Game theory
From Super Mario to Monty Python, postmodern culture blurs the lines between highbrow and lowbrow, John Higgs explains in an excerpt from his book Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century
If you want to understand postmodernism you should spend a few hours playing Super Mario
Bros., a 1985 video game designed by Japan’s Shigeru Miyamoto for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
In Super Mario Bros. the player takes control of a mustachioed Italian plumber named Mario. Mario’s job is to travel across the Mushroom Kingdom in order to rescue Princess Peach, who has been kidnapped by Bowser, the monster-king of the turtle-like Koopa people. None of that, it is worth stressing, makes any sense.
Super Mario Bros. is a combination of elements that don’t fit together under any system of categorization, other than the game’s own logic. Fantasy kingdoms are all well and good, but they are not usually the playground of Italian plumbers. Likewise the mix of elements Mario encounters in the game, from giant bullets to fire-spitting pot plants, does not lend itself to logical scrutiny. There is no need to look for hidden meaning in the symbolism of Super Mario Bros., because it isn’t there.
The character of Bowser, for example, was originally intended to be an ox, but he became a turtle-beast simply because Miyamoto’s original drawing looked more like a turtle than an ox. Mario himself was also something of an accident. He originally appeared in the arcade game Donkey Kong and was known as Jumpman, because he was a man who could jump. He was later christened Mario as an in-joke, in honour of the landlord who owned the warehouse that was being rented by Nintendo of America. Princess Peach was rechristened Princess Toadstool for the American version of the game, for no reason of any importance.
None of these things affected the success of the game. What mattered was that each element was fun in itself. This is probably the most recognizable aspect of postmodernism, a collision of unrelated forms that are put together and expected to work on their own terms. The idea that an outside opinion or authority can declare that some elements belong together while others do not has been firmly rejected.
A related aspect of postmodernism is what theorists call jouissance.
Jouissance refers to a sense of playfulness. The French word is used over its closest English translation, “enjoyment,” because it has a more transgressive and sexualized edge that the English word lacks. Postmodern art is delighted, rather than ashamed, by the fact that it has thrown together a bunch of disparate unconnected elements. It takes genuine pleasure in the fact that it has done something that it is not supposed to do. A good example of postmodern jouissance can be found in the British dance records from the late 1980s, such as MARRS’ “Pump Up the Volume” or “Whitney Joins the JAMs” by the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. These were records made by musicians who had just gained access to samplers and were exploring what they could do. They were having a whale of a time playing around and putting together all sorts of unconnected audio.
Athird postmodern element can be seen in the mass-produced nature of the game. Super Mario Bros. is made from code, and that code is copied to create every instance of the game. It is not the case that there is one “real” version of the game, while the rest are inferior imitations. The code that ran on Shigeru Miyamoto’s development system, at the moment he signed the game off as complete, does not have some quality of authenticity that a battered secondhand copy found in a market in Utrecht does not.
The status of identical copies of a work of art had been a hot topic in the art world ever since the German critic Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. As far as postmodernists were concerned, that debate was over. Every mass-produced copy
of Super Mario Bros. was intrinsically as good as all the others, and no amount of hoping to find some magical aura imbued in an artist’s own copy could change that.
A fourth important factor is that the game is well aware that it is a game. Super Mario Bros. makes no attempts to hide the conventions of the form, and will regularly highlight them in a way that games such as chess or tennis do not. Should the player find and collect a green and orange ‘1-Up’ mushroom, they will be rewarded with an extra life and hence extend their playing time. In a similar way, the game is littered with rewards, power-ups and other gameplay factors that affect the structure of play, and which only make sense in the context of a video game.
This self-aware element of postmodernism is sometimes associated with film, television or theatre, such as the1977 Woody Allen movie Annie
Hall. Allen’s character was able to win an argument with a self-righteous bore in a cinema queue by producing the media critic Marshall McLuhan from off-screen. At this point Allen turned to the camera and said, directly to the audience, “Boy, if life were only like this!” In doing so he acknowledged the artificial nature of the situation: that he was a character in a movie, talking to a camera, in order to address a future audience of cinemagoers.
Postmodern moments like this are rare in the narrative arts, because they rely on the suspension of disbelief for their power. They are more common in the genre of comedy, such as the work of the British comedy troupe Monty Python. The final sequence in the “Spanish Inquisition” episode of their second television series involved three members of the Spanish Inquisition being late for a sketch that they were supposed to appear in. Once this was realized they hurried off and caught a bus in order to get to the sketch. They knew that they were running out of time because the end credits had started rolling over them. They finally arrived in the sketch at the moment the program ended. Another postmodern aspect of Su
per Mario Bros. is that each time the game is played, it is different. There is no one true version of the game, and hence no true “authorial intent” to provide the correct understanding of Miyamoto’s work. Some users even go so far as to alter the code in order to create different versions of the game, known as mods. For gamers, this is entirely valid.
Postmodernists have firmly internalized Duchamp’s insight that when different people read a book or watch a movie, they perceive it differently. There are many interpretations of a work, and it cannot justifiably be argued that one particular perspective is the “true” one, even when that perspective is the author’s. People can find value in a work by interpreting it in a way that the author had never thought of.
Finally, the game itself transcends the categories of highbrow and lowbrow, being simultaneously high art and populist fluff. When Super Ma
rio Bros. was released in1985 cultural critics would have dismissed it as lowbrow, had they been aware of it at all. Video games were then seen as dumb, noisy things for kids, and it took a number of decades before claims for their cultural validity were heard. Yet Super Mario Bros. was named as the best game of all time by IGN in 2005. It becomes difficult to classify a dumb bit of kids’ entertainment, which is hailed as the pinnacle of a recognized art form, as being either highbrow or lowbrow. Monty Python were a good example of the way postmodern culture was happy to be deep and shallow at the same time. Their “Philosophers’ Football Match” sketch depicted a game of football between German and Ancient Greek philosophers. Like much of their comedy, it was both silly and clever. As the football commentator describes the match, “Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.”
Shigeru Miyamoto, it is not controversial to claim, is the most important video games designer in history. His impact on games can be compared to the influence of Shakespeare on theatre and Dickens on the novel. Like Dickens and Shakespeare, his work combines mainstream appeal with an unmatched level of inventiveness that places him in a different league to his peers. This is not to suggest that games are similar to plays or novels. A game isn’t attempting to emulate the complex understanding of human nature that the best of those art forms achieve. It is an attempt to create a “flow” state in the player. The player reacts to events on the screen, and the way in which they react alters those events. This creates a continuous feedback loop between the game and the gamer. Like so much else in the 20th century, the link between the observed and the observer is fundamental.
To Miyamoto and his audience, of course, such concerns were unimportant. The distinction between highbrow and lowbrow was a meaningless excuse to look outside for validation. Postmodernism did not recognize the authority of any such external framework. Concepts such as highbrow and lowbrow, or “art” and “not-art,” were projected on to the work by critics or gallery owners for their own benefit. They were not intrinsic qualities of the work itself. All that mattered, in games such as Su
per Mario Bros., was whether it was in itself any good. The fact that a game such as Super
Mario Bros. made total sense to an audience of children shows that the mainstream population was able to accept postmodernism, and take it in its stride, in a way that they never could with modernism.
Capitalism also had no problem with postmodernism. An example of this is the art world’s response to the postmodern refusal to be either highbrow or lowbrow. This is nicely illustrated by their embrace of the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein took frames from cheap comic books and copied them on to large canvases. Gallery owners were in no way concerned about Lichtenstein’s copyright infringement. They took the view that his paintings were important art and that the comic-book images he blatantly plagiarized were not. A number of his paintings, such as Sleeping
Girl from 1964 and1961’s I Can See the Whole Room . . . And There’s Nobody in It!, have since sold for prices in excess of $40 million (U.S.). To the business side of the art world, this is great stuff. The original comic art that those paintings were plagiarized from, meanwhile, is still viewed by gallery owners as either being essentially worthless, or as a curiosity that has become interesting due to the link to Lichtenstein. Comic book artists are still not very happy about this.
Yet if audiences and the business establishment are so comfortable with postmodernism, why has it become such an undeniably hated movement? Trying to find someone who has anything good to say about postmodernism in the early 21st century is a challenge indeed. The word itself has become an insult, and one which negates the need to engage in further criticism. Once something has been dismissed as “postmodern,” it seems, it can be dismissed.
Postmodernism, as the word suggests, was what came after modernism. “Modern” comes from the Latin word modo, meaning “just now.” “Post” meant “after,” so postmodernism essentially means “after just now.” “Modernism” may not have been a particularly helpful label for the avant garde culture of the early 20th century, but it was positively descriptive compared to its successor.
It does not help that the term “postmodern” has been applied so broadly. Eighties furniture that looked like it had been designed by designers on cocaine was postmodern. Comic books about characters who discovered that they were fictional were postmodern. Self-consciously awkward 1970s architecture was also postmodern. From Umberto Eco’s
The Name of the Rose to the pop videos of New Order, from the sculptures of Jeff Koons to the children’s cartoon series Danger Mouse, postmodernism claimed them all. All this generated the suspicion that the term itself was meaningless. Many attempts to define it gave this impression too.
The reason for the current dismissal of postmodernism is its relationship with academia. The romance between academia and postmodernism, it is fair to say, did not end well.
Their relationship started promisingly enough. Postwar academia was quick to recognize postmodernism, and it had a lot to say about it. Many leading thinkers turned their attentions to the phenomenon and linked it to movements such as structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction. Postmodernism began to shape a great deal of intellectual debate, particularly in American academia. French philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida became hugely influential. Yet as this process progressed, doubts started to appear. It wasn’t apparent what use all this postmodern dialogue was, for a start. It didn’t seem to produce anything solid. There was a nagging suspicion that it might be meaningless. Few people voiced that suspicion initially, for fear of looking ignorant, but increasingly it became hard to avoid the fact that a huge amount of academic postmodern discourse was gibberish.
This situation came to a head in 1996 when Alan Sokal, a physicist from New York University, submitted an article to the postmodernist academic journal Social Text entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The article argued that reality was “a social and linguistic construct” and that the development of a postmodern science would provide “powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project.”
Sokal was spoofing the deconstructionist idea that science was a socially constructed “text,” and hence open to different interpretations, by arguing that the laws of physics themselves could be anything we wanted them to be. He was making mischief, essentially, and his article was deliberately absurd and meaningless. But this was not apparent to the editorial team at Social Text, who thought that it was just the sort of thing that they were looking for and proceeded to publish it.
In normal circumstances Sokal’s hoax would have been viewed as an attack on the world of academic publication. The failure of judgment of the journal’s editors was, ironically, just the sort of thing that deconstructionists were banging on about when they talked about science being a social text. But thanks to the amount of unease surrounding postmodernism in academia, the Sokal hoax became viewed as a killer blow not to academic journals, but to postmodernism itself.
In the aftermath of the Sokal hoax, philosophers were very quick to leave postmodernism behind them, as can be seen in the string of critical obituaries that followed the death in 2004 of Jacques Derrida, the French founder of deconstructionism. The New York Times headline ran “Jacques Derrida, Obtuse Theorist, Dies at 74.” It might have been thought that such an influential figure would have received a little more respect immediately after his death, but by then the world of philosophy was deeply ashamed about its postwar postmodern phase, and was distancing itself from the embarrassment as much as possible.
The problem was that there was no mechanism inside postmodernism for weeding out the meaningless from the meaningful. As a result it became possible to build an academic career by sounding clever, rather than being clever. Writing in Nature in1998, the English biologist Richard Dawkins highlights the following example of apparently meaningless postmodern discourse: “We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticized previously.” After a few decades of this sort of stuff, philosophers had had enough. It is understandable that anyone who had spent their working life reading texts like this would have rushed to put the boot into postmodernism, once Sokal had got it to the floor.
For academics, postmodernism was like quicksand. Once you fell into it, it was almost impossible to climb out. The more you struggled, the further in you were pulled. It also seemed inherently smug and pleased with itself. As an example, consider the way that this chapter used an old video game to explain postmodernism. This was, in itself, an extremely postmodern thing to do. It was an example of seemingly unrelated concepts thrown together and expected to work. It managed to avoid being either highbrow or lowbrow. This chapter has now started discussing itself, which shows that it is self-aware. This display of selfawareness essentially demonstrates the point that this paragraph was undertaken to explain, which makes it self-justifying, which in turn makes it even more postmodern and hence validates itself further. You can see why postmodernism winds people up.
Excerpted from Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th
Century by John Higgs. Copyright © 2015 John Higgs. Published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.