Roland Barthes famously talked about “the death of the author”. By this he meant that we shouldn’t waste our time attempting to work out and authors intention when writing. The author’s relationship to the text ends as soon as they have written it. S/he is to all intents and purposes dead to his work and audience. The reader is free to interpret the text as they wish, potentially differently for each reading.
This formed a key component of postmodernism and deconstructionism. It linked to concepts such as intertextuality whereby the author never truly owned the work anyway as all works are derivative of others. It also linked with the idea that truth is subjective and provisional. This of course fed into Foucault’s concern with power. Truth, fact, interpretation and ownership for him all became about power, who has it and the struggle for it.
20-30 years ago when as a younger adult, I was engaging with these concepts for the first time, they were still primarily backward looking tools, seeking to understand and analyse our world around us and its history.
However, there is a prescriptive nature to postmodernism and this means that it unavoidably influenced future behaviour. What happens if truth is relative and all about power?
Well, I think that firstly it leads to the kind of laziness I’ve talked about when it comes to books and scripts. Writers have no real motivation to do careful research. Fiction no longer has rules to anchor it. It is just “makey uppy”. This makes it all the poorer, we end up frustrated too. Notice that because you don’t want heroes and you can’t have finality, we lose both comedy and tragedy do that we are left with never ending series and the incomplete anti climatic finales of shows like Line of Duty
We have killed the stories along with the authors. We also have lost the big unifying story or meta narrative too. This leaves us vulnerable to fake news (what is ‘fake’? after all) and a society that splinters and polarizes around extremes. I think we saw a foretaste of this in Northern Ireland. The peace deal there compromised with rather than dealt with the sectarians. Truth did a deal with myths and lies for the sake of reconciliation. It was a very postmodern deal. What followed was that the extremes took over and devoured the old mainstream. We may be witnessing a larger scale version of that at a national level now with the potential replacing of Conservatives by Reform UK and Labour by Corbyn’s offering.
The postmodern world from Ukraine to Palestine is fragmented, violent and dangerous. Story is dead and we have killed it.
Faithroots 