What is postmodernism?
Postmodernism is when individuals copy each other to form a similar version of what they are trying to portray and change into a more different style to form a different truth.
Definitions of Key terms
- Pastiche – it imitates an artistic style of another person’s work
- Parody- when a performance imitates and is used for a comic effect
- Bricolage – ‘do it yourself’ the creation of work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available. ‘involves the rearrangment and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’
- Intertextuality – it seeks the connections between media texts and social life. 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. In other words
- Referential
- Surface and style over substance and content
- Metanarrative
- Hyperreality – This happens when you can distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. For example, in the movie we can not tell which is the movie or the game that is happening.
- Simulation (sometimes termed by Baudrillard as ‘Simulacrum’) – it is where the model mimics the operation of an existing system that provides evidence to make decisions for process changes. The simulation of total mediation without meaning. Their are many layers of the game so we can many different copies that is perpetrated from the real world.
- Consumerist Society
- Fragmentary Identities
- Alienation – when you reject a person’s position of former attachment / becomes isolated from their environment or from other people. A form of separation or distance.
- Implosion
- cultural appropriation
- Reflexivity
Postmodernism works in terms REITERATION, so in the example of The Love Box in your Living Room it is a reiteration of the documentary work by Adam Curtis.
The process of fragmentation is a key element of POSTMODERN CULTURE. The notion of separating, splitting up and dividing previously homogeneous groups such as, friends, the family, the neighbourhood, the local community, the town, the county, the country and importantly, is often linked to the process of fragmented identity construction.
Rather than forming mass centres of communal, shared living, such mega-cities often create more isoloation, more individualism, more fractured and alienated individuals struggling to survive and keep alive.
For many this is reflective of the new global economy (globalisation), which has created a high polarized class division between the rich / the really super rich and the poor / underclass (ie the really, really poor) made possible through the rapid increase of new forms of technological developments.
As such, another characteristic of POSTMODERN CULTURE is the emergence of FRAGMENTED COMMUNITIES.
slavoj zizek says postmodernism is a sham, that it’s really just modernism in disguise.
Fredric Jameson is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism, in the expression of a new phase of capitalism.
The desire to consume just for the sake of consumption (ie there is no real need to consume more) creates a society that focusses on surface and/or style over substance.
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‘
the fragmentary, decentred nature of music videos that break up traditional understandings of time and space so that audiences are ‘no longer able to distinguish ‘fiction’ from ‘reality’, part of the postmodern condition’
As 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.’
Alongside their similarity to adverts (essentially the music video is a commercial tool to sell music products) ‘making them part of a blatantly consumerist culture‘. And of course, the ‘considerable evidence of pastiche, intertextuality and eclecticism‘
This links to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s proposition that postmodernism holds an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives‘, those overarching ideas, attitudes, values and beliefs that have held us together in a shared belief.