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What social psychologists call "the principle of superficiality versus depth" [1] has pervaded Western culture since at least the time of Plato. [2]
Socrates sought to convince his debaters to turn from the superficiality of a worldview based on the acceptance of convention to the examined life of philosophy, [3] founded (as Plato at least considered) upon the underlying Ideas. For more than two millennia, there was in the Platonic wake a general valorisation of critical thought over the superficial subjectivity that refused deep analysis. [4] The salon style of the Précieuses might for a time affect superficiality, and play with the possibility of treating serious topics in a light-hearted fashion; [5] but the prevailing western consensus firmly rejected elements such as everyday chatter [6] or the changing vagaries of fashion [7] as superficial distractions from a deeper reality.
By contrast, Nietzsche opened the modernist era with a self-conscious praise of superficiality: "What is required is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity!". [8]
His (still) preference for superficiality was however over-shadowed for most of the 20th century by modernism's full subscription to the depth/surface model, and to the privileging of the former over the latter. Frederic Jameson has highlighted four main modernist versions of the belief in a deeper reality - Marxist, psychoanalytic, existential, and semiotic - in each of which reality is understood to be concealed behind an inauthentic surface or façade. [9] Jameson contrast these models sharply with the lack of depth, the ahistoricity, the surface-focus and flatness of the postmodern consciousness, with its new cult of the image and the simulacrum. [10]
In the last third of the 20th century, Lyotard began challenging the Platonic view of a true meaning hidden behind surface as a theatrical world-view, insisting instead that sense manifestations had their own reality which necessarily impacted upon the purely verbal order of intelligibility. [11] Similarly, deconstruction has increasingly sought to undo the depth/surface hierarchy, proposing in ironic style that superficiality is as deep as depth. [12] The result has been the call to abandon the idea that behind appearances there is any ultimate truth to be found; [13] and in consequence the growing postmodern replacement of depth by surface, or by multiple surfaces. [14]
That process of substitution was well under way by the 1990s, when notoriously "surface was depth", [15] and in the new millennium has led to a state of what has been called hypervisibility: everything is on view. [16] In this new era of exposure [17] we are all submerged in what the psychoanalyst Michael Parsons has called "the totalist world where there is a horror of inwardness; everything must be revealed". [18]
If postmodernism's proponents welcomed the way a new transcendence of the surface /depth dichotomy allowed a fuller appreciation of the possibilities of the superficial [19] - the surface consciousness of the now, as opposed to the depths of historical time [20] - critics like J. G. Ballard object that the end-product is a world of "laws without penalties, events without significance, a sun without shadows": [21] of surface without depth. They see postmodern superficiality as a by-product of the false consciousness of global capitalism, where surface distractions, news, and entertainment supersaturate the zapping mind in such a way as to foreclose the possibility of envisioning any critical alternative. [22]
Almost all depth psychologies defy the postmodern to value depth over surface—to aim, in David Cooper's words, for "change from the depths of oneself upwards into the superficies of one's social appearance". [23] Debates may rage over whether to begin analysis at the surface or by way of deep interpretations, [24] but this is essentially a question of timing. Thus for example Jungians would highlight at the start of therapy what they call the persona-restoring phase as an effort to preserve superficiality, but would later optimally see the client moving from the surface to deeper emotion and creativity. [25]
Fritz Perls by contrast maintained that "the simplicity of the Gestalt approach is that we pay attention to the obvious, to the utmost surface. We don't delve into a region which we don't know anything about, into the so-called 'unconscious'". [26] A similar focus on the superficial has fuelled much of the Freud Wars of late modernity, in which, according to Jonathan Lear, "the real object of attack—for which Freud is only a stalking-horse—is the very idea that humans have unconscious motivation". [27] Given a choice of surface or depth—"are we to see humans as having depth, layers of meaning which lie beneath the surface of their own understanding?"—he asks: "Or are we to take ourselves as transparent to ourselves...to ignore the complexity, depth and darkness of human life"; [28] the postmodern bias remains towards superficiality.
Social psychology considers that in everyday life social processing veers between superficiality, where we rely on first impressions and immediate judgements, and a deeper form of processing in which we seek to understand the other person more fully. [29] In the ordinary course of life, we necessarily take others at face-value, [30] and use ideal types/stereotypes to guide our daily activities; while institutions too can rely on the superficial consensus of groupthink [31] to preclude deeper investigation.
Some circumstances however necessitate a shift from superficial to extensive processing. When things become serious, we must put more and deeper thought into understanding, leaving superficial judgements to cases where the stakes are low, not high. [32]
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse defined by an attitude of skepticism toward what it characterizes as the "grand narratives" of modernism, opposition to notions of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and emphasis on the role of ideology in maintaining systems of socio-political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naive realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. Thus, the postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.
Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical movement that arose in the second half of the 20th century as a critical response to assumptions allegedly present in modernist philosophical ideas regarding culture, identity, history, or language that were developed during the 18th-century Enlightenment. Postmodernist thinkers developed concepts like difference, repetition, trace, and hyperreality to subvert "grand narratives", univocity of being, and epistemic certainty. Postmodern philosophy questions the importance of power relationships, personalization, and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. Many postmodernists appear to deny that an objective reality exists, and appear to deny that there are objective moral values.
Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern.
Postmodernity is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. The idea of the postmodern condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state like regressive isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism.
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, gender relations, critique of economy, economics, social history, art, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his best known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard can be also seen as a critic of post-structuralism and had distanced himself from postmodernism.
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as epistemology and communication, the human body, modern art and postmodern art, literature and critical theory, music, film, time and memory, space, the city and landscape, the sublime, and the relation between aesthetics and politics. He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. Lyotard was a key personality in contemporary Continental philosophy and author of 26 books and many articles. He was a director of the International College of Philosophy founded by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt.
Proposed by Jean Baudrillard, the concept of hyperreality captures the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. This is more prominent in technologically advanced societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. It allows the merging of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR), and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI).
In analytical psychology, the shadow is an unconscious aspect of the personality that does not correspond with the ego ideal, leading the ego to resist and project the shadow. In short, the shadow is the self's emotional blind spot, projected ; e.g., trickster.
Depth psychology refers to the practice and research of the science of the unconscious, covering both psychoanalysis and psychology. It is also defined as the psychological theory that explores the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, as well as the patterns and dynamics of motivation and the mind. The theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and Alfred Adler are all considered its foundations.
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1980 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While the first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), was a critique of contemporary uses of psychoanalysis and Marxism, A Thousand Plateaus was developed as an experimental work of philosophy covering a far wider range of topics, serving as a "positive exercise" in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhizomatic thought.
French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism.
Post-postmodernism is a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism.
Historicity in philosophy is the idea or fact that something has a historical origin and developed through history: concepts, practices, values. This is opposed to the belief that the same thing, in particular normative institutions or correlated ideologies, is natural or essential and thus exists universally.
Father complex in psychology is a complex—a group of unconscious associations, or strong unconscious impulses—which specifically pertains to the image or archetype of the father. These impulses may be either positive or negative.
A simulacrum is a representation or imitation of a person or thing. The word was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god. By the late 19th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original. Literary critic Fredric Jameson offers photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, in which a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real thing. Other art forms that play with simulacra include trompe-l'œil, pop art, Italian neorealism, and French New Wave.
Popular culture is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of the practices, beliefs, and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a given point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. The primary driving force behind popular culture is mass appeal, and it is produced by what cultural analyst Theodor Adorno refers to as the "culture industry".
Repressive desublimation is a term, first coined by Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse in his 1964 work One-Dimensional Man, that refers to the way in which, in advanced industrial society (capitalism), "the progress of technological rationality is liquidating the oppositional and transcending elements in the “higher culture.” In other words, where art was previously a way to represent "that which is" from "that which is not," capitalist society causes the "flattening out" of art into a commodity incorporated into society itself. As Marcuse put it in One-Dimensional Man, "The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship."
Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery, was published by Duke University Press in 1992, though most of its contents had been featured in Mississippi Review in 1988.
Libidinal Economy is a 1974 book by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. The book was composed following the ideological shift of the May 68 protests in France, whereupon Lyotard distanced himself from conventional critical theory and Marxism because he felt that they were still too structuralist and imposed a rigid "systematization of desires". Drastically changing his writing style and turning his attention to semiotics, theories of libido, economic history and erotica, he repurposed Freud's idea of libidinal economy as a more complex and fluid concept that he linked to political economy, and proposed multiple ideas in conjunction with it. Alongside Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Libidinal Economy has been seen as an essential post-May 68 work in a time when theorists in France were radically reinterpreting psychoanalysis, and critics have argued that the book is free of moral or political orientation. Lyotard subsequently abandoned its ideas and views, later describing it as his "evil book".
Philosophy of architecture is a branch of philosophy of art, dealing with aesthetic value of architecture, its semantics and relations with development of culture.
