Postmodernity
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Postmodernity (also called post-modernity or the postmodern condition) is a term used by philosophers, social scientists, art critics and social critics to refer to aspects of contemporary art, culture, economics and social conditions that are the result of the unique features of late 20th century and early 21st century life. Among these features are included globalization, consumerism, the fragmentation of authority, and the commoditization of knowledge. (See Modernity)
Meaning of modernity and postmodernity
It is important to acknowledge that the very notion of modernity and modernism is problematic. Etymologically, it comes from Latin modo, meaning just now. (OED 2nd Ed.) Pinkey notes that the term modernism refers to "merely the empty flow of time itself" (Pinkey, 1989:42). "Modernity can only define itself in terms of a temporal break with an organic past", (ibid) or, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, "[i]n Historical use commonly applied (in contradistinction to ancient and mediæval) to the time subsequent to the middle ages". (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989) Its nature as a term is inherently indexical or deictic: every period which compares and contrasts itself to previous periods is modern in its self-understanding. Indeed, [Jürgen] Habermas observes that "[p]eople considered themselves modern during the period of Charles the Great, in the 12th century, as well as in France of the late 17th century...the term 'modern' appeared and reappeared exactly during those periods in Europe when consciousness of a new epoch formed..." (Habermas, 1981:147)
Postmodernism is an even more problematic term, paradoxically meaning (if we take its Latin origins literally) 'after just now'. Indeed, Jean-François Lyotard describes it as "the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo)." Its paradoxical nature might lead one to question whether it is in fact distinct from the modern period. "Postmodernism has the essential double meaning, the continuation of modernism and its transcendence." (Lyotard 1984:759) (Jencks, 1986:21).
The relationship between modernism and postmodernism, can best be examined through the works of several authors, some of whom argue for such a distinction, while others call it into question. Following a methodology common among the authors whose work this article examines, a number of artists and writers commonly described as modernist or postmodernist will be considered, although it is noted that this classification is at times controversial. Although useful distinctions can be drawn between the modernist and postmodernist eras, this does not erase the many continuities present between them.
Brief Introduction to the Uses of the Term
The term postmodernity is used in a number of ways. Most generally, postmodernity is the state or condition of being postmodern (i.e., after or in reaction to what is modern), particularly in reference to postmodern art and postmodern architecture. In philosophy and critical theory, postmodernity more specifically refers to the state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. A related term is postmodernism, which refers to movements, philosophies or responses to the state of postmodernity, or in reaction to modernism.
Most theorists of postmodernity view it as a historical condition that marks the reasons for the end of modernity, which is defined as a period or condition loosely identified with the Industrial Revolution, or the Enlightenment. One "project" of modernity is said to have been the fostering of progress, which was thought to be achievable by incorporating principles of rationality and hierarchy into aspects of public and artistic life. (see also post-industrial, Information Age). This usage is ascribed to the philosophers Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Lyotard understood modernity as a cultural condition characterized by constant change in the pursuit of progress, and postmodernity to represent the culmination of this process, where constant change has become a status quo and the notion of progress, obsolete. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein's critique of the possibility of absolute and total knowledge, Lyotard also further argued that the various "master-narratives" of progress, such as positivist science, Marxism, and Structuralism, were defunct as a method of achieving progress.
The literary critic Fredric Jameson and the geographer David Harvey have identified post-modernity with "late capitalism" or "flexible accumulation;" that is, the stage of capitalism following finance capitalism. This stage of capitalism is characterized by a high degree of mobility of labor and capital, and what Harvey called "time and space compression." They suggest that this coincides with the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system which they believe defined the economic order following the Second World War. (See also Consumerism, Critical theory)
Many philosophers, particularly those seeing themselves as being within the modern project, use post-modernity with the reverse implication: the presumed results of holding post-modernist ideas. Most prominently this includes Jürgen Habermas and others who contend that post-modernity represents a resurgence of long running counter-enlightenment ideas.
"Post-modernity" is also used to demark a period in architecture beginning in the 1950's in response to the International Style, or an artistic period characterized by the abandonment of strong divisions of genre, "high" and "low" art, and the emergence of the global village. Postmodernity is said to be marked by the re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, non-orthogonal angles such as the Sydney Opera House and the buildings of Frank Gehry.
For some of its critics, "post modernism" is simply cynical belief, the dissolution of cause and effect, the absence of order.
Descriptions of postmodernity
Philosophy and Critical Theory
Within philosophy and critical theory the use of the term "post-modernity" tends to cluster around two bodies of opinion. One argues that the modern project is completed, and that post-structuralism, specifically with anti-foundationalist ideas, must be incorporated into, or supplant, modern notions of criticism. For this group the work of Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault and Jameson represents a definitive reply to the modern project. In general the belief in this range of opinion is that post-modernity, as a condition, precedes acceptance of postmodernism. In this context it is a neutral to positive term, neutral in that it is a state of affairs, but positive in that it is generally presented as dispensing with restricting assumptions or structures of the previous period.
The other prominent position in philosophy is generally associated with modern critical theory, particularly with Jürgen Habermas. It argues that the modern project is not finished, and that universality cannot be so lightly dispensed with. In general, the use of the term in this context argues that postmodernity is a consequence of holding postmodern ideas. It is generally a negative term in this context.
Traits of Postmodernity
Jameson highlights a number of phenomena which he views as distinguishing postmodernism from modernism. The first is "a new kind of superficiality" or "depthlessness", in which models which once explained people and things in terms of an "inside" and an "outside" (such as hermeneutics, the dialectic, Freudian repression, the existentialist distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, and the semiotic distinction of signifier and signified) have been rejected.
Second is a rejection of the modernist "Utopian gesture", evident in Van Gogh, of the transformation through art of misery into beauty, whereas in postmodernism the object world has undergone a "fundamental mutation", has "now become a set of texts or simulacra" (Jameson 1993:38).
Whereas modernist art sought to redeem and sacralize the world, to give life to world, (we might say, following Graff, to give the world back the enchantment that science and the decline of religion had taken away from it), postmodernist art bestows upon the world a "deathly quality… whose glacéd X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content". (ibid.)
Graff identifies the origins of this transformative mission of art in the attempted substitution of art for the social role of religion as giving meaning to the world. Art was supposed to re-imbue the world with the meaning, which the rise of science and Enlightenment rationality had removed. However, in the postmodern period this task is finally revealed as a futile one.
Thirdly, Jameson identifies a feature of the postmodern age as the "waning of affect". He notes that not all emotion has disappeared from the postmodernist age, but that it lacks a particular kind of emotion such as that found in "Rimbaud's magical flowers 'that look back at you'". He notes that "pastiche eclipses parody", as "the increasing unavailability of the personal style" leads to pastiche becoming a universal practice.
Jameson argues that distance "has been abolished in the new space of postmodernism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial co-ordinates". This "new global space" constitutes postmodernism's "moment of truth". The various other features of the postmodern which he identifies "can all now be seen as themselves partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object"
To Jameson, the postmodern era has seen a change in the social function of culture. He identifies culture in the modern age as having a property of "semi-autonomy", its "existence… above the practical world of the existent". But in the postmodern age, culture has been deprived of the autonomous status it once possessed. Rather, the cultural has expanded, to consume the entire social realm, such that it all becomes cultural.
In the Postmodern age, "critical distance" has become outmoded. This is the assumption that culture can be positioned outside "the massive Being of capital", upon which left-wing theories of cultural politics are dependent. Jameson argues that "the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity". (Jameson 1993:54)
Social Sciences
In a sociological context postmodernity can be said to focus on the conditions of life which became increasingly prevalent in the late 20th century in the most industrialized nations. These include the ubiquity of mass media and mass production, the unification into national economies of all aspects of production, the rise of global economic arrangements, and shift from manufacturing to service economies. Variously described as consumerism or, in a Marxian frame work as late capitalism: namely a context where manufacturing, distribution and dissemination have become exceptionally inexpensive, but social connection and community have become more expensive.
The sociological view of postmodernity as a condition ascribes it to more rapid transportation, wider communication and the ability to abandon standardization of mass production, leading to a system which values a wider range of capital than previously, and allows value to be stored in a greater variety of forms. David Harvey argues that the condition of post-modernity is the escape from "Fordism", a term coined in reference to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Artifacts of postmodernity include the dominance of television and popular culture, the wide accessibility of information and mass and telecommunications. Postmodernity also exhibits a greater resistance to making sacrifices in the name of progress, including such features as environmentalism and the growing importance of the anti-war movement. Postmodernity in the industrialised core is marked by increasing focus on civil rights and equal opportunity, as seen by such movements as feminism and multi-culturalism, as well as the backlash against these movements.
Joyce's Ulysses
James Joyce's Ulysses can be viewed as a text which problematises the distinction between modernism and postmodernism. McHale notes that "Ulysses, literary historians agree, is one of the founding texts of the 'High Modernist' phase of literary modernism" (McHale 1990:5). However, "Ulysses has lately entered upon a strange second career as a postmodernist text" (ibid.) McHale argues that this is due to the nature of the text, for while parts of it are an exemplar of High Modernist style, other sections deviate from this style, in a way which has come to be called by many "postmodernist". Indeed, he notes that different critics have placed emphasis on different parts of the work: earlier modernist critics mostly neglecting the sections which deviate from a modernist style, while more recent postmodernist critics have emphasised those sections which display these deviations. (Joyce 1964)
For social, political, technological, and economic determinists, postmodernity is a major cause of the emergence of postmodernism and postmodern culture. For others, it is a mode of society which goes hand in hand with postmodernism. Postmodernity may be a reason for some to choose postmodernism as a way of life, epistemological, ethical, or aesthetic position.
As a stylistic approach
Main Article Postmodern architecture
The term "post-modernity" is used, particularly in architecture and literature, to denote a stylistic approach to forms and use, with origins in the 1950's and continuing through the present.
General usage
In a general sense, postmodernity is the state or response to a society which has evolved from modernity. It can mean the personal response to a post-modern society, the conditions in a society which make it post-modern or the state of being that is associated with a post-modern society. In most contexts, postmodernity should not be confused with post-modernism, which is the self-conscious adoption of post-modern traits in art, literature and society.
Postmodernity versus post-modernism
There are multiple positions on the differences between postmodernity and post-modernism.
One position says that post-modernity is a condition or state of being, or is concerned with changes to institutions and conditions (Giddens 1990) - whereas postmodernism is an aesthetic, literary, political or social philosophy that consciously responds to post-modern conditions, or seeks to move beyond or critique modernity.
Brief history of postmodernity
Postmodernity has been said to have gone through two relatively distinct phases: the first phase beginning in the 1950's and running through the end of the Cold War, where analog dissemination of information produced sharp limits on the width of channels, and encouraged a few authoritative media channels, and the second beginning with the explosion of cable television, internetworking and the end of the Cold War and the expansion of "new media" based on digital means of information dissemination and broadcast.
The first phase of postmodernity overlaps the end of modernity and is regarded by many as being part of the modern period (see lumpers/splitters, periodization). In this period there was the rise of television as the primary news source, the decreasing importance of manufacturing in the economies of Western Europe and the United States, the increase of trade volumes within the developed core. In 1967-1969 a crucial cultural explosion took place within the developed world as the baby boom generation, which had grown up with postmodernity as their fundamental experience of society, demanded entrance into the political, cultural and educational power structure. A series of demonstrations and acts of rebellion - ranging from nonviolent and cultural, through violent acts of terrorism - represented the opposition of the young to the policies and perspectives of the previous age. Central to this was opposition to the Algerian War and the Vietnam War; to laws allowing or encouraging racial segregation; and to laws which overtly discriminated against women, and restricted access to divorce. The era was marked by an upswing in visible use of marijuana and hallucinogens and the emergence of pop cultural styles of music and drama, including rock music. The ubiquity of stereo, television and radio helped make these changes visible to the broader cultural context.
This period is associated with the work of Marshall McLuhan, a philosopher who focused on the results of living in a media culture, and argued that participation in a mass media culture both overshadows actual content disseminated, and is liberating because it loosens the ability of local social normative standards.
The second phase of postmodernity is visible by the increasing power of personal and digital means of communication, including fax machines, modems, cable, and eventually high speed internet. This led to the creation of the new economy, whose supporters argued that the dramatic fall in information costs would alter society fundamentally. The simplest demarcation point is the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the liberalisation of China. For a period of time it was believed that this change ended the need for an overarching social order, which was called "The End of History" by Francis Fukuyama. However, such predictions, in light of subsequent events, now are seen by many as extremely naive. Internetworking in particular has altered the condition of postmodernity dramatically: digital production of information allows individuals to manipulate virtually every aspect of the media environment, from the source code of their computers, to the wikipedia project itself. This condition of digitality has brought producers of content in conflict with consumers over intellectual capital and intellectual property.
In the 1990's a debate grew as to whether the present was a "high modernity" or whether postmodernity should be regarded separately. In general those who believe that postmodernity is a separate condition acknowledge a transition where postmodernity, sometimes hyphenated, is an extension of modernity.
In this period it began to be argued that digitality, or what Esther Dyson referred to as "being digital", had emerged as a separate condition from post-modernity. Those holding this position argued that the ability to manipulate items of popular culture, the world wide web, the use of search engines to index knowledge, and telecommunications were producing a "convergence", which would be marked by the rise of "participatory culture" in the words of Henry Jenkins and the use of media appliances, such as Apple's iPod.
Criticisms of Post-Modernity
Criticisms of the post-modern condition can broadly be put into four categories: criticisms of post-modernity from the perspective of those who reject modernism and its offshoots, criticisms from supporters of modernism who believe that post-modernity lacks crucial characteristics of the modern project, critics from within post-modernity who seek reform or change based on their understanding of post-modernism, and those who believe that post-modernity is a passing, and not a growing, phase in social organization.
Anti-Modernity Critiques
Many philosophical movements reject both modernity and post-modernity as healthy states of being. Many of these are associated with cultural conservatism, and with some branches of Christian theology. In this view post-modernity is seen as a rejection of basic spiritual or natural truths, and the emphasis on material and physical pleasure is explicitly a rejection of inner balance and spirituality.
Many of these critiques attack, specifically, the perceived "abandonment of objective truth" as being the crucial unacceptable feature of the post-modern condition, often with the aim of offering a metanarrative that provides exactly this truth.
Modernist Critiques of Post-Modernity
Critic Timothy Bewes called Post-Modernity "an historical blip", a "cynical reaction" against the Enlightenment, and against the progress of the modern project. This viewpoint, that features attributed to post-modernity, including consumerism, are "kitsch" and a turning away from fundamental deep structure and uncompromising progress is one which is levelled by art critic Robert Hughes as well. Instead, from this viewpoint, post-modernity is a subsidiary historical moment in a larger modern period.
James Fowler argues that post-modernity is characterized by the "loss of conviction", and Grenz concurs, saying that post-modernity is a period of pessimism contrasting with modernity's optimism.
However, the most influential proponent of this critique is Jürgen Habermas, who contends that all responses to modernity abandon either the critical or rational element in philosophy, and that the post-modern condition is one of self-deception over the uncompleted nature of the modern project. He argues that without both critical and rational traditions, society cannot value the individual, and that social structures will tend towards totalitarianism. From his perspective, universalism is the fundamental requirement for any rational criticism, and to abandon this is to abandon the liberalizing reforms of the last two centuries.
This argument is then extended to state that Post-modernity is counter-enlightenment (see The Enlightenment, modern responses). Richard Wolin in his book The Seduction of Unreason argues that key advocates of post-modernity began with a fascination for fascism. This is related to the theory that Romanticism is a reactionary philosophy and that Nazism was an outgrowth of Romanticism, a widely held viewpoint among modernist philosophers and writers. They argue that the cultural particularlity, and identity politics of post-modernity, by which they mean the consequences of holding to post-structuralist views, is "what Germany had from 1933-1945". They further argue that post-modernity requires an acceptance of "reactionary" criticisms that amount to anti-Americanism. Stephen Hicks in his book Explaining Postmodernism extends this explanation further back to the beginnings of the Counter-Enlightenment in the skepticism of Hume and Kant and the anti-liberalism of Rousseau.
Post-modernists, including Lyotard and Stanley Fish, see Habermas' problem as being that he desires to rationalize universalism, and that the entire critique rests on the modernists' insufficient faith in social mechanisms to work. (See post-empiricism).
This debate is seen by philosophers such as Richard Rorty as being a debate between modern and post-modern philosophy rather than being related to the condition of post-modernity per se. It also grows out of a common agreement on both sides that modernity is rooted in a rationalized set of Enlightenment values, which were ascribed to that period by the early modern.
(See also Hypermodernity)
Critiques within Post-Modernity
The range of critiques of the post-modern condition from those who generally accept it is quite broad, and impossible to easily summarize, since the debate is contemporary and on going. The list below includes some which have generated controversy and interest, and is not intended to be taken as comprehensive or exclusive.
One criticism is phrased as "The future ain't what it used to be". In this view, the world "promised" in the late 1960's and early 1970's has not arrived, and instead, the current incarnation of society is, somehow, less appealing, or at least less advanced than the "postmodernity" envisioned previously.
Another criticism levelled at post-modernity from within is expressed by author David Foster Wallace, who argues that the trend towards more and more ironic and referential expression has reached a limit, and that a movement back towards "sincerity" is required, where the artist actually says what she intends to have taken as meaning.
Different viewpoints on the relationship between them
It is possible to conceptualise two different polar viewpoints concerning the relationship between modernism and postmodernism: one which views postmodernism and modernism as being fundamentally distinct; another which identifies them as being essentially identical, and thus rejects that any useful distinction between them exists. The approaches of individual thinkers to this question lie somewhere between these two viewpoints.
In this article several authors representing a range of different views on the issue will be considered. At the extreme that postmodernism represents a fundamental break from modernism, is Fredric Jameson. At the other extreme, authors such as Jürgen Habermas, Marshall Berman and Gerald Graff, view postmodernism as fundamentally a continuation of modernism. In between these two positions, is Jean-François Lyotard, who views postmodernism as part of modernism, although an important new phase.
Jameson's view
To Jameson, postmodernism is not part of the modern, but rather a radical break with it. Postmodernism is not an aesthetic condition or style, but rather a "cultural dominant". To him postmodernism is a "cultural dominant", not a style, because of concerns that theories of historical periods (such as postmodernism) ignore the many differences within the supposed periods, and present them as homogenous.
Jameson considers, and disagrees with, the thesis that postmodernism is a later stage of modernism, rather than an altogether new stage of civilisation. He notes that the features of postmodernism can be found fully developed in modernism. He gives the examples of Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel and Marcel Duchamp as representing the features of postmodernity while being present in the modern period. To Jameson what distinguishes the postmodern era from the modern, and likewise the modern from earlier eras, is the social standing of these features. Whereas modernism was rejected by Victorian society as "ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally 'antisocial'" (Jameson 1993:78), it later came to be canonised and institutionalised in academe; finally, with the rise of postmodernism, modernism was rejected by a younger generation as a "set of dead classics", no longer existing in opposition to the "official or public culture of Western society", but rather representing it. (Jameson 1993:113)
Jameson concludes that while in his view the modernist and postmodernist have distinguishable features, even if all the features of postmodernism were identically present in modernism, the two periods could "remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social function, owing to the very different positioning of postmodernism in the economic system of late capital." (Jameson 1993:131)
Jameson seeks to elucidate the distinguishing features of the postmodern period. In order to do so, he compares various works of art, literature and architecture which he views as definitive of the two periods in question, seeking thereby to identify the presence or absence of these features in them.
Van Gogh & Warhol
The first comparison is of the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Andy Warhol. Jameson considers two modernist interpretations of Van Gogh's "Peasant Shoes". He starts with art as transformational, taking "the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state" and transforming this into "a hallucinatory surface of colour". This transformation is seen as a "Utopian gesture" (Jameson 1993:26). The second interpretation Jameson considers is art as creating a world, whereby "henceforth illustrious peasant shoes slowly recreate about themselves the whole missing object-world which was once their lived context" (ibid.).
Both these interpretations stress the continuity between art and worldly context. Hence both convey meaning to ("speak to") the viewer, in that "the work in its inert, objectal form, is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth". By contrast, in relation to Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes", Jameson is "tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all". (Jameson 1993:27)
Marshall Berman's view
Postmodernist authors have frequently characteristed modernity as a totalising monolith. However, Berman has argued that modernity in fact is dynamic, forever changing, fluid and pluralistic — characteristics which have been identified with postmodernism. Thus, for Berman, postmodernism is a continuation of modernism. Indeed, the work in which he presents this view is entitled — All That is Solid Melts into Air — a term which succintly describes the postmodern condition, and yet is in fact a quote from Marx's description of modernity.
Berman argues that the Enlightenment tradition contains within itself an anti-Enlightenment argument, and that anti-modernism is as old as modernism itself, in which the Enlightenment represents "a sort of fall from grace", in which humanity's "metaphysical balance and unity with nature" is disrupted (Berman 1991:1-3). While this argument has the undoubtedly non-modernist Catholic right and Southern conservatives in the United States as its defenders, it can also be found in Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume, Johnson, Diderot, Rousseau and modernists such as W.B. Yeats and Eliot, resulting in what he refers to as "modernist anti-modernism". This then supports the view espoused by Graff that postmodernism is a continuation or triumph of tendencies already found within modernism, rather than something wholly new. (Berman 1991:1-3).
Habermas' view
Jürgen Habermas views postmodernism as, for all its claims of fragmentation and plurality, still existing within a larger 'modernist' framework. He is an influential critic of postmodernism, viewing it as nihilism.
Habermas views the origins of modernity as being in a period's conceptualisation of its relationship with previous periods. From the 12th century until the Enlightenment, people saw themselves as "modern" whenever they looked back to antiquity as a period to be emulated, as an ideal which one should return. This changed with the Enlightenment, and the beginning of what is generally termed modernism, which Habermas sees as that which "simply makes an abstract opposition between tradition and the present." (Habermas 1981:147).
Graff's view
The conception of postmodernity as a succeeding age to modernity is closely associated with the idea of modernism as a failure; indeed, awareness of modernism's failure is seen as the driving force behind postmodernity. Graff sees postmodernity as being driven by the failure of high culture to give back meaning to a world from which meaning has been drained. He views postmodernism as the "logical culmination" of the premises of modernism (Graff 1973:122). Like Jameson and Lyotard do, he traces the history of the broader societal phenomena of modernity and postmodernity through the history of the art of these two periods. He argues that "Postmodernist anti-art was inherent in the logic of the modernist aesthetic". (Graff 1973:124).
Graff traces the modernist aesthetic as originating in an attempt to use art as a substitute for religion, which due to the rise of scientific thought and secularisation had in the 19th century become threatened. The world of facts and the world of values, which in premodern thought had been unified through religion, had been torn apart by the rise of science and Enlightenment philosophy.
Art seemed, for a while, a means of bridging once more this divide; but in the end it has not been successful. As Graff puts it, "the downfall of religion and the relativism of science were developments which could not help undermine the moral and epistemological foundations of art." (Graff 1973:124).
Graff argues that "modernism's positive faith in literary meanings and postmodernism's repudiation of these meanings prove to be highly ambivalent attitudes — much closer to each other than they might at first appear." (Graff 1973:124). Postmodernism views its rejection of a "significant external reality" (Graff's term for the loss of the belief in the unity of truth and value) as both a blessing and a curse: in some postmodernist authors and works, it is depicted as a liberatory force; in others as a great loss. Of the first approach, he gives a few examples among works which he considers postmodernist: among others, John Cage, certain poems of the Beats, Ken Kesey and Richard Fariña; of the second, he cites Barthelme, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Borges, Barthes' The End of the Road, and Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading as examples. (Graff 1973:125)
Both Graff and Jameson criticise those who view postmodernism as an unmitigated blessing. Graff writes that "the revolutionary claims which have been widely made for the postmodernist new sensibility are overrated… when we view it in the context of the current social and cultural situation, postmodernism shows itself to be a reactionary tendency, one which reinforces the effects of technocratic, bureaucratic society." Jameson likewise believes that "the complacent (yet delirious) camp-following celebration of this aesthetic new world… is surely unacceptable". (Graff 1973:125) (Jameson 1993:78)
Lyotard's view
Lyotard disagrees with Jameson in that he sees postmodernism as part of modernism rather than a fundamental break. In his book The Postmodern Condition he identifies the postmodern as being "undoubtedly part of the modern." (Lyotard 1984:13). Postmodernism is also seen as modernism's "nascent state". (ibid.)
To Lyotard, both modern and postmodern art seek to present the "unpresentable", to represent through art certain ideas or concepts which are incapable of representation. He gives as examples such ideas as the world, the simple, the infinitely great, and the infinitely powerful — although the artist may attempt to produce representations of these things, they appear "painfully inadequate". Modernist art "allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents", while the form of the art provides its consumer with "solace and pleasure" in the face of this failure of representation. In postmodern art, by contrast, the unpresentable is represented "in presentation itself", but the "solace of good forms" is denied. (Lyotard 1984:17-21)
Although Lyotard views postmodernism as part of modernism, he does identify it as an important new phase in modernism. To him the end result of modernism is giving to us "as much terror as we can take", seeing its metanarratives of the "Progress of Spirit" and the "March to Freedom" as resulting in the 20th century horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, with their mass extermination of millions of people. (Lyotard, 1984:81-2) (Fuery & Mansfield, 2001:108).
Whereas for Jameson, the postmodern age has already happened as an inevitability, for both Lyotard and Habermas, postmodernism is a result of a decision to reject the metanarratives which have formed modernism's foundation: a decision which Lyotard calls upon us in order to take to save ourselves from totalitarianism, but which Habermas opposes, as undermining the moral justification for the very political institutions which protect us from it.
Thus, Jameson can be seen as presenting postmodernism as a theory about our modern society, whereas for Lyotard and Habermas it is more a political position to be accepted or rejected as a matter of choice.
Lyotard famously defines postmodernism as "incredulity towards metanarratives". However, Jameson's work can be seen as introducing postmodernism as a metanarrative itself, one of the decline of one cultural dominant and the rise of another. In Graff's work, this metanarrative is extended, into a narrative of the slow decline of the belief in the objective truth and values in society, through the rise of science and the decline of religion, accompanied by attempts to stave off this decline through the means of Art and Literature, attempts which in postmodernism are finally revealed as ultimately futile.
Lyotard's work itself can be criticised as being self-defeating: his opposition to all metanarratives become yet another metanarrative among all others. Palmeri identifies his postmodernism as containing "a vision or premonition of an all-encompassing and threatening explanatory or totalitarian order plays a significant role in the world of the narrative" (Palmeri 2001:3).
Which authors' texts are (post)modernist?
From the above analysis it can be seen that many of the authors discussed, including Jameson, Lyotard and Graff, conduct their analysis of postmodernity and modernity through an examination of works of art and literature which they identify as being modern or postmodern respectively. In some instances however, their identifications can be open to question. For example, Lyotard implies that Joyce, generally considered to be a high modernist, is a postmodernist, although as discussed above, there are defensible reasons for describing some of his work as such. (Lyotard 1984:758). Susan Sontag (Evans 2001) has commented, in an interview by Evans Chan, that "many writers who used to be called modern or modernist are now called postmodern…", giving Donald Barthelme as an example, an author whose work is identified by Graff, among others, as postmodernist. Chan adds that "the way writers are being relabelled as postmodern is at times baffling", noting with puzzlement Jameson's labelling of Beckett as a postmodernist. That the classification of many authors as modernist or postmodernist is subject to dispute demonstrates that the boundaries between modernism and postmodernism are not clearly defined. In turn this lends some support to those (such as Lyotard and Graff) who view postmodernism as a part or continuation of modernism, as opposed to those such as Jameson who view it as a fundamentally new phenomenon.
Conclusion
One must conclude that the relationship between modernity and postmodernity is a contentious one. At one extreme, postmodernity is seen as a phase or continuation of modernism. In the alternative, postmodernity is seen as a fundamental break with modernity. If one accepts the proposition that works can be continually reclassified, the distinction is one of semantics. However, if the distinction is based upon distinct historical periods there is a clear differentiation. The works examined illustrate the debate — there is no consensus view and one must accept that all points of view are to some extent valid, although Jameson's view is preferred because although his detractors see the features of postmodernity in modernity, the predominance of certain features has clearly changed —in other words the cultural dominant in the postmodernity era is different to that of the modernisty era.
References
- Anderson, Perry (1998) The Origins of Postmodernity, London: Verso
- Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Hicks, Stephen R. C. (2004) Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (ISBN 1592476465).
- Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity. An enquiry into the origins of cultural change, Oxford: Blackwell.
- Ihab Hassan, From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context (2000), text online.
- Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was a French philosopher and literary theorist well-known for his embracing of postmodernism after the late 1970s. He published "La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir" (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979)
Studies in postmodernity
- European Graduate School - Media and Communication Studies Program
- MIT Comparative Media Studies
- New School University - Media Studies Program
- University of Toronto - McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology
- University of King's College- Contemporary Studies Program
Bibliography
Baudrillard, J. 1984. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e).
Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso.
Chan, Evans. 2001. "Against Postmodernism, etcetera--A Conversation with Susan Sontag" in Postmodern Culture, vol. 12 no. 1, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Docherty, Thomas.1993. (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, New York: Harvester Wheatsheat.
Docker, John.1994. Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eagleton, Terry. 'Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism'. Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985. London: Verso, 1986. 131-47.
Foster, H. 1983. The Anti-Aesthetic. USA: Bay Press.
Fuery, Patrick and Mansfield, Nick. 2001. Cultural Studies and Critical Theory. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Graff, Gerald. 1973. "The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough" in Triquarterly, no. 26, Winter 1973, pp. 383-417.
Habermas, "Modernity - An Incomplete Project" (in Docherty ibid)
Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. trans. by Seyla Ben-Habib. Modernity versus Postmodernity. in V Taylor & C Winquist; originally published in New German Critique, no. 22, Winter 1981, pp. 3-14.
Jameson, F. 1993. "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (in Docherty, ibid).
Jencks, Charles. 1986. What is Post-Modernism? New York: St. Martin's Press, and London: Academy Editions.
Joyce, James. 1964. Ulysses. London: Bodley Head.
Lyotard, J. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press
Mansfield, N. 2000. Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Harroway. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
McHale, Brian. 1990. "Constructing (post) modernism: The case of Ulysses" in Style, vol. 24 no. 1, pp.1-21, DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University English Department.
Palmeri, Frank. 2001. "Other than Postmodern?--Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics" in Postmodern Culture, vol. 12 no. 1, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pinkney, Tony. 1989. "Modernism and Cultural Theory", editor's introduction to Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso.
Taylor, V & Winquist, (ed).1998. Postmodernism: Critical concepts (vol 1-2). London: Routledge.
Wheale, N. 1995. The Postmodern Arts: An introductory reader. New York: Routledge.
Simpson, J.A. and Weiner, E.S.C. 1989. The Oxford English dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Other External Links
- The postmodern essay generator
- "My Postmodern Art Gallery at the Saguaro Lounge" - Satire of Artistic Postmodernism
