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 nation-state 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=ZVMf2hhfer0&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.

Pollack - action and expressive movement Mondrian - abstract rhythms of modern spaces

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.