideas were present to consciousness, and the essence of a thing consisted of its being fully present to itself” (Rivkin 258). This ideal realm of ideas is perhaps the driving force behind “remodernism,” and other cultural movements of the 21st Century.

Faith in the “metaphysical notion of an ideal realm of ideas” is shown through both Fight Club and Waking Life. In Waking Life, Richard Linklater takes his audience through a pastiche of philosophical scenes that covers philosophy, linguistics, and sociology, to name a few. Like Fight Club, Waking Life employs pastiche to reintroduce the meta-narrative. The primary meta-narrative in Linklater’s work is that of Sarte’s theories on existentialism. At the same time, however, the film engages Marxist and Freudian theory, in addition to several others. For example, an entire scene in the film consists of a seemingly random character who is not introduced or a part of the overlying plot structure, but nonetheless contributes his truth: “The quest is to be liberated from the negative, which is really our own will to nothingness. And once having said yes to the instant, the affirmation is contagious. It bursts into a chain of affirmations that knows no limit. To say yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence.” (Linklater Waking Life) The idea of “nothingness” reminds one of existentialism, while the affirmation of the present moment sounds more like Plato’s notion of the ideal realm of ideas that exist outside of physical realities.

Waking Life does employ an over-arching narrative structure that pieces together this pastiche, however. This narrative arc is grounded in Freud’s concepts of the unconscious mind, and the role that it plays in both our dreaming and waking realities. For example, while the main character, Wiley Wiggins is surfing through a pastiche of television commercials, he hears the following messages:
Shamans and other visionaries who have developed and perfected the art of dream travel, the so-called lucid dream state where by consciously controlling your dreams, you’re able to discover things beyond your capacity… series winning back-to-back… why don’t you tell us about what Felix is doing… a single ego is an absurdly narrow vantage from which to view this experience. And where most consider their individual relationship to the universe, I contemplate relationships of my various selves to one another. (Linklater Waking Life)
This is extended to the theme, style, and structure of the film; that of the dream within a dream within a dream. Such a notion is truly postmodern, but Waking Life does also emphasize certain fundamental truths. Largely, these fundamental truths can be traced back to Freud and Marx. As in Fight Club, the pastiche becomes a reintroduction of the meta-narrative. Rivkin sheds light on this connection through the following:
Freud found, express wishes or desires that cannot find expression in waking life precisely because they are at odds with the requirements of the ego, which itself merely registers the requirements of the larger society. Unconscious wishes can find expression in dreams because dreams distort the unconscious material and make it appear different from itself and more acceptable to consciousness. (Rivkin 390)
This psychological arc is carefully woven through the narrative of Waking Life, and brings the viewer back to a more modernist reflexiveness of absolute truth. A character reflects on the relationship between dreams and reality: “To the functional system of neural activity that creates our world, there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action, and actually the waking perception and action” (Linklater Waking Life). This re-emphasis on science is another example of the juxtaposition of modernism and postmodernism in the 21st Century.

Freudian meta-narrative also runs through Fight Club, primarily through Oedipal references with the possibility of latent homosexuality. This is evident during the bathtub scene in which Tyler imagines fighting his father. He explains that “we’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is the answer we really need” (Fincher Fight Club). All this from a naked and vulnerable split personality.
The fight clubs enact a simple and familiar substitution demanded by this logic and its clash with the opposing force of Hollywood’s usual prohibition against gay sexuality; for gay sexuality, framed as a form of intimacy, violence is substituted, with each fight cathected for its participants and concluding with an embrace. In a conventional Hollywood homophobic staging of homosocial and homoerotic desire, men can touch one another intimately only with their fists. (Cinema Journal JSTOR)
When paired with the image of Jack embracing a crying man with enormous breasts in order to achieve catharsis, one begins to see Freud’s metanarrative at work, if only reinterpreted and delivered through pastiche.

Ultimately, the question of faith arises when one considers the paradox that lies behind Derrida’s concept of differance, and the films Fight Club and Waking Life. Derrida builds upon Saussure’s concept of the dialectical nature of the linguistic sign. Rivkin explains, “there had to be a more primordial process of differentiation at work that affected everything having to do with language, thought, and reality” (Rivkin 258). In addition to the fragmentation of time and space through this notion, Derrida also contends that
The presence of an object of conscious perception or of a thought in the mind is shaped by its difference from other objects or thoughts… The same is true of ideas in the mind. When philosophers think of a concept like ‘nature’ that is distinct from ‘culture,’ they are in fact using concepts that could not exist as identities apart from their difference from one another. The difference between the two concepts must preexist the concepts. (Rivkin 258).
In a colloquial sense, it becomes a chicken versus the egg conundrum. Through his rhetoric, Derrida debunks universal truth, ontology, and knowledge itself. His argument is fundamentally flawed, however, in that it utilizes the very signs, signifiers, sciences, and logic that it seeks to negate. In this sense, Derrida’s work becomes valuable in a philosophical sense, but is not to be taken literally by one who has some amount of faith in God, himself, or universal truth. Fight Club and Waking Life offer similar paradoxical qualities when one juxtaposes their content and form. Contextually, both films offer critiques of the capitalistic system and its emphasis on commodity consumption. In Waking Life, an irate driver shouts through a loudspeaker:
And now in the 21st Century, it’s time to stand up and realize that we should not allow ourselves to be crammed into this rat maze. We should not submit to dehumanization… I’m concerned with the systems of control… It’s up to each and every one of us to turn loose and show them the central mode of control – make us feel pathetic, small so we’ll willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny. We have got to realize that we’re being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state! (Linklater Waking Life)
In combining this with the earlier quote of “the things you own end up owning you,” one can see a clear link to Marxism in both works. What is essential, however, is the realization that these films are ultimately critiquing that which they are themselves, commodities. Derrida’s notion of differance and both films essentially collapse upon the form that is responsible for delivering the content. Without a fundamental faith in universal truth, or God, or oneself, nothing that is perceived can be proven meaningful or even real. This is where faith becomes an essential part of building the bridge from postmodernism to the next cultural movement.

Perhaps the movement of the 21st Century will link the metaphysical truths of Plato with new discoveries in quantum mechanics. It is likely that the trend of reinventing meta-narratives within a postmodern framework will continue. A caricature of Aklilu Gebrewold in Waking Life sums it up best:
The main character is what you might call "the mind." It's mastery, it's capacity to represent. Throughout history, attempts have been made... to contain those experiences which happen at the edge of the limit...where the mind is vulnerable. But I think we are in a very significant moment in history. Those moments, those what you might call liminal, Limit, frontier, edge zone experiences...are actually now becoming the norm. These multiplicities and distinctions and differences... that have given great difficulty to the old mind...are actually through entering into their very essence, tasting and feeling their uniqueness. One might make a breakthrough to that common something... that holds them together. And so the main character is, to this new mind, greater, greater mind. A mind that yet is to be. And when we are obviously entered into that mode, you can see a radical subjectivity, radical attunement to individuality, uniqueness to that which the mind is, opens itself to a vast objectivity. So the story is the story of the cosmos now. The moment is not just a passing, empty nothing yet. And this is in the way in which these secret passages happen. Yes, it's empty with such fullness... that the great moment, the great life of the universe...is pulsating in it. And each one, each object, each place, each act...Leaves a mark. And that story is singular. But, in fact, it's story after story. (Linklater Waking Life)

All that it needs is a signifier…





Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Literary Theory, an Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies). Grand Rapids: Blackwell Limited, 2004. Print.

Boler, Megan. "An Epoch of Difference: Hearing Voices in the Nineties." EBSCO. Web. http://web.ebscohost.com.libproxy.csun.edu:2048/ehost/delivery?vid=3&hid=106&sid=310df891-0f72-45a5-b24f-990726312777%40sessionmgr104.

"Disinformation fight club: a postmodern consumer parable." Disinfo.com / Popular. Web. 19 Aug. 2009. http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1152/pg2/index.html.

Fight Club. Dir. David Finch. Perf. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. 20th Century Fox, 1999. DVD.

"Introductory Deconstruction." Literary Theory, an Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies). Grand Rapids: Blackwell Limited, 2004. Print.

Rivkin, Julie. "Introductory Deconstruction." Literary Theory, an Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies). Grand Rapids: Blackwell Limited, 2004. Print.

Sarup, Madan. An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993. Print.

"Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis." Literary Theory, an Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies). Grand Rapids: Blackwell Limited, 2004. Print.

Stuckists.com. Web. 19 Aug. 2009. http://www.stuckists.com/.

Thompson, Stacey. "Punk Cinema." JSTOR. CSUN, 2004. Web. http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.csun.edu:2048/stable/pdfplus/1225873.pdf.

Waking Life. Dir. Richard Linklater. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Julie Delphy. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2001. DVD.