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 and life

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

“The Simpsons relishes its self-referentiality and frequently engages in pastiche” – Gray (2005:5)

Intertextuality: surface signs, gestures & play

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.’

• BRICOLAGE is a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it ‘involves the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’
• INTERTEXTUALITY is another useful term to use, as it suggests signs only have meaning in reference to other signs and that meaning is therefore a complex process of decoding/encoding with individuals both taking and creating meaning in the process of reading texts

Surface and style over substance

If it the priority is play, then the emphasis is on the surface, in other words, if the main focus is the idea of just connecting one product to another, then the focus is superficial, shallow, lacking depth, so ‘in a postmodern world, surfaces and style become the most important defining features of the mass media and popular culture‘

In terms of the key principles of art and design the priority is in formal elements: of shape, colour, texture, movement, space, time and so on. As opposed to more discursive principles of: narrative, character, motivation, theme, ideology

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‘

Characteristic of modern societies, is the creation, development and concentration of centres of high consumption, with a displacement of both consumption and production that has radically altered the nature of societies and individuals living in them.

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

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

The loss of a metanarrative

A process which the French intellectual Jean Baudrillard would describe as IMPLOSION which gives rise to what he terms 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

Jameson argued that parody implies a moral judgment or a comparison with previous societal norms. Whereas pastiche, such as collage and other forms of juxtaposition, occur without a normative grounding and as such, do not make comment on a specific historical moment

This links to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s proposition that postmodernism holds an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives‘ (1979:7) those overarching ideas, attitudes, values and beliefs that have held us together in a shared belief, For example, the belief in religion, science, capitalism, communism, revolution, war, peace and so on. Lyotard points out that no one seemed to agree on what, if anything, was real and everyone had their own perspective and story

Definitions

• Pastiche – A parody but rather than mocking, it celebrates a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music imitating a style or character of the work of artists
• Parody – A work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony
• Intertextuality – Shaping a text’s meaning by a different text
• Metanarrative – A narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience or knowledge
• Hyperreality – An inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality
• Simulacrum – Those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself
• Consumerist Society – A type of society where people devote a great deal of their life to “consuming”
• Fragmentary Identities – Presence of more than one sense of identity within a single human body
• Implosion – A collapse of a system
• Cultural Appropriation- The inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another culture