Postmodernism can be understood as a philosophy that is characterised by concepts such as RE-IMAGINING, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE. It’s an approach towards understanding, knowledge, life, being, art, technology, culture, sociology, philosophy, politics and history that is REFERENTIAL – in that it often refers to and often copies other things in order to understand itself.
Parody v Pastiche
pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist
parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony
BRICOLAGE is a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it ‘involves the rearrangment and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’
Intertextuality: Text inside another by being referenced
Shuker refers fragmentary, decentred nature of music videos, breaks up traditional understandings of time and space so that audiences are ‘no longer able to distinguish ‘fiction’ from ‘reality’, part of the postmodern condition’ (ibid).
Shuker notes, two points are frequently made about music videos: ‘their preoccupation with visual style, and associated with this, their status as key exemplars of ‘postmodern’ texts.’
Surface and style over substance
‘in a postmodern world, surfaces and style become the most important defining features of the mass media and popular culture‘ (Strinati: 234).
A brief economic, historical and societal backdrop to Postmodernism.
In 1959, Richard Hoggart (Uses of Literacy) noted the shift in modern societies particularly the impact on our ‘neighborhood lives’, which was ‘an extremely local life, in which everything is remarkably near‘ (1959:46).
In other words, there is an argument that postmodern culture is a consumer culture, where the emphasis on style eclipses the emphasis on utility or need. So that ultimately there is no real value to postmodern culture other than the need for consumption. If this is the case, then it is possible to link postmodernist cultural expression with broader shifts in society, specifically around economics and politics.
Fragmentary consumption = Fragementary identities.
This process of fragmented consumption separating, splitting up and dividing previously homogeneous groups such as, friends, the family, the neighborhood, the local community, the town, the county, the country and importantly, is often linked to the process of fragmented identity construction.
So in summary, the focus on FRAGMENTATION OF IDENTITY is characterised and linked to an increase of consumption and the proliferation of new forms of digital technologies. In effect, another key characteristic of postmodernism is the development of fragmented, alienated individuals living (precariously) in fragmented societies.
Jean Baudrillard would describe as IMPLOSION which gives rise to what he terms SIMULACRA.
Jean Baudrillard together with Fredric Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s. The loss of a metanarrative
SIMULACRA. The idea that although the media has always been seen as a representation of reality – a simulation, from Baudrillard’s perspective of implosion, it is has become more than a representation or simulation and it has become SIMULACRUM not just a representation of the real, but the real itself, a grand narrative that is ‘truth‘ in its own right: an understanding of uncertain/certainty that Baudrillard terms the HYPERREAL.