Postmodernism

connacht100

can anyone give me a simple and easy definition of what postmodernism is about? thanks

Zillah

No, they can't, largely because postmodernism is the greatest load of ambiguous **** this side of 1900. I did my thesis on it, so trust me, a simplistic definition would not be an accurate one.

First of all, we must put it in context. A very simple way of looking at cultural expression over the last few hundred years goes like this: Romance -> Realism -> Modernism -> Postmodernism.

Romance being a whimsical affair filled with fantasy elements with magic and grandiose notions. It's about idealising or escaping reality. Stories about things like King Arthur would be romance.

Realism being the form of expression that maintains that there is an objective reality that can be captured, controlled or understood. The invention of the camera was a big moment for realists.

Modernism is where is starts to get murky. Putting numbers on these things is hard but we're looking at a period from perhaps 1900 to 1960, but you'll never pick dates that someone won't disagree with. Modernism is a bit of a fusion of the previous two; the approach to life that maintains that progress through science and new methods must result in universal benefits, that such is desirable and potentially inevitable, that the world can be known and that objective moral standards exists. Superman, square sky scrapers, urban work ethic...that sort of stuff.

Post Modernism is basically when people start looking back on all of this shit and deciding that those idiots were far too restrained by their own rules, biases and fundamental assumptions (especially Modernism and the assumption that it is inherently a good/worthy thing). Something that can be described as postmodern would be something that knowingly throws out previous conventions, or keeps them in for specific reasons, or refers to things that have gone in the past knowing that they make no sense without that context. Pretty much anything that shows a deliberate expression of the social context in which it is produced could be described as postmodern.

And as confusing as that sounds, it's still barely the tip of the iceberg. If you're asking out of curiosity then roll with what I've described. If you need to understand properly for college or something, then just keep reading and reading different cultural theorists on the subject and you'll eventually get your own intuitive grasp of what its all about.

experiMental

Postmodernism is really a minor rejection of modernism. It tries to fill in the vacuum left by modernism.

Joe1919

Postmodernism is not a theory because it rejects any idea of theory or 'grand narritive'. It rejects philosophy and reason itself to some extent and refuses to allow itself to be tied down or defined as this would be contradicting its own terms. 'isms' are all rubbish so to speak. There is nothing beyond the text......
Postmoderism may refuse even to argue its own case, as in engaging in argument, one is subscribing to the idea that there is reason and some absolute right/wrong beyond our own measure of life.....

nyarlothothep

I did my thesis on it too 2 years ago, the complexity of the subject was to say the least a bit torturous though the economic side of it was interesting. If you're looking at economic postmodernism I think it gets less bullsh1tty.

So far as I can remember postmodernity in a cultural sense represents the breakdown of modernist grand narratives such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the emancipation of the rational subject or the hermeneutics of meaning. Postmodernism refutes these grand narratives which are also definable as master narratives in which man acquires sublime meaning in his conquest of nature. Any discourse is characterized as modern if it seeks legitimation through one of these grand narratives. Also the distinction between high and low art goes out the window.

Also Baudrillard talks about simulacra. Or something to that effect. He states that the representation of reality is substituted by the representation of signifiers for reality in a simulation of non-reality that is hyper real. The element of abstraction in representational models is negated by this systemic state. The real is divisible to the operations of the system where it can be manipulated and re-produced in whatever way the system deems fit. Thus the real in its conflation with signifiers for the real becomes hyper real. He says that simulation fundamentally confuses the boundaries between the real and the imaginary.

However many any of the claims concerning postmodern culture are deeply problematic. Arguments focusing on its relations to modernism attest to this. Modernist forms continue to exist within the postmodern cultural realm. It has been argued that postmodernism accounts for the decline of all meta narratives yet this is a meta narrative in itself. Moreover, meta narratives continue to persist although they are affected by new trends in society. The idea that our reality is completely mediated is also refutable. It is still the case that our perception of reality is not defined purely by simulacra but that it is also informed by direct experience and other factors of reality construction. The notion that the boundaries between popular culture and high culture have broken down is undermined by the fact that we can still distinguish between them in addition to distinguishing between modernist and postmodernist cultures. The alteration of spatial and temporal relations by new technologies is not a new historical phenomenon.

Economically Postmodernity is distinguished by flows of capital, labour, commodities, information and images which are in part regulated by particular spatio-temporal conditions. The core of post organized capitalism is located in global cities and transnational firms in addition to the communication and business agencies which service them. It is constituted by the key demands for informational and communicational conduits.

Markets and hierarchies are interlinked. Globalization has resulted in the increased power of transnationals over national product markets. Moreover, they are also “hollowed out.” The proliferation of disintegrated sectors such as business services, finance service and telecommunications are informed by the centralized power of transnationals.

and stuff...

There is so much to read up on in this subject.

DadaKopf

If you're looking at economic postmodernism I think it gets less bullsh1tty.

Like whom, or what texts?

brianthebard

Zillah stories about King Arthur would be medieval. I know you were only giving a brief introduction, but I think its a little heavy on cliches.

experiMental wrote: »

Postmodernism is really a minor rejection of modernism. It tries to fill in the vacuum left by modernism.

Vacuum in what sense? I see postmodernism as emerging from modernism, attempting to share the same influences and space but being co-opted into the mechanisms of capitalism. Thus postmodernism is the degradation of modernism. OP you aren't going to get a satisfactory answer here because as already mentioned there are so many meanings. Personally I would recommend Perry Anderson's Origins of Postmodernity if you want to read a short but quite comprehensive piece on the topic and its main motivations. Alternatively there is Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition or something by Frederick Jameson, but I haven't read him so can't recommend anything.

DadaKopf

There's the other aspect that various 'postmodern' writers developed their ideas out of the failure of the structuralist project. Structuralism (via Levi-Strauss, de Saussure, Althusser) did not live up to its promises, hence post-structuralism sought explanation, and then went beyond that (e.g. Foucault). This is a specific example of the collapse of modernist projects such as structuralism, whose exponents claimed the deep, universal structures of language and culture could be uncovered and formulated.

I have been reading poststructuralist approaches to analysing international finance, and I do feel that the analytical innovations developed by 'postmodern' thinkers have been of huge practical value.

experiMental

brianthebard wrote: »

Vacuum in what sense?

I meant it in terms of modern arts and architecture, as after 1960's, audiences began to reject modernism and they have lost faith in it. It became full of cliches and gradually lost all of its meaning. It left a vacuum in that sense, that people wanted a new form of expression and thinking to make their lives better. In architecture, after 1970's, a lot has been reinvented and the meaning of architecture began to differ. That was partly to do with the use of computers.

In some aspects of postmodernism, people have almost completely reinvented modernist theories and approaches, because modernism seemed to be out of date.

brianthebard

I wouldn't see it as such a break, but that the descent into cliche is what became postmodernism, and the fetishisationo of technology is indeed a part of it. Its not so much that modernism became stale but that elements of modernism became tied to the capitalist system and became cliches that we now think of as postmodernism. That would be my opinion on the matter.

Craft25

As far as i can make out..

first people told stories around campfires...

then they developed into the universally held belief systems / religions..

then we thought we could work it all out, enlighten ourselves, make it all better... freudianism, marxism, surrealism.. whaterver, delve beneath and come up with a new narrative..

then we realised it was all pointless (postmodernism), everybody watchin tv, hanging out with separate groups of friends... basically people going about choosing their own story to believe of what the world is, and whats the best way to go about life... even the sociologists and philosophers were believing stories handed down to them... so its all a bunch of stories, everyone creates their own worldview, we will never fix anything.. then we'll die

Offalycool

It get's even more absurd, we now live in pseudo-modernism :eek:

http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm

Húrin

Craft25 wrote: »

As far as i can make out..

first people told stories around campfires...

then they developed into the universally held belief systems / religions..

then we thought we could work it all out, enlighten ourselves, make it all better... freudianism, marxism, surrealism.. whaterver, delve beneath and come up with a new narrative..

then we realised it was all pointless (postmodernism), everybody watchin tv, hanging out with separate groups of friends... basically people going about choosing their own story to believe of what the world is, and whats the best way to go about life... even the sociologists and philosophers were believing stories handed down to them... so its all a bunch of stories, everyone creates their own worldview, we will never fix anything.. then we'll die

That's a good summary I think. Would you say that postmodernism owes everything, or a lot, to the existentialists like Sartre and Camus? They both come from the same country too!

Offalycool

You could argue that the enlightenment thinker, Kant, started the post-modern spiral. He systematicly worked out the “transcendental conciousness” in his work Critique of Pure Reason. Basicly put, it claims we can never know the world beyond sense experience as it really is. Our minds superimpose understanding on the world through the unconscious imagination (He would not have used the term unconscious or imagination, but “apriori”). He did this to validate the sciences because after Hume cast doubt on any permanency in the world, science lost purpose. Kant believed that something must be real and permanent, and so the transcendental world was his solution.

The German Idealists had a field day with this, but before long the Existentialists came to believe the individual gave meaning to a world always in conflict. They believed in pure subjective conceptions of the world that negated the “other” and was doomed to conflict. Post-modernism started with the deconstruction of the human imagination, the realisation that not even the Existentialists could have faith in their subjective points of view.

For post-modernists, the imagination is simply a mish mash of previously observed phonomona that are not related in any solid way to the external world. No concept has a absolute meaning; words or references are malleable and change meaning in the imagination of passive individuals who have no real control over how they are observed. It induces in the individual a kind of schizophrenia. It has a lot to do with the rise of technology, the wars of the twentieth century and the apparent supremacy of international capitalism, which supposedly turns people into robots, acting on the sublime stimulus of the market.

Ostrom

It (unfortunately) has a lot of currency in sociology (my own discipline).

Although I seem to be doing a good job of avoiding most of the strong programme side.

Alan Sokal published an excellent parody of postmodern science studies (in its more severe epistemic relativist form). The article itself was complete nonsense, but was published in full by the editors of Social Text (ill have to check the proper citation tomorrow, it was 1993 as best I remember).

The rejoinders are well worth reading as an excellent snapshot of some of the more severe criticisms of applied relativism in sociology.

You will find (my own opinion) the worst of it in Actor Network Theory (although Latours 'We Have Never Been Modern' is well worth a read) - Keith Tester claimed there is no such thing as a fish - all well and good for ontological discussion, but it has spawned tiresome journals and volumes.

My own problem with it is its extent - valid theoretical points they may raise, but the rejection of meta-narrative approach means you tend to see little methodology, little empirical research, and a near ruining of what was supposed to be an empirically grounded critical discipline.

Anyway, if youre interested I can post some references....