Giving Up Hope

Look at these two logos; one is the logo of the Norwich School of Art (seen after attending their degree congregation last week) and the other is a logo from a secular wedding I attended yesterday (or ‘wedfest’ as it was named). The two logos do seem to have a passing resemblance: tangled, scribbled, looping lines; splashes of separated elements; lack of symmetry; they are essentially a chaotic profusion of marks conveying a mood of frenetic incoherent activity. The wedfest logo vaguely reminds me of the pile of detritus collected after sweeping the floors and paths of the Old Castle where I work: string, paper, dust, the odd bird carcass (killed by the cats), and miscellaneous plant matter. The meaning or story behind these logos is difficult to decipher. But are they intended to have meaning? Perhaps not: they connote and celebrate postmodern styles, if not content. Postmodernist art strives to break free of all obliging constraints of coherence, unambiguous meaning, and even the aethestic process itself. However, there is no escape from Sherlock Holmes’ science of deduction: “From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of the Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other” says Holmes. If nothing at all postmodernism has at least alerted us to the complexity of life, its eclectism, its mish mash of elements that at first sight do not cohere. But in spite of it all Holmes’ logician could tell us a thing or two about the splashes of paint, or the sweepings from a floor. Moreover, the overriding symmetries relating the two logos shown here give the lie to the postmodernist dream of an overarching and thoroughgoing irrationalism.

For those who embrace the great contradiction of postmodernism as a doctrine with content rather than just a style, life is regarded as a constant experiment, a constant breaking down of old barriers, assumptions and laws. All in good enlightenment tradition were it not for the fact in philosophical postmodernism experiment is not just an end in itself, but is, in fact THE END. For the absolute antifoundationalist life is an experiment with no hope of finding a coherent conclusion. “Since I gave up hope I feel a lot better,” sings Steve Taylor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Taylor) in one of his songs parodying the postmodern mindset.