Criticism on Postmodernism

Although, my case studies are postmodern, it can be critiqued that postmodernism is ultimately  meaningless. Even linguist, Noam Chomsky proclaims postmodernism is meaningless, thus it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge, as well as  Richard Dawkins who states it "lacks content." Postmodernism is conclusively grounded on hyperbole and over generalization as seen in my case study of Ariana  Grande's music video 'Problem' where the entire music video is based on a stereotype of seventies culture, playing on figures like Bardot. Also, postmodernism is too idealistic as seen in my video game of Batman lego which has no boundaries, magically getting rid off structure isn't beneficial to everyone, providing falsification. The lack of set rules and structures determines it to be a very broad subject and consequently can be hard to define. One critic argues that; "theory will always fail on it's claim to make good on it's claim to provide a set or rules..it therefore, by definition, can have no consequence."



 There are also many theories that say postmodernism is very pessimistic, Timothy Bewes saying it's a "cynical reaction". I also believe that this idea could also be considered truthful because it claims that there are no more origional ideas anymore and that every media yext has been influenced by another. However, whether this is entirely a bad thing is another case because each media text inspiring one another could benefit some texts.

Intro

The transition from modernism to postmodernism is palpable due to its distinct differences of postmodernity relying on theories and theorists, fragmentation, multiple, confliticing identiies conforming to master narratives as opposed to modernism relying on metanarratives and the belief in individualism with a sense of order.

Postmodernity is a basis of bricolage, pastishe, parody, homage, blurring, intertextuality and fragmentation. 

Postmodern

Community - created by Dan Horman Sept 17th, 2009 on NBC

• Baudrillard's hyperreality - show is a sticom about sitcoms - unrealistic sets - non-diegetic sounds of audience laughter 
• Meta-narratives - confronts meta-narrative of family, study group 'education', mise-en-scene book learning setting which is incredibly dysfunctional through the show's character representations
• characters contradict themselves e.g. innocent Annie used to be a drug addict
• Roland Barthes; "we know that text is not a line of words replacing a single theological meaning" but a text that "blend and clash the text is a tissue of quotations" Community commences this by absorbing comments and challenges on the legitimacy of multi-dimensional space
• meta-humour and pop culture references, often pardoying film and television cliches and tropes

Ariana Grande's Problem Music Video

Task #3

Future of postmodernism

The future of postmodernism is metamodernism -

1. Metamodernism is a set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism. One definition characterizes metamodernism as mediations between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism.
2. Ours is a generation raised in the ‘80s and ‘90s, on a diet of The Simpsons and South Park, for whom postmodern irony and cynicism is a default setting, something ingrained in us. However, despite, or rather because of this, a yearning for meaning—for sincere and constructive progression and expression—has come to shape today’s dominant cultural mode.
3. Whereas postmodernism was characterised by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat), the discourse surrounding metamodernism engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives and universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from postmodernism.
4. metamodernism considers that our era is characterised by an oscillation between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. We see this manifest as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other.
5. This metamodern sensibility can be discerned in, for example, the films of Wes Anderson, Miranda July, and Spike Jonze; in the music of Arcade Fire, Bill Callahan, and Future Islands; in TV shows fromParks and Recreation to Breaking Bad; in the novels of David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Roberto Bolaño; the poetry of Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Sophie Collins, and Melissa Broder’s quasi-mystical multimedia NewHive offerings. In the visual arts, we have seen a shift away from the insubstantial conceptual one-liners of the YBAs, or Jeff Koons’s vacuously overinflated ironic baubles, towards a reengagement with materiality, affect and the sublime, found in the work of artists like Olafur Eliasson, Peter Doig, and Guido van der Werve.

   Ours is also an age in which increasingly speculative modes of thought are thriving, with philosophies such as Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, as well as movements like Occupy, the Tea Party, and the rise of extremist political factions (for better or worse), empowered by network culture. However, metamodernism itself is not intended as a philosophy or an art movement, since it does not define or delineate a closed system of thought, or dictate any particular set of aesthetic values or methodologies. It is not a manifesto—although, as an artist myself, I couldn’t resist the temptation to imagine it as if it were, with my 2011 manifesto an exercise in simultaneously defining and embodying the metamodern spirit; at once coherent and preposterous, earnest and somewhat self-defeating, yet ultimately hopeful and optimistic.

   Metamodernism does not, then, propose any kind of utopian vision, although it does describe the climate in which a yearning for utopias, despite their futile nature, has come to the fore. The metamodernism discourse is thus descriptive rather than prescriptive; an inclusive means of articulating the ongoing developments associated with a structure of feeling for which the vocabulary of postmodern critique is no longer sufficient, but whose future paths have yet to be constructed.

   
   
6. 1.

   We recognise oscillation to be the natural order of the world.

   2.

   We must liberate ourselves from the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child.

   3.

   Movement shall henceforth be enabled by way of an oscillation between positions, with diametrically opposed ideas operating like the pulsating polarities of a colossal electric machine, propelling the world into action.

   4.

   We acknowledge the limitations inherent to all movement and experience, and the futility of any attempt to transcend the boundaries set forth therein. The essential incompleteness of a system should necessitate an adherence, not in order to achieve a given end or be slaves to its course, but rather perchance to glimpse by proxy some hidden exteriority. Existence is enriched if we set about our task as if those limits might be exceeded, for such action unfolds the world.

   5.

   All things are caught within the irrevocable slide towards a state of maximum entropic dissemblance. Artistic creation is contingent upon the origination or revelation of difference therein. Affect at its zenith is the unmediated experience of difference in itself. It must be art’s role to explore the promise of its own paradoxical ambition by coaxing excess towards presence.

   6.

   The present is a symptom of the twin birth of immediacy and obsolescence. Today, we are nostalgists as much as we are futurists. The new technology enables the simultaneous experience and enactment of events from a multiplicity of positions. Far from signalling its demise, these emergent networks facilitate the democratisation of history, illuminating the forking paths along which its grand narratives may navigate the here and now.

   7.

   Just as science strives for poetic elegance, artists might assume a quest for truth. All information is grounds for knowledge, whether empirical or aphoristic, no matter its truth-value. We should embrace the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivety of a magical realism. Error breeds sense.

   8.

   We propose a pragmatic romanticism unhindered by ideological anchorage. Thus, metamodernism shall be defined as the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons. We must go forth and oscillate!

Tasks

Task #1

Modernism to postmodernism

"Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past. -gilbert adair

Modernism/Modernity	Postmodern/Postmodernity
Master Narratives and Metanarratives of history, culture and national identity; myths of cultural and ethnic orgin.	Suspicion and rejection of Master Narratives; local narratives, ironic deconstruction of master narratives: counter-myths of origin.
Faith in "Grand Theory" (totalizing explantions in history, science and culture) to represent all knowledge and explain everything.	Rejection of totalizing theories; pursuit of localizing and contingent theories.
Faith in, and myths of, social and cultural unity, hierarchies of social-class and ethnic/national values, seemingly clear bases for unity.	Social and cultural pluralism, disunity, unclear bases for social/national/ethnic unity.
Master narrative of progress through science and technology.	Skepticism of progress, anti-technology reactions, neo-Luddism; new age religions.
Sense of unified, centered self;  "individualism," unified identity.	Sense of fragmentation and decentered self;  multiple, conflicting identities.
Idea of "the family" as central unit of social order: model of the middle-class, nuclear family.	Alternative family units, alternatives to middle-class marriage model, multiple identities for couplings and childraising.
Hierarchy, order, centralized control.	Subverted order, loss of centralized control, fragmentation.
Faith and personal investment in big politics (Nation-State, party).	Trust and investment in micropolitics, identity politics, local politics, institutional power struggles.
Root/Depth tropes.  Faith in "Depth" (meaning, value, content, the signified) over "Surface" (appearances, the superficial, the signifier).	Rhizome/surface tropes.  Attention to play of surfaces, images, signifiers without concern for "Depth".
Faith in the "real" beyond media and representations; authenticity of "originals"	Hyper-reality, image saturation, simulacra seem more powerful than the "real"; images and texts with no prior "original".  "As seen on TV" and "as seen on MTV" are more powerful than unmediated experience.
Dichotomy of high and low culture (official vs. popular culture);  imposed consensus that high or official culture is normative and authoritative	Disruption of the dominance of high culture by popular culture;  mixing of popular and high cultures, new valuation of pop culture, hybrid cultural forms cancel "high"/"low" categories.
Mass culture, mass consumption, mass marketing.	Demassified culture; niche products and marketing, smaller group identities.
Art as unique object and finished work authenticated by artist and validated by agreed upon standards.	Art as process, performance, production, intertextuality.  Art as recycling of culture authenticated by audience and validated in subcultures sharing identity with the artist.
Knowledge mastery, attempts to embrace a totality.  The encyclopedia.	Navigation, information management, just-in-time knowledge.  The Web.
Broadcast media, centralized one-  to-many communications.	Interactive, client-server, distributed, many-  to-many media (the Net and Web).
Centering/centeredness,  centralized knowledge.	Dispersal, dissemination,  networked, distributed knowledge
Determinancy	Indeterminancy, contingency.
Seriousness of intention and purpose, middle-class earnestness.	Play, irony, challenge to official seriousness, subversion of earnestness.
Sense of clear generic boundaries and wholeness (art, music, and literature).	Hybridity, promiscuous genres, recombinant culture, intertextuality, pastiche.
Design and architecture of New York and Boston.	Design and architecture of LA and Las Vegas
Clear dichotomy between organic and inorganic, human and machine	cyborgian mixing of organic and inorganic, human and machine and electronic
Phallic ordering of sexual difference, unified sexualities, exclusion/bracketing of pornography	androgyny, queer sexual identities, polymorphous sexuality, mass marketing of pornography
the book as sufficient bearer of the word;  the library as system for printed knowledge	hypermedia as transcendence of physical limits of print media;  the Web or Net as information system

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard, born in 1929, in Reins, Paris is a postmodern theorist and a  sharp critic of contemporary society, culture and thought.  According to Baudrillard, our postmodern culture has become reliant on models and maps that we have lost all contact with the real world that preceded the map.When it comes to postmodern simulation and simulacra, Baudrillard suggests that postmodern culture is artificial, thus the concept of artificiality still requires some sense of reality against which to recognize the artifice. We have lost all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice. Hyperreality is a world of simulacra, without intermediary mass media. The "American dream" is an example of this, culture and media create and perpetrate the hyperreal.

Jean Baudrillard

Bio:

• Born in 1929 in Reins, Paris
• 1966 began teaching sociology
• His books gathered a wide audience during the 1980s and 1990s - he became an intellectual celebrity, he published frequently in the English and French speaking popular press

5 key works:

1. Simulcra and simulations
2. Utopia deferred: writings from the Utopia
3. The system of objects
4. Symbolic Exchange
5. The spirit of terrorism: and requim for the twin towers

 

"There is no theory of the media" - Baudrillard 'Requiem for the media' 1971

2005:

• According to the academic William Merrin Baudrillard isn't actually a postmodernist.
• Although, he borrows many ideas to describe this media saturated world, he's actually more interested in the way we connect, make meaning, experience and communicate.
• Baudrillard is first and foremost a sociologist, anthropologist and philospopher.
• He just happens to be living in an age where the media influence has significant parts of these topics.
• Baudrillard offers a radical anthropoligical critique of what he calls the semiotic and simulation - of an avant garde response to the world of simulation and our attempts to understand it.
• His ideas ideas are based on the work of the French anthropologist Emil Durkheim.
• Durkheim was concerned primarily with how societies could maintain their coherence in the modern era, where matters such as shared religious and ethnic backgrounds could no longer be assumed. . .

 

"The mass media are anti-mediatory and...fabricate non-communication - this is what characterizes them." -Baudrillard 'Requim for the media' 1971