Assimilating Ideas on the Postmodern 'Actor'

Well it has certainly been awhile. This post is vague and unclear and meant to be more of a 'getting back into the flow of things' piece. I think I set out in it to accomplish too much.

“The postmodern man is an observer, not a participant: a film enthusiast, not a life enthusiast.” - Michelle

"Heidegger’s essay on the Age of the World Picture remarks on the distinction between a time when man was a spectacle for the gods, the object of a perception which was itself beyond conception, and a modernity wherein man is fundamentally the perceiver of a world that offers itself to him as or is posited as a picture. Benjamin, in his Artwork essay, also alludes to man’s former status as an object or show for the gods. Fascism, he famously remarks turns humanity into a spectacle for itself. At the same time, the gigantism of this spectacle – the rallies, the giant screens, the massive advertisements careering towards the random city dweller from the sides of buildings, magnifies man to God-like proportions. The modern citizen is miniaturised before the Olympian powers of industrial society but also watches them, agog, and lives vicariously though them." (rest here at Long Sunday)

The Long Sunday article then goes on to depict the world through the eyes of John Berger as he flips through a magazine:

"The ‘plane’ on which these images co-exist is inhuman, there is no human point of view where all these images converge."

Heidegger is talking about a modern world, while I think Berger and Michelle are talking about a postmodern one. Somewhere between Mussolini and Wal-Mart (which by the way is in my Microsoft spell check, even if Heidegger isn’t) there is a ‘gap’. During modernity man did see himself as observer, however he also saw himself as taking-part by becoming as an essential cog in the larger socio-political order. I think this has a lot to do with the general tendency of the period of subscribing to larger reified ideologies. With the breakdown of the ‘grand narratives’, the post modern ‘actor’, though still viewing them self as an observer, now think they are lying outside the larger order unable to affect it.

Benjamin describes the modern man:

"Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics, which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."

But he is not insane. He believed in the ideologies that guided him, and it is only from a historical perspective that we become aware of his alienation. The postmodern actor on the other hand is insane. He is handicapped by the inability to form a “human point of view where all these images converge”. They have been enlightened to their impending destruction, but being void of perspective are unable to remedy this, and yet still derive aesthetic pleasure from it!