Is Postmodernism useful? Nathan Barley (Written by Charlie Brooker)

Snorting Barley

Post-modernity is said to characterise our age and if you are a student of Media Studies then you have probably hit your head against the term with such ferocity that an intellectual coma has swiftly followed. Ouch!
For brevity’s sake and without collapsing into the impenetrable mire of such theorists as Lyotard and Baudrillard, I understand post-modernism to describe an intellectual position typical of the late 20thand early 21st Century. The postmodern world of this period is one in which the ‘grand narratives’ of Marx, Freud, organised religion and the modernist impulse of scientific discovery have all run out of epistemological steam: we have stopped believing in their deep and epic truths. One effect of this in terms of cultural products like Film and TV is a heavily ironic and detached sense of engagement with the work or text: ‘creatives’ no longer see themselves as tortured souls wrestling truth from their medium; now they are facilitators, installation artists, entertainers or ironists. Their purpose is to now play with truths, to beak down the barriers between the text and the reader, the TV show and viewer. New buzzwords like ‘interactive, self-referential, inter-textual and hybrid’ reflect this distrust of rational statement in favour of a playful delight in surface meanings. How natural then that gossip magazines, reality TV shows, celebrity culture, prankster TV, unreconstructed sexism, reflexive genre homage and infotainment to name but a few postmodern manifestations should now dominate our cultural lives and, five years ago, the prescient life of Nathan Barley.
Add to this post-modern brew the digital revolution, increasing globalisation and the triumph of consumerism (despite the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s) and we have the possibility of mass-producing ‘the idiot’. But maybe now Dan Ashcroft and his nemesis Nathan Barley can help us.
Nathan is ‘a self-regarding consumer slave’. In other words Nathan enjoys his own image; he is a narcissist – and there’s plenty of them on You Tube and Facebook. Nathan is also a punter who thinks he is free to buy, but is actually conditioned to consume. As Brooker later comments in his infamous I hate Macs article (Guardian 5.2.2007), “If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that ‘says something’ about your personality, don’t bother. You don’t have a personality. A mental illness, maybe – but not a personality.” Consumption as lifestyle choice is literally and metaphorically a manufactured lie and the idea that we can ironically consume is a fantasy – wages and debt and waste are not ironic – they are real. The only irony in consumerist values is the tragedy that consumption never satisfies: fast food, fast TV, fast news, fast facts. Fast is the new black … on crack!
Ashcroft (AKA Brooker) also reminds us that idiots are blind to their ‘uniform individuality’. Apple put the ‘i’ into pods, pads and phones and ‘we’ all bought into it. A postmodern world is meant to blur boundaries, emphasise difference, explore hybridity and the margins but in fact we merely walk around in a circle and end up staring up our own sphincters or into the face of a Z-list celebrity.
In my view Modernism’s utopian quest, “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” may be flawed but it certainly isn’t over. If it is Brooker’s satires wouldn’t work – but they do. We recognise the banality of so much of post-modern surface culture – all sheen and self-confident noise but something, which, like a Happy Meal, ultimately lacks substance. It is like one of the idiots in Nathan Barley who uses the valediction, “Keep it foolish.” This throw-away-line reveals a depthless problem with post-modernity: it is so afraid to say anything (uncool) that it says nothing (cool) and that plays into the hands of the vacuous idiocracy.
So next time you look into a self-proclaimed, post-modernist’s ironically twinkling eyes, ask yourself this question: are they an idiot? In a world with out rules there is only nonsense and then only the idiots make sense. Only an unfashionable critique of postmodernism’s negative impact will start to arrest its influence. Fight the fight people. Brooker needs our help.