POSTMODERNISM
"…rejecting
boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid
genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage,
irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art (and thought) favors
reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity
(especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity,
and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized
subject.
But--while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these
ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot
of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a
fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of
The Wasteland, for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse),
but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something
to be lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try
to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity,
coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern
life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do.
Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation,
provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that.
The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make
meaning then, let's just play with nonsense.
Another way of looking at the relation between modernism and
postmodernism helps to clarify some of these distinctions. According
to Frederic Jameson, modernism and postmodernism are cultural
formations which accompany particular stages of capitalism.
Jameson outlines three primary phases of capitalism which dictate
particular cultural practices (including what kind of art and
literature is produced). The first is market capitalism, which
occurred in the eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries
in Western Europe, England, and the United States (and all their
spheres of influence).
This first phase is associated with particular technological
developments, namely, the steam-driven motor, and with a particular
kind of aesthetics, namely, realism. The second phase occurred
from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century
(about WWII); this phase, monopoly capitalism, is associated
with electric and internal combustion motors, and with modernism.
The third, the phase we're in now, is multinational or consumer
capitalism (with the emphasis placed on marketing, selling,
and consuming commodities, not on producing them), associated
with nuclear and electronic technologies, and correlated with
postmodernism.
Postmodernism then is the critique of grand narratives, the
awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions
and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization
or practice. In other words, every attempt to create "order"
always demands the creation of an equal amount of "disorder,"
but a "grand narrative" masks the constructedness
of these categories by explaining that "disorder"
REALLY IS chaotic and bad, and that "order" REALLY
IS rational and good.
Postmodernism,
in rejecting grand narratives, favors "mini-narratives,"
stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than
large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern "mini-narratives"
are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary,
making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability.
…the
postmodern avowal of fragmentation and multiplicity tends to
attract liberals and radicals. This is why, in part, feminist
theorists have found postmodernism so attractive …
http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html
