Postmodernity and Postmodernism

Terms
Postmodernity a state of mind in the postwar world, characterised by: - F. Jameson: parody and pastiche - Fragmentation/reinterpretation - Multiplicity, multiculturalism - Rereadings of the past (New Historicism: St. Greenblatt, H. Aram Veeser, The New Historicism, 1989)

Postmodernism
An age in culture defined as a later development of various tendencies in modernism (s. Ihab Hassans features of modernism/postmodernism) incredulity towards metanarratives (J.-F. Lyotard) the waning of affect (Fredric Jameson)

Fredric Jameson
Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997 (based on F. Jamesons 1884 The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. => it expresses an irrepressible historical impulse or it represses and diverts it, depending on the side of the ambiguity you happen to favor. (p.ix)

The moderns were interested in what was likely to come from changes; PM is more formal, it only clocks the variations and knows that the contents are just more images. Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. => culture has become a second nature. (p. ix)

=> an immense dilation of the sphere of culture (the sphere of commodities), an immense and historically original acculturation of the Real, a quantum leap in what Benjamin called the aestheticization of reality (he thought it meant fascism, but we know its only fun). PM is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process. (p.x)

PM = an exasperating condition: the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments. This would be a more interesting and plausible story than Lyotards end of master narratives / it tells us that the theory seems necessarily imperfect or impure: 1) antifoundationalism. the unforeseeable return of narrative as the narrative of the end of narratives; a return of history in the midst of the prognosis of the demise of historical telos => 2) virtually any observation about the present can be mobilized in the very search for the present itself and used as a symptom of the deeper logic of the postmodern, which turns into its own theory (since there is no deeper logic) (p. xi)

In any case, this book is not a survey of the postmodern, nor even an introduction to it (always supposing such a thing was possible in the first place); nor are any of its textual exhibits characteristic of the postmodern or prime examples of it, illustrations of its principal features. That has smth to do with the qualities of the characteristic, the exemplary, and the illustrative; but it has more to do with the nature of postmodern texts themselves, which is to say, the nature of a text in the first place, since that is a postmodern category and phenomenon which has replaced the older one of a work. (p.xvii)

Roland Barthes, From Work to Text, first published in Revue desthtique, 1971, in The Rustle of Language, ed. cit., pp. 57-58.

The difference is as follows: the work is a fragment of substance, it occupies a portion of the spaces of books (for example, in a library). The Text is a methodological field. The opposition may recall (though not reproduce term for term) a distinction proposed by Lacan: reality is shown *se montre+, the real is proved *se dmontre]; in the same way, the work is seen (in bookstores, in card catalogues, on examination syllabuses), the text is demonstrated, is spoken according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language: it exists only when caught up in a discourse (or rather it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself to be so); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work which is the Texts imaginary tail. Or again: the Text is experienced only in an activity, in a production.

Agency raises the issue of late capitalism (a term which originated with the Frankfurt School: Adorno and Horkheimer) or synonyms (administered society) / as widely used today, late capit. has different meanings: the expansion of the state sector and bureaucratization are natural, nobody notices them any more. What marks a development from Lenins concept of the monopoly stage of capitalism is the emergence of new forms of business organization (multinationals, transnationals) beyond the monopoly stage + a vision of a world capitalist system distinct from the older imperialism. (p.xviii)

The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

The waning or extinction of the hundred-yearold modern movement (abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the exhaustion of the high modernist poetic impulse (as manifested in Wallace Stevenss poetry). => a rich range of empirical, eclectic movements: Andy Warhol and pop art (p. 1)

Architecture
modifications- more dramatically visible: it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism as it will be outlined in the following pages initially began to emerge. More than in other arts, PM positions in architecture have been inseparable from a critique of architectural high modernism and of Frank Lloyd Wright or the so-called international style (Le Corbusier, Mies etc.) , where formal criticism and analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building into a virtual sculpture, or monumental duck, as Robert Venturi puts it) are at one with the traditional city and its older neighborhood culture.

Le Corbusier: better living conditions for the citizens of crowded cities Villa Savoye: the machine-for-living ideal (1931)

Postmodernism: Constructing worlds Brian McHale

Postmodernist Fiction (1987) dominants: - ontological - epistemological Constructing Postmodernism (1992): Postmodernism as discursive construction

McHales questions (Postmodernist Fiction, London and New York: Methuen, 1987):
"The Cognitive Question (asked by most artists if the 20th century, Platonic or Aristotelian, till around 1958): 'How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?' The Postcognitive Questions (asked by most artists since then): 'Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?'" (Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries, 1978)

Words + how to build a zone

"The space of a fictional world is a construct, just as the characters and objects that occupy it are, or the actions that unfold within it. Typically, in realist and modernist writing, this spatial construct is organized around a perceiving subject, either a character or the viewing position adopted by a disembodied narrator. The heterotopian zone of PM writing cannot be organized in this way, however. Space here is less constructed than deconstructed by the text, or rather constructed and deconstructed at the same time. Postmodernist fiction draws upon a number of strategies for constructing / deconstructing space, among them juxtaposition, interpolation, superimposition, and misattribution. (p. 45)

Displaced Fantastic
these texts hesitate between the literal and the allegorical, bt the repres of a world and the antirepresentational foregrounding for its own sake. These are ontological oppositions, ontological hesitations, although not the oppositions and hesitations associated with traditional fantastic writing. Hesitation has been displaced from the frontier bt this world and the "world next door", to the confrontation bt different ontological levels in the structure of texts. This explains the general diffusion of fantastic "charge" throughout PM writing: a displaced effect of the fantastic persists wherever a dialogue springs up bt different ontological realms or levels. (p. 82)

Tony Hilfer, American Fiction since 1940, London: Longman, 1992

Postmodernism as black humour: Joseph Heller, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut
Postmodernism as metafiction: John Barth, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth

Postmodernism and the Other

Homi Bhabha: Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt, in L. Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies, London and NY: Routledge, 1992, pp. 56-69.

Steven Connor, Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (2004): Chronology

1947 India gains independence 1950 Pop art 195462 Algerian War of Independence 1956 UK intervenes in Suez Canal, withdraws after US pressure 1957 Launch of Sputnik Earth satellite by USSR 1960 Andy Warhol, Campbells Soup Can Founding of Tel Quel journal 1961 Space War, the first computer game, begins to circulate 1964 Terry Riley, In C, foundational work of minimalist music 1963 Martin Luther King gives I Have a Dream speech President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas 1965 Steve Reich, Come Out 1966 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 National Organization for Women founded in USA Jacques Derrida gives Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences at Johns Hopkins University

1954 Jasper Johns, Flag

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962 (Tate Modern, London)

Andy Warhol, Campbell Soup Cans, 1962 (New York, MOMA)

 1967 Detroit race riots The Beatles, Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band Decriminalization of homosexuality between male adults in UK Flash Art journal founded (magazine on contemp. art founded in Rome) 1968 Nationwide riots and protests in France USSR invades Czechoslovakia 196872 Student protests across US 1969 Neil Armstrong takes first steps on the Moon Gay Liberation Front established in New York 1970 boundary 2: a journal of postmodern culture founded Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch 1971 Ihab Hassan, POSTmodernISM: A Paracritical Bibliography 1973 Establishment of ARPANET (Advanced Research and Projects Network), forerunner of the internet, linking together universities of Stanford, UCSB, UCLA, and Utah 1973 Thomas Pynchon, Gravitys Rainbow 1974 President Nixon resigns over Watergate scandal after break-in at Democratic Party headquarters 1975 Appearance of first personal computer 1979 First cellular phone released in Tokyo 1979 Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne

Richard Serra (American minimalist painter, Process Art) Tilted Arc (Federal Plaza New York, 1981)

1981 Salman Rushdie, Midnights Children Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Milles plateaux 1982 Ridley Scott, Blade Runner 1983 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations 1984 English translation of Lyotards The Postmodern Condition 1984 William Gibson, Neuromancer Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 1985 Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto Don DeLillo, White Noise David Lynch, Blue Velvet Live Aid, worlds first global concert, held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia 1986 Space shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after take-off, killing all seven crew members 1988 Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective broadcast 1989 Tiananmen Square protest and massacre in Beijing. Fall of Berlin Wall Tim Berners-Lee develops concept of World Wide Web David Lynchs Twin Peaks begins broadcasting 1990 Postmodern Culture, an online journal, founded