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.

pastiche – imitates something from someone else

parody – mimics something with irony

Bricolage – created with a a diverse range of things

Metanarrative – idea of storytelling, focusing on a point

Simulacrum – representation of something or someone

Conumerist Society – a lot of time and effort put into it and resources

Fragmentary Identities – different identities for different people/settings

Implosion – sudden failure of a business

cultural appropriation – elements of a culture is introduced to another culture

Reflexivity – relationship between cause and effect

Intertextuality: surface signs, gestures & play – people can act like or look like more than one gender

• their preoccupation with visual style (roy shuker)

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’ (Barker & Jane, 2016:237). Similarly, INTERTEXTUALITY is another useful term to use, as it suggests signs only have meaning in reference to other signs

Surface and style over substance

• surfaces and style become the most important defining features 

Richard Hoggart

• neighborhood lives
• an extremely local life, in which everything is remarkably near

POSTMODERNISM CULTURE

• focused on consumption
• more displaces (not living in a community)

Fragmentary consumption = Fragementary identities.

• 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.
• creates alienated individuals

 Jean Baudrillard

• implosion of society

Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson

• loss of meta narrative
• crisis in historicity

hyper reality is a simulation (it’s real but not real eg copies of something)

“I’ve always said you can’t understand the world without the media nor the media without the world” (Professor Natalie Fenton, quoted in Fake news vs Media Studies J. McDougall p.17 2019, Palgrave)

PAUL GILROY

• double consciousness derived from W.E.B Dubois
• eg black british / american (you’re more than one thing so have to try to act as both to fit in and not be judged)