I know I can count on all you nice smart people to help me out. Just what does post modern mean? Please explain at length. Give an example. You have 20 minutes, start now, good luck.
Well, it would help if you would ask these questions at 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. on a tuesday rather than waiting until everyone was out doing their Saturday shopping.
You may have noticed that a lot of things in your lifetime have been given the vaguely “positive” adjective modern. This is a term that first became popular just over 100 years ago (although the word is over 400 years old and the derivatives are 250 years old) to actively describe the current day’s superiority to the past. People having spent the better part of the last century cheering modernization, there are now reactions against it. Those reactions are identified as either “postmodern” or “postindustrial” (depending on one’s perspective).
As to the application of the word, you would have to go into specific areas of art and culture to find specific examples. Postmodern architecture will probably have a different connotation than postmodern dance.
While modernism basically exalted the increase of industry, the continued acceptance of new ideas and new works, and a disdain for anything that “looked back” at earlier eras, postmodernism generally tries to distance itself from the need to change constantly (other than changing into postmodernism, of course) and looks back (sometimes overromantically) to earlier eras (or sometimes tries to disassociate itself with any era, simply rejecting the notion of change for change’s sake).
Again, the expression of postmodernism has to be viewed separately in any given human endeavor. The direction of postmodern literature may or may not have anything in common with postmodern music, for example.
Try a search on “postmodern” at http://search.britannica.com/ and look at the number of possible entries.
Tom~
(BTW, we’d have answered sooner if you had posted this in GQ where it belongs. We can’t answer what we can’t find.)
OK, I’ll go…first of all, the “modern” to which PoMo is “post” is “modern” as they (the posties" define it: “modernism” is described by them as a late 2nd millennium attitude and belief structure built around the following:
a) There is a correct answer to every meaningful question.
b) Anything can be predicted if you have enough information about the relevant parameters beforehand.
c) Everything makes sense to everyone if they can be shown how to see it from the correct (emotionally/clinically detached, objective, universalist) perspective.
d) In matters of art and taste (literature, music, fine art, etc), the quality of the good artworks is recognized over time and added to a “canon” of universally recognized great art; after which, it is easy to analyze all such pieces for what they have in common and in this fashion build up a list or library of analytical standards for what makes great art great. Subsequently, any art can be critiqued by comparison to the canon and/or the standards derived from the canon.
e) In architecture, city planning, and industrial design, form follows function. Every line, angle, curve, or protrusion has a purpose and its existence is caused by the need or usefulness of that purpose. Arbitrary, random, or purposeless features detract from design.
[end descrip of modernism as postmodernists would describe it]
Postmodernism and its evil conceptual siblings “poststructuralism” and “deconstruction” and “semiotics” are politically loaded movements which defined modernism and then declared it wrong and themselves to be the new, better way of understanding things. The political background first:
The social liberation movements of the 60s led to attempts in academia to define and describe oppressions and unfair social systems such as ethnocentricism, patriarchy, etc. The old fogies responded by saying that these analyses were emotionally loaded, that their “truths” were not objective and detached, that they were not derived from modern principles of social-science research. In the arts, you’ve no doubt heard of “dead white European males” – this was the canon, of course. They were excellent by canonical definition and nonwhite nonmale nonEuropean (or nonAmerican) artists were not presented or taught or covered or thought appropriate for projects because they weren’t in the canon nor did their works look excellent when compared to the standards derived from analyzing the canon. In the cities, gridlike arrangements were easy to manage on low budgets but led to a factory-like sameness; and the PanAm building in New York City (now known as the MetLife building) in one fell swoop soured lots of folks on PoMo architecture (ugly soulless boring-ass building towering over and ruining the views of both Grand Central Station and the Helmsley Building on Park Avenue). All the new skyscrapers looked like identical glass and metal rectangles.
OK, so: Postmodernism:
- The belief that there is no right and wrong in any universal objective sense, not even for factual matters. There is only your God and my God, your taste in music and ** my taste in music, your conceptualization of the plasma state of the expanding universe at 0.01 seconds after the Big Bang and ** my conceptualization of the plasma state of the expanding universe at 0.01 seconds after the Big Bang.
At first glance it looks wonderful and lovely, more fair for difference in taste (and it makes some entirely **accurate ** revisions to 19th Century absolutist-objectivist ideas about meaning and reality), but taken to extremes (or established as a starting point in philosophy or social theory, which makes it hard to escape its evil shadow) it means you can’t say the Creation Science people are in any meaningful sense full of shit, you can’t say the artwork of Dega or da Vinci or the really cool unknown artist you met in Central Park yesterday for that matter are in any sense better than the artwork that went into the design of the Starbucks Coffeehouse logo, you can’t defend preferring the politics of Martin Luther King over that of Adolf Hitler since you can only say that to **you ** their ideas have more appeal.
For more on the subject (specifically the intrusion of PoMo thinking into feminist theory on college campuses) go here:
Missing in Action: Poststructuralist Feminism and/or Radical Feminism in the Academy
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Skip all that other crap, here it is…
Post moderm is what I do, I post madren…as opposed to Crick &Watson(??) who post in an old fashioned manner.
There ya go.
You’re welcome.
What I want to know, is what comes next? Postpostmodernism? Extradoublemodernism? Ultrapostnewness? Eventually there’s going to be a prefix shortage.
No, no, no. Postmodern just means “Not yet.”
<P ALIGN=“CENTER”>Tris</P>
“How long does getting thin take?” Pooh asked anxiously.
–A. A. Milne
I actually was considering posting my understanding of “Post-moderism” on the “Most annoying commercial” thread, in relation to those Old Navy ads that are deliberatley stupid, but transparently so, allowing the viewer can congratulate him or herself for being in on the joke. I see Postmodernism as being “about” itself; an trend pioneered by 20th C. painting’s seeing fit to be its own suject matter since the era of Abstract Expression. Fifty years later we have Broadway musicals “about” Broadway musicals (A Chorus Line), magicians that are “about” magic (Penn & Teller, “Secrets Revealed” on Fox) and Science Fiction that’s “about” Science Fiction (Galaxy Quest). Modernism was a matter of ideological cannibalism among the creative community; Post-modernism is about making an open admission of it to the rest of us, and hoping we’ll be flattered enough with this inside information long enough for something else to come along. Or maybe something won’t come along, for a long, long time - remember: for over a thousand years Europe made do with leftover Greco-Roman trends.
These are fine and erudite answers, but I humbly ask one of you for an example, and an explanation of why it is considered postmodern. How about literature, yeah, could you think of a book considered the apex of postmodernity, and why it is so.
Modernity utilizes binaries. Everything is black and white. There are no in-betweens. Postmodernity’s answer is that there IS no answer.
Books to read:
The Condition of Postmodernity by David Harvey (a Modernist, BTW)
Anything at all by Michel Foucault (who’s a sort of postmodernist god)
I personally think that both ideas are misguided. Modernism is, because of its historical basis, very sexist, not to mention rigid. Postmodernism, because it has no answers, makes it impossible to debate anything.
~Kyla
“Anger is what makes America great.”
I’m not sure whether po-mo really makes debate/answers impossible (in this respect I lump it in with post-historicism). It does suggest that there is no “objective” truth that we can know, perhaps, but it doesn’t suggest that any human endeavor is pointless (which is the usual conclusion its detractors draw from it). What it does do is ask that one be conscious of their own bias and the bias of old and new canons. Debate can still continue, but we need to see how some versions of the truth have been naturalised while others have not. Subjective and value judgements are unavoidable-- embrace this rather than deny it.
So really any work which works to develop a new canon (how about Gabriella Garcia Marquez?) can be called po-mo, or works that are very self aware and challenge older notions of objectivity.
In architecture I would cite buildings by Michael Graves, who rejects the ‘form follows function’ rules of modernism and builds with modern techniques but lays on a pseudo-classical facade which has no pretensions toward function (an example is the Portland Building). For music perhaps Philip Glass or Einsturzende Neubauten who try to break down the dichotomy between music and noise (perhaps Backstreet Boys are doing this unintentionally…). A book like Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (or the film of Naked Lunch or The Usual Suspects) tries to articulate some of this a bit by illustrating the subjectivity of truth-- you sort of lose track of what’s real and what’s imagined and what are lies the narrator tells you (a traditional no-no-- the third-person narrator, as we all know, is to be trusted…but what if the narrator were on peyote?). Rosenkranz and Guildenstern are Dead-- the breakdown of the ‘fourth wall’ and the notion/conceit of the players’ ignorance that they are being watched by a third party, etc. A film called “Suture” also plays with these ideas. Po-mo also is applied to things which are meaningfully self-conscious/self-aware/ purposefully kitschy (like Jeff Koons’ work).
I don’t like to think of post-modernism as a negative and nihilistic movement (although I am not a post-modernist myself in my work… I think…). I think in some ways it is inevitable at this point (I don’t want to get into a pluralism debate, though). In some ways it’s like learning that there is no Santa Claus-- once you lose objectivity there’s no turning back for a while. We’ve lost our innocence in some way, but I don’t think it’s neccessarily a bad thing.
[Smartass] It means “I’m better than you.” [/smartass]
from Manduck:
This is one of my quibbles. Why do people feel compelled to label movements with generic and unspecified time descriptors, such as modern and contemporary? It is the height of stupidity to ascribe the label “modern” as a descriptor of a style in any more than as a generic reference to distinguish it from “classical”, i.e. stuff they did in previous centuries. This leads to the ridiculous circumlocution “post modern” as a descriptor for the movement after “modernism”. And when postmodernism dies (as it will), we will be left in an even bigger hole as to what to call the replacement. Not to mention the confusion derived by trying to use the word “modern” in its original and still current meaning as a descriptor meaning “current”. If I want to describe art that is cutting edge, up to date, now, I can’t call it “modern” or some erudite will get pissy that I’m referring to that stuff from the early 20th century. This is the same silliness that labels current rock music as “alternative”. Bull****. The stuff called alternative rock was alternative in the mid '80s, when it wasn’t played on the radio and you had to search to find it. Now it is most definitely mainstream, and to call it alternative is just pathetic. You’re creative musical artist types - come up with a creative and meaningful label!
Sorry for the tirade.
from M.K.:
I agree with the criticisms listed above and the need to be aware of inherent biases, etc, and look for ways around the perspective problems. But postmodernism, or the wave called post structuralism or deconstructionism, is patent nonsense. It is the social theorists attempting to set themselves up as superior by purposeful obfuscation. It is absurd, because it is meaningless - which can be seen if you take the assertions to their conclusion. You will find that deconstructionism leaves no room for its own premises to stand - it is self-defeating.
Not only that, but the followers extend it into the physical sciences, where they no not what they say. They take the concept that there is no such thing as an objective morality or an objective definition of right and wrong, and that evaluating different societies and cultures must therefore be judgment free, and they try to extend that belief into scientific research into chemistry, physics, etc. They come up with bizarre notions that scientists are making reality happen they way they want it to by their attention. This is so completely bogus it doesn’t merit even being called wrong.
I’m going off on a tirade again and diverging from the OP. I guess I’ll shut up now.
Another important aspect of post-modernism is that it was developed at the height of the cold war, and many of its original proponets were people who believed, quite reasonably from their vantage point, that the bomb was going to drop and the world end within a few years, a generation at most. Because of this there is a sort of hollow frivolity in a lot of early post modernist stuff–a lot of word play, puns, throwaway popculture references, etc. The reason post modernists were not that interested in coming up with a philosophy that allowed for debate or progress was because they didn’t see that happening. They thought they were living in the waning days of civilization. Contemporary art and literature contain much more hope that the post modernist stuff of the sixties and seventies.
The best introduction to post modernist literature I can think of would be Thomas Pynchon’s * The Crying of Lot 49 *. It is a textbook example of postmodern literature, and has the added benefit of being very short. With somebody like Eco you have to make a serious commitment just to read the book.
Kyla:
Wish I’d said that.
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I will relate a parable from when I worked at Tower Records in the Village (NYC), which is known for the rude employees…
A customer came up to a co-worker and asked where the “post-modern section was.”
She replied, “Under ‘P’ for pretentious.”
Yer pal,
Satan
I went to MOMA over the holidays, and everything was 1880-1920. I thought to myself “When are they going to stop calling this stuff modern? Either that, or when is modern not going to mean state of the art anymore?”
It turns out MOMA really was showing just the earliest stuff in its collection (In March or April they will switch over to 1920-1960, I think). But I’m beginning to think none of this stuff belongs in a “Modern” art museum anymore.
Of course it would be nice if someone was doing something these days that was worth selling off all your Monet’s for.
“Postmodern”? The name is just a placeholder to describe what came after the “Modern” era, in whatever field one cares to discuss.
When enough time has passed that we can get a good look at the things that occured during the postmodern era, we’ll put a more descriptive name on it.
By that time, of course, we will be living in the post-postmodern era. 
“…will your ‘smart’ toaster talk to your ‘smart’ phone? If it does, will it have a constructive conversation, or will the two devices just argue about networking protocols all the time?” - http://linuxtoday.com/stories/15256.html
Wow, I’m impressed with all these great responses, I guess I have some reading to do. I dunno, the term “postmodern” is tossed around even by a “Duh” magazine like Entertainment Weekly - well, if those rocket scientists can grasp the concept, by golly, I can, too!
I’ll tell you tomorrow.
I thought this was the “modern” era.
“Postmodern” makes me think of the opening of “Plan 9 from outer space”
Criswell: Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.
And here I was thinking that I was doomed to live my life in the present.