Critical pedagogy group meeting: the Space Project 23rd November


Posted by Terry

On the evening of  Wednesday 23rd November, the Critical Pedagogy discussion group had its second meeting at the Space Project in Leeds, described as a radical education project. Of the small group that attended half had not been at the initial meeting so this meeting started with a brief report on what had been discussed then but quickly moved on to a discussion of why each individual was interested in the topic. In some cases it was a concern to develop a more relevant and critically engaged approach to teaching within higher education. In others the interest is to see if critical pedagogy has anything to offer when thinking about engaging with groups and communities outside of formal education. One of the reasons that the Space Project was interested in starting the critical pedagogy group in the first place is to explore how it might be relevant and useful for engaging with groups beyond the university who could be brought into the project and use the space. There seemed to be a general consensus that a critical pedagogy should be ‘emancipatory’, in itself or in its objectives. Emancipation from what was not explicitly discussed although it became clear that there was a shared dissatisfaction with many aspects of contemporary society and defective democratic political processes. Likewise, the meeting didn’t start with any attempt to define critical pedagogy in advance.

Apart from the inside and beyond the university distinction, there was also some discussion of the difference between critical pedagogy as a set of teaching methods and techniques and as a process. One concern was about how to change the relationship between teachers and students and get away from the so-called ‘transmission belt’ and ‘banking’ models of education where teachers are seen to have the knowledge, students suffer from a knowledge deficit and it is just a question of the former transferring their knowledge to the latter who ‘bank’ it for later use. In practice this leads to forms of hierarchy and dependency and ignores the knowledgeability of students and that knowledge construction is a continuous social process. It implies knowledge is a ‘thing’ of some sort and down plays the fact that knowledge is always incomplete, always developing, always partial and open to negotiation. Students are assessed in terms of how much knowledge they have absorbed and can reproduce competently. The participation in and awareness of knowledge as a process is confined to the academic. Critical pedagogy opens the possibility that the relationship between teacher and student could be one of collaboration in a knowledge construction process where the historical, social and contingent nature of knowledge is recognised and exploited in a joint project that respects and utilises the knowledge and reasoning capacity of students. Critical pedagogy introduces and embeds criticality into the content and process of teaching and learning, a process where the distinction between teacher and learner breaks down so that everyone is a collaborative learner. However, it is still the case that not everyone will be equivalent in terms of their expertise and experience or their facility to articulate these in discussion. There will be different sorts of ‘cultural capital’ attached to individuals. Clearly the collaborative knowledge construction process would need to be able to exploit individuals’ expert knowledge and broader experience without lapsing back into the disabling hierarchical ‘transmission belt’ model. This requires the critical problematisation of the notion of legislative expert knowledge and the development of non-hierarchical forms of consensual decision making. Expert knowledge, like any other, is contextual and historically contingent and subject to change in the face of challenges and changing circumstances. This is usually a process that is confined to other ‘qualifying’ experts. But when the expert knowledge is deployed in a collaborative process with ‘lay persons’ in real life situations about which they are already knowledgeable, intellectually and in their lived experience, then the expert knowledge can be modified through exposure to concrete situations that require consensus based pragmatic decisions and actions that cannot be simply ‘read off’ from expert knowledges.

That this is in fact very hard to achieve in the current educational context of assessment, metrics and measurements was also a point of discussion. Several of us have experienced the resistance to these ideas, or, more accurately since the ideas are rarely discussed, to the practice of these ideas, by students. It can lead to anxiety and discomfort as putting this into practice subverts expected and familiar roles and procedures. It may well be that the intention is to empower students and broaden the context within which they think and understand, but this is experienced as a threat very often, of lecturers not doing their job properly and jeopardising the students’ ability to perform according to assessment criteria. Basically they want to know what knowledge they need to reproduce, what are the best books and articles to read that will give them the answers and how many references are deemed to be sufficient, and so on. Critical pedagogy as a set of techniques and practices may prove very difficult to apply in practice unless the organisational context simultaneously embraces critical pedagogy as a process that modifies the administration and assessment of learning outcomes. This may not be quite such a problem outside of and beyond the organisation of formal education.

There was some discussion of ‘levels’ or modalities of criticality and a distinction was made between ‘surface’ or shallow versions, as in the examples of quality circles, suggestion boxes and so on, and the deep criticality of questioning the surface reality, getting behind it, seeing how contingency is packaged and presented as taken-for-granted ways of thinking and doing,  custom and practice, exposing and examining the underlying social process of construction, of framing, the networks and mechanisms of power and control, interest and repression, inclusion and exclusion. This is clearly fundamentally connected to the analysis of ideologies and ideological processes. The first ‘surface’ criticality reproduces the status quo, the second questions and problematises it. The first ‘perfects’ and focuses on the resilience of the existing reality. The second, by demonstrating the contingency of reality, as represented and as materially existing, as the result of specific contingent historical events and processes, demonstrates the world was different before it got this way and could be different from what it is now, and so opening up the discussion of possibilities.

There was some discussion of the knowledge and knowledgability of individuals, groups and communities beyond the university and the Space Project. One suggestion was that critical pedagogy as a process might suggest a way of aligning with radical groups and issues and bringing to struggles and movements a broader explanatory framework that recognises and exploits the existing knowledge and experience of the group  and that has strategic and practical significance.  As an aside, this is where I mentioned Harry Collins’ research on ‘interactive expertise’ where, for example, a group interested in critiquing and campaigning against certain forms of biotechnology recruited and worked with experts in biotechnology and where the experts and the lay members of the group learnt from each other, developing the more technical aspects within a practical social and political context. An example of this perhaps closer to home is the process whereby various specifically focussed anti-cuts movements, for instance against the cuts in HE and another against the attack on pensions, come to identifying the common connection their issues have and recognising the broader underlying system that each are a symptom of – the ideologically and powerful interest driven process of privatisation and hyper-marketisation. This coming together of groups and issues has developed ‘on the ground’ as the groups have formed links and communicated largely via the Internet and social media. But a wide variety of students and academics from different disciplines and with different expert knowledges have contributed to this development right from the start and increasingly academics and research students are in discussion and participating in ‘teach-ins’ and other events in newly emerging public  events and spaces including occupations, sit-ins and squats.

Finally there was some discussion of the way forward. Two strands to follow were identified. One was to do some reading and research on the ideas around critical pedagogy and alternative forms of education. This might take the form of a traditional study group. The other strand was to look for and think about concrete examples of what could be seen as a critical pedagogy in practice. This could include some aspects of the current occupations, for instance, but could also look at some examples from Italy, South America, and so on. What we didn’t leave the meeting with was a reading list. The final decision was to find a way of including anyone who is interested who cannot make all, or indeed any, of the meetings. Some sort of on-line presence and reporting would seem to be the obvious solution. Again, no concrete proposal was made other than to have a dedicated Facebook group. This will probably happen but, as was noted at the time, not everyone is in or wants to be in Facebook. Another suggestion was a blog, or a section in the Really Open University web site. Look out for announcements any day now. In the meantime theses notes are my recollection of what was discussed at the last meeting with a few additional observations. No doubt others will add to these and, where I have misremembered, put me right!


Leeds Radical Library – ‘crisis’ discussion group


Posted by Terry

The Space Project in Leeds has recently started a new initiative, the Radical Library Collective. In addition to accumulating books and resources that encourage critical, systemic political thought to help  understand the society we are part of, the project aims to encourage “a culture of discussion”  through a reading group New Weapons, by inviting speakers and hosting book launches. In January next year the the first discussion group meetings will address the issue of Crisis. Quoting from the blurb on the Space Projects Facebook community page:

From bankrupt PIGS, revolting Greeks and an £1 trillion hole in Italy abroad, to riots, banker bailouts and strikes at home, wherever you look these days there’s banter about ‘crisis’. But what crisis? Where, and for whom? Facilitated by Leeds Radical Library, this first discussion series, Crisis!, aims to provide a lively forum for debate about some of the key issues of our time: what is capitalism and why does it seem to break again and again? Taking short, weekly texts as a starting point, we want to explore the history of capitalist crisis to find out what ‘our crisis’ has in common with previous crises, and what might be unique about it. While economists and bankers whom we’ve never met or elected seem able to make more and more decisions about the way we run our lives, Crisis! aims to unravel from the very beginning the modern day myths about ‘finance’, ‘capital’ and ‘democracy’.

It would be great if some ‘out-of-towners’ could come along. Hopefully the discussions will be blogged.


Occupations as human mic


Posted by Terry

I have recently become aware of the so-called ‘human microphone’, a tactic adopted by the Wall Street occupiers when their use of megaphones was banned. A great description of how this works can be found on the excellent Literary Kicks blog Occupy Wall Street: How the People’s Mic Works. I think the human mic is a powerful metaphor for the growing number of occupations spreading around the world, about 2000 I think at the last count. One of the complaints about the occupations that is becoming increasingly common is that there are no clear objectives or set of alternative policies. This is entirely unreasonable. Who these days can claim (truthfully  and realistically) to have clear objectives or a well thought out and realistic strategy for getting there?  Our government, the US government, the EC Commissioners? The only clear and thought-out strategy there is any evidence for at the moment seems to be Goldman Sachs’ strategy, by a combination of recruiting influential politicians as advisers and consultants and taking over governments’ economic policies via their (unelected)  place men and alumni ‘technocrats’. (See What price the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe for an account of the Goldman Sachs Project).

For a number of years now there has been much hand wringing and regret about the atrophy of civil society and the demise of public spaces for open and democratic discussion. The pervading acceptance that the current system is the least bad and that there is no alternative (TINA) – the basis of the argument that we are now in a ‘post political’ era – leads to and legitimates the conclusion that all that remains to be done is the find the most efficient and managerialist methods of administrating capitalism and consumer society. Life’s shit and the best we can do is to make it a bit less smelly for the docile and deserving. The importance of the occupations, at this stage of the game at least, is to open up and re-politicise spaces in civil society, to develop both a negative critique and exposure of the lies, corruption, injustice,  hypocrisy and inhumanity, to make visible the human face and experience of those that suffer as the ‘collateral damage’ of the system, and (although I am rather ambivalent about some aspects of this) to smoke out and make visible to all the links between corporate power, political complicity and the state ideological and material apparatuses of repression.  At the same time, and more positively, the occupations are fantastic experiments and demonstrations of citizens ‘doing it for themselves’ - providing tentative intimations of different sorts of non-hierarchical and consensual organisation, of alternative values and forms of sociality and conviviality. It is through networks of city occupations, alternative educational spaces like the Social Science Centre in Lincoln and the Space Project in Leeds, through initiatives like the Really Open University, and more recently Tent City University and the Bank of Ideas (to name but a few) that the critiques, ideas and values are transmitted and amplified  into and throughout the public domain through mainstream, citizen and social media, coalescing into an ever widening and deepening public awareness and debate about the state we are in, and the systems of interest, power and irresponsibility that  got us here. Where we are denied the ‘megaphone’ of meaningful and effective representation in our defective, subservient and co-opted political system the human microphone of the new and growing radical and critical spaces is becoming a formidable weapon.


Saramago quote #2


Posted by Terry

Today, calling a government socialist, social democratic, conservative, or liberal is to ascribe power to it, that is, purport to identify something in it that is not really there but in some other place far out of reach – a place where you can see the filigree outlines of economic and financial power, a power that invariably eludes us when we try to get closer, that inevitably counter-attacks if we whimsically wish to reduce or regulate its domain, subordinating it to the common good. In other, clearer, words, then, what I’m saying is that people do not choose a government that will bring markets within their control; instead, the market in every way conditions governments to bring people within its control.

The Notebook,  page 19 Clear as Water


The social construction of top footballers?


Posted by Terry

Interesting item on the Today programme on BBC radio 4 this morning on how a large study of childhood cohorts shows that children born in August systematically under achieve all their lives compared with children born in September. This is because of the structure of the school year. I didn’t follow this completely as I only heard some of it. However, Matthew Syed (author of Bounce) gave the example of top footballers. The vast majority apparently are clustered in birth months where they were amongst the older boys in a school year. They were bigger, stronger, more likely to be picked by PE instructors and sports masters, more likely to experience success and status, more likely to develop to the extent that they will be selected by club scouts, and so it goes on. Conversely, younger boys are more likely to experience mediocrity or failure and so on. It is the case that in any one school year their will be children nearly a whole year apart in age. I need to find the study reported and see how this translates into academic achievement, if it does.


Generation Us: The Challenge of Global Warming


Posted by Terry

Provisional notes. To cleaned up when slides obtained and before communicating with Earth and Environment for discussion.

The Centre for Canadian Studies and the School of Earth and Environment, both of the University of Leeds, present ‘Generation Us: The Challenge of Global Warming’, a lecture on both the history and the future of the science of global warming. The acclaimed Canadian scientist and author, Dr. Andrew Weaver, will explore how international policy, media portrayal and technological solutions can all impact climate change, ultimately asking how modern society can turn the challenge of global warming to potential creativity and innovation. The lecture will take place on Monday, 31st October, 5pm-7pm, in Room 8.119 at the School of Earth and Environment.

Convincing account of the science of climate change. Showed the political  and age demographic of those most likely to doubt climate change is happening. Right wing and older.

Demonstrates that the agreed carbon emission targets designed to keep us below the 2 degrees ‘guard rail’ , even if we succeeed in meeting them, will not limit us to 2 degrees and 4 or more is likely.

Why scientists are bad communicators to the public. Always frame their answers with conditions and uncertainties. E’g of ‘is the sky blue?’ Also misrepresented in the media. Policies needed now to get results for future generations in 50 or more years. Not politically powerful compared with hospitals and so on – the 5 year election cycle. Bottom line: do we owe anything to future generations?

Showed how the  less developed nations who contribute less towards the problem are the most likely to be affected and the least able to mitigate or ameliorate. A Canadian emits250 time more carbon than an Ethiopian, e.g.

Continued growth on present scales is unsustainable. Equilibrium will be met but may not include humans. Gave the tragedy of the commons as a reason why we are in trouble. Individual advantage of an extra cow on the commons while costs are shared with all the others. But breaks down if all follow the same logic. Tend towards over grazing and destruction of the resource. Advocated technology as a solution – solar panels would only take up a very small are of the planet for instance. In addition the externalities should be priced in to reflect the true scarcity and cost of the resources used so that the markets work efficiently. In answer to questions about capitalism he said that a fixed capitalism woudl be prefereble to a Chinese command economy and would be possible. Why not have corporations that, having achieved a certain level of production, flatten and stop growth? A zero growth capitalism is possible.

How would this address issues of equality, equity and environmental justice? Reminiscent of Urry’s point, hopefully made tomorrow, that climate policy is framed almost exclusively in terms of science and technology coupled to a flawed and crude economic theory as a surrogate for social science. Weaver’s account of policy implications demonstrates this quite well.

 


What do we want? What is possible?


Posted by Terry

The right leaning media have been criticising the occupation at St Paul’s  in London for not being able to specify an alternative to the system they are against and, specifically, that their demands are poorly and inconsistently articulated. One possible response to this is that their objective is to keep the focus on the issues around the bankers’ responsibility for the economic collapse and the apparent immunity of the top 1% and their hangers-on and immediate collaborators to the consequences of their actions while the remaining 99% are bearing the financial and ideological brunt.  The occupiers’ actions provide a rallying point for discussion and further action and is drawing in ever larger numbers and organisations. The TUs are getting involved and there is even the possibility that Christians will form a defensive ring of prayer around the occupation to shield it from violent eviction!  The movement may not yet have a coherent set of ideas about an alternative society and how to get there but it is at the very least enabling and encouraging a space of dissent and resistance that leaves open a range of possibilities.

None-the-less, that discussion will sooner or later have to coalesce into a reasonably concrete vision of objectives and how to achieve them, in practice. It is difficult to over emphasise the considerable obstacles to doing this. I am currently working on some ideas about how to think about this and what the practical and political possibilities are. For the moment I will just list the conceptual resources I am starting to work with, in no particular order.

John Holloway’s ideas on Crack Capitalism and the possibilities for developing alternative modes of behaviour and ways of doing that resist reproducing the social relations of capital. Part of what I am doing is building on a critique of these ideas.

Zygmunt Bauman’s take on ‘liquid modernity’, the fact of irreducable uncertainty and what the role of sociology and socilogists should be.  This relates directly to his ideas on freedom ‘from’ and freedom ‘to’ and the possibilities of going beyond the naturalisation of the current system and promoting a dialogue, even a poly-logue, that makes thinking about and enabling alternatives that are emancipatory.

Slavoj Zizek’s view of what is possible as laid out in the Afterword –  Welcome to Interesting Times – of the paperback edition of Living in the End Times.

Norbert Elias’s ontology of ‘levels of integration’ and how, in a social developmental context, this creates increasingly far flung and dense networks of dependency and interdependency that help explain the relative lack of opportunity and power chances at the lower levels of integration (limited in autonomy, opportunity and mobility) and the relative autonomy and immunity of the higher levels of integration including, in Baumans’ terms, the free floating, trans-state and seemingly immune highly mobile global elites. It is difficult to see how much progress can be made towards a radical restructuring of society without taking these far flung networks of dependency into account.

I think to way forward for me will to be to produce a summary and critique of these thinkers ideas and then see to what extent some sort of synthesis may be of possible that is conceptually, empirically and politically useful. Maybe this is a project that could be conducted collaboratively in some way – perhaps via presentations, discussion and workshops in the sorts of spaces for resistance that are opening up?

 


Levels of integration, rioting and protest


Posted by Terry

Reading the introduction by Norbert Elias the  The Sociology of Community edited by Bell and Newby 1974. Richard Kilminster told me this is a recycling of an essay Elias wrote sometime before that is connected to his ideas on The Outsiders and the Established but explicitly is an application of his ideas on levels of integration. I think this is also illuminating on our current condition of burgeoning critique of our current state of affairs due to unregulated and dysfunctional capitalism but our lack of a way forward or any clear articulation of what needs to be done and to what ends. I will be making some notes here in due course on Zizek’s and Bauman’s take on this. It is a great shame Elias is no longer around to shed light on this but I think we an construct something along the lines of what he may have argued had he witnessed the Arab Spring, the the UK ‘consumerism by other means’ riots and the Occupy Wall Street movement spreading round the globe.

The nub of his argument is that as societies become more complex a higher level of integrations develops involving a restructuring of webs of interdependencies. The opportunities for relatively autonomous decision making and action in the old communities and localities become reduced and constrained as they become restructured as components of a lower level of integration. This is putting it in the most abstract terms but the important thing is to study how the resistance and instability is a consequence of this process. Although these are increasingly widespread networks of interdependencies the process does not produce an equal balance of power. The lower levels of integration become more dependent on the higher levels and are shaped, enabled and constrained by the higher levels that are much less dependent on any particular component of the lower level. This leads to a number of difficulties for members of the lower levels of integration trying to make changes and have a clear idea of what to do and to what ends. Firstly, they are in several crucial ways ‘constructed’ by the higher levels they are resisting . This can, for instance, mean that they conceptualise their predicament and its solutions in terms of the vocabulary and framework of the higher level and this reinforce it or at best modify it. This is s sort of intellectual colonisation or dependency. Secondly, the dependencies that restrict their freedoms ‘from’ and ‘to’  cannot be simply recast as an act of will. The new forms of autonomy desired cannot easily be disentangled and reconstituted form the complex webs of dependencies people are embedded in and embodied in them. There may be a nostalgic harping back to previous forms of local autonomy and living but the development of the systems of dependency we now inhabit cannot just be rewound.


Saramago quote #1


Posted by Terry

“And I would ask the political economists, the moralists, if they have already calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to wretchedness, to overwork, to demoralization, to infantilization, to despicable ignorance, to insurmountable misfortune, to utter penury, in order to produce one rich person.” José Saramago. The Notebook page 56 The Question


Postmodernism: from the cutting edge to the museum


Posted by Terry

Review article in the Guardian by Hari Kunzru Thursday 15 September 201. This offers a succint background to the books I am reading by Owen Hatherley - Militant Modernism and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain.

Postmodernism: from the cutting edge to the museum (full text)

The Sony building stands at the corner of Madison Avenue and 56th Street in midtown Manhattan. At 197m, it’s a little higher than its immediate neighbours, but there are at least 60 taller buildings in the city. It is an inoffensive, creamy colour. At ground level there’s a spectacular atrium. Yet when it was completed in 1984, it was considered the most shocking building in the world.

The reason is the top. You have to walk a block or so away to get a sense of it. The building, originally known after its first corporate owner, AT&T, is crowned by a broken pediment; a circular space has been carved out of the apex of the triangle which tops the façade. It’s a simple, rather beautiful gesture. It is also a huge act of betrayal by the architect and the most visible trace on the New York skyline of postmodernism, a cultural current that is the subject of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, a major new exhibition at the V&A.

Why betrayal? The architect was Philip Johnson, who in 1932 had curated an extraordinary architectural show at the Museum of Modern Art. Images and models of buildings by Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra and others led a generation of architects to make an absolute break with the styles of the past and embrace the tenets of modernism, chief among which was the idea that form should follow function. Johnson termed this new wave the “international style”, a name which stuck as the skylines of major cities (notably Chicago) were transformed by constructions of plate glass and structural steel, buildings which banished decoration, mere skin and bones enclosing volumes of space.

Initially a radically utopian architecture, dreaming of a rational future uncluttered by superstition and ornament, the international style had, by the 1970s, become a rather joyless orthodoxy. For every triumph of the movement, such as Mies and Johnson’s Seagram building or Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, there were 10 undistinguished tower blocks, whose indifference to their context seemed less an expression of universality than of the arrogance of planners. Britain suffered particularly badly, as shoddy system-built high-rises gave modernism a bad name from which it has never entirely recovered.

For the man who had brought the international style to North America to put an ornamental pediment on his building was like Mondrian deciding to put a vase of flowers in a corner of his black and white grid. The AT&T tower became known, sneeringly, as the Chippendale building, because it reminded observers of the ornamental broken pediments the 18th-century cabinetmaker often put on highboys and bookcases. A building that looked like a piece of furniture? It seemed trivialising, a tasteless joke.

But Johnson was not the only person finding his sense of humour. Suddenly serious architects were adding colour to their creations, making little historical references, nudges and winks. All sorts of things that had been off-limits came back: trompe l’oeil, vernacular, pastiche. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown published a theoretical book about the tackiest built environment in the world, the Las Vegas strip. They called it, provocatively, Learning from Las Vegas. The strip, they argued, with its riot of billboards and neon, was (literally) a place of signs rather than things, where the buildings were only a minor part of an environment of semiotic seductions, designed to be legible to a person travelling by at 35mph.

This is the essence of postmodernism: the idea that there is no essence, that we’re moving through a world of signs and wonders, where everything has been done before and is just lying around as cultural wreckage, waiting to be reused, combined in new and unusual ways. Nothing is direct, nothing is new. Everything is already mediated. The real, whatever that might be, is unavailable. It’s an exhilarating world, but uncanny too. You look around at your beautiful house and your beautiful wife and you ask yourself, like the narrator of the Talking Heads song: ‘Well, how did I get here?” After that, it’s only a short step to deciding that this is not your beautiful house and your beautiful wife at all. The world of signs is fast, liquid, delirious, disposable. Clever people approach it with scepticism. Sincerity is out. Irony is in. And style. If modernism was about substance, about serious design solving serious problems, postmodernism was all manner and swagger and stance.

The curators of the V&A show have sensibly decided to steer away from art and literature (which could fill a second exhibition), and to present postmodernism as a set of design strategies, visible across the spectrum from fashion to graphics to furniture. They have also cheekily periodised it, choosing a 20-year time frame, which they gleefully ignore when it suits them. The result is revelatory, a ground-breaking history of a recent cultural past that has, almost without us noticing, gone from the cutting edge to the museum.

For designers, postmodernism meant making material things that felt like signs of themselves. The Italian pranksters of the Memphis group defined the aesthetic of the late 70s and early 80s with household objects that looked as if they’d materialised from cartoons, absurdly juxtaposed simple forms presented in bright, artificial colours. LA-based Peter Shire created candy-coloured furniture that always seemed on the verge of retreating back into two-dimensionality. His Bel Air chair of 1982 is the very avatar of postmodern weightlessness, an object that could exist at any scale, at home by a pool, in an aquarium, at the bottom of a cocktail glass. But postmodernism, protean, ever hard to pin down, wasn’t just about a cartoon future. The taste for historical pastiche, for country kitchens and neo-Georgian kitsch, was also part of the same tendency. Laura Ashley, Merchant Ivory and the fake past of Poundbury are (whether Prince Charles knows it or not) just as postmodern, in their way, as the fashion designs of Rei Kawakubo or the graphic riot of Arata Isozaki’s Team Disney building.

If postmodernism could be fun and bright, it was also disturbing. In a friction-free world of signs, what happened to value? Nowhere did this question arise more forcefully than in Oliviero Toscani’s advertising campaigns for Benetton, in which deliberately-confrontational images of Aids patients and death row inmates were used to sell pastel-coloured knitwear. The cynicism of Toscani’s work seemed to suggest we were now living in the corporate world of Videodrome, David Cronenberg‘s 1983 horror film about a sleazy producer discovering an anonymous cable channel broadcasting extreme sexual violence. The relentless march of money across the cultural landscape of the 1980s, with figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring describing brief and tragic arcs, seemed to many a fundamental debasement of the idea of art. To others, it was just fun.

Fittingly, for a cultural moment where everyone appeared to be playing themselves, postmodern performers such as Grace Jones, Leigh Bowery and Klaus Nomi developed a style of self-presentation that, for the first time, floated free of human limitations. On MTV (on air 1981) and magazine pages designed with the new Apple Macs (on sale 1984) they appeared both more and less than human, like the replicants from Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner. Postmodern bodies often suggested machinery, as in the deadpan totalitarianism of the bands Kraftwerk and Devo. The most human of acts, such as singing and dancing, became infected with something robotic and unheimlich: David Byrne’s jerky dancing and oversized organisation-man suits, Laurie Anderson’s vocoder voice singing lullabies about Superman and big science, Boy George’s liquidation of gender, Madonna’s hyper-disciplined blonde bombshell, who seemed closer to the man-machines played by Arnold Schwarzenegger than the pop pin-ups of the previous generation. Jean-Paul Goude’s manipulated, post-produced photos of Grace Jones, her limbs elongated, her oiled skin suggesting chrome and spray paint, stand among the most powerful documents of the period. Jones was pointing the way towards something both troubling and exhilarating, something which as the 80s became the 90s, became codifed as the “posthuman”.

Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, the curators of the V&A show, point to the video for New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” as a paradigm of postmodern visual style. Its director, the New York artist Robert Longo, produced a palimpsest of decontextualised, pixellated imagery, incorporating a signature of his Men in the Cities series of images of contorted, falling figures dressed in business wear. Post 9/11 this is uncomfortable to watch, which makes it even more curious that Mad Men, the popular TV drama, alludes to Longo’s figures in its title sequence, which has a businessman falling past a façade that inescapably calls to mind the most famously absent international style buildings in Manhattan, the twin towers of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center.

For many, the events of 11 September signalled the death of postmodernism as an intellectual current. That morning it became clear that “hostility to grand narratives”, as Jean-François Lyotard defined it, was a minority pursuit, an intellectual Rubik’s cube for a tiny western metropolitan elite. It seemed most of the world still had some use for God, truth and the law, terms which they were using without inverted commas. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was widely ridiculed for declaring that the attacks signalled “the end of the age of irony”, but his use of the po-mo buzzword proved prescient. If irony didn’t vanish (though during the crushing literalism and faux-sincerity of the Bush-Blair war years it seemed like a rare and valuable commodity), postmodernism itself suddenly seemed tired and shopworn.

Use Google’s ngram viewer to look at the incidence of the word “postmodernism” in books since 1975 and you find a sharp rise, peaking in around 1997, then an equally sharp decline. Plot this against the use of the word “internet” and the comparison is startling. Almost unused before the mid-80s, “internet” overtakes “postmodernism” in 2000, and carries on rising. All avant-gardes are in the business of futurism. They make an attempt to inhabit the space they predict, and in so doing, they bring it into being. Postmodernism was, crucially, a pre-digital phenomenon. In retrospect, all the things that seemed so exciting to its adherents – the giddy excess of information, the flattening of old hierarchies, the blending of signs with the body – have been made real by the internet. It’s as if the culture was dreaming of the net, and when it arrived, we no longer had any need for those dreams, or rather, they became mundane, part of our everyday life. We have lived through the end of postmodernism and the dawning of postmodernity.