Postmodernism: theoretical background

Part 1

MOST COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT POSTMODERNISM

Denial of the existence of ANY truthRadical skepticism about ABSOLUTE TRUTH

Representation of the CHAOTIC nature of the contemporary world

Representation of the COMPLEXITY of the world

Postmodernism is about DESPAIR and the MEANINGLESSNESS of life

Postmodernist thought aims at a PLAYFUL restructuring of our

ordinary ways of perceiving and representing the world

is a conscious problematization of what is “true” and “real”/an inquiry into how “truth” and “reality” are made rather than found.

Postmodernism in the broadest sense

Questioning the Platonist/metaphysical foundations of Western philosophy

METAPHYSICS

Socrates Plato Aristotle WORLD

Reality

Ideal form

Essential

Eternal

Mental

Non-Material

Appearance

Replica (copy)

Contingent

Perishable

Physical

Material

VS.

TRUTH IN POSTMODERNISM

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying ‘there are only facts,’ I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations…”

PERSPECTIVISM

There can be several co-existing conceptual schemes within which “truths”/“facts” can be established.

THEORIES IN/OF POSTMODERNISM

DECONSTRUCTION (Post-structuralism)

Jacques Derrida(1930-2004)

“Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human

Sciences”(1966)

Fredinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

Langue Parole (Language as a system) (Actual utterances) Sign

Signifier Signified

Referent

Language is a system of differences

STRUCTURALISM

The “deconstruction” of structures

We like to see the world organized into structures

Structures are always built around a center

All centers are arbitrarily chosen, giving us the semblance of a structure

Jean BaudrillardSimulacra and

Simulation(1981)

SIMULACRUM AND HYPERREALITY

“It’s a new reality show about a producer trying to make a reality show about a family obsessed

with reality shows.”

Simulacrum: a copy or replica of something

Baudrillard: simulacrum is not just a copy of an “original,” but a representation which becomes a “truth” in its own right

Hyperreality: the representation is experienced as more real than the

An illustration of the logic of the simulacrum: Disneyland

DISTRUST OF GRAND NARRATIVES

Jean-Francois Lyotard:

The Postmodern Condition:

A Report on Knowledge

(1979)

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. […] To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, to the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements—narrative [...]. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?”

Examples of grand metanarratives:

-Various historical accounts (e.g., universal, cultural, literary history)-Philosophical world-models (e.g., Western metaphysics)-Redemptive ideologies (e.g., religion, Marxism)-Explicative narratives (e.g., science, psychoanalysis)-Narratives of heroism and love (e.g., romantic novels)

Modernism and postmodernism in

literature and the other arts

Part 2

Rejection of Romanticist and Realist modes of representation

Self-consciousness

Radical subjectivization of the object

Paradigm shift in the perception and representation of the world

MODERNISM

Romanticism

Caspar David Friedrich: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog

(1818)

Realism

Adolf von Menzel: Portait of Karoline Arnold (1905)

Modernism

(1911)

Jackson Pollock: No. 5 (1948)

POSTMODERNISMMODERNISM

Georges Braque: Violin and Candlestick (1910)

VS.

DALÍ AND PICASSO PAINTING THE “SAME” EGG

William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

(1929)

MODERNIST FICTION

The story of the Compson family subjectivized through the mode of representation stream of consciousness

A postmodernist text is not the subjectivized representation of a “story,” a “situation,” an “event,” etc., but a textual world in its own right

(1964)

DADAISM

(1973)

WORLD

RealityAppearance

SIGNWORK OF ARTLITERARY WORK

Text Form Signifier MeaningSignifiedContent

THE METAPHYSICTHE METAPHYSICS OF S OF BINARY BINARY STRUCTURESSTRUCTURES

THE POSTMODERN VIEWTHE POSTMODERN VIEW

No point in making binary disctinctions:

-REALITY is a kind of APPEARANCE (Baudrillard)-SIGNIFIED is a kind of SIGNIFIER (Derrida)-CONTENT is a kind of FORM-MEANING is a kind of TEXT

Signifier(s) Signified

Reading for the signified

SignifierSignified

Signifier(s) Signifier(s)

The reader is forced to face signifiers as signifiers

Postmodernism emphasizes that -all literary texts are material objects (signifiers)-all literary texts are simulacra

Modernism vs. Postmodernism

Brian McHale via Roman Jakobson

MODERNISM POSTMODERNISM Epistemological Ontological

“Dominant”Brian McHale: Postmodernist Fiction (1987)

Techniques used in postmodernist literary works

- Irony

- Pastiche

- Intertextuality

- Metafiction

- Metalepsis

Donald Barthelme (1931-1989)

The Dead Father (1975)

John Barth (b. 1930)

“The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967)

By “exhaustion” I don’t mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities—by no means necessarily a cause for despair.

(1967)

Möbius strip (tangled hierarchy)

Maurits Cornelis Escher: Drawing Hands (1948)

M.C. Escher: Relativity (1953)

Raymond Federman (1928-2009)

“Surfiction” (1975)

Surfiction (as in surreal) is “fiction above fiction”: it is a radically non-mimetic form whics has no intention to mirror “reality.”

(1985)

Ronald Sukenick (1932-2004)

In Form : Digressions on the Act of Fiction (1985)

One of the tasks of postmodern fiction is “to displace, energize, and re-embody its criticism—literally to re unite it with our experience of the text.”

Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)

Entropy (transfer content) Energy (work content)

The term was coined by Rudolf Clausius in 1865

Callisto’s apartment

Callisto is dictating his memoirs to his lover, Aubade, and is brooding over entropy and apocalypse.

Washington D.C.February 1957Temperature: 37 F (cca. 2-3 ºC)

Meatball’s apartment

Meatball is throwing a raucous party,where a host of diverse guests arearriving .Saul’s apartmentSaul has just had an argument with his wife over communication theory.

“Entropy” (1960)

(1963)

(1966)

(1973)

Arnold Schoenberg: Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909)

MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE

POSTMODERNIST ARCHITECTURE