Post-Modernism

Post-modernists view virtual worlds as examples of post-modernism in action. Then again, they view everything like that, so virtual worlds aren’t necessarily particularly special in this regard. What makes them interesting to post-modernists (in the sense that anything at all is interesting to them) is that they illustrate certain post-modernist concepts more clearly than usual, and thus make good examples when explaining postmodernism to people who don’t get it.

Post-modernism ¹ only really arrived in the mid-1980s. As an intellectual movement, it has things to say about a very wide range of topics. Fundamentally, though, it’s about the meaning of meaning (or, rather, the lack of meaning of meaning). Human beings are entirely subjective; all objectivity is therefore illusory. Meaning is constructed from individually meaningless signs and symbols; the truth is hidden behind the image, but the truth itself is an image. Ultimately, human beings are constructs created by themselves; deconstruct them, and at best all you find is another layer to deconstruct.

As I’ve just explained it (which is very much only a brief summary), post-modernism is basically a “so what?” subject. It’s full of theory, the theory seems to apply, but it also undermines itself in a recursive fashion. In the end, you may understand it but so what? This is what: It enables people to look at things in a non-traditional manner, giving greater insight into what things mean and why they mean it. It’s incredibly easy to overdo, though.

Insofar as virtual worlds are concerned, their importance to post-modernism is that they clearly demonstrate two of its tenets (both due to Jean Baudrillard ²). The first of these is the individual as a simulacrum of the self: In virtual worlds, with their lack of physicality, how could the individual be anything else? The second is the concept of the hyperreal, where representation becomes simulation (Reality as a simulation of itself); virtual worlds, being simulations of reality as people both understand and desire it to be, can seem to them to be more real than reality ³.

It’s unsurprising, therefore, that there is a virtual world set up specifically to exemplify these theories in action: PMC2 ⁴, sponsored by the journal Postmodern Culture ⁵. Perhaps even less unsurprising is that many of the post-modern writings about virtual worlds concern this particular virtual world. Well, it makes a change from LambdaMOO.

Some papers (with great titles) that refer to virtual worlds as post-modernist icons are

• Mark Nunes, 1995 ⁶. This is a good statement of the post-modern line regarding virtual worlds, making useful reference to the “modern” that post-modern is “post.” Nunes sees virtual worlds as places that defy the unavoidability of modernist futures, allowing people to play with the assumptions that modernity bequeathed us concerning community, information, liberation, and self. They offer the chance to thwart inevitability by allowing us to redefine and rewrite whatever we choose.

• Jeffrey Fisher, 1997 ⁷. Fisher takes viewpoint that cyberspace is not the equivalent of medieval paradise that many people seemed to think it was (and he wrote this before The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace was published). Virtual worlds allow individuals to re-create themselves and to archive that re-creation ⁸; thus, they can transform people. Virtual worlds are not universally available to everyone, though, nor can they ever be: Although they can transform people, they can’t transform everyone because not everyone has (nor ever will have) access to them. There are thus real social costs to a virtual world existence.

• Troy Whitlock, 1994 ⁹. A concerted and deliberate example of post-modernism disappearing up its own backside. Whitlock set up a player class, “terrorist,” in the dying days of PMC-MOO. Every worst post-modernist nightmare ensued as the consequences of post-modernist theories came back to bite the theorists—as a legitimate example of their theories in action. Deconstructivists were deconstructed; self-reference was used as a weapon against self-reference. Amusing though this is, it makes many serious points in the detail. A splendid illustration of how Reality always wins, even against hyperreality.

• Chip Morningstar, 1993 ¹⁰. This is one of my favorite papers related to virtual worlds, written by a pioneer of the subject. It’s a wonderful cutting-through of academic weed to find the ideas that flower at the center of post-modernism. Chip takes a marvelous, pragmatic approach, pointing out what’s bogus about post-modernism as it is applied to virtual worlds (and everything else), and what’s valuable (which isn’t a lot, but neither is it nothing). It’s a magnificent dose of real reality to counter the hyperreal reality of post-modernist thought. After reading this, you need never feel daunted by anyone who renormalizes the phenomenology of narrative space through intersubjective cognitive strategy again.