Post modernismA2 Media Studies

Critical Perspectives in Media

To recap....• Modernity - A period of history marked by

industrialisation, secularisation, rationality.

• What do these terms mean??

• Differing views on exact times but following the Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason.

• Can you remember time period of modernism??

• Postmodernity - The time period following modernity. Can you remember time period?

Modernity and postmodernity

• Modernity - A period of history marked by:

• *industrialisation (following the Industrial Revolution),

• *secularisation (a move away from religious values and institutions toward non-religious values and secular institutions),

• *rationality (using reason to provide answers)

• Differing views on exact times but following the Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason (Mid 1850s onwards).

• Postmodernity - The time period following modernity. Arguably 1960s to the present day.

What is post modernism?

• A state of affairs in society

• A set of ideas which tries to define this state of affairs

• An artistic style or approach to the making of things

• A word used in many different contexts to explain many different aspects of the above

• The prefix post- means after and modern can be taken to mean current or up-to-date. How then is it possible to be after the modern?

Post modernist images - why?

•.

Postmodernism• Postmodernism - A literal definition is

After Modernism.

• Postmodernism – noun

a late 20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism that represents a departure from modernism and has at its heart a general distrust of grand theories and ideologies as well as a problematical relationship with any notion of “art.”

From – The Apple Dictionary!

A useful starting point.

Postmodernism

• The Compact Oxford English Dictionary refers to postmodernism as "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions.”

Useful definition – part at the end about drawing attention to conventions was not in the first definition but is useful.

Postmodernism• Postmodernism was originally a reaction to

modernism. Largely influenced by the Western European disillusionment induced by World War II, postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organising principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality.

• From Wikipedia.

Modernism• Self-reflexivity.

Rejecting traditional ideas about realism and

experimenting with representation.

Postmodernism• Postmodernism as a reaction to twentieth-century aesthetic

modernism emerged soon after WW2. It still carried most of the features of twentieth-century aesthetic modernism. So, some have argued that it is essentially just an outgrowth of modernism, and not a separate movement. But, there is a fundamental difference. It is that while aesthetic modernism had presented fragmentation, for example, as something tragic to be lamented (as in Eliots' "The Waste Land"), postmodernism no longer laments it but rather celebrates it. Thus, postmodernism is inclined to stay with meaninglessness, playing with nonsense. Dino Felluga sees this difference and lists some of the things "that distinguish postmodern aesthetic work from modernist work" as follows:

From www.newworldencyclopedia.org

Postmodernism

• 1. Extreme self-reflexivity, more playful and even irrelevant (as in pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's "Masterpiece" or architect Frank Gehry's Nationale-Nederlanden Building in Prague)

• 2. Irony and parody (many examples in pop culture and media advertising. eg The Simpsons).

• 3. A breakdown between high and low cultural forms in more immediately understandable ways (as in Andy Warhol's painting for Campbell's Tomato Soup cans).

Postmodernism4. Retro. It is to use styles and fashions from the

past with fascination but completely out of their original context (as in postmodern architecture in which medieval, baroque, and modern elements are often juxtaposed). Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard tend to regard it as a symptom of our loss of connection to history in which the history of aesthetic styles and fashions displaces real history.

5. A further questioning of grand narratives (as in Madonna videos such as "Like a Prayer" and "Material Girl," which question the grand narratives of traditional Christianity, capitalism, etc.).

Postmodernism6. Visuality and the simulacrum vs. temporality. The predominance of visual media (tv, film, media advertising, the computer) has lead to the use of visual forms (as in Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus: A Surviver's Tale through the medium of comics). Visuality also explains some other related features of aesthetic postmodernism: a more breakdown between high and low cultural forms, and a retro. Baudrillard and others have argued that a retro involves copies ("simulacra") of the past without any connection to real past history, blurring the distinction between representation and temporal reality.

Post modernism• 7. Late capitalism whose dominance is

generally feared (as in the predominance of paranoia narratives in movies such as "Blade Runner" and "the Matrix"). This fear is aided by advancements in technology, especially surveillance technology, which creates the sense that we are always being watched.

• 8. Disorientation (as in MTV or those films that seek to disorient the viewer completely through the revelation of a truth that changes everything that came before).

• 9. Return of orality (based on an influx of oral media sources such as tv, film, and radio).

Postmodernism - Our definition.

Postmodern Media - Our definition.