Postmodernism

1
Postmodernism
2
What Exactly Do We Mean By Postmodern

• The Result of
• The Aftermath of
• The Afterbirth of
• The Development of
• The Denial of
• The Rejection of

3
What is Modern?

• Modern means just now.
• History is divided into periods.
• In Western thought, Tradition defines itself
  against its predecessors.

4
What is Modernism?

• Refers to the changes wrought by the
  technological effects of industrialization.
• Technology- internal combustion engine, steam
  turbine, telephone, tape machine, synthetics
• Mass Media/Entertainment- advertising, mass
  circulation newspapers, radios, movies
• Science- Genetics, Freud (psychoanalysis),
  Rutherfords model of the atom, Plancks quantum
  theory, Einsteins Special and General theories
  of Relativity

5
Understanding the Shift to Postmodernism Through
Art

• Picasso- anti-representational model of
  (de)form(ation)
• The Crisis of Representation- photography and
  mass production replaced hand crafted original
  art. Realism was coming to an end.
  Representation
• Cezanne- creates uncertainty in perception.
  Depict the effect of perceiving reality, rather
  than reality.
• Cubism- rejected the notion of a single
  isolatable event, the view contains the viewer.

6
The End of Original Art?

• Walter Benjamin argued that the aura of art (the
  fetish of sacred uniqueness) is eliminated by
  mass production.
• This has a disintegrating effect on originality
  itself.

7
The Postmodern- Art

• When the modern is at war with itself, it becomes
  post modern.
• What, then, is the postmodern?... It is
  undoubtedly a part of the modern. All that has
  been received, if only yesterdaymust be
  suspected. What space does Cezanne challenge?
  The Impressionists. What object do Picasso and
  Braque attack? Cezannes. What presupposition
  does Duchamp break with in 1912? That which says
  one must make a painting, be it Cubist. And
  (Daniel) Buren questions that other
  presupposition which he believes had survived
  untouched in the work of acceleration, the
  generations precipitate themselves. A work can
  become modern only if it is first postmodern.
  Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at
  its end but in the nascent state, and the state
  is constant. Lyotard, 1979

8
False Postmodernism

• Antimodernism- asks for an end to
  experimentation. Tends to have conservative
  tendancies.
• Eclectic Postmodernism- degree zero of
  contemporary general culture one listens to
  reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonalds food
  for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears
  Paris perfume, wears retro clothes. All
  tastes, like all needs, are attended to by
  the market.

9
Postmodernism

• Has three key items on the agenda
• 1) Reproducibility
• 2) A Consumerist Aura
• 3) Legitimation

10
Reproducibility

• Everything is reproducible
• Reproducibility increases the value of the real.

11
Consumerist Aura

• Extends to anything that has nostalgia value.
• Image Consumerism- the reproduced is taking the
  place of the real, or replacing it as
  hyper-reality. The reproduced is taking the
  place of reality or replacing it as
  hyper-reality.
• We are living what has already been lived and
  reproduced with no reality anymore but that of
  the cannibalized image.

12
Legitimation

• Whose power will legitimate what is done, and
  the right way of doing it.
• Why are some things in? Why are some things art?
• The Role of the Critic in the process of
  legitimation.
• The irony of postmodernist anti-art as becoming
  legitimated as prized and highly priced
  commodities.

13
Jean-Francois Lyotard

• Jean-Francois Lyotard was born in 1924 at
  Versailles
• Taught philosophy in secondary schools from 1949
  to 1959. He taught at universities at Nanterre
  and Vincennes.
• Later he secured a post as professor of
  philosophy at the University of Paris VIII
  (Saint-Denis) which he held until his retirement
  in 1989.
• He was also professor of philosophy at the
  Collège International de Philosophie in Paris,
  and professor of French and Italian at the
  University of California at Irvine.
• Active member of the radical Marxist group
  Socialisme ou barbarie for some ten years from
  1954 to 1964.
• Then he joined another radical group, Pouvoir
  ouvrier, only to leave two years later.
• From 1955 onwards, while a member of Socialisme
  ou barbarie, Lyotard was assigned responsibility
  for the Algerian section. His accounts of the
  anti-imperialist struggle in Algeria, as Bill
  Readings (1993 xiii) argues, "provide a useful
  empirical corrective to charges that
  poststructuralism is an evasion of politics, or
  that Lyotards account of the postmodern
  condition is a blissful ignorance of the
  postcolonial question".
• After 1966 Lyotard discontinued his active
  political affiliation with any radical Marxist
  group and, indeed, this break, autobiographically
  speaking, represents intellectually, on the one
  hand, a break with Marxism and, on the other, a
  turn to philosophy.

14
Lyotards philosophical writings divide into two
main periods

• First Period- signaled a conscious shift away
  from the doctrinaire praxis philosophy.
• Second Period- An investigation into the
  Postmodern Condition.

15
The First Period

• He attempts to develop a metaphysics of truth
  without negation
• He attempts to substitute Freuds economy of
  libidinal energy (and the notion of primary
  process) for Marxist political economy.
• In this situation there is no truth arrived at
  through dialectics the supposed ethical and
  social truths of Marxism, based upon an appeal to
  an historical ideal, are no better than the
  falsehoods it wants to overcome.

16
Lyotards Critique of Dialectics

• Lyotard (1974) criticizes the underlying notion
  of the dialectic.
• He does not believe that a political,
  philosophical, or artistic position is to be
  abandoned because it is "sublated".
• It is not true that the experience of a position
  means its inevitable exhaustion and necessary
  development into another position where it is
  both conserved and suppressed.
• Veerman (1988 272) suggests that the upshot of
  Lyotards metaphysics in his first period is
  simply that "we cannot take one political stand
  rather than another, since the correct one cannot
  be decided".

17
Breaking with Marxism

• What if there wasnt any Self at all in
  experience to synthesize contradictorily the
  moments and thus to achieve knowledge and
  realization of itself?
• What if history and thought did not need this
  synthesis?
• What if the paradoxes had to remain paradoxes?
• What if Marxism itself were in its turn one of
  those particular universals which it was not even
  a question of going beyond?

18
The New Realities Confronting Marxism

• Capitalism had survived. Modern capitalism, once
  its market and production capacities had been
  restored, had set up new relations of
  exploitation and taken on new forms.
• Lyotard lists the following the new realities
  confronting Marxism
• 1) The reorganization of capitalism into
  bureaucratic or State monopolistic capitalism
• 2) The role of the modern State in the so-called
  mixed economy
• 3) The dynamics of the new ruling strata
  (bureaucratic or technocratic) within the
  bourgeoisie the impact of the new techniques on
  work conditions and on the mentality of workers
  and employee
• 4) The effects of economic growth on daily life
  and culture
• 5) The appearance of new demands by workers and
  the possibility of conflicts between the base and
  the apparatus in worker organizations"

19
The Second Phase- Postmodern Lyotard

• He acknowledges his debt.
• the Marxian analysis of commodity fetish as it
  applies to knowledge and education
  (commodification thesis).
• It is one of the main processes of
  rationalisation which guides the development of
  the system as a whole.
• He recognizes the way in which the logic of
  performance, aimed at maximizing the overall
  efficiency of the system, generates
  socio-economic contradictions, but he parts
  company with Marxists on the possibility of
  emancipation or of salvation expected to arise
  automatically from these contradictions.

20
Lyotards Project in Postmodernity

• "Our role as thinkers is to deepen what language
  there is, to critique the shallow notion of
  information, to reveal an irremediable opacity
  within language itself". The issue for Lyotard is
  one of understanding and providing a critique of
  capitalist forms of the insinuation of will into
  reason and the way this is manifest primarily in
  language. (1993)

21
The Modern and the Postmodern

• The Modern Condition
• to designate any science that legitimates itself
  with reference to a metadiscourse . . . making an
  explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as
  the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of
  meaning, the emancipation of the rational or
  working subject, or the creation of wealth
  (Lyotard 1984xxiii).
• The Postmodern Condition
• "incredulity toward metanarratives" by which he
  means to point to "the obsolescence of the
  metanarrative apparatus of legitimation" to which
  corresponds "the crisis of metaphysical
  philosophy and of the university institution . .
  ."

22
Lyotard- The Postmodern Condition

• What is the Postmodern condition-
• that the status of knowledge is altered as
  societies enter what is known as the
  postindustrial age and cultures enter what is
  known as the postmodern age" (1984 3).
• He uses the term postmodern condition to
  describe the state of knowledge and the problem
  of its legitimation in the most highly developed
  societies.
• It is the state of Western culture "following the
  transformations which, since the end of the
  nineteenth century, have altered the game rules
  for science, literaure and the arts" (Lyotard,
  1984 3).

23
Transformations of the Postmodern Condition

• Lyotard places these transformations within the
  context of the crisis of narratives,
• Especially those Enlightenment metanarratives
  concerning meaning, truth and emancipation which
  have been used to legitimate both the rules of
  knowledge of the sciences and the foundations of
  modern institutions.

24
The Role of Language

• Significantly, he maintains, the leading sciences
  and technologies have all been based on
  language-related developments -- theories of
  linguistics, cybernetics, informatics, computer
  languages, theories of algebra -- and their
  miniaturization and commercialization.

25
Language and Knowledge

• Lyotard argues that the status of knowledge is
  permanently altered by the changes in language.
• The availability of knowledge as an international
  commodity becomes the basis for national and
  commercial advantage within the global economy.
• Knowledge has already become the principal force
  of production, changing the composition of the
  workforce in developed countries.
• The commercialization of knowledge and its new
  forms of media circulation will raise new
  ethical-legal problems between the nation-state
  and the information-rich multinationals, as well
  as widening the gap between developed and Third
  worlds.

26
Lyotard on Politics

• Lyotard (1988b) suggests that "the essential
  philosophical task will be to refuse . . . the
  complete aestheticization of the political"
  (ibid.) characteristic of modern politics.
• By aestheticization Lyotard means an active
  fashioning or shaping of the community or polity
  according to the idea of reason.
• He addresses the crisis of "the end of the
  political", that is, "of all attempts to moralize
  politics which were incarnated in Marxism"
  (Lyotard, 1988b 300).
• Lyotards political writings are characterized by
  a "resistance to modern universalism" by an
  argument against what may be called the "politics
  of redemption".
• What we are presented with in Lyotards work, as
  an alternative, is a politics of resistance, a
  form of writing which offers resistance to
  established modes of thought and accepted
  opinion.

27
Jean Baudrillard

• Was born in 1929 in the northern town of Reims.
• Son of civil servants and grandson of peasant
  farmers, Baudrillard was the first in his family
  to attend university
• His early life is influenced by the Algerian war
  in the 1950s and 60s.
• He taught German in a Lycée before completing his
  doctoral thesis in sociology under the tuition of
  Henri Lefebvre.
• He then became an Assistant in September 1966 at
  Nanterre University of Paris.
• He was associated with Roland Barthes, to whose
  semiotic analysis of culture his first book, The
  Object System (1968) is clearly indebted.
• He was also influenced by Marshall McLuhan who
  demonstrated the importance of the mass media in
  any sociological overview.
• He became Mâitre-assistant at the University in
  1970, and left the school in 1987.

28
Is Baudrillard a Sociologist?

• According to him, NO. Much of his work is intent
  on destroying the discipline
• He also does not consider himself a philosopher.
• Perhaps, he is a moralist.

29
Baudrillards Influences

• Lefebvres Critique of Everyday Life (1958) and
  its analysis of structures beyond the workplace
  including Marxs concept of Alienation.
• Revolution of the Everyday- to resist the
  bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.
• Sartres creation of the intellectual as
  independent from political parties, free to
  build a dialogue with Marxism.

30
Mass Consumption

• Baudrillard provides a critical account of the
  emergence and effect of mass consumption.
• Modernization leads to mass consumption.
• Baudrillard argues Marxs theories have stalled.
• Consumption, not production, is the basis of the
  social order.

31
Is He Influenced by Structuralism?

• NO
• He opposes structuralism because he sees it as a
  system intent on classifying culture. This is
  repressive.

• Yes
• Structural systems at work in consumption, and
  structuralism could be used to expose its
  dynamics.

32
Jean Baudrillard- The Simulacrum

• Postmodernism as the end of theory.
• The border between art and reality has utterly
  vanished as both have collapsed into the
  universal simulacrum.
• The simulcrum is arrived at when the distinction
  between representation and reality- between signs
  and what they refer to in the real world breaks
  down.

33
Simulations

• Reality no longer emits signs with guarantee its
  existence.
• Sings now construct the real as simulations.
• It is no longer relevant to say the real world
  exists. No system of representation or
  analysis can refer to the reality.

34
The Four Stages of Images

• Images have Four Successive Historic Phases
• 1) It is the Reflection of a basic reality.
• 2) It masks and perverts a basic reality.
• 3) It marks the absence of a basic reality.
• 4) It bears no relation to any reality whatever-
  it is its own pure simulacrum.

35
1) Symbolic Order

• Early stages in which hierarchical systems
  predominate.
• Signs are limited and fixed by rank, duty and
  obligation.
• Social mobility is not expected/possible and
  wrongful use of signs is punished.
• Reality is not an issue. Signs do not play with
  social reality. They are dominated by
  unbreakable and reciprocal symbolic order.

36
2) First Order of Simulacra (1400- 1800)- Signs
Pervert a Basic Reality

• This stage is dominated by counterfeits and false
  images.
• Ranges from the Renaissance to the Industrial
  Revolution.
• Fashion is born. Competition over signs succeeds
  statutory order.
• The sign is freed and refers not to obligation
  but to produced signified (meanings like status,
  wealth, prestige).
• Most class enter this sign exchange.
• When signs are emancipated from duty, they can
  pretend to be anything.
• They dream of the symbolic order, but can only
  feign it or falsify it.
• Now signs take over all aspects of social life
  and provide a schematic equivalent for it.

37
3) Second Order of Simulacra- Signs Mask the
Absence of a Basic Reality (Industrial Period)

• This period is dominated by the production and
  the series. Signs are mass produced.
• Signs are repetitive, systematic, operational and
  make individuals the same (as in the system of
  objects).
• The sign is not a counterfeit of the original, it
  refers indifferently to other signs in the
  series.
• Derived from Marxs commercial law of value
  belong here.

38
4) Third Order Simulacra (Current Phase)

• Is dominated by simulation.
• Signs bear no relation to any reality whatsoever.
  They are pure simulacra simulations.
• The real returns but only in its simulation.
• Simulations are not appearances of reality-this
  would leave the reality principle intact.

39
Hyper-Reality

• Reality becomes redundant and we have reached
  hyper-reality.
• Images breed incestuously with each other without
  reference to reality or meaning.

40
The Nullification of Reality

• -For the sign to be pure, it has to duplicate
  itself it is the duplication of the sign which
  destroys its meaning.
• And so Art is dead, not only because its
  critical transcendence is gone, but because
  reality itself, entirely impregnated by an
  aesthetic which is inseparable from its own
  structure, has been confused with its own image.
  Reality no longer has the time to take on the
  appearance of reality. It no longer even
  surpasses fiction it captures every dream even
  before it takes on the appearance of a dream.

41
Understanding Simulations and Culture

• Culture is no longer a living body, the
  presence of a collectivity (religion, feasts,
  storytelling) producing signs.
• Now signs produce cultures.
• Culture is described by the dynamics of
  consumption-fashion cycles, ambience, codes. No
  aspect of culture escapes this.
• The main example of this is cultural recycling
  ephemeral signs of past culture which are
  produced as simulations.