Is Postmodernism Useful?

Debates about postmodernism and whether it is really a useful theory or not.
• Lyotard and Baudrillard share a belief that the idea of truth needs to be ‘deconstructed’ so that we can challenge dominant ideas that people claim as truth.

• There are always competing versions of the truth. A postmodernist cannot wish to remove one version of the truth and replace it with the ‘correct’ one. All notions of truth must be viewed with suspicion.

• Postmodernism challenges the very notion of truth….and certainly disputes the idea that we should live our lives by adhering to widely perceived ideas of the truth (through religion etc)

• Many critics see this position as offensive. They believe that it is a luxury of people who live in advanced, rich nations and democratic states to take this ‘playful’ stance on matters of truth… (JM, 138) For example, many people in sub-Saharan have to face very fundamental truths every day…truths about the need to eat to survive etc

• The denial of ‘grand narratives’ and moral principles in postmodernism is also objected to by people who have religious convictions and attach importance to moral principles.

• If truth is absent, many would argue that we sink into a moral relativism where ‘anything goes’.

• Even if you accept the idea that there is such a thing as postmodernism, many would suggest that its time has now passed. It has been argued that the events and aftermath of 9/11 have undermined postmodernism’s belief that we have reached the end of ‘grand narratives’. Religious fundamentalism is perhaps the ultimate grand narrative. Did postmodernism get it wrong? Possibly, but there is an argument put forward by some that 9/11 reminds us of why we need postmodernism to try to challenge the authority of ‘grand narratives’.

• Postmodernism has emerged from so many different disciplines that it is notoriously difficult to define. How much value can we ascribe to theory which remains so elusive? If it is difficult to define what postmodernism is all about, might we conclude that there is nothing really there: there is nothing at its heart.

• Postmodern challenges the ideas of core truths/principles. By disputing the very notion of core truths, it would be contradictory for postmodernism to establish a coherent and clear set of central ‘postmodern ideas’. It has therefore become impossible for postmodernism to coalesce around a shared ideology (it challenges the idea that you should/could have one) and as a result has postmodernism denied the possibility that it can make a difference.

• Some would argue that postmodernism is really a descriptive rather than prescriptive movement. It tries to describe current phenomena but does not really move towards any idea of how we should progress from this point. In many ways, it even disputes the idea that we can make progress.

• Can you really separate postmodernism from modernism? One criticism of postmodernism is that it is not as new as many would claim it to be. In particular, intertextuality/pastiche/parody are often seen as key characteristics of postmodernism but, it is argued, they can also be seen as characteristics of many modernist texts: ‘Joe Dante’s films may be marked by a plundering of all kinds of popular cultural sources, but then so is James Joyce’s Ulysees, a high modernist novel’.

It is important to remember that not everyone agrees with the ideas of postmodernism….Many would dispute the ideas commonly associated with postmodernism.

‘Although the omnipresence of the postmodern and its advocates would seem to suggest otherwise, not everybody subscribes to the view that language constitutes rather than represents, reality; that the autonomous and stable subject of modernity has been replaced by a postmodern agent whose identity is largely over-determined and always in process; that meaning has become social and provisional; or that knowledge only counts as such within a given discursive formation, that is a given power structure.’ Hans Bertens (1994)

"Postmodern Media Break the Rules of Representation" Discuss.

Postmodern Media Break the Rules of Representation

'Drive' Soundtrack Tracklist

The soundtrack to Drive includes an original score by Cliff Martinez that was inspired by '80s style synth-pop. In addition to crafting his own compositions, Martinez built the film's sonic landscape from ideas pioneered by European electronic bands, such as Kraftwerk, Other songs in the set - which were recorded and arranged with a similar retro edge - include 'Nightcall' by Kavinsky and Lovefoxx of Brazilian dance-rock outfit CSS, a tune by the Chromatics, and others.

1. Nightcall - Kavinsky & Lovefoxx
2. Under Your Spell - Desire
3. A Real Hero - College Ft. Electric Youth
4. Oh My Love - Riz Ortolani Ft. Katyna Ranieri
5. Tick of the Clock - The Chromatics
6. Rubber Head
7. I Drive
8. He Had a Good Time
9. They Broke His Pelivs
10. Kick Your Teeth
11. Where's the Deluxe Version?
12. See You in Four
13. After the Chase
14. Hammer
15. Wrong Floor
16. Skull Crushing
17. My Name on a Car
18. On the Beach
19. Bride of Deluxe

Tracks 6-19 by Cliff Martinez

POMO Music Task - Childish Gambino (Video)

"Postmodern media manipulates time and space" To what extent does this definition apply to the texts you have studied?

Pomo Essay Time and Space

Postmodern Music Task

Postmodernism and Music V4

Frederic Jameson - Criticism of Postmodernism

Jameson sees postmodernism as vacuous and trapped in circular references - nothing more than a series of self referential 'jokes' that have no deeper meaning or purpose.
(Ironically, postmodernists don't disagree but use his criticism as their purpose).

For Jameson, literary and cultural output is more purposeful than this and he, therefore, remains a modernist in a world increasingly dominated by postmodern culture.

Jameson also sees reason for the present generations to express themselves through postmodernity as they are the product of such a heavily globalised, multinational dominated economy, which carries the multinational media industry as one of its main branches. The omnipresence of media output helps explain postmodernists' merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole, "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the American history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life." (p.22 Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1991.)

Jean-Fançois Lyotard

Lyotard rejected, what he called, the 'grand narratives' or universal 'meta-narratives'.

Principally, the grand narratives refer to the great theories of history, science, religion, and politics. For example, Lyotard rejects the ideas that everything is knowable by science or that as history moves forward in time, humanity makes progress. He would reject universal political 'solutions' such as communism or capitalism. He also rejects the idea of absolute freedom.

In studying media texts, it is possible also to apply this thinking to a rejection of the Western moralistic narratives of Hollywood film where good triumphs over evil, or where violence and exploitation are suppressed for the sake of public decency.

Lyotard favours 'micro-narratives' that can go in any direction; that reflect diversity; that are unpredictable.

'The Death of Uncool'

Brian Eno - 25th November, 2009.

"It's odd to think back on the time - not so long ago - when there were distinct stylistic trends, such as "this season's colour" or "abstract expressionism" or "psychedelic music". It seems we don't think like that anymore. There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.

We're living in a stylistic tropics. There's a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don't have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It's all alive, all "now", in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it's old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources - cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them - it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political, and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life."

Key Terms

• Intertextuality - one media text referring to another.
• Parody - mocking something in an original way.
• Pastiche - a stylistic mask, a form of self-conscious imitation. 
• Homage - Imitation from a respectful standpoint. 
• Bricolage - Mixing up and using different genres and styles.
• Simulacra - simulations or copies that are replacing 'real' artefacts.
• Hyperreality - a situation where images cease to be rooted in reality. 
• Fragmentation - used frequently to describe most aspects of society, often in relation to identity. 

Danger Mouse - Grey Album

Modern Art vs. Postmodern Art

Miley Cyrus - We Can't Stop (Music Videos Without Music)

Bricolage

Bricolage is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process. The term is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verbbricoler, the core meaning in French being, "fiddle, tinker" and, by extension, "to make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)". In contemporary French the word is the equivalent of the English do it yourself, and is seen on large shed retail outlets throughout France. A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur.

Postmodernism Definition

Definition #1
Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. They are designed to be read by a literate (ie experienced in other texts) audience and will exhibit many traits of intertextuality. Many texts openly acknowledge that, given the diversity in today's audiences, they can have no preferred reading (check out your Reception Theory) and present a whole range of oppositional readings simultaneously. Many of the sophisticated visual puns used by advertising can be described as postmodern. Postmodern texts will employ a range of referential techniques such as bricolage, and will use images and ideas in a way that is entirely alien to their original function (eg using footage of Nazi war crimes in a pop video).

Definition #2
Label given to Cultural forms since the 1960s that display the following qualities:

Self reflexivity: this involves the seemingly paradoxical combination of self-consciousness and some sort of historical grounding

Irony: Post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression, but it also abuses, installs, and subverts conventions and usually negotiates contradictions through irony

Boundaries: Post modernism challenges the boundaries between genres, art forms, theory and art, high art and the mass media

Constructs: Post modernism is actively involved in examining the constructs society creates including, but not exclusively, the following:

• Nation: Post modernism examines the construction of nations/nationality and questions such constructions
• Gender: Post modernism reassesses gender, the construction of gender, and the role of gender in cultural formations
• Race: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of race
• Sexuality: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of sexuality

Definition #3

"Postmodernism is cultural movement that came after modernism, also it follows our shift from being a industrial society to that of an information society, through globalization of capital. Markers of the postmodern culture include opposing hierarchy, diversifying and recycling culture, questioning scientific reasoning, and embracing paradox. Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding modernism"

"Postmodern style is often characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche, and irony. Postmodern theorists see postmodern art as a conflation or reversal of well-established modernist systems, such as the roles of artist versus audience, seriousness versus play, or high culture versus kitsch."

By R. Lee from Media Studies 180 Hunter College, Sections 102, 103

Definition #4
"A general explanation is that postmodernism is a contradiction in terms, as post means after and modern means now, it is impossible for anything to be after now. The term itself is supposed to be deliberately unexplainable.

In terms of literature and media it is generally considered to be anything which makes little attempt to hide the fact that it is not real, it wants you to know that its been created and it wants you to recognise elements from elsewhere (i.e. that they have 'stolen' ideas from other sources), that there are no new or original ideas and that everything is in someway connected. Importantly it doesn’t want you to view it as being any more or less valid or important than a text which pretends to be real, postmodernists want everything to be equal, they want to remove binary opposites and start again. Students are often criticised for being post modern as they tend to like 'naff' things and think they are cool precisely because they aren't cool (thus removing binary opposites)"
Michael Smith (2009)

Definition #5
George Ritzer suggested that postmodern culture is signified by the following:
• The breakdown of the distinction between high culture and mass culture. 
• The breakdown of barriers between genres and styles. 
• Mixing up of time, space and narrative. 
• Emphasis on style rather than content. 
• The blurring of the distinction between representation and reality.