Definitions
Pastiche- an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period.
Parody- an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.
Bricolage- something constructed or created from a diverse range of things.
Intertextuality- the relationship between texts, especially literary ones.
Metanarrative- a narrative account that experiments with or explores the idea of storytelling, often by drawing attention to its own artificiality.
Hyperreality- an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality
Simulacrum- an image or representation of someone or something
Conumerist Society – in which people devote a great deal of time, energy, resources and thought to “consuming”.
Fragmentary Identities -presence of more than one sense of identity within a single human body.
Implosion- an instance of something collapsing violently inwards
Cultural appropriation – the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.
Reflexivity- refers to circular relationships between cause and effect, especially as embedded in human belief structures.
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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.
Music videos: ‘their preoccupation with visual style, and associated with this, their status as key exemplars of ‘postmodern’ texts.’ Shuker
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‘ (Strinati: 234).
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.
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.
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.