Introducing Postmodernism E-Book

Chris Garratt

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 125

Beschreibung

What connects Marliyn Monroe, Disneyworld, "The Satanic Verses" and cyber space? Answer: Postmodernism. But what exactly is postmodernism? This Graphic Guide explains clearly the maddeningly enigmatic concept that has been used to define the world's cultural condition over the last three decades. Introducing Postmodernism tracks the idea back to its roots by taking a tour of some of the most extreme and exhilarating events, people and thought of the last 100 years: in art - constructivism, conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol; in politics and history - McCarthy's witch-hunts, feminism, Francis Fukuyama and the Holocaust; in philosophy - the work of Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault and Heidegger.The book also explores postmodernism's take on today, and the anxious grip of globalisation, unpredictable terrorism and unforeseen war that greeted the dawn of the 21st century. Regularly controversial, rarely straightforward and seldom easy, postmodernism is nonetheless a thrilling intellectual adventure. Introducing Postmodernism is the ideal guide.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-760-4

Text and illustrations copyright © 2013 Icon Books Ltd

The author and artist have asserted their moral rights.

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

First, let’s consider the WORD…

PART ONE: THE GENEALOGY OF POSTMODERN ART

What’s Modern? The Shock of the Old

Dialectical Antagonism

What’s MODERNISM?

Picasso’s Big Bang

The Crisis of Representation

Cézanne: the View Contains the Viewer

The “Science” of Cubism

The End of Original Art?

Modern is Postmodern

The Sublime

Genealogy of a Modernist tree

Machine-Aesthetic Optimism

Constructivism

Stalinist Totalitarianism

The Tragic Failure of Abstract Expressionism

DADA!

Marcel Duchamp and the Readymades

The Aura of the Artist

The Event

Installations

The Supreme Master of Po Mo Art?

Was Duchamp to Blame?

ENDGAME

We’re keeping pace with modernity…

Expiry Date

False Postmodernisms

Eclectic Postmodernism

A “Real” Postmodernism?

What you see is what you get…

Legitimation

The Simulacrum

PART TWO: THE GENEALOGY OF POSTMODERN THEORY

Structuralism

Meanings and Signs

Signification

The Binary Model

Figures of Speech: Metaphor and Metonymy

Semiology

Structural Anthropology

Brief Critique of Structuralism

Poststructuralism

The Death of the Author

Writing: Degree Zero

…Poststructuralist Blues… No Exit from Language

Deconstruction

J’ACCUSE!

“Différance”

The Accuser Accused…

The Structures of Power/Knowledge

Art and Power/Knowledge

Eugenics: measuring the excluded inferior

Some possible conclusions

What is Power?

The Fiction of the Self

The Imaginary or “Mirror Phase”

The Symbolic Order

Not entirely silenced…

No Place in History

What is Postmodern Feminism?

The end of the story…

Scientific Legitimation

Knowledge is a post-industrial force of production

Theories of Everything

The Anthropic Principle

A Retraction…

Genetics

PART THREE: THE GENEALOGY OF POSTMODERN HISTORY

Po Mo Vernacular

Computerizing Difference

Simulated Reality and Disneyland

Welcome to the Holocaust Theme Park

The Installation of Memory Loss

Hypermodernism: the Memory Loss of Reality

Hyperreal Finance

Welcome to Cyberia!

A Walk on the Wild Side

The War as NOT seen on TV

The first Cyberwar?

Only (re)Produce

CYBERIAN STREETSCENES

“I wannabe a wigger”

Karaoke…

…and Serial Killings

X-rated Cybersex Games

Cyborgs and Schwarzenegger

Madonna, Cybergirl

Zapping or Zero-Consciousness

Endlessly Contemporary Amnesia

Zapped-out Hypermodernism

Icons of the Respectable Right

The Satanic Verses and Postmodern Panic

Third World Postmodernism

The End of History

Teleology

Eschatology and the last Men

Virtual Reality

A Post-Marxist Repentance

Endgame…

Return of the “Grand Narrative” Philosophers?

Bug-eyed into the 21st Century

Did you wish for “9/11” too?

The Fourth World War

War on Terrorism… as seen on TV

The Clone in the Scrap-yard

Virus or Blowback?

The New Bolsheviks

The Liberal Consensus

The Last Grand Narrative

The Future is Tomorrow’s Past

The Art of Terrorism

What is Postmodern Now?

Cold Comfort in Science

The End of Culture

Beyond our Conscious Perception

Neither God, the Cosmos nor Consciousness

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Biographies

Index

Charles Jencks, an authority on postomodern architecture and art, provides a useful scanning of the term postmodern. But what does it mean in practice? Does “postmodern” accurately aum up the story of what we are present? Or is it just a fashionable term that leaves us unenlightened about our true historical condition?

First, let’s consider the WORD…

What do you mean postmodern? The confusion is advertised by the “post” prefixed to “modern”. Postmodernism identifies itself by something it isn’t. It isn’t modern anymore. But in what sense exactly is it post…

-as a result of modernism?

-the aftermath of modernism?

-the afterbirth of modernism?

-the development of modernism?

-the denial of modernism?

-the rejection of modernism?

Postmodern has been used in a mix-and-match of some or all of these meanings. Postmodernism is a confusion of meanings stemming from two riddles…

-it resists and obscures the sense of modernism

-it implies a complete knowledge of the modern which has been surpassed by a new age.

A new age? An age, any age, is defined by the evidence of historic changes in the way we see, think and produce. We can identify these changes as belonging to the spheres of art, theory and economic history, and explore them for a practical definition of postmodernism.

Let’s begin with art by tracing the genealogy of postmodern art.

PART ONE: THE GENEALOGY OF POSTMODERN ART

We could begin by visiting an installation by the Conceptual artist Daniel Buren (b.1939), entitled On two levels with two colours (1976), which features a vertically striped band at the floor levels of two adjoining gallery rooms, one at a step up from the other. Empty rooms, nothing else…

HOW DID WE GET TO THIS? DO WE WANT TO STAY? HOW DO WE LEAVE, IF WE WANT TO?

Buren’s installation is not necessarily a representative example of art in the postmodern age. But it is a good place to start from, in the sense of where modernism itself has arrived at through a persistent history of innovation.

What’s Modern? The Shock of the Old

Modern comes from the Latin word modo, meaning “just now”. Since when have we been modern? For a surprisingly long time, as the following example shows.

Around 1127, the Abbot Suger began reconstructing his abbey basilica of St. Denis in Paris. His architectural ideas resulted in something never seen before, a “new look” neither classically Greek nor Roman nor Romanesque.

Suger didn’t know what to call it, so he fell back on the Latin, opus modernum. A modern work.

JUST A MINUTE…HOW CAN YOU CALL YOURSELVES MODERN IF YOU’RE REVIVING SOMETHING THAT’S ANCIENT? BECAUSE NATURE AND REASON HAVE SHOWN US THAT THE CLASSICAL IS THE ONLY TRUE AND PERENNIALLY MODERN STYLE.

Suger helped to inaugurate an immensely influential architectural style which became known as the Gothic.

Gothic was in fact a term of abuse, coined by Italian Renaissance theorists, meaning a northern or German barbaric style. The ideal style of Renaissance architects and artists was the classical Greek, or what they called the antica e buona maniera moderna – the ancient and good modern style.

Ever since then, architects have been arguing about what best represents a perennial style – classical, gothic, modern or even postmodern.

Dialectical Antagonism

At least since medieval times, there has been a motivating sense of antagonism between “then” and “now”, between ancient and modern. Historical periods in the West have followed one another in disaffinity with what has gone before. A rejection of one’s immediate predecessors seems almost instinctively generational.

The result of this historical dialectic (from the Greek, debate or discourse) is that Western culture recognizes no single tradition.

History is carved up into conceptual periods –

and so on. These antagonistic periods are Western culture’s sets of tradition, a sort of “periodic table” of tradition.

Tradition in the West is constituted and indeed energized by what is in combat with it.

Another peculiarity of Western culture is its strongly historicist bias, a belief that history determines the way things are and must be.

WHAT WE PRODUCE IS ALWAYS MILES AHEAD OF WHAT WE THINK. Darling. it’s arrived…WORKLESS WASHDAYS at last!

Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism provided the classic historicist formula.

Marxism established a structural difference between society’s traditional or cultural institutions and its economic productive forces. Rapid-paced progress occurs in the infrastructure, the economic sphere of productive activities which supports but also subverts the superstructure, the social sphere of ideology which includes religion, art, politics, law and all traditional attitudes. The superstructure evolves more slowly and is more resistant to change than the economic infrastructure, especially in the modern industrial age of advanced capitalism.

The ways we think – or better, those assumptions we take for granted – are pre-established by superstructural ideologies.

TOO CRUDE, TOO MECHANICAL. IF THINKING IS ALL PRE-ESTABLISHED BY IDEOLOGY, WHERE DOES THE FREEDOM TO THIHK SCIENTIFICALLY COME FROM? AND WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR FREEDOM TO CRITICIZE? THE TAIL DOESN’T WAG THE DOG.

“Mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve…we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”

Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique ofPolitical Economy (1859)

What’s MODERNISM?

The Marxian formula is still useful for understanding the different speed-lanes of change in the traditional and productive spheres of society.

Modernism, in the infrastructural productive sense, begins in the 1890s and 1900s, a time which experienced mass technological innovations, the second tidal wave of the Industrial Revolution begun nearly a century before.

New Technology

•the internal combustion and diesel engines; steam turbine electricity generators

•electricity and petrol as new sources of power

•the automobile, bus, tractor and aeroplane

•telephone, typewriter and tape machine as the basics of modern office and systems management

•chemical industry’s production of synthetic materials – dyes, man-made fibres and plastics

•new engineering materials – reinforced concrete, aluminium and chromium alloys

Mass Media and Entertainment

•advertising and mass circulation newspapers (1890s)

•the gramophone (1877); the Lumière brothers invent cinematography and Marconi the wireless telegraph (1895)

•Marconi’s first radio wave transmission (1901)

•first movie theatre, the Pittsburgh Nickelodeon (1905)

Science

•genetics established in the 1900s

•Freud launches psychoanalysis (c.1900)

•discovery of uranium and radium radioactivity by Becquerel and the Curies (1897–9)

•Rutherford’s revolutionary new model of the atom overturns classical physics (1911)

•Max Planck’s quantum theory of energy (1900) revised by Niels Bohr and Rutherford (1913)

•Einstein’s Special and General theories of Relativity (1905 and 1916)

It isn’t difficult to see how these innovations extend logically to postmodern scientific and information developments. Two examples…

1. The foundations of postmodern cosmology – atomic theory, quantum and Relativity – were laid down between the 1890s and 1916.

2. The modern copper telephone wire replaced with the postmodern fibre-optic cable increases the information data-load 250,000 times over (the entire contents of Oxford’s Bodleian Library transmitted in 42 seconds).

Modernism in the cultural or superstructural sense occupies the same period in the early 1900s – the heroic first phase of modernist experimentation in literature, music, the visual arts and architecture.

Picasso’s Big Bang

Despite the telephone, telegraphy and other such technological novelties, a photographic glimpse of everyday life circa 1907 looks to us entirely remote from “modernity”. Nothing prepares us – or indeed the good folk of 1907 – for the first truly modernist painting, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907.

Those angular deformities and staring African mask faces depict prostitutes, partly expressing Picasso’s own panic about syphilis but, more importantly, proclaiming a new anti-representational model of [de]FORM[ation].

WHY HAS THIS VIOLENCE TO REALISTIC REPRESENTATION IN ART COME ABOUT?

The Crisis of Representation

Some art historians have argued, to an extent correctly, that the invention of photography ended the authority of painting to reproduce reality. Painting pictures of “reality” had simply become obsolete. Technological innovation in the infrastructure had outstripped the superstructural traditions of visual art. Mass production (photography) replaced hand-crafted originality (art).

YES! THAT’S GREAT!…SAY CHEESE…NOW…HOLD IT FOR 3MINS 45 SECS…

The crisis runs deeper than this crude but effective scenario suggests. The doctrine of realism itself was coming to an end.

Realism depends on a mirror theory of knowledge, essentially that the mind is a mirror of reality. Objects existing outside the mind can be represented (reproduced by a concept or work of art) in a way that is adequate, accurate and true.

Cézanne: the View Contains the Viewer

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) did not scrap realism but revised it to include uncertainty in our perception of things. Representation had to account for the effect of interaction between seeing and the object, the variations of viewpoint and possibilities of doubt in what one sees.

MERDE! WHO LEFT THAT LADDER THERE? IMPRESSIONISM HAS SHOWN HOW APPEARANCES CHANGE WITH THE LIGHT AND ARE AFFECTED BY RAPID MOVEMENT…. THAT’S NOT ENOUGH! WE DON’T SEE THINGS AS FIXED BUT AS SHIFTING. A TREE CHANGES IF MY GAZE SLIGHTLY SHIFTS.

Cézanne had taken a revolutionary new direction, painting not reality but the effect of perceiving it.

Cézanne was not interested simply to reproduce a fragmented, subjective view of reality. He sought after a basic foundation, a “unified field” theory that must underlie the variability of perception, and this he got from elementary geometric solids. In a famous letter of 1904, he advised, “…treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.”

UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE? UNIFIED FIELD THEORY? THESE MAKE CÉZANNE SOUND LIKE A — MODERN PHYSICIST!

The “Science” of Cubism

THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE WAS NOT MINE: IT WAS THE DISCOVERY OF PHYSICIST WERNER HEISENBERG (1901–76), FORMULATED IN 1927 AS A CONSEQUENCE OF QUANTUM MECHANICS. IN SIMPLEST TERMS, IT STATES THAT THERE IS ALWAYS UNCERTAINTY IN SIMULTANEOUS MEASUREMENTS OF THE POSITION OF A PARTICLE… OUR ALBERT HOW CAN YOU BE SO SURE? ……AND THE UNIFIED FIELD THEORY WAS MY LIFETIME QUEST TO DEMONSTRATE HOW ALL NATURE’S FORCES DERIVE FROM ONE COMMON UNITY AND A SINGLE ULTIMATE LAW OF ACTION!

Cézanne was not a physicist, modern or otherwise. Nor indeed were his successors and heirs, the Cubists. What we have is one of those rare occasions in history when science and art arrive independently at complementary attitudes.

Cubism, unleashed by Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, was then developed by him, Georges Braque and others between 1907 and 1914.

A typical Cubist painting, Picasso’s Girl with a Mandolin (1910), takes Cézanne’s theories of variability and stability to an astounding logical conclusion.

SIMPLIFICATION TO GEOMETRIC SHAPES AND PLANES MULTIPLE AND SIMULTANEOUS VIEWPOINTS INTERLOCKING MOVEMENTS SYNTHESIS OF SPACE AND FIGURE

The human figure simplified to geometry, interacting on a par with the space around it and treated like architecture, might be said to be dehumanized. Cubism agreed with modern physics in rejecting the notion of a single isolatable event – the view contains the viewer. This is not necessarily a dehumanizing limit but a recognition that the human is non-exceptional to reality.

The End of Original Art?

“Reproducible reality” was left to photography, while art took a quantum leap in a new Cubist direction. Cubism rescued art from obsolescence and re-established its authority to represent reality in a way that photography could not.

But photography threatened both traditional and avantgarde art in another sense not recognized until later, in 1936, when the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin published his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

I SAW THAT THE AUTHORITY OR AUTONOMY OF ORIGINAL WORKS OF ART DERIVES FROM THEIR UNREPRODUCIBILITY — (EXCEPT AS FAKES) – WHICH GIVES THEM A MAGICAL AURA, A CHARISMATIC HALO THAT SURROUNDS AUTHENTIC ART OBJECTS BECAUSE THEY ARE “ONE-OFFS”, UNIQUE, IRREPLACEABLE AND HENCE PRICELESS.

He argued that this aura – this fetish of sacred uniqueness – would now be eliminated by mass reproduction, essentially by the photographic printing of original works of art in widely distributed books, posters, postcards and even postage stamps.

The mechanical reproducibility of original art must inevitably have a disintegrating effect on “originality” itself.

Modern is Postmodern

The modern is always historically at war with what comes immediately before it. In this same sense, modern is always post-something.

HANG ON! WE’VE ONLY HEARD ABOUT MODERNISM SO FAR—AREN’T WE SUPPOSED TO BE TALKING ABOUT POST MODERNISM? BY TRYING TO GRASP A PARTICULAR FEATURE OF MODERNISM, WE ARE TALKING ABOUT ITS PROGRESS, WHICH SEEMS ENDLESSLY CONTEMPORARY!

The modern ends up being at war with itself and must inevitably become post-modern.