Lecture 7: The Postmodern Turn

1
Lecture 7The Postmodern Turn

• CRS 1001 Introduction to Cultural Studies

2
Modernity

• Period after the 'Middle Ages' or feudalism
  theorized by Marx, Weber
• characterized by innovation, novelty, and
  dynamism
• The Enlightenment (about 1648 1781)
• Immanuel Kant
• Enlightenment is mans release from his
  self-incurred tutelage.mans inability to make
  use of his understanding without direction from
  anotherSapere aude! (Dare to know)

3
Cartesian Reason

• Reason ? autonomy, nature, progress
• Truth ? the foundation
• Modernization
• processes of individualization, secularization,
  industrialization, cultural differentiation,
  commodification, urbanization, bureaucratization,
  and rationalization

4
LEONARDO DA VINCI 1452-1519

• Last Supper, painted in 1495

5
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) The Ball at
the Moulin dela Galette, 1876

• Embody a most basic attitudes about art and life
• men and women together
• open and casual
• warm, radiant sunlight
• Figures blend softly into one another and into
  their surrounding space
• The world is pleasurable, sensuous
• Generously endowed with human feeling

6
Juan Gris, a Spanish artist (1887-1927)together
with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque the first
and greatest exponents of the cubist painting
Portrait of Picasso 1912 Oil on canvas, 93.4 x
74.3 cm (36 3/4 x 29 1/4 in) Collection of Mr.
and Mrs. Leigh Block Art Institute of Chicago
7
Failures of modernity

• Aesthetic modernity
• rebelled against industrialization and
  rationalization
• failures of modernity
• economic disparity, gender discrimination,
  imperialism

8
The Search for Postmodern

• Ending of an epoch?
• new postmodern philosophy (Nietzche, Foucault,
  Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari,
  Lyotard, etc.)
• diversities between postmodern positions

9
Postmodernism the beginnings

• Individual use in late 19th and early 20th
  centuries
• Gained significance in American criticism in 50s
  and 60s
• Classical texts
• Fredric Jamesons Postmodernism or the Cultural
  Logic of Late Capitalism (1984)
• Blade Runner (1981)

10
Blade Runner (1981)

• A Ridley Scott adaptation of the Philip K. Dick
  novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

11
Postmodernity

• post as an epochal term, a rupture
• new forms of knowledge advanced information
  ?produce a postmodern social formation
  (Baudrillard, Lyotard)
• development of a higher stage of (consumerist)
  capitalism (Federic Jameson)

12
Postmodern

• Conspicuous display of a formal
  self-consciousness
• Borrowing of texts and styles across all
  boundaries
• Listens to reggae, watches Westerns, eats
  MacDonalds for lunch and local cuisine for
  dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro
  clothing in Hong Kong knowledge is a matter for
  TV games.

13
Challenges

• increased cultural fragmentation new modes of
  experience, subjectivity, and culture
• A world of floating images simulations
• Loss of the sense of originality
• Loss of authentic identity
• Loss of values and standards in art and morality

14
The critique of modern theory

• Rejection of grand narratives from Descartes to
  Marx, Weber for their
• search for a foundation
• universalizing and totalizing claims
• apodictic truth
• fallacious rationalism

15
Postmodernism

• The advancement of technology overtook the
  advancement of industry in 1900s
• Media images encourage superficiality rather than
  substance, cynicism rather than belief, the
  thirst for constant changes rather than security
  of stable traditions, the desires of the moment
  rather than the truths of history (Strinati 1991)

16
Baudrillard

• Media-saturated consumer society
• Signifier detached from its signified
• World of floating images copies without
  originals
• Simulacrum simulations stand in for the real

17
Andy Warhol, American Pop Artist (1928-1987)

• Campbell's Soup Can  (1964)  Silkscreen on
  canvas  35 3/4 x 24 in
• Leo Castelli Gallery, New York

200 Campbell's Soup Cans (1962)Oil on canvas, 6
ft x 8 ft 4 inLeo Castelli Gallery, New York
18
Jean Baudrillard Simulations (1983)

• Simulation models of a real without origin or
  reality ? hyperreal
• The map precedes/engenders the territory
• Difference between the two has disappeared
• The real is produced from miniaturised units,
  memory banks that can be reproduced an
  indefinite number of times
• Substituting signs of the real for the real itself

19
Hyperreality

• A hyperreality of simulations in which images,
  spectacles and the play of signs have replaced
  the logic of production and class conflict
• The model structures social reality erosion of
  the distinction between the model and the real
• The boundary between representation and reality
  implodes
• Signs and codes constitute the real

20
Jean Baudrillard

• There is no clear appropriate answer to defining
  postmodernism. Basically, if post-modernism
  exists, it must be the characteristic of a
  universe where there is no more definitions
  possible. It is a game of definitions which
  mattersthey have been deconstructed,
  destroyedit has all be done. The extreme limit
  of these possibilities has been reachedall that
  are left are the pieces.

21
The postmodern critique

• no rational, unified subject but a decentered,
  fragmented one
• ?provides a critique of representation

• not macroperspectives but microtheory and
  micropolitics (Lyotard 1984a)

22
Postmodern Culture

• A sense of fragmentary, ambiguous and uncertain
  nature of living
• An awareness of the centrality of contingency
• A recognition of cultural difference
• The collapse of cultural boundaries
• a bricolage, the blending and blurring of styles
  and genres
• An acceleration in the pace of living

23
Lyotard Lets make war on Totality

• Five Major Characteristics
• Rejection of any unifying, grand narrative
• End of totalistic or unifying thought
• loss of confidence in causal relations,
  predictability, controllability, etc.
• A fundamental change of worldview crisis of a
  mechanist world
• disbelief in determinism, stability, order,
  balance, progress etc.
• Right to radical differences
• Pluralism in everyday life

24
Wong Kar Wai Chungking Express (1994)