How we moved from traditional solid structures to the shifting, uncertain markers of the new world?
If so how do we understand it? Ideas around the concept of POSTMODERNISM may help us to navigate . . .
Over the next couple of weeks as we run up to Xmas we will look at this topic. We will look at a couple of films and we will answer a couple of exam questions and then . . . it’s over!
Definitions of Key terms
- Pastiche
- Parody
- Bricolage
- Intertextuality
- Referential
- Surface and style over substance and content
- Lack of a Metanarrative
- Hyperreality
- Simulation (sometimes termed by Baudrillard as ‘Simulacrum‘)
- Consumerist Society
- Fragmentary Identities
- Alienation
- Implosion
- cultural appropriation
- Reflexivity
- Individualism
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.
In other words, new expressions of identity and being – often found in popular culture and/or modern technology, are actually new iterations (versions) of previous expressions of popular culture. It is therefore possible to understand postmodernism as a complicated and fragmentary set of inter-relationships, a practice of re-imagining, pastiche, bricolage and self-referentiality, which may be understood alongside another key expression / concept: intersectionality that has been discussed in this post.
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
Intertextuality: surface signs, gestures & play
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’
(Barker & Jane, 2016:237)
Similarly, 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. In other words . . .
. . . the concept that the meaning of a text does not reside in the text, but is produced by the reader in relation not only to the text in question, but also the complex network of texts invoked in the reading process.
See this source for link to Kristeva and post-structuralism
Postmodernism can therefore be understood (more than other creative movements) as deliberate, intended, self-conscious play (about play?), signs about signs, notes to notes? Often, this may be frivolous, trite, casual, surface, throw-away. It may even be ironic, joking, or literally, ‘just playing’. However, it is always a deliberate copy (of the old). Therefore, the old has been re-worked into something new, which clearly entails a recognition (a nod and a wink) to what it was and where it came from.