Postmodernism

Postmodernism isn’t really a single theory at all; it’s more a set of ideas used to describe the way in which culture and cultural artefacts (art, music, fashion, film, TV, literature and even architecture) have been produced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. When we talk about something like a film or painting or a piece of music being postmodern, we are usually giving it certain qualities which some thinkers see cropping up again and again in the culture of the world around us.

What makes this even more confusing is the term itself: postmodernism implies that modernism (whatever that is) is over, but as we will see, it’s much more problematic than that suggests.

Modernism is the name we give to some of the defining characteristics of culture in the first half of the twentieth century. During this time there was a whole explosion of ideas about the way art, music, film and literature should be made. On a simple level this is most obvious in the way a lot of cultural artefacts from this time look and sound. Poetry didn’t have to rhyme, paintings no longer had to be representational, music didn’t actually have to sound like music, and books didn’t have to use proper sentences or in some cases, proper words. So paintings by Picasso, books by James Joyce and poetry by T.S. Eliot might all be considered modernist.

What modernist texts did was to take the traditional materials of culture such as images and words and re-organise them in attempt to express the uncertainties and anxieties of modern life. Theorists believe there are many reasons why modernism became prevalent at this time. One is the fact that the world was going through such a violent upheaval (World War One, The Spanish Civil War and World War Two) that art and culture had to reflect the uncertainty, tragedy and mess of the time.

Postmodern, then, is the term that is used to describe what comes after modernism. It is difficult to pin it down to a strict definition, but it certainly seems to be very different. Where modernist texts are very dense, serious and complicated, postmodern texts or artefacts seem less serious and more playful. The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought says that:

Postmodernism is often associated with a revolt against authority and signification and a tendency towards pastiche, parody, quotation, self-referentiality and eclecticism.

A complex definition. So what does it mean? Well:

– ‘revolting against authority and signification’ would suggest that postmodern texts tend not to reflect the established order of things, but rebel against mainstream ideas about what is appropriate and fashionable.

– it also means that they tend not to express any specific meaning or intention, such as a social or political agenda. Rather these texts ‘play around’ with ideas through the way they look and sound.

– ‘pastiche, parody and quotation’ means that these texts often refer to, borrow from and sometimes just outright copy other older or contemporary texts.

– ‘self-referentiality’ means that postmodern texts often refer to themselves – that is to say, that often these texts know they are texts and make fun of themselves. A good example of this comes from that most postmodern of TV programmes The Simpsons. During an episode in which Homer and Bart set out to film an alien that they believe is occupying the woods in Springfield, Bart asks what will happen if they don’t manage to film an alien. Homer replies:

Postmodernism

Then we’ll fake it, and sell it to the Fox Network – they’ll show anything!

This joke is deliberately self-referential, as The Simpsons is made and distributed by Fox TV.

We might sum up the characteristics of the postmodern in the following way:

Postmodernism …

… is ironic – the assumption that the audience knows one thing about a cultural product but then says another.

… is playful – it may subvert or break the rules of particular styles or genres.

… is nostalgic – a desire for retro culture.

… chops things up and rearranges them (styles, narratives, genres).

… borrows from other styles (intertextuality, eclecticism and pastiche).

… makes fun of other genres, texts and narratives (parody).

… concentrates on the small details rather than the big picture, and looks to avoid anything that provides an answer to all life’s questions, for example religion, politics and so on. (This is called the destruction of the Grand Narrative.)

Good examples of postmodern texts might be:

Film: Pulp Fiction or Scream TV: The Simpsons or The Sopranos Music: The Streets or The Darkness Art: Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can

But can you explain why?

There are a number of key people who are responsible for these ideas: the French philosophers Lyotard and Baudrillard (see page 39) and the American Frederic Jameson. These and others are the people who began to group together these observations about culture under the umbrella of postmodernism.