"Western biology that began as a structuralist science became a poststructuralist science with the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin. However, western biologists as well as physicists know when to be structuralists and when to use poststructuralist concepts. A physicist who studies the quark model of the atom is a structuralist who is concerned with "horizontal" structures whereas a cosmologist who is engrossed with the intricacies of the evolution of the universe is a poststructuralist."____________________________________
by Prof. Nalin de Silva
(February 11, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Jean Baudrillard is a founding father of postmodernism. Together with Jean-Francois Lyotard he has created the postmodern world. While Derrida, Lacan, Foucault and the others could be considered as poststructuralists, Baudrillard and Lyotard have to be considered as the theorists of postmodernism. Jameson who is of the view that the postmodernist era is the third stage of capitalism is generally considered a neo Marxist postmodernist, though many Marxists would have nothing to do with "bourgeois" theories of postmodernism. Baudrillard is associated with the concept of simulation that has become a corner stone of theories on postmodernism. According to this founding father we live in an era that cannot distinguish the "real" from the "unreal". He has coined the term "hyper reality" to denote the present "postmodern" situation especially in the western world, where the "unreal" is taken to be more "real" than the "real" and people adjust their lives to fit into this new state. Baudrillard has illustrated this situation with the Disneyland experience, and according to him the Americans (and the westerners and following them the others) live in a world that has been created by copying the Disneyland and others which themselves are creations. The unreal Disneyland has become the hyper reality for the people. For Baudrillard people live in an era of postmodernity comprising "simulations". People face "simulacra" all the time and have no way of identifying the truth from falsehood.
Lyotard's main contribution to postmodernism is connected with exorcising meta narratives from theory. Meta narratives that deal with general situations are metaphysical in Lyotrad's scheme, and general theories that attempt to explain interconnectedness between phenomena that appear to be different, have to be exorcised. Both Lyotard and Baudrillard have been influenced by poststructuralism though they finally cut the umbilical chord to create a postmodernist world for themselves and the others. It is not difficult to see how western social sciences have tried to follow western physics in the last fifty years or so and lose their way finally. Structuralism was introduced "officially" to western social sciences only in the beginning of the twentieth century though western physics had been a pseudo poststructuralist science from the days of Galileo and Newton. Though no western physicist would call himself (more than ninety percent of western physicists are males) a structuralist or a poststructuralist, western physics has been studying the physical world in terms of structures that evolve in time, though Newtonian physics had failed to distinguish between the past and the future! As far as Newtonian physics is concerned time is frozen and it was left to thermodynamics to identify the future from the past. In that sense one may call Newtonian physics a pseudo poststructuralist science and thermodynamics and quantum physics poststructuralist sciences. Einstein's relativity theories, both special and general, could not see any difference between the past and the future and even they could be considered as pseudo poststructuralist sciences.
Western biology that began as a structuralist science became a poststructuralist science with the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin. However, western biologists as well as physicists know when to be structuralists and when to use poststructuralist concepts. A physicist who studies the quark model of the atom is a structuralist who is concerned with "horizontal" structures whereas a cosmologist who is engrossed with the intricacies of the evolution of the universe is a poststructuralist. In western biology and physics one could be a structuralist at one time and a poststructuralist at a different time depending on what one is studying at a given time. Without the western social scientists realising it, Marx in the nineteenth century had already used a poststructuralist framework in his theories of historical materialism. It is clear that both Marx and Darwin had been influenced by western physics though whether they have been successful in their attempts to create evolutionary structures in history and biology respectively is a different matter altogether. It is significant that Marx wanted to dedicate his Das Capital to Darwin though the latter refused to be honoured for some reason or other. In giving these examples, my intention is not to categorise physics, biology or Marxism as poststructuralist but to draw the attention of the reader to the fact that so called structuralism or poststructuralism is not new to the world, and could have been used in the western "natural sciences" long before those terms were used in the western social sciences.
Neither the structuralists nor the poststructuralists abandoned concepts such as truth, reality, objectivity in general though some in exceptional cases could have questioned them. Even Derrida in his deconstruction does not do away with truth as such. He questions basically the concept of presence as found in the western culture, and hence the concept of subject, the hierarchial structure in the so called binary oppositions and the Eurocentric view of knowledge. However, as has been emphasised by many people including Derrida himself deconstruction is not destruction, and what Derrida has attempted is to expose the underlying assumptions in some of the concepts and theories used in western systems of knowledge. He has shown that the systems of knowledge created in the west have a Eurocentric view and we may say that such systems are relative to a certain frame of reference that could be called the westcentric frame of reference. The frame of reference has an origin or a centre and once the centre is removed the system collapses or at best becomes disorderly. However, Derrida does not create knowledge in a different frame of reference (or from a point of view different from the westcentric view), and even he creates knowledge with respect to the westcentric frame of reference. In my view this is similar to Einstein questioning the absolute frame of reference of Newtonian Mechanics but confining himself to the frames of reference that move uniformly with respect to the absolute frame of reference, namely the so called inertial frames of reference in Galilean relativity. Derrida does not move even into a stage corresponding to the special relativity stage in physics, let alone general relativity and quantum physics.
What distinguishes Baudrillard and Lyotard from the rest of French thinkers is their questioning and then discarding of the concepts such as absolute truth and objectivity. If Derrida is a passive relativist then Baudrillard and Lyotard are aggressive relativists. However aggressive they may be, they are constrained by the inherent rigidity of the western systems of knowledge and as a result they are forced to dig their own graves. It is very much probable that Baudrillard and Lyotard have been influenced by quantum physics which itself has not resolved the difficulties arising out of interpreting observations. In fact the greatest challenge to quantum physics is to interpret what an observation is! I find that the so called postmodernism of Baudrillard and Lyotard is the result of an attempt to understand the post electronic revolution world with some ideas from quantum physics. Quantum observations are not only relative to the observer but according to the Copenhagen interpretation nothing definite can be said in advance about the outcome of an observation. Copenhagen interpretation would demand that before the observation the system would not have the particular property that the observation would measure. In a sense the quantum physics according to the Copenhagen interpretation is more relative than the theories of relativity. In relativity theories there is something absolute and objective that appears to be different to different observations. The observations may be relative, but they are only the ways through which something absolute that exists independent of the observations appear to different observers. Even in quantum physics the particles "are there" independent of the observer though some properties of the particles may be observer dependent. The western systems of knowledge can afford to question absolute truth and objectivity but cannot remove them. The concepts such as absolute truth and objectivity are at the centre of the entire western systems and the moment they are removed the whole system collapses like a pack of cards. The western systems of knowledge are finally based on western Greek Judaic Christian Chinthanaya with God at its centre.
Let us see how Baudrillard digs his own grave as well as that of postmodernism. According to this founding father we live in a world where one is confronted with simulacra. People do not get the "real commodity" but a copy of it and they are dictated by the creations like the Disneyland. This implies that there is a "reality" as such from which Baudrillard too cannot escape. The real exists or has existed or would exist in the future somewhere, but the consumer has to be satisfied with is a simulation. For example, one knows, at least Baudrillard knows that there is a real journalism somewhere but what the reader/listener/viewer gets is only a simulation and not the real thing. Apart from Baudrillard and the others who know the real journalism how are the others to know the simulation from the real? If the others do not know anything about real journalism then they are not in a position to know that what they receive is a simulation. The "simulacra theory" has this problem of identification, assuming of course that there are "real commodities" independent of the consumer (observer). What Baudrillard forgets is that the so-called "real commodities" are also defined by the society and not by an individual who knows the criteria of determining the "real" from the "simulacrum". The criteria are not God given, and independent of the consumer (observer) but are relative to the society. The western world even in the form of postmodernists is unable to do away with "reality", "objectivity", "absolute morals" etc., for the reason that God is at the centre of the westcentric frame of knowledge. The so called reality is defined with respect to this centre and even postmodernism clings the centre in spite of questioning by Derrida and others. It has to be emphasised that quantum physics was able to do away with only the "local reality" as defined by Einstein, Podolsky and Rossen in their famous 1935 paper and refined later by John Bell with his celebrated inequalities. The "reality" of the "particles" is not questioned in quantum physics as the westcentric frame of reference is an absolute frame of reference with God at the centre.
It is this absoluteness that finally goes against Baudrillard and the rest of postmodernists. The postmodernists assume that there is an absolute in journalism, politics, cinema. literature, science that includes social sciences etc., as a simulacrum cannot be defined unless there is an absolute at least in the minds of Baudrillard and the God. Postmodernists consider the present state of the world as a postmodern stage where the "observers" are bombarded with simulacra. Since we live in a postmodernist stage it has to be assumed that even in the case of theories what the "observers" receive are "simulacra" and not the "real" as the modernists and the premodernists were fortunate enough to receive from their theorists. This implies, according to postmodernism, the theories that are produced in this postmodernist stage are themselves "simulacra" and not real, unless the postmodernist theory has a way of excluding theory from the postmodernist stage. It is not only the theory that is a simulacrum but the theorists themselves are simulacra. Thus according to postmodernism, postmodernist theory itself and the postmodernists themselves are simulacra! If postmodernist theory (postmodernism) is a simulacrum how justified are we in using postmodernist theory in the discussions (may I say discourse)? On the other hand do we know whether we are real or "simulacra"? In other words we could ask whether the "subject" who is after all a construct of the society (the "discourse" on the "other" in defining the "subject" is relevant here) is a simulacrum? Western theories that are linear and not cyclic, and formulated in the westcentric frame of reference with the God at the centre cannot avoid these pitfalls. Postmodernism which is a simulacrum according to postmodernism itself has managed to dig its grave. However, a question remains to be answered. Is the grave that postmodernism has dug a simulacrum?
(Professor Nalin de Silva is a Sri Lankan theoretical physicist, philosopher and a political analyst. He is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.)
(February 11, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Jean Baudrillard is a founding father of postmodernism. Together with Jean-Francois Lyotard he has created the postmodern world. While Derrida, Lacan, Foucault and the others could be considered as poststructuralists, Baudrillard and Lyotard have to be considered as the theorists of postmodernism. Jameson who is of the view that the postmodernist era is the third stage of capitalism is generally considered a neo Marxist postmodernist, though many Marxists would have nothing to do with "bourgeois" theories of postmodernism. Baudrillard is associated with the concept of simulation that has become a corner stone of theories on postmodernism. According to this founding father we live in an era that cannot distinguish the "real" from the "unreal". He has coined the term "hyper reality" to denote the present "postmodern" situation especially in the western world, where the "unreal" is taken to be more "real" than the "real" and people adjust their lives to fit into this new state. Baudrillard has illustrated this situation with the Disneyland experience, and according to him the Americans (and the westerners and following them the others) live in a world that has been created by copying the Disneyland and others which themselves are creations. The unreal Disneyland has become the hyper reality for the people. For Baudrillard people live in an era of postmodernity comprising "simulations". People face "simulacra" all the time and have no way of identifying the truth from falsehood.
Lyotard's main contribution to postmodernism is connected with exorcising meta narratives from theory. Meta narratives that deal with general situations are metaphysical in Lyotrad's scheme, and general theories that attempt to explain interconnectedness between phenomena that appear to be different, have to be exorcised. Both Lyotard and Baudrillard have been influenced by poststructuralism though they finally cut the umbilical chord to create a postmodernist world for themselves and the others. It is not difficult to see how western social sciences have tried to follow western physics in the last fifty years or so and lose their way finally. Structuralism was introduced "officially" to western social sciences only in the beginning of the twentieth century though western physics had been a pseudo poststructuralist science from the days of Galileo and Newton. Though no western physicist would call himself (more than ninety percent of western physicists are males) a structuralist or a poststructuralist, western physics has been studying the physical world in terms of structures that evolve in time, though Newtonian physics had failed to distinguish between the past and the future! As far as Newtonian physics is concerned time is frozen and it was left to thermodynamics to identify the future from the past. In that sense one may call Newtonian physics a pseudo poststructuralist science and thermodynamics and quantum physics poststructuralist sciences. Einstein's relativity theories, both special and general, could not see any difference between the past and the future and even they could be considered as pseudo poststructuralist sciences.
Western biology that began as a structuralist science became a poststructuralist science with the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin. However, western biologists as well as physicists know when to be structuralists and when to use poststructuralist concepts. A physicist who studies the quark model of the atom is a structuralist who is concerned with "horizontal" structures whereas a cosmologist who is engrossed with the intricacies of the evolution of the universe is a poststructuralist. In western biology and physics one could be a structuralist at one time and a poststructuralist at a different time depending on what one is studying at a given time. Without the western social scientists realising it, Marx in the nineteenth century had already used a poststructuralist framework in his theories of historical materialism. It is clear that both Marx and Darwin had been influenced by western physics though whether they have been successful in their attempts to create evolutionary structures in history and biology respectively is a different matter altogether. It is significant that Marx wanted to dedicate his Das Capital to Darwin though the latter refused to be honoured for some reason or other. In giving these examples, my intention is not to categorise physics, biology or Marxism as poststructuralist but to draw the attention of the reader to the fact that so called structuralism or poststructuralism is not new to the world, and could have been used in the western "natural sciences" long before those terms were used in the western social sciences.
Neither the structuralists nor the poststructuralists abandoned concepts such as truth, reality, objectivity in general though some in exceptional cases could have questioned them. Even Derrida in his deconstruction does not do away with truth as such. He questions basically the concept of presence as found in the western culture, and hence the concept of subject, the hierarchial structure in the so called binary oppositions and the Eurocentric view of knowledge. However, as has been emphasised by many people including Derrida himself deconstruction is not destruction, and what Derrida has attempted is to expose the underlying assumptions in some of the concepts and theories used in western systems of knowledge. He has shown that the systems of knowledge created in the west have a Eurocentric view and we may say that such systems are relative to a certain frame of reference that could be called the westcentric frame of reference. The frame of reference has an origin or a centre and once the centre is removed the system collapses or at best becomes disorderly. However, Derrida does not create knowledge in a different frame of reference (or from a point of view different from the westcentric view), and even he creates knowledge with respect to the westcentric frame of reference. In my view this is similar to Einstein questioning the absolute frame of reference of Newtonian Mechanics but confining himself to the frames of reference that move uniformly with respect to the absolute frame of reference, namely the so called inertial frames of reference in Galilean relativity. Derrida does not move even into a stage corresponding to the special relativity stage in physics, let alone general relativity and quantum physics.
What distinguishes Baudrillard and Lyotard from the rest of French thinkers is their questioning and then discarding of the concepts such as absolute truth and objectivity. If Derrida is a passive relativist then Baudrillard and Lyotard are aggressive relativists. However aggressive they may be, they are constrained by the inherent rigidity of the western systems of knowledge and as a result they are forced to dig their own graves. It is very much probable that Baudrillard and Lyotard have been influenced by quantum physics which itself has not resolved the difficulties arising out of interpreting observations. In fact the greatest challenge to quantum physics is to interpret what an observation is! I find that the so called postmodernism of Baudrillard and Lyotard is the result of an attempt to understand the post electronic revolution world with some ideas from quantum physics. Quantum observations are not only relative to the observer but according to the Copenhagen interpretation nothing definite can be said in advance about the outcome of an observation. Copenhagen interpretation would demand that before the observation the system would not have the particular property that the observation would measure. In a sense the quantum physics according to the Copenhagen interpretation is more relative than the theories of relativity. In relativity theories there is something absolute and objective that appears to be different to different observations. The observations may be relative, but they are only the ways through which something absolute that exists independent of the observations appear to different observers. Even in quantum physics the particles "are there" independent of the observer though some properties of the particles may be observer dependent. The western systems of knowledge can afford to question absolute truth and objectivity but cannot remove them. The concepts such as absolute truth and objectivity are at the centre of the entire western systems and the moment they are removed the whole system collapses like a pack of cards. The western systems of knowledge are finally based on western Greek Judaic Christian Chinthanaya with God at its centre.
Let us see how Baudrillard digs his own grave as well as that of postmodernism. According to this founding father we live in a world where one is confronted with simulacra. People do not get the "real commodity" but a copy of it and they are dictated by the creations like the Disneyland. This implies that there is a "reality" as such from which Baudrillard too cannot escape. The real exists or has existed or would exist in the future somewhere, but the consumer has to be satisfied with is a simulation. For example, one knows, at least Baudrillard knows that there is a real journalism somewhere but what the reader/listener/viewer gets is only a simulation and not the real thing. Apart from Baudrillard and the others who know the real journalism how are the others to know the simulation from the real? If the others do not know anything about real journalism then they are not in a position to know that what they receive is a simulation. The "simulacra theory" has this problem of identification, assuming of course that there are "real commodities" independent of the consumer (observer). What Baudrillard forgets is that the so-called "real commodities" are also defined by the society and not by an individual who knows the criteria of determining the "real" from the "simulacrum". The criteria are not God given, and independent of the consumer (observer) but are relative to the society. The western world even in the form of postmodernists is unable to do away with "reality", "objectivity", "absolute morals" etc., for the reason that God is at the centre of the westcentric frame of knowledge. The so called reality is defined with respect to this centre and even postmodernism clings the centre in spite of questioning by Derrida and others. It has to be emphasised that quantum physics was able to do away with only the "local reality" as defined by Einstein, Podolsky and Rossen in their famous 1935 paper and refined later by John Bell with his celebrated inequalities. The "reality" of the "particles" is not questioned in quantum physics as the westcentric frame of reference is an absolute frame of reference with God at the centre.
It is this absoluteness that finally goes against Baudrillard and the rest of postmodernists. The postmodernists assume that there is an absolute in journalism, politics, cinema. literature, science that includes social sciences etc., as a simulacrum cannot be defined unless there is an absolute at least in the minds of Baudrillard and the God. Postmodernists consider the present state of the world as a postmodern stage where the "observers" are bombarded with simulacra. Since we live in a postmodernist stage it has to be assumed that even in the case of theories what the "observers" receive are "simulacra" and not the "real" as the modernists and the premodernists were fortunate enough to receive from their theorists. This implies, according to postmodernism, the theories that are produced in this postmodernist stage are themselves "simulacra" and not real, unless the postmodernist theory has a way of excluding theory from the postmodernist stage. It is not only the theory that is a simulacrum but the theorists themselves are simulacra. Thus according to postmodernism, postmodernist theory itself and the postmodernists themselves are simulacra! If postmodernist theory (postmodernism) is a simulacrum how justified are we in using postmodernist theory in the discussions (may I say discourse)? On the other hand do we know whether we are real or "simulacra"? In other words we could ask whether the "subject" who is after all a construct of the society (the "discourse" on the "other" in defining the "subject" is relevant here) is a simulacrum? Western theories that are linear and not cyclic, and formulated in the westcentric frame of reference with the God at the centre cannot avoid these pitfalls. Postmodernism which is a simulacrum according to postmodernism itself has managed to dig its grave. However, a question remains to be answered. Is the grave that postmodernism has dug a simulacrum?
(Professor Nalin de Silva is a Sri Lankan theoretical physicist, philosopher and a political analyst. He is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.)
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