ABSTRACT
In The Postmodern Condition, a book which originates from a request by the Conseil des Universités of the Government of Quebec to produce a report on knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) famously argues that postmodernism can be defined as an “incredulity towards metanarratives” – that is to say, the grand narratives of truth and reason are no longer believed in, or regarded, as universals, and are replaced by local expressions, little stories or narratives (les petit recits), that do not attempt to totalize or oppress others. Canadian media guru and critic Marshall McLuhan recognized in The Medium is the Massage that the shift from metanarratives to les petit recits was in part technological, generated by the move from a print culture to one of “electric circuitry” (63). The anti-hierarchical screen or televisual world of postmodernism – surface rather than depth, democratic horizontality rather than vertical hierarchy – is also one which critiques what theorists call “phallogocentrism”: a worldview dominated by the law of the father, the symbolic phallus, and the Christian “logos” or Word. In Canadian postmodernism, Nietzsche’s death of God is translated into the death of the father, whereby deconstructive father quests, from Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands (1975) to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), probe deeply into myth and traditional narrative structures, revealing new non-patriarchal modes of being. The idioms of popular culture now replace or interweave with the centuries-old canonical strata of “great works” and Biblical intertexts, with the additional sense (or sensation) that the new media will be forever generating more information, based upon the infinite code of fashion changes, sampling, cutting and pasting, permutational logic, and randomly generated narrative units, to name just a few informational processes. As McLuhan says, “Information pours upon us, instantaneously, and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition” (63).
