Postmodernism Flashcards

Postmodernism

Coined in 1938 by English historian Arnold Toynbee, after Federico de Onis.
Toynbee: declining influence of Christianity and Western nations post 1875.
Encompasses developments in philosophy, film, architecture, art, literature, and culture.
Reaction to modernism, referring to the lack of artistic, intellectual, or cultural organizing principle.
Started after World War II, peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, and is ongoing.

Emerges in 1960s and 70s, alongside feminism, new historicism, postcolonialism.
Wider set of phenomena in art, film, architecture, literature, and popular culture.
Defined by reaction against or further development of modernism:
Frederic Jameson: Postmodernisms emerge as specific reactions against established forms of high modernism.
Prefix "post" indicates a break from and reliance on what follows.

Modernism: distinction between elitist art/literature and low-brow/popular art/literature.
Postmodernism: rebels against distinctions by mixing characteristics and references.
Jameson: incorporation blurs the line between high art and commercial forms.
Fiction: intertextual references to both high and low culture; mixing of genres (hybrid genres).

Coined by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1979).
All knowledge is narrative; knowledge from story-telling (myths/legends).
Narratives legitimize knowledge and justify existing power relations.
Religion as narrative: institutionalized narrative knowledge.
Modern era: natural science as new narrative.
Religion/science were universally accepted grand narratives.
Lyotard: postmodern period challenges grand narratives.
Cast as old-fashioned and oppressive, privileging certain narratives and reinforcing hierarchies.

Lyotard rejected "grand narratives" or universal "meta-narratives."
Grand narratives: great theories of history, science, religion, politics.
Rejects ideas that everything is knowable by science or that humanity makes progress.
Rejects universal political 'solutions' such as communism or capitalism.
Rejects the idea of absolute freedom.
Rejects Western moralistic narratives of Hollywood film.
Favors ‘micronarratives’ that reflect diversity and are unpredictable.

If all knowledge is narrative, what does this mean for our perception of reality?
What is reality? Science or perception?
Rosemergy: we experience the world as flat even though we know it is round.
Our perception of reality is a fiction we adopt.
Simulation is not representation because representation assumes a distinction between the real and the copy, and assumes they’re equivalent.

Jean Baudrillard: simulating illness leads to real symptoms.
Simulation threatens the difference between 'true' and 'false', 'real' and 'imaginary'.
The simulator produces ‘real’ symptoms, so they are treated neither as ill nor not ill.
Simulation has become the real; there is no original or real as referent anymore.
Baudrillard: It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.
Baudrillard: The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Postmodernism begins after WWII, when Nazism and Communism were questioned.
Others date it to the 1960s and McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” (1964).
The manner in which the message is mediated becomes more important than the meaning of the message itself.
In an era disillusioned by political failures, the holocaust, and loss of religion, mediation filled the vacuum.
Grew the idea that theories were possible for how mediation works.
Previously, serious thought was reserved for the messages behind the mediation.