Postmodernism

A related term is postmodernity, which refers to the state of things after modernity. This includes a focus on the sociological, technological, and other conditions that distinguish the Modern Age from what is thought to have arisen thereafter. Postmodernism, on the other hand, denotes intellectual, cultural, artistic, academic, and philosophical responses to the condition of postmodernity. Another related term is postmodern, an adjective used to describe either a condition of, or a response to, postmodernity. For example, one may refer to postmodern architecture, postmodern literature, postmodern culture, postmodern philosophy, &c.

Table of contents

1 Brief outline of postmodernism 2 History of postmodernism 2.1 Early usage of the term 3 Postmodernism in art 4 Postmodernism in economics 5 Postmodernism in architecture 6 Postmodernism in literature 7 Deconstruction 8 Postmodernism in philosophy 9 Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism 10 Postmodernism and its critics 11 Further Reading 12 See also 13 External links

Brief outline of postmodernism

Postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define, in large part because it is defined in the negative. Before understanding postmodernism, one must first understand modernism and modernity, which themselves are not easy to define. From the postmodern perspective, modernity was a continuation of the Enlightenment, a striving for unity, universality, certainty, and high-minded truths. These truths defined a widely-accepted boundary between what was the "center" or "focus" of society and what was the "margin" or "periphery". Beginning in the mid to late 20th century, society became increasingly diverse, pluralistic, and fragmentary. A concern of postmodernism is exploring that fragmentation, and playfully undermining the rigid boundaries between the "center" and the "margin".

Thus, artistic and philosophical works of postmodernism tend to embrace fluid and multiple perspectives, eclecticism, irony, the breaking of barriers, the reversal of roles, and the conflation of opposites. Given a choice between two dichotomous ideals, works of postmodernism tend to emphasize the ideal that in modernism was considered subordinate or inferior. For example, works of postmodernism often favor matter over mind, machine over man, writing over speech, form over substance, surface over depth, feminine over masculine, derivative over original, kitsch over fine art, and localism over universalism.

While postmodernism is distinct from nihilism and relativism (which are often considered to be forms of modernism), postmodernism shares with them a distrust toward totalizing claims about truth, ethics, or beauty. Utopian ideals of universally applicable truths or aesthetics give way to provisional, decentered, local petit recits which, rather than referencing an underlying universal truth or aesthetic, point only to other ideas and cultural artifacts, themselves subject to interpretation and re-interpretation. However, where nihilism and relativism are serious about this distrust and decentering, the decentering in postmodernism is more self-consciously ironic, as nihilism and relativism are viewed, themselves, as attempts to describe the world at its "center" and in its totality.

Postmodernists often express a profound skepticism regarding the Enlightenment quest to uncover the nature of truth and reality. Perhaps the most striking examples of this skepticism are to be found in the works of French cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard. In his book Simulations, he contends that social 'reality' no longer exists in the conventional sense, but has been supplanted by an endless procession of simulacra. The mass media, and other forms of mass cultural production, generate constant re-appropriation and re-contextualisation of familiar cultural symbols and images, fundamentally shifting our experience away from 'reality', to 'hyperreality'.

Postmodern thought owes much to its allied school, post-structuralism (or deconstruction) which sought to destabilise the relationship between language and the objects to which it referred. This has manifested itself in the arts as decontextualised 'cut-ups' of sound and visual media. Along this line, it is significant that the beginning of postmodern architecture is not considered to be the construction of any great building, but the destruction of the modernist Pruitt-Igoe housing project (see Minoru Yamasaki).

Postmodernism has applications in many modern academic and non-academic disciplines; philosophy, theology, art, architecture, film, television, music, sociology, fashion, technology, literature, and communications are all heavily influenced by postmodern trends and ideas, and are rigorously scrutinised from postmodern perspectives.

Postmodernism has usually been understood as a phenomenon taking place primarily within Western countries. However, theorists have argued for the existence of non-Western national varieties such as Russian postmodernism [1], as well as Japanese, Latin American, and other variants.

In Western countries, postmodern culture is ubiquitous and permeates every aspect of our daily lives. From film and television programs to political personas and our daily clothes, postmodernity, it has been stated, "is the very air we breathe". (Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols).

Note: "post-modern" tends to be used by critics, "postmodern" by supporters. This may be because postmodern is considered merely a symbol and its meaning (as obtained through simple linguistic analysis) can be ignored.

History of postmodernism

Postmodernism was first identified as a theoretical discipline in the 1980s, but as a cultural movement it predates them by many years. Exactly when modernism began to give way to postmodernism is difficult to pinpoint, if not simply impossible. Some theorists reject that such a distinction even exists, viewing postmodernism, for all its claims of fragmentation and plurality, as still existing within a larger 'modernist' framework. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas is a strong proponent of this view.

The theory gained some of its strongest ground early on in French academia. In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard wrote a short but influential work The Postmodern Condition : a report on knowledge. Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes (in his more post-structural work) are also strongly influential in postmodern theory. Postmodernism is closely allied with several contemporary academic disciplines, most notably those connected with sociology. Many of its assumptions are integral to feminist and post-colonial theory.

Some identify the burgeoning anti-establishment movements of the 1960s as the earliest trend out of cultural modernity toward postmodernism.

Tracing it further back, some identify its roots in the breakdown of Hegelian idealism, and the impact of both World Wars (perhaps even the concept of a World War). Heidegger and Derrida were influential in re-examining the fundamentals of knowledge, together with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his philosophy of action, Soren Kierkegaard's and Karl Barth's important fideist approach to theology, and even the nihilism of Nietzsche's philosophy. Michel Foucault's application of Hegel to thinking about the body is also identified as an important landmark. While it is rare to pin down the specific origins of any large cultural shift, it is fair to assume that postmodernism represents an accumulated disillusionment with the promises of the Enlightenment project and its progress of science, so central to modern thinking.

The movement has had diverse political ramifications: its anti-ideological insights appear conducive to, and strongly associated with, the feminist movement, racial equality movements, homosexual rights movements, most forms of late 20th century anarchism, even the peace movement and various hybrids of these in the current anti-globalization movement. Unsurprisingly, none of these institutions entirely embraces all aspects of the postmodern movement, but reflect or, in true postmodern style, borrow from some of its core ideas.

Early usage of the term

In an essay From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context, [1] Ihab Hassan points out a number of instances in which the term postmodernism was used before the term became popular:

• John Watkins Chapman, an English salon painter, in the 1870s, to mean Post-Impressionism.
• Federico de Onís, 1934, to mean a reaction against the difficulty and experimentalism of modernist poetry. (The term was postmodernismo)
• Arnold Toynbee, in 1939, to mean the end of the "modern," Western bourgeois order dating back to the seventeenth century.
• Bernard Smith, in 1945, to mean the movement of Socialist Realism in painting
• Charles Olson, during the 1950s,
• Irving Howe and Harry Levin, in 1959 and 1960, respectively, to mean a decline in high modernist culture.

Postmodernism in art

Postmodernist art may be seen as a reaction to the reductionism and abstraction of Modernism.

Where modernists desired to unearth universals or the fundamentals of art, postmodernism aims to unseat them, to embrace diversity and contradiction. A postmodern approach to art thus rejects the distinction between 'low' and 'high' forms. It rejects rigid genre boundaries and favours eclecticism, the mixing of ideas and forms. Similarly, it promotes parody, irony, and playfulness, commonly referred to as "jouissance" by certain postmodern theorists. Unlike modern art, postmodern art does not approach this fragmentation as somehow faulty or undesirable, but rather celebrates it. As the gravity of the search for underlying truth is relieved, it is replaced with 'play'. As postmodern icon David Byrne, and his band Talking Heads said: 'Stop making sense'.

Andy Warhol is an early example of postmodern art in action, with his appropriation of common popular symbols and "ready-made" cultural artefacts, bringing the previously mundane or trivial onto the previously hallowed ground of 'high art'.

See also: Postmodern music

Postmodernism in economics

In economics, Postmodernism refers to multinationalist, consumer-based capitalism, as opposed to the monopoly capitalism associated with modernism through the first half of the 20th century, or market capitalism before that. Some echo Marxism in arguing that the shift in mode and technology of production may have precipitated or at least emphasized the change to modernism and then to postmodernism.

Postmodernism in architecture

As with many cultural movements, one of postmodernism's most pronounced and earliest ideas can be seen in architecture. The functional, mostly bland forms and spaces of the modernist movement are replaced by unapologetically bold aesthetics; styles collide, form is adopted for its own sake, and new ways of viewing familiar styles and space abound.

Classic examples of modern architecture are the Empire State building or the Chrysler building. A classic example of post-modernist architecture is the ATT building in New York, which, like modernist architecture, is a skyscraper relying on steel beams and with lots of windows — but, unlike modern architecture, it borrows elements from classical (Greek) style. Post-modern buildings are usually not so grand and imposing as modern skyscrapers; they are more playful, and, often through the use of mirrored glass that reflects the sky and surrounding buildings, call attention to their environment rather than to themselves.

Postmodern architects include: Philip Johnson (later works), John Burgee, Robert Venturi, Ricardo Boffil

Postmodernism in literature

In some ways, it can be said that postmodern literature does not so much set itself against modernist literature, as develop and extend the style, and make it self-conscious and ironic. Both modern and postmodern literature represented a break from 19th century realism, in which narrative told a story from an "objective" or "omniscient" point of view. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explored subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness (for modernist examples, see the "stream of consciousness" styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce). In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explored fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction (for modernist examples, see Woolfe, and the works of Swedish dramatist August Strindberg and the Italian author Luigi Pirandello).

Unlike postmodern literature, however, modernist literature saw fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis. In postmodern literature, however, this crisis is avoided. The tortured, isolated anti-heroes of, say, Knut Hamson or Samuel Beckett, and the nightmare world of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, make way in postmodernist writing for the playfully deconstructed and self-reflexive narrators of novels by John Fowles, John Barth, or Julian Barnes. Meanwhile, authors such as Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon in the novel Gravity's Rainbow, satirise paranoid system-building of the kind associated, by postmodernists, with Enlightenment modernity.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction was a tool of postmodernism that was itself constructed by the philosopher and textual artist Jacques Derrida. He played with words, putting them together with unique combinations of punctuation to make points about, in essence, how meaningless words are and the ways in which we give them meaning. The term deconstruction itself is Destruct + Construct. By analyzing an idea and breaking it into pieces, you are simultaneously asserting its existence. If it did not exist and was not of importance, you would not be analyzing it. Also, you are in the process of defining it and reifying its existence as you name its pieces. Most people use deconstruction simply to mean the analysis of the binaries within an idea. Understanding that this analysis recreates the binaries is more difficult to grasp.

Postmodernism in philosophy

Many figures in the 20th century philosophy of mathematics are identified as "postmodern" due to their rejection of mathematics as a strictly neutral point of view. Some figures in the philosophy of science, especially Thomas Samuel Kuhn and David Bohm, are also so viewed. Some see the ultimate expression of postmodernism in science and mathematics in the cognitive science of mathematics, which seeks to characterize the habit of mathematics itself as strictly human, and based in human cognitive bias.

Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism

In terms of frequently cited works, postmodernism and post-structuralism overlap quite significantly. Some philosophers, such as Francois Lyotard, can legitimately be classified into both groups. This is partly due to the fact that both modernism and structuralism owe much to the Enlightenment project.

Structuralism has a strong tendency to be scientific in seeking out stable patterns in observed phenomena - an epistemological attitude which is quite compatible with Enlightenment thinking, and incompatible with postmodernists. At the same time, findings from structuralist analysis carried a somewhat anti-Enlightenment message, revealing that rationality can be found in the minds of 'savage' people, just in forms differing from those that people from 'civilized' societies are used to seeing. Implicit here is a critique of the practice of colonialism, which was partly justified as a 'civilizing' process by which wealthier societies bring knowledge, manners, and reason to less 'civilized' ones.

Post-structuralism, emerging as a response to the structuralists' scientific orientation, has kept the cultural relativism in structuralism, while discarding the scientific orientations.

One clear difference between postmodernism and poststructuralism is found in their respective attitudes towards the demise of the project of the Enlightenment: post-structuralism is fundamentally ambivalent, while postmodernism is decidedly celebratory.

Another difference is the nature of the two positions. While post-structuralism is a position in philosophy, encompassing views on human beings, language, body, society, and many other issues, it is not a name of an era. Post-modernism, on the other hand, is closely associated with "post-modern" era, a period in the history coming after the modern age.

Postmodernism and its critics

Charles Murray, a strong critic of postmodernism, defines the term:

"By contemporary intellectual fashion, I am referring to the constellation of views that come to mind when one hears the words multicultural, gender, deconstruct, politically correct, and Dead White Males. In a broader sense, contemporary intellectual fashion encompasses as well the widespread disdain in certain circles for technology and the scientific method. Embedded in this mind-set is hostility to the idea that discriminating judgments are appropriate in assessing art and literature, to the idea that hierarchies of value exist, hostility to the idea that an objective truth exists. Postmodernism is the overarching label that is attached to this perspective." [1]

This antipathy of postmodernists towards modernism, and their consequent tendency
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