Chapter 9

Charles Fort and Postmodernism

Part 1: Information as a Form of Life

Colin Bennett

For Jacques Derrida 1930-2004 (RIP). 

In the 1960s and 1970s a variety of different theories arose out of the philosophy called ‘phenomenology’ and the sociological outlook influenced by the linguistic theory ‘structuralism’. Together, these ideas coalesced into an outlook popularised as postmodernism. The origin of these ideas is mostly French, but postmodernism caught a mood amongst academics, and more broadly amongst opinion-formers, and the culturati to quickly gain a currency in intellectual life in the 1980s and 1990s.

Postmodern thought is now widely established in philosophy, aethestics, art, design, and literary criticism, but it has not been received well in Britain. Admittedly, when delivered by certain French intellectuals, it chills the Anglo-Saxon heart in particular, due to the difficult relationship of that mind with mysticism, the erotic, abstract art, the exotic the experimental, and particularly the avant-guard. It could hardly be therefore expected that Postmodernism would be welcomed in Britain, where the utilitarian Protestantism that created the Industrial Revolution has never appreciated metaphysical or abstract philosophies, preferring Scientific Rationalism, Scepticism, Utilitarianism and the philosophy of scientific methodology and logic (Propositional Calculus, for example). We have of course good reasons for thanking Protestantism. Without it we would be still writing letters to the squire about permission to ride horses across ploughed land.

When most writers and academics discuss Postmodernism, almost all start with the 1950s, and by the second paragraph they are into a labyrinth of various and often over-complicated theories of art and aesthetics which few understand in a clear sense. Being for the most part very bad communicators, most writers on Postmodernism assume that they are talking to their professional colleagues in a highly specialised area. Almost none are capable of demonstrating those historical processes which brought about the Postmodern view. This is the main reason why, though powerful behind the scenes, Postmodernism on the whole has had a very bad press in Britain.

Strangely, the nation that produced Shakespeare and the Industrial Revolution has always had a difficult relationship with Brain, though Brain they have in plenty, perhaps more than any other nation else. The result of this schizophrenia (which can be seen in Britain from the 17^th century onwards) is that the British do not admit to having intellectuals, or if they admit reluctantly that such creatures exist, they keep them locked up in the west wing like madmen, dwarves, or illegitimate offspring. Failing that, the Brits use other methods to get rid of genius, either by ritual crucifixion (Alan Turing, the creator of the first digital computer) or neglect (Barnes Wallace the aircraft designer). They still put up all kinds of barriers against the demon Intellect as they once lit cliff-top fires to warn of the Approach of Napoleon’s fleet. As such, the Brits remain quite baffled by Postmodernism as they still gaze in puzzlement at the work of Sartre, Kafka, or Borges. Winston Churchill put it well when he said he could never understand a nation such as the French, if only because they made over fifty varieties of cheese. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s time, others have expressed the same astonishment at endless varieties of French perfume. We can no more imagine an English perfume than we can imagine an English intellectual. The two ideas clash like “military intelligence” or “Irish pornography.”

But given the often poor quality of Postmodern expression, the Brits do have a point. Many French Postmodernists are brilliant original thinkers, but most are dreadful communicators, even in their own native language. In translation, it must be admitted that they appear often as pretentious, over-complicated, and in many ways incomprehensible. However, the great French writer Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) is an exception. His volume of short essays entitled Mythologies is a Postmodern masterpiece concerning the structure of symbolism and advertising and the role of suggestion and imagination in western cultural anthropologies. He strikes a balance between the academic essay and the fictional piece which is the very essence of successful Postmodern writing. Like Borges, in doing this Barthes blurs the edges of what we far too easily assume is the “real.”

But what was Modernism in the first place? Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor, English Department, University of Colorado, explains:

“Modernism is the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it should mean. In the period of “high modernism,” from around 1910 to 1930, major writers such Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust, Mallarme, Kafka, and Rilke emphasised impressionism and subjectivity in writing (and in visual arts as well); an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived. An example of this would be stream-of-consciousness writing.

1. A movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions. Faulkner's multiple-narrated stories are an example of this aspect of modernism.

2. A blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry seems more documentary (as in T.S. Eliot or ee cummings) and prose seems more poetic (as in Woolf or Joyce).

3. An emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials.

4. A rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs (as in the poetry of William Carlos Williams) and a rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation.

5. A rejection of the distinction between "high" and "low" or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art.”

This last section (5) however is not true of the modernists. Rather does it define the Postmodernists. Mary Klages continues, describing the overlap:

“Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.

But while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of Eliot’s The Wasteland, for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse), but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with nonsense.”

This is as good a try as any, and gives lots of information. But the error is in assuming that Postmodernism reduces the world to nonsense games, which is not true. In the Postmodern world, Beethoven remains as valuable as he always was and always will be. But at last we are beginning to realise that a soap opera serial can give as profound an experience to some people as a Beethoven symphony. Thus we do not have states of “nonsense” at all, rather do we have class and cultural relativism. The odds have been merely evened up.  Thus from the Postmodernist point of view, Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley might well lift a person to the same height as Wagner or Mozart. Noel Coward put the point well when he marvelled at the magic intoxication produced by what he called “cheap music.”

In this sense the Postmodern view enables us to demythologise the political mystique of the profound. In pre-Modern thinking, the profound was seen as being not accessible without great difficulty and the proper social and educational credentials. The profound was therefore a commodity restricted to small and very clever elites who used it as a control-threat just as mediaeval priests used hell fire as a political bludgeon. Therefore, in that it shreds the myths of constituted authority,  Postmodernism is a deeply subversive outlook. A poem, say, about putting pop-tarts into the microwave after cleaning dogshit off the sole of a shoe appears to disturb the Station Masters of Western thinking. They would prefer poets to still be thinking about some Big Beautiful Deal in the sky about skylarks and sunsets and those “sublime harmonies” of “Dame Nature” that produce cancers, and a fortunately dead foetus with three misshapen heads, four arms and no legs.

Postmodernism is the only philosophy capable of analysing all culture as media. What is media? It is that metaphysical fluid by means of which we construct every single aspect of our mental activity, no less. Media need not of course be electronic. Any royal court or elaborate priestly assembly is media in that many people interpret and construct meaning through such a tribal display. People are used to thinking of Hollywood say in the singular sense of “media” but media displays range from the Nazi phenomenon to the power-displays of Roman Catholicism and the old-style tank and missile parades of Communism. Technology is merely a means by which such a display of fashion, taste, opinion, religion and power is effectively propagandized through a particular framework of image-reference.

In this sense, media is identical to the concept of the “system,” this being a word first used by Charles Fort in the sense that is meant here. In any particular cultural theatre, “solutions” are created in response to tribal predicaments. These performance-arrays may vary from anti-Semitism to Communism, from Jesus and/or Royalty, from “objective” science to the entire apparatus of our present “solution” represented by the implicit and explicit eroticism of that glamour industry called mass-consumerism.

Whether we imagine ourselves in a royal court or in a TV studio, a laboratory or a space ship, Media is central Control. All these things are “structured” by levels of techno-eroticism, glamour, image-power, all making older concepts of “fact” look rather pale and insignificant by comparison. Recognition of and participation in this ever-changing dynamic image-environment is automatic. We are into this kaleidoscopic matrix as soon as we put a comb through our hair in the morning and step out to the local Post Office looking for new worlds to conquer.

Charles Fort pointed out in his Book of the Damned that when we look at one of any number of popular science magazines we see happy smiling scout and guide faces, their arms full of those intriguing toys called “discoveries.” There is nothing sexier than a discovery. They are irresistible. Turn the pages of the lavishly illustrated science magazines, and we enter a whole galaxy of sweetness, surprise and adventure which makes for Christmas every day of the year. This constant display of science as the giver of numberless happy-jack tinsel wonders conceals of course the billions of screaming animals tortured to death, the massive financial corruption with corporate scientific structures, the murders of leading scientists, and the contamination of all air, water and earth. It masks also the secret experimentation on individuals and populations, the total co-operation of science with the security services and the defence sector, and of course the Orwellian social control through image-manipulation by massive corporate agendas.

Fort pointed out that rationalism was as much thought-control as anything else. Reading New Lands and Wild Talents, We see the concepts behind the words “democrat,” “factual,” and “objective” and “scientific” as being the classic weasel words of Orwellian Double Think. This gives a new meaning to those present-day books with titles such as The Road to Reality and The Theory of Everything.

Fort deconstructed science in that he showed its systems of “explanations” to be rather like the actions of a set of wall-papering clowns. But the Postmodern view is that we navigate mentally by the often delightfully comic self-deceptions inherent in a kind of cultural theatre in which the “real” plays the part of an abstract Platonic approximation, a kind of ignis fatuus in the mental life. From the Fortean/Postmodern point of view all mental activity is an advertising phenomenon whose parts sell off goods to other parts, entailing all the commercial chicanery that represents necessarily. We are always absorbed in some kind of advertising culture, of which science is one. As history shows, societies are “run” by massively engineered fantasies involving glamour, images, and dreams, Linear streams of carefully processed “facts” play little of no part at all in historical causation.

Fort was the great philosopher who was the first to construct a model of mind based on self-deceptions, confusions, mistakes, and socio-political conspiracies without number. In this respect, his “noisy” model, both individual and social, contrasts with many other models which (AI for example) are far too clean. Such “logic” models operate by piling up information through scanning networks until sufficient information is acquired for a decision. Even today these hard-wired robotic analogies prevail and researchers often assume that “thinking” is information-processing. That thinking often “occurs” by juxtaposing absurdity, by play, by haphazard simulacra does not appear to concern AI researchers. That thinking might occur with no input or no information at all is another problem that AI is going to have to face.

But there is another far greater problem than this facing AI. Mental processes can be defined by their ability to subvert themselves, by their destructive impulses vital to moral definitions. Digital software which has the option to withdraw its labour is somewhat could hardly exist. It would violate very industrial paradigms that gave it birth.

Kurt Vonnegut, in his 1996 novel Timescape, cites the image of one of the very last vaudeville comedians of America, whose final act was to fall into the orchestra pit and climb back on stage wrapped round with a bass drum and all its associated tackle. This spectacle always brought the house down. Analogue intellectuality is useless to describe such a Samuel Becket-like image of the absurdity of the human predicament. Factual analysis (the equivalent to point-to-point wiring) is of no consequence if what is being examined is a non-cerebral process of image-association. Images have a life of their own, they develop in unpredictable ways, and their power appears to have no relation to rational causation in time and space. Their intrinsic worth is in inverse proportion to their power. But their absurdity, like the sayings of King Lear’s Fool, remain with us always as essential parts of our moral life. Such images are Postmodern in that they cannot be measured in the scientific sense. Yet without such images we are all very dead.

In part 2 of this essay we shall use Fort’s techniques to show how Cerebral is now being replaced by Performer.