Painting Postmodernism Green

(One day I'll get around to formatting this correctly....)

I am going to argue that green politics and green-ness
generally is among the most quintessential of
post-modern phenomena, even near to being
postmodernism itself. I'll also further pursue what
greens should do about it. But first I think we have to
clear up what we each really mean by "postmodernism"
or what we define it as. No wonder it engenders so
much confusion and mystification when so many of its
critics or proponents wont first establish exactly
what it is they are (or think they are) talking about.

Re: >postmodernism is a bunch of academics, artists,
media brats and pop >musicians doing weird things
with ideas no one understands, cultural >technologies
everyone is afraid of or insidious yank pop culture
mind rot. > >a vaguely defined style of architecture,
philosophy and video clip decor > >Postmodernism
appears as a set of descriptions of surface details,
>which are either celebrated or denounced, depending
on ones taste

As well as the above, I've heard postmodernism
defined as a number of  things including a feminist
rewriting of his-story or a sort of explosion  of
cultural polytheism and new multiplicity of
viewpoints and ideologies  (many of which however
appear to be rather backward looking).. Most seem  to
beg the question of why they first came into existence
- what was the  actual postmodern *condition* that
gave rise to postmodern phenomena?

I'm offering a definition of modernism as a process
(and philosophy and  ideology) of domination of nature
and matter itself by way of scientific  method,
reaching its fullest expression in 18th-20thC
industrialism.

Postmodernism is the actuality and
conscious/cultural realisation of the
conclusion/failure/success/impasse/exhaustion
(whichever you prefer)  of modernism. The realisation
that conquest cannot go on forever. That banishing,
penetrating the riddle of nature leaves us facing only
the riddle  of technology, and we ourselves dominated
by the technology of that  modernist project of
domination. We encounter the knowledge that progress
reaches a point where it ceases to be progress. That if
you  reach the top of a hill and keep pushing, you only
roll down the other side. This is certainly what *my*
reading of Adorno was all about.

To link what I've tried to define as the post-modern
*condition* (ie an  environmental crisis, a crisis of
direction) to postmodern *phenomena*  let us look
first at what has happened in the arts since the
abstractionist/purist/eventually reductionist
tendencies of modern art took us very quickly from
cubism to the white square on the white  background.
What began to happen later and became most obvious
during  the short-lived "rebirth" of painting in the 80's
was the rise of the  critic. This amounted to a palace
revolution in the art world where  critics became
more important than the artists. Critics started to
write about each other instead of about artists.. There
followed a  counter insurgency on the part of artists
who chose to become critics  themselves through acts
of histrionics (publicly acting out the role of  artist
more so than simply being one), appropriation from the
past etc  and it began to be said that originality was
dead or irrelevant, plagiarism  was hip and there was
nothing left for culture to do but reprocess, chew  its
cud as it were.

The point is that when the forward motion of the
culture becomes untenable and begins to break down,
so does consensus and everyone becomes a critic
(there are even reluctant or unconscious critics who
have no choice in looking for where to turn but back to
the past for clues as to where things went wrong). The
apparent multiplicity and pluralism in postmodernism
is actually united in its being, at root, some form or
other of critique or review. (Postmodern theory makes
mention of a "post-critical" state but this isn't the
place to try and  deal with the semantics of that...
though who do you think turns out such ideas other
than a bunch of critics??)

Green-ness and green politics seems to me to be,
again, the quintessential  cultural reaction to the
postmodern condition in scientific and political-
economy terms. Certainly the old left doesn't fill this
space as it was in no  small part the dialectical
synthesis (sorry) of the antipathy of east-west
politics that drove the whole military-industrialist
project of the 20thC. I  will not attempt to place the
"new left" anywhere as to me it seems far too
slippery and at least superficially diverse a thing to
define (in this sense  it certainly displays postmodern
tendencies or afflictions? It did actually  make
interesting inroads into art criticism though, eg: John
Berger's "Ways  of Seeing").

Green-ness meanwhile is (or was) a pure
uncompromising critique of modernist  industrialist
politics. It has spat upon the left as often as the right.
In its  most extreme and naive forms it hungers for
the past (even for lost innocence?), it reviles the very
concept of progress, it is puritanically
anti-materialist, anti-centralist, anti-industrialist
etc etc. Obviously it  has matured and moved beyond
this primal absolutist stage but I'll dwell on that
elsewhere.

Anyway, so much for defining my terms...

Re: >This last is the crucial determinate here: people
react to green issues >because they have seen them on
TV. >The green movement has had >influence out of all
proportion to its actual organisational size because of
>television. This comes in part from a conscious use
of TV politics. >... which gets hundreds of thousands,
>sometimes millions of people thinking that the
greens are probably right >through directly invading
the terrain of television.

I must take issue with a lot the article's postulating
as if the "green  movement" is something that just up
and invented itself. Rather it was  created by the
"postmodern condition" as I have described it and far
from  people reacting to green issues because they are
on TV, they are on TV  because people react to them.
They are news because they are the natural
inescapable concerns of a significant growth within
the global mass  consciousness. Green organisations
grew out of it as an articulate  extension/expression
of those concerns.

However it is at this point that I swing more into line
with the original  thrust of the article in that
activists of all kinds must come to grips with  media
politics because long range communications media
like TV and radio  are the language in which that mass
consciousness relates. They are the  actual media via
which it has come into being.

While conscious of the media space as something to
invade, the greens with whom this conf is concerned
have been afflicted by an aversion to debates and "just
talking" (even tho they do an awful lot of it amongst
themselves) and a subsequent failure to recognise the
very verbal nature of TV as well as radio and print.
They suffer resultingly from a lack of verbal
ammunition.

This is manifest in the current lack of rigour (or lack
of anything) in Green policy development, due to an
apparent general lack of interest in developing it. An
electoral organisation is useful in that it can exploit
the interests of media and the opportunities it offers
*at election times*. To me its not about winning votes
or seats or whatever so much as wedging an opening
into the media shitfight for political green thought,
beyond the apolitical inoffensiveness practiced  by the
more conservative organisations, that make the
co-opting of green ideas and terminology so much
easier for the economic mainstream.

Now I know this ignores the broader cultural warfare
suggested by Wark's article, but for a specifically
political wing of the green movement, ie "The Greens",
a good policy base on the political questions of the
time (which will be identified by or via the media of
course) should be seen as useful because it is
(counter)cultural material that can be stuffed into
every hole the media universe has open to us, into
whatever context it can possibly be squeezed/warped/
stretched/compressed.

Yes, greens could could see themselves more as media
activists, "The Greens" being those who specifically
deal in political-economic material taking advantage
of opportunities that present themselves at election
times and through elected members. Debate is the
'medium within the media' by which media decrees
(such as who wins the election or what is or isn't an
ecological catastrophe) form. A lack of hard (and
innovative?) policy ammunition means, when
opportunities for debate arise, that we are left with
only the usual tired moralising.

Re: >Just like in the 60s, every image and slogan which
is charged with political >meaning, arising out of
events and struggles and recorded in popular >memory,
ends up as a jingle. 'Revolution' became a way to sell
panty-hose. >Freedom' was somehow steered away
from association with, say, civil >rights and
connected up via expensive marketing to flared jeans
and roll >your own tobacco. Greenness will, likewise,
become a commodified parody >of itself. Unless green
politics keeps up the media side of its game and
>plays these postmodern games as well, if not better
than the enemy > >The only way to avoid complete
co-option of a politically charged >vocabulary and
image-repertoire is to keep moving, keep making it up

There is also the option of counter-attack. It is
possible to capture, to appropriate the language of
"the enemy", its psychological terminology, its verbal
weaponry. I have yet to witness greens working to this
degree of sophistication, most seem yet to come to
grips with the co-option process that has gone on
since green concerns came centre stage in the 80's (it
has gone far deeper than green labelling, taking form
as, or within, activist organisations themselves).

A case in point is the invention of the term "economic
rationalism". This is as much a label that can be stuck
on almost anything as is the term "environmentally
friendly". They have simply stuck it onto the
concepts/policies of deregulation and the wisdom of
the market where there is absolutely no intrinsic
reason for it to be stuck at all. The
green/left/anarcho-what-have-you forces have
swallowed the bait and instead of attacking the label
first, have allowed it to stick and found themselves
placed in a position where they have to argue against
something called economic rationalism, whereupon it
becomes the easiest thing in the world to accuse them
of being irrational. This is precisely what Sen. Peter
Walsh had to say not long ago "What do they want us to
be, economically irrational?"

What needs to be done is to attack the legitimacy of
the label, just as we would the legitimacy of
undeserved "environmentally friendly" labels. The
economic rationalist label has to be torn off of
capitalist economics. This could easily be done by
sticking it onto green economics! The simple act of
greens coming out and saying they are
converted/sworn to the cause of economic
rationalism, without any change at all to radical green
policies of course (ie it's *these* that are
economically rational), could serve to destroy this
powerful piece of bullshit linguistic magic or even
steal it away for the use of greens. An alternative
might be to come up with something called "ecological
rationalism" but I think this would be less effective.

Finally, it's interesting to observe the possibility of
Bill Mollison becoming a TV star. I heard about six
callers on Margaret Throsby's show (2BL) this morning
call in to nominate him for "person of the year", right
up there with Gorbachev and Fred Hollows! If so
inclined (probably not), he's in a position to follow on
the apparent success of "Global Gardener" with
lectures, chat show appearances etc etc. I was just
wondering if we might get to witness the
postmodernisation of Bill Mollison! ... where
permaculture becomes a consumable, where you don't
have to go out and get the garden going because you
can buy the "feeling" of permaculture in a t-shirt
instead, just like you can find the feeling of Green
inside a bottle of shampoo. This is what postmodern
analysts call simulacra - the simulated reality or
essence of a thing or experience - an experience you
can have of something without it even existing - the
experience you have when you're not having an
experience...

Anyway...

David Nerlich 13/12/91


Re postmodernism again, I think in my earlier
response I *was* relating  Dhanu's 2nd definition of
postmodernism (grand historical narratives etc) to
green-ness. I think the apparent contradictions in this
become clearer when you lay it out on a time scale and
see that green-ness is two things or two phases of
one thing. There is a postmodern critical phase
damning all the mistakes of the past and working to
repress and inhibit their continuance (ie much of the
work Greenpeace does) and then there is a
new-modernist phase of developing new technologies,
economics and culture (ie much of the work
Permaculture does). They both serve each other. The
former breaking down ideological material and
political space and mulching it up for use by the
latter. The latter lending some purpose and credibility
to the former.

I think the political "Greens" here try to cover both
phases, though I'm not sure it's done as well as it
possibly could be. I think the formation of localised
political units is part of the latter(ist) phase, but in
some ways is undermined by being too far ahead of its
time and lacks it own support mechanisms to bring the
intended inheritance about - ie postmodern
media-based propaganda against centralism etc.

Instead of the old modernism of technological
expansion we are trying to develop a modernism of
technological refinement. That's not postmodern, its
new-modern, sure. An optimal rather than maximal
modernism. I don't disagree with any of Dhanu's
definitions of postmodernism - the thing is you can't
really disagree with anybody's. I think postmodernism
and recent philosophy generally is less of a quest for
truth than a political battleground, a war of ideas. To
anyone still mystified by the postmodern concept I
would say, ask not "what does it mean?" but rather
"how can I exploit it?"