Introduction

What is postmodernism? 

Postmodernism and Postmodernity 

Different Stages and Different Fields

The Postmodern Debate

Examples for discussion  (fju)

Why do we want to study it here? 

I. A Distinction of the terms: Postmodernism and Postmodernity 

Generally, Postmodernity refers to the socio-political conditions of postwar/contemporary period ("new forms of social, political and economic arrangement; new mode of thinking" Connor) and postmodernism refers to the cultures produced under those conditions.  Just as the two terms are controversial and variously defined, the relations between the two also vary from one cultural field (e.g. music industry and literature) to another (See examples of definitions).

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II. General Characteristics of Postmodernism

• As "intellectual/political movement"
  1. "post" - Modernity/Modernism:
     post =

     after and because of (Hutcheon) "taking leave of" (Vattimore) beyond the future (post) anterior (modo)(Lyotard) 'after' just now--or sometimes beyond, contra, above, ultra, meta, out-side-of (Jencks)  (see quotes)

  2. constructionism
  3. anti-foundationalism (de-totalization)
  4. de-centering, boundary-crossing
  5. depthlessness

  (Mcrobbie p. 2-5) "At that time there were two approaches to postmodernism, each of which raised important questions for sociologists.  From architecture to fine art, from remakes of B movies to the cinema of David Lynch, from Talking Heads to Laurie Anderson, what was becoming increasingly apparent was indeed a concern with surface, with meaning being paraded as an intentionally superficial phenomenon (what Jameson labeled 'waning in affect' or depthlessness).  Not only was meaning in art or in culture all there, for all to see, stripped of its old hidden elitist difficulty, but it also, again as Jameson pointed out, seemed already familiar, like the faint memory of an old pop song, a refrain, a chorus, a tune, a 'cover version' of an original which never was.  (e.g. Jameson)    The second way of looking at postmodernism back in the 1980s was to consider it as an anti-foundationalist form of anti-social theory--that is, a form of criticism which interrogated and exposed the (cruel) foundations upon which modern social thought had been based.  This approach, which became more familiar in the late 1980s, suggested that there could no longer be one theory of society, no one 'big picture'.  At best there were a number of snapshots of the same view, each aware of the limits of its own field of vision.  Here, too, we detect a playfulness, a disrespect for the meta-narratives of history, a refusal to play the game of philosophy and a desire instead to enjoy a willful breaking of the rules in favour of epithet, contingency, discontinuity.  (e.g. Lyotard, Baudrillard)"

• As style: uncertainties (undecidability); exhaustion--replenishment; parody (pastiche); self-reflexiveness; double-ness, eclecticism; crisis in representation.

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III. Different Stages and Different Fields

(H. Bertens  on postmodernisms from his "Introduction")

 

1)" a complex anti-modernist artistic strategies which emerged in the 1950s and developd momentum in the course of the 1960's.  e.g.--architecture; For Robert Venturi, ...Charles Jencks and other theorists, modernist architecture is the purist self-referential architecture of the Bauhaus .. .and of the corporate architecture of the postwar international style.  Postmodern architecture turns away from this self-absorbed and technocratic purism and turns to the vernacular and to history, thus reintroducing the humanizing narrative element that had been banned...  e.g. -for many of the American literary critics that bring the term postmodernism into circulation in the 1960's and early 1970's, postmodernism is the move away from narrative, from representation..  a move toward radical aesthetic autonomy, towards pure formalism  e.g. photography--anti-representational, anti-narrative, deconstructionist photography"

"two strands:  1) it embraced the enlarged condition of possibility apparently released by the fading of modernism--critical pluralist  2) attempts to go beyond modernism by revealing the inability within it --oppositional, exploratory"  two extremes--  anti-representational --------------------representational and narrative  two attitudes  positive--Charles Jencks,  negative--Jameson, Baudrillard  1960--the avant-garde attacj ib art-as-institution is broadened and raised to socio-political level.  1970--postmodernism was gradually drawn into a poststructuralist orbit.  Like poststructuralism, this postmodernism rejects the empirical idea that language can represent reality, that the world is accessible to us because its objects are mirrored in the language that we use.  --two moments within this poststructuralist postmodernism  1)the later 1970s and the early 1980s, derives from Barthes and Derrida and is linguistic, that is, textual, in its orientation.  2) the other moment. . . derives from Foucault and, to a lesser extent, Lacan. It belongs to the 1980s rather than the 1970s, although it is difficult to pinpoint its appearance.  Like the early deconstructionist postmodernism, this later poststructuralist postmodernism assumes a reality of textuality and signs, of representations that do not represent.  Here, however, the emphasis is on the workings of power, and the constitution of the subject. . . . This postmodernism interrogates the power that is inherent in the discourses that surround us--and that is continually reproduced by them--and interrogates the institutions that support those discourses and are, in turn, supported by them.  against the hegemony of any single discursive system . . . in its advocacy of difference, pluriformity, and multiplicity.  (e.g. liberal humanism)"

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IV. The Postmodern Debate

 

Positive	Negative
Subversive of mainstream systems; Empowering the margins	Apolitical, complicitous, imperialistic
Anti-foundationalism, Pluralism	Skepticism, Relativism
Boundary-breaking	Overall commodification, lack of critical distance;
Constructing subjectivity	Death of the subject
Parody	Pastiche, kitsch

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Events related to Chinese/Taiwanese Modernity and Postmodernity: An Unfinished Chronicle

• its position as a Third-World nation with the experience of multiple colonization
• its experience of war and unfinished national movements