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
The postmodern world of individual consumption, computational behavourial systems, the loss of a ‘metanarrative’ (‘truth’ . . . ‘reality’) and an overeliance on surface signs, gestures and play. A world without meaning or relevance. A world that is literally killing itself, or as Baudrillard would call it a world that is IMPLODING!
Postmodernism can be understood as a philosophy that suggests society lacks an overall metanarrative – an agreed ‘truth’ or shared ‘reality’. This is because new media technologies have allowed us to build-up and exist in our separate and individual worlds. This means that our existence and identity is ‘fragmentary’ and ‘individualistic’. While this may gives us a high degree of freedom and control it can also have the effect of making us ‘alienated’, ‘isolated’, ‘lost’ and ‘anxious’.
If we are lost and alienated it means we have less power over society, ourselves and our existence.
The rise of new media technologies seems to illustrate that we are not quite in control of our own identity (or destiny – think work, health, education, society etc). This gives rise to what Jean Baudrillard calls a simulated, hyperreal existence. A world where the virtual (digital) may be more real than the real. It is a world where are not sure what is true or what is real – which includes both individuals (ourselves) and society.
Key characteristics of the postmodern world of new media technologies are: COPY, PASTICHE, PARODY, RE-IMAGINING, 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. Think of sharing, posting, sending, adjusting, editing – new media technologies allow you to copy, parody, re-imagine etc.
It is a world that prioritises style and surface over any substantial change or meaning – a world that is endlessly busy looking at itself . . . the selfie?
As such new expressions from new media technologies (particularly around identity and being) can be seen as a massively complicated and fragmentary set of inter-relationships – think how many pictures, videos, texts are produced, stored and recorded every second of every day! This is a practice of re-imagining, pastiche, bricolage and self-referentiality, which may be understood alongside another key expression / concept: intersectionality – which provides evidence for how we see ourselves and the world and how we exist as human beings in contemporary society.
Postmodernism can therefore be understood as a way of understanding and categorising the new world – dominated by new media technologies. It could be said that it is a world that is more interested in the self, in play, in the visual, the surface, the personal. And can often been seen as frivolous, trite, casual, surface, throw-away. If anything it is dominated by an economic model based on consumption (ie buying stuff). So while it may even be seen as ironic, joking, or literally, ‘just playing’ it is usually underpinned by a transactional economic exchange (ie buying more stuff!).
However, it is most often 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.
It also suggests that we live in a meaningless, irrelevant and pointless stream of replication and repetition.
. . . a complex network of texts invoked in the reading process.
See this source for link to Kristeva and post-structuralism
So can we start to break some of these ideas down a little bit . . .
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
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 . . .