Lloyd's Building, London

The postmodernist debate on a culture increasingly saturated with signs
by Mitja Stefancic
It is argued that in the second half of the Twentieth century, Western culture became increasingly saturated with media images, new cultural forms and expressions, consumerist trends and needs, which together produced a remarkable proliferation of signs. Older analytical forms of explanation were said to be obsolete and no longer adequate for the purpose of understanding the new social and cultural reality with all its multifaceted features. It is in this context that postmodern theorists developed their radical and much controversial ideas.
We will start our analysis with the North American theorist Fredric Jameson. In his famous essay 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society' his attention is directed to the significant breakdown of the relationship between signifiers in contemporary Western cultures. In line with Saussure's model, Jameson divides the sign as composed by three components; the first component is the signifier, namely the material object, the sound of a word or the script of a text. The second one is the signified, which coincides with the meaning of that material word or material text. The third component is the referent, the real object in the real world to which the sign refers. However, the referent is viewed by Jameson as a kind of myth without a real essence. He therefore argues that 'we are left with the sign itself and its two components'.
According to Jameson, the signified is normally produced by the inter-relationship of material signs. What is being witnessed in postmodern culture is the lessening of the relationship between signifiers . They lose their significance and they are transformed to mere images. He draws a comparison between the condition experienced by people in postmodern cultures and the state of schizophrenia. To develop his point, Jameson refers to Jacques Lacan: 'for Lacan, the experience of temporality, human time, past, present, memory, the persistence of personal identity over months and years is also an effect of language. It is because language has a past and a future, because the sentence moves in time, that we can have what seems to us a concrete or lived experience of time'. It is because the schizophrenic does not make sense of language in this way that he does not experience temporal continuity. As a result the schizophrenic is condemned to a perpetual present. For Jameson this implicates that material signifiers are experienced by the schizophrenic as isolated and disconnected, and they fail to link into a coherent sequence. This is the reason why a frequent sense of saturation is experienced by the schizophrenic, which can from time to time turn into a disturbing sense of unreality if this sense of saturation overpasses certain limits.
Jameson's argument becomes clear if we turn to some of the major works produced by the pop artist Andy Warhol, which literally incorporate images of objects, famous people and masterpieces from the past. In his well known 'Thirty are better than one', thirty images of Leonardo's Mona Lisa are encapsulated in a sequential way as in a mosaic. The copies appear to be increasingly self-referential and bit-by-bit they lose their link with the original masterpiece. Moreover, the images do not provide the viewer with a feeling of coherent sequence. On the contrary, they appear to be isolated one from another. We are far away from claiming that Warhol himself was schizophrenic. However, we argue that many of his works express remarkable similarities with the way in which reality is experienced by the schizophrenic subject. Another good example is provided by the copies representing Marilyn Monroe such as Marilyn (1976). They appear to be highly self-referential images in which the colours become powerful and overwhelmingly vivid. They bear a hallucinogenic intensification of the colours and therefore they are felt by the observer as unreal.
Jameson pays particular attention to the implications of his argument for the world of art. While in modernism each artist maintained a distinctive style and 'texts' of others were normally quoted, in contemporary culture they are incorporated to such an extent that the line between original and copy, between high and commercial art becomes increasingly difficult to draw. Jameson pushes forward the pessimistic hypothesis that the writers and artists of the present times will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds: 'they have already been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible; the most unique ones have been thought already'.
Although Jameson's argument is well developed and well presented, there are examples that put its validity under doubt. A good one is provided by the Slovene music group Laibach, which in the Eighties gained fame for its ability to mix different styles (rock, jazz, folk) with industrial and electronic sounds. Laibach reinterpreted songs from the Beatles and Rolling Stones making provocative statements of being better than the originals. Moreover, the lyrics of their songs mix Slovene, English, German and Serbo-Croatian language, occasionally comprising speeches delivered by famous politicians. Laibach's music is very original and bears a recognisable seal of authenticity despite the fact that their work takes significant inspiration from other artists and disparate cultural fields.
Let us now turn our attention to our second postmodern theorist, namely the French writer Jean Baudrillard. Similarly as Jameson, he argues that in contemporary societies schizophrenia replaces hysteria and paranoia, the pathologies that characterised modernity. Although Baudrillard starts from the same point of view as Jamseon, he ends up with a slightly different conclusion. He emphasises the state of terror proper to the schizophrenic that follows the sense of the great proximity of everything. He views it as a state of confusion in which the possibility of human experience can easily break down: 'the schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in great confusion'.
Both intellectuals agree on the idea that people live in a world saturated with signs, in which temporal continuity vanishes and the sense of the real is radically modified. However, unlike Jameson, Baudrillard senses an epochal change in Western culture that is linked to a new transition in the function of signs. The French theorist traces the history of the sign (or image, as it is sometimes defined in his writings) and divides it into four phases, from the initial one, in which signs are the reflection of reality, to the final stage of pure simulation. The most important for our discourse is the transition from signs that coincide with the dissimulation of something to those that dissimulate that there is nothing. 'The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy. The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognise his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance'.
Baudrillard appears to stress the logic of simulation that governs contemporary Western societies more than any other postmodern theorist. The world that surrounds the individual ceases to be a mirror in which the real images of things are reflected. Signs are not the reflection of a basic reality any more; they become simulacra, a term borrowed by Baudrillard from Ecclesiates. The world saturated with simulacra is the world of the hyperreal, in which information, entertainment and other forms of simulation come to replace the events of everyday life. The French intellectual sees the quintessential example of this in Disneyland: 'Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland… Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation'.
According to Baudrillard, this phenomenon has important implications for our everyday social life. For example, as Douglas Kellner notes, 'in the society of simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, and codes and models determine how individuals perceive themselves and relate to other people'.
The last postmodern theorist to be analysed in this article is Jean Francois Lyotard. In contrast with contemporary French philosophy and social science he rejects Saussure's idea of language as comprising a system of signs and therefore he does not employ the notion of sign in his writings. Nonetheless his ideas appear to be useful for understanding the postmodern debate on sign saturation, especially if compared to Jameson and Baudrillard's ones. In his well-known work 'The Postmodern Condition' he argues that as societies enter the post-industrial age, knowledge is deeply altered under the impact of technological transformation. He claims that 'the miniaturization and commercialisation of machines is already changing the way in which learning isacquired, classified, made available and exploited'. For Lyotard knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented as modernist big truths disappear.
While Jameson emphasises the lessening of the inter-relationship between signifiers and Baudrillard stresses the logic of simulation in contemporary Western societies, Lyotard centres his arguments on the replacement of meta-narratives by modest ones. He does not deny the proliferation of signs and images in contemporary Western societies. However, he views them from a different perspective than the other two intellectuals. For Lyotard, in this process of proliferation and fragmentation the meaning is not lost as in Jameson's opinion. On the contrary, meaning becomes much more 'flexible' and of a transient nature.
It is the 'grand Narratives', namely the universal truths that serve to justify and legitimate modern Western culture, that are dissolved. As Hans Bertens puts it: 'with the transition from modernity to postmodernity, meta- or grand narratives have given way to "petit récits", to modest narratives that have a limited validity in place and time'.
While the grand Narratives were of a solid and rigid nature, the 'petit récits' are of a changing and progressive nature and for this reason they can be compared to the flux of a river stream. Moreover, if compared to little particles, they do not follow one specific direction; they are rather directed to the most disparate directions. While mixing together, they produce new meanings, which are accompanied by a wide range of possible interpretations.
Remarkable similarities with Lyotard's perspective and a close echo of his ideas can be found in Umberto Eco's novel 'The Name of the Rose', which established the presence of the postmodern novel in Italy. The novel appears to combine the different interests of the Italian intellectual, which shift from medieval to popular culture, from the detective novel to semiotics and literary theory. The book does not entail a unique style. Instead, it is the result of the mixture and convergence of different genres. It does not comprise a linear narrative, but a set of different narratives on different levels, which are related to texts from the past. As Peter Bondanella comments, 'the novel has been conceived as a purely postmodernist performance and even provides one of the most convincing and useful definitions of the term "postmodern". In the postscript, Eco underlines the concepts of pastiche, parody, and revisiting the literary past as the essential elements of postmodernism: books always speak of other books'.
After analysing the different points of view of the postmodern theorists, let us now turn to postmodern architecture. While modernism was based on rational, scientific principles, and rejected the styles that preceded its advent, postmodernism in architecture rejects the concept of style in itself. More precisely, it rejects a uniquely contradistinctive style and celebrates a mixing of styles and forms instead. A good example is provided by the iconoclastic Lloyd's building, which is located in the heart of London's financial district. The project was developed by the architect Richard Rogers in the Seventies in order to 'cater for the needs of the market into the 21st century, facilitating the flexible expansion and contraction of the underwriting space in line with the future market trends' . Spiral forms, massive tubes, crosses fusing with circular and spherical shapes are all constituting elements of the building. To this list we can add the towers in stainless steel and squares in glass that form the asymmetrical facades of the building.
Adopting Jameson's point of view, we can say that the various forms and symbols are incorporated instead of being quoted and in this way they are deprived of their original meaning. For example the highly religious connotations of the cross or the symbol of life attributed to the form of the circle in ancient times become mere constitutive elements of the building, with no deeper substance or meaning. In this way a new style emerges, but one that clearly lacks original ideas, in which the elements are more and more self-referential.
Considering this architectural style from Lyotard's point of view, the emphasis on diversity of forms and elements can be explained in terms of the rejection of a 'grand' style. However, we would suggest that in this way a new style is paradoxically created, the one that incorporates different elements which are iconoclastic and increasingly self-referential. Baudrillard's perspective suggests us that the signs comprised in the building do not reflect reality in any way. The building is a multitude of simulacra that represents a virtual reality. Lloyd's building is multifaceted and fragmented in order to make us believe that the economy of the prestigious firm (Lloyd's) is solid and stable.
Although postmodern theorists agree on the notion that contemporary culture is increasingly saturated with signs, they were divided in their understanding of the social and cultural implications of such phenomenon. For Jameson, the most evident implications regard the world of art, where the line between original and copy become blurred, as it is clear from some of Warhol's masterpieces. For this reason he advances the hypothesis that the most original styles have already been invented and no new ones will emerge in future. Baudrillard takes a standpoint similar to Jameson's one by stressing the state of confusion experienced by people due to the proliferation of images and codes in everyday life. According to him, simulacra produce a hyper-reality dominated by the logic of simulation. In contrast with Jameson and Baudrillard, Lyotard rejects Saussure's model of sign. He views the fragmentation of meta-narratives and their replacement by the modest narratives from a more positive perspective.
All of these arguments are original and all of them can be successfully applied for the analysis of different contemporary cultural phenomena; some of these theories are better for the explanations of certain particular phenomena, some for other ones. However, we would suggest that it is taken together in all their differences that they become a helpful tool for understanding the social and cultural phenomena that emerged from the second half of the Twentieth century on.