Postmodernism and
Popular Culture
We live in a world in which aspects
of postmodernity are in constant
tension with aspects of modernity
and premodern existence…
A world that is both industrial and
postindustrial, in which many of the
qualities that characterized
modernity (the speeding up of time
and compression of space that
resulted in part from urbanization,
industrialization, and automation)
have become conditions in
postmodernity alongside and in
relation to virtual technologies and
the flows of capital, information,
and media in the era of
globalization.
Postmodernism and Its Visual Cultures
Critic Fredric Jameson used the term
postmodernity to describe the cultural logic of
late capitalism.
This definition of postmodernism emphasizes
the formative role of economic and political
conditions, including postwar globalization, the
emergence of new information technologies,
and the breakdown of the traditional nationstate in the emergence of postmodern modes of
cultural production.
Modernity was based on the idea that the truth
can be discovered by accessing the right
channels of knowledge to arrive at
structural and material bases.
Whereas the postmodern is distinguished by
the idea that there is not one but many truths
and that the notions of truth are culturally
and historically relative constructions.
Because postmodernism’s central goal is to put all
assumptions under scrutiny in order to reveal the
values that underlie all systems of thought, and thus to
question the ideologies within them that are seen as
natural, the idea of authenticity is always in question
in postmodernism.
Jean Baudrillard
has described the late twentieth
century as a period during which
images became more real than
the real - they are hyperreal.
One of the critics of
postmodernity, Jean Baudrillard,
introduced the concept of
simulation to describe the
collapse between counterfeit and
real - and the original and the
copy that exists in the digitized
culture.
Simulations are unlike
representations, which make
reference to a real object;
simulacra stand on their own
without requiring recourse to real
objects or worlds elsewhere.
He believes that simulation is the
new image paradigm that replaces
representation.
That is, the images themselves
(simulacra) stand as real objects or
worlds elsewhere.
Our culture, with computers and
TV sets, is the paradigm for global
looking practices ruled by the
simulacra of virtual media images.
The hyperreal overtake the real in
the postmodern world.
Unlike representations, which
make reference to the real,
simulacra can stand on their own
without requiring recourse to real
objects or worlds elsewhere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVMf2hh
fer0&feature=related
Postmodernism is very much associated
with popular culture where style and
image are core elements.
Postmodernism asserts that surface
contains meaning in itself – we cannot
get beneath the surface to find something
more real or more true.
Postmodernism complicates the
divisions between high and low culture
distinctions and makes it impossible to
occupy a critical viewpoint on culture
from outside or above it.
Where modernists hoped to unearth universals or the fundamentals of art, postmodernism aims to unseat them, to
embrace diversity and contradiction. A postmodern approach to art rejects the distinction between low and high art
forms.
The postmodern creator, in turn, is free to combine any elements or styles in a work, even in ways that are counter to
or irrelevant to the apparent function of the object.
Postmodern style is often characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche, irony, the return of ornament
and historical reference, and the appropriation of popular media.
Advertisements need not sell
their viewers on function or
quality.
They promote their goods as
embodiments of style – style
we can live by wearing or
using these products.
This is a world lived at the
level of consumption, images,
media and the popular.
In interpellating new kinds of
human subject positions,
postmodern texts participate in
an exchange of signification that
helps to shape how viewers
engage with cultural texts,
negotiate their meaning, and
construct their identities in
relationship to them.
Postmodernism is a set of styles – as a creative
explosion of style and surface image in reaction to the
rigid attention to form and underlying structure in
modernism.
Modernism
The transition from old to new is often part of what the
concept of modernism is.
The idea of modernism changed with the
Enlightenment, the cultural movement associated with
scientific progress and reason, future oriented versus
being based on a relation to the past.
Modernity reached its height in the 19th century and
into the early 20th century with movement of
populations.
Demographics found cities attracting millions from the
countryside and industrial capitalism flourished.
It was characterized by the experience of upheaval
and change, yet also of optimism and a belief in a
better, more advanced future.
Form follows function
In art, instead of representing reality, there is an interest in
revealing basic elements, like the mental state of the
painter at the moment of creation.
Concept, process and performance serve as essential
aspects of many modern artists’ practices. This stands for
a radical break with the past. Content was the form itself.
Mondrian - abstract rhythms of modern spaces
Pollack - action and expressive movement
In the USSR post-Revolution
Constructivism was a break with the
past, in an attempt to reflect the
dynamism and vitality of a society reflecting a belief in science and
technology - not the idea that art is
spiritual or sublime.
There was an understanding that
abstract art was reactionary - and art
was there to serve the advancement of
the state.
Dziga Vertov as a filmmaker tried to show the
dynamic flow of the new urban civilization
taking shape in the USSR.
This observational mode lead to a type of
direct cinema activity in the 50s and 60s
(documentary film technique that captures
spontaneous action, with minimal interference
of director, camera, editor in the events
unfolding).
Other movements that broke with past
conventions:
Cubism (rejected tying political change to
modernist aesthetics as Constructivism did)
Futurism - tied to the emergence of Fascism in
Italy in the 1910s-20s.
Modernism was characterized by a sense
of knowing that was forward looking and
positive – belief in knowing what was
true and real as what was for the best in a
given society.
The Postmodern is characterized by
questioning these sorts of knowledges
and the belief in progress.
Do we really know that progress is
always a good thing?
Postmodernism insists that there are
many truths as opposed to a single pure
truth.
In postmodernism all social institutions fall
under scrutiny, as do all philosophical
assumptions.
There is a questioning of all ideologies
rather than accepting certain truths as
natural.
A constant quest for authenticity.
Postmodernism questions the idea of
presence, or immediate experience as being
reliable and real.
Why? Because everything is mediated
through language, images, social forces, etc.
So postmodernism works in tension with
modernism and the past.
Postmodernism emphasizes ideas of
pluralism and multiplicity - especially
of meaning. There are multiple
subjectivities and identity categories
like race, gender, class, age…
Polysemy derives from this, a belief
that texts can have many meanings.
The idea of hypertext reflects
postmodernism in using a network
model with multiple pathways rather
than linear narrative to organize
knowledge and information.
Postmodernism emphasizes irony and sense of
one’s own involvement in low or popular culture.
Appropriation, parody, nostalgic play and
reconfiguration of historical forms and images
are associated with the term Postmodernism.
Reflexivity
In Postmodernism, many artists use self-awareness of
one’s part in popular culture to produce work that
examines their own position in relation to the artwork
or the artwork’s institutional context.
The early work of Cindy Sherman, where her “Film
Stills” created referential shots from Hollywood studio
films, but there never were any such films.
As the “actress” Sherman puts herself through a variety
of styles, gestures and stereotypical poses as the passive
object of male visual pleasure.
What Sherman does differently is to insert herself into
the image and into the process of image production.
This is how she achieves irony and reflexivity.
Her images feed our nostalgia for bygone eras. They
also comment ironically on the past as they make
appearance and reality conflict. Sherman makes us
think reflexively about subjectivity and gendered
processes of identification in this postmodern era.
Punk and New Wave performers of the
70s-80s raided thrift stores to acquire
clothes to reflect earlier musical and
artistic styles referenced in their works.
Transforming oneself is best exemplified
by Madonna and Michael Jackson who
transformed and appropriated their looks
according to familiar cultural referents.
(Marilyn Monroe; Elizabeth Taylor looks)
Body and identity become infinitely
malleable in a culture where image is
the ultimate register of experience.
Reflexivity also takes the form in
postmodern style of referencing
context or framing in order to rethink
the viewers relationship to an image
or narrative.
One narrative style is to refuse the
viewers the opportunity to become
absorbed in the narrative and lose
themselves.
The conventions of cinematic
storytelling are broken by pulling
back the camera to reveal framing
devices or the set.
Is there anything original left to discover?
Postmodernism seems to deny that there can be
anything really new.
Presently there is a borrowing, an appropriation, of
previous historical styles.
Postmodernism has been characterized by a kind of
fatigue with the new and the sense that everything has
been done before.
One of the key terms to describe this culture of
imitation and remake is pastiche.
Pastiche is a quoting and combining of different
styles with a specific notion that style has no
obligation to be better than what has preceded it.
An arch may have no structural function – indeed, its
use may be in the humor of existing without a
function, as mere decoration. This celebration of
surface can be found in architecture.
The term pastiche is derived from the Italian word
pasticcio, which refers to a combination of elements
(like montage, collage, and medley forms).
When pastiche is engaged with reworking elements
of the past, it can also fall into the category of parody.
In terms of Hollywood cinema, we are now in an era
when the vast majority of genre works are genre
parodies.
Postmodern questioning raises important
epistemological issues with the project of history and
the degree to which we have access to the past.
Pastiche can allow us to feel our connection to the
affective frameworks, the structures of feeling,
past and present, that we inherit and pass on.
In art, the notion that nothing new can be made – that
something new is a fallacy, is a fundamental aspect of
postmodernism – the copy has the same value as the
original… and where the theft of an “original” [by
Sherrie Levine] questions the idea of original value
and authenticity.
Much postmodern art rethinks the function of art and
the role of institutional context in producing meaning.
Popular culture: parody and reflexivity
Intertextuality is the insertion of
another text with its meaning, within a
new text.
It assumes that the viewer is informed
about the meaning of the text(s) and
thus can ‘get’ the point.
In advertising this reminds viewers of
other ads and of course, makes the
viewer think s/he is “savvy” or cool,
because s/he ‘gets’ the point.
What is the future in a present that
constantly remakes, parodies and
references the past?
Addressing the postmodern consumer
The assumption is that vewers are media literate
and a little jaded by contemporary pop culture.
Advertisers use metacommunication where an ad
speaks to the viewer as a strategy about the
process of viewing the ad. The product is
secondary to the ‘insider’ feeling the ad is
supposed to generate, but of course selling the
product is the primary goal.
In short, if you understand the process of selling,
you will then have a positive reinforcement
regarding the product. Thus is a commodity sign
created.
Another popular technique is the “anti-ad” where
the object is to establish a product or name brand
as hip or cool, or socially aware and concerned.
Or the ad becomes grotesque and bizarre in order
to draw someone’s attention.
Or they may use free flowing signifiers detached
from a specific situation.
For a company like Benetton, the breaking of
advertising codes is important so long as it
achieves notoriety. In fact, Benetton does not even
show its banal product any longer.
Postmodern culture is also
produced through changes
that have taken place in the
production, dissemination,
and marketing of media
forms.
The emergences of
independent media forms
and productions have
capitalized in particular on
the Web as an alternative
venue for marketing media
apart from the confines of
the industry.
Postmodern styles have emerged not
only out of a set of economic and
cultural shifts but also through a
redefinition of authorship and the
relationship of production,
distribution, and consumption that has
been enabled by changing
technologies and new cultural
practices.
The fragmentation of the market has
supported the growth of a significant
independent sector in the 2000s.
As a politics that relies upon style for
its expression, postmodernism runs the
risk not only of reducing real social
conditions to mere media effects - but
also of reducing political expression to
image.
Does a social message lose its
impact when it is reduced to
selling a line of clothing?
Postmodernism remains a very
cynical feature of our
landscape, much different from
modernism. We may be aware
that it is still propounding the
dominant consumerist
ideology…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMCdmoJ8Ab4
Crowel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOzDUAh5b90
Carson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqjz3_tuvsE
Reminders:
You have been sent this weeks Thursday assignment.
Quizzes will be returned on Thursday.
The final exam is April 30th at 3:30 in this room.
Any ACCESS arrangements will need to be made in the
next few weeks. Please let me know what they are.
On the final day of class: evaluation, quiz, review.
NO class on April 23rd.