Postmodernism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- The Carlton Cabinet (1981) by Ettore Sottsass was my de facto first exposure to postmodernism. I was hooked.--Jahsonic
- “Modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 pm when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.” -- Charles Jencks
- "Pop in the broadest sense was the context in which a notion of the postmodern first took shape, and from the beginning until today, the most significant trends within postmodernism have challenged modernism's relentless hostility to mass culture." -- After the Great Divide (1986) - Andreas Huyssen
- The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply “quote” as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance. --Fredric Jameson, 1984
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Context
By medium: postmodern art - postmodern architecture - postmodern literature - postmodern film - postmodern music
Early theorists: Fredric Jameson - Jean-François Lyotard - Ihab Hassan - Charles Jencks
Critics and connoisseurs: Alan Sokal - Linda Hutcheon - Andreas Huyssen - John McGowan
By field: post-feminism - postmodern philosophy
Techniques: appropriation - collage - deconstruction - death of the avant-garde - eclecticism - fragmentation - intertextuality - montage - nonlinearity - parody - pastiche - playfulness - the techniques of Pop Art - randomness - self referentiality - relativism
Related: consumerism - critical theory - hyperreality - metanarrative - post-industrial society - postmodernity - post-structuralism - semiotics - simulacrum
Preceded by: Modernism
Precursors: Dada - Surrealism
Definition
Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism.
Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated Pomo) was originally a reaction to modernism (not necessarily "post" in the purely temporal sense of "after"). Largely influenced by the disillusionment induced by the Second World War, postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality.
Postmodernity is a derivative referring to non-art aspects of history that were influenced by the new movement, namely the evolutions in society, economy and culture since the 1960s. When the idea of a reaction to—or even a rejection of—the movement of modernism (a late 19th, early 20th centuries art movement) was borrowed by other fields, it became synonymous in some contexts with postmodernity. The term is closely linked with poststructuralism (cf. Jacques Derrida) and with modernism, in terms of a rejection of its bourgeois, elitist culture.
The term was coined in 1949 to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, leading to the postmodern architecture movement. Later, the term was applied to several movements, including in art, music, and literature, that reacted against modern movements, and are typically marked by revival of traditional elements and techniques. Postmodernism in architecture is marked by the re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, and non-orthogonal angles. It may be a response to the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style.
If used in other contexts, it is a concept without a universally accepted, short and simple definition; in a variety of contexts it is used to describe social conditions, movements in the arts, and scholarship (incl. criticism) in reaction to modernism.
Influence and distinction from postmodernity
Postmodernist ideas in the philosophy and the analysis of culture and society, expanded the importance of critical theory, and has been the point of departure for works of literature, architecture, and design, as well as being visible in marketing/business and the interpretation of history, law and culture, starting in the late 20th century. These developments — re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from industrial to service economy) that took place since 1950/1960, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968 — are described with the term postmodernity, as opposed to the "-ism" referring to an opinion or movement. As something being "postmodernist" would be part of the movement, "postmodern" would refer to aspects of the period of the time since the 1950s, a part of contemporary history; still both terms may be synonymous under some circumstances.
See also
- The development of postmodernism
- Aesthetic relativism
- List of postmodern authors
- Nobrow
- Postmodern architecture
- Continental philosophy
- Postmodern psychopathic characters
