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Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes: “It [a roadhouse]is so architecturally interesting . . . with its postmodern wooden booths and sculptural clock” (Ruth Reichl).
postmodernism post·mod'ern·ism n.A philosophical stance which claims that it is impossible to make grand statements—meta-narratives—about the structures of society or about historic causation, because everything we perceive, express, and interpret is influenced by our gender, class, and culture; knowledge is partial and situated, and no one interpretation is superior to another. Some have argued that postmodernism is related to post-Fordism, and the rise of consumer capitalism, economic globalization, the information economy, and new models of flexible accumulation, but these links are, of course, meta-narratives—the very interpretations which postmodernists reject.
Postmodernism has confirmed in geographers the recognition that space, place, and scale are social constructs, not external givens (See structuralism). Of particular interest is the way that time and space have been ‘compressed’ by modern transport systems, especially by jumbo jets; postmodernity differs from modernity in that it is less territorially bounded—nowhere is very far away any more. As a result, cultures are transformed. Some geographers claim that postmodernism challenges the dominance of time and history in social theories, and instead stresses the significance of geography and spatiality.
The postmodern tradition also stresses, and indeed champions, difference, and this is a strand which has been welcomed by feminist geographers, who would claim that geography has been speaking in an authoritarian, masculinist voice for too long.
postmodernism, a disputed term that has occupied much recent debate about contemporary culture since the early 1980s. In its simplest and least satisfactory sense it refers generally to the phase of 20th‐century Western culture that succeeded the reign of high modernism, thus indicating the products of the age of mass television since the mid‐1950s. More often, though, it is applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles—most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. In this sense, promoted by Jean Baudrillard and other commentators, postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
As applied to literature and other arts, the term is notoriously ambiguous, implying either that modernism has been superseded or that it has continued into a new phase. Postmodernism may be seen as a continuation of modernism's alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world: in very crude terms, where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference, favouring self‐consciously ‘depthless’ works of fabulation, pastiche, bricolage, or aleatory disconnection. The term cannot usefully serve as an inclusive description of all literature since the 1950s or 1960s, but is applied selectively to those works that display most evidently the moods and formal disconnections described above. It seems to have little relevance to modern poetry, and limited application to drama outside the ‘absurdist’ tradition, but is used widely in reference to fiction, notably to the novels (or anti‐novels) and stories of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, and many of their followers. Some of their works, like Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Nabokov's Ada (1969), employ devices reminiscent of science fiction, playing with contradictory orders of reality or the irruption of the fabulous into the secular world.
Opinion is still divided, however, on the value of the term and of the phenomenon it purports to describe. Those who most often use it tend to welcome ‘the postmodern’ as a liberation from the hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures; while sceptics regard the term as a symptom of irresponsible academic euphoria about the glitter of consumerist capitalism and its moral vacuity. For more extended discussions, consult Jean‐François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1986); H. Bertens and D. Fokkema (eds.), Approaching Postmodernism (1986); and Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987). See also post‐structuralism.
For more information on postmodernism, visit Britannica.com.
The term ‘Postmodernism’ has been applied to many disciplines including architecture, design, literature, communications, music, sociology, and film. In relation to architecture and design, by the late 1950s the visual language of Modernism was increasingly equated with the tastes of the educated professional classes, the corporate aesthetic of successful multinational companies, and the outlook of an architectural establishment that had taken up a vocabulary derived from radical avant-garde tendencies in the interwar years. Firmly embedded in the contemporary world of television, passenger jet air transportation, foreign travel, and nuclear energy the burgeoning Postmodern Zeitgeist (or ‘spirit of the age’) of the later 1950s and early 1960s was to many—particularly younger architects, designers, and consumers—emphatically different from that of 1920s and 1930s Modernism. The early 1960s was a period in which the ephemeral values of Pop came of age, its brightly coloured, culturally diverse, and image-rich ethos increasingly at odds with the rational, restrained aesthetic associated with the Modernists' exploration of new materials, manufacturing technologies, and abstract forms in the decades before the Second World War.
Ornament is an important feature of the Postmodernist vocabulary, a characteristic very much opposed by Modernist practitioners and theorists such as Adolf Loos, whose article on Ornament and Crime of 1908 anticipated the antipathy to the decorative arts of leading figures such as
One of the best-known maxims associated with Postmodernist architecture and design is architect, designer, and writer Robert Venturi's ‘less is a bore’, an ironic subversion of the Modernist credo ‘less is more’. Although the architectural and design historian and author of Pioneers of Modern Design Nikolaus Pevsner had disapproved of what he detected as a growing trend towards ‘Postmodern’ electicism in an essay of 1961, Venturi did much to begin to define the term more tightly in his landmark book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in 1966. In this—in opposition to the clarity of form and enduring values associated with Modernism—he identified a number of Postmodern characteristics including hybridity, ambiguity, distortedness, inconsistency, and equivocality. Such ideas were further developed in Venturi's 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas, written with fellow architects Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. They advocated the use of a visual language that could be widely understood, drawing on the visual imagery and symbolism of popular culture seen in the vibrant, often neon-lit, façades of the hotels, casinos, restaurants, and other entertainment buildings in Las Vegas. However, the popular visual language of billboards and façades explored by Venturi in Learning from Las Vegas had been a developing trend in business circles in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe for well over a decade. In business as well as architectural and design theoretical circles there had also been a growing interest in the formulation of a visual syntax that explored the aspirations and desires of consumers through a more sophisticated understanding of the driving forces of popular culture, an outlook that was fiercely attacked by the American writer Vance Packard in his best-selling book The Hidden Persuaders of 1957. Increasing investment in Motivational Research, especially in the United States, further refined understanding of the visual language of advertising and retailing. Leading figures in the field were the social anthropologist Burleigh Gardner of Social Research Inc. and Austrian-born Dr Ernst Dichter, president of the Institute for Motivational Research and author of The Strategy of Desire (1960).
Next to Venturi one of the most important figures involved in the definition of Postmodernism in architectural and design circles was the American architect, designer, theorist, historian, and prolific writer Charles Jencks, whose major books included The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977) and Postmodern Classicism (1983). Further definitions of Postmodernism have been explored in the writings of cultural theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard. The latter proposed in his book The Post-Modern Condition (1984) that Postmodernism was a rejection of the universal certainties of the Modernist world in favour of the local and provisional. Further underlining the variety and complexity of the ways in which the term has been utilized was Marxist writer Frederic Jameson's view that Postmodernism was a form of American cultural imperialism and an expression of multinational and consumer capitalism. The emergence of Postmodernism also coincided with the rise of service-based, Post-Industrial economies and the demise of the production-based economies associated with Fordism. Furthermore, computerized flexible production runs that could respond swiftly to the varied consumer demands of a pluralist society began to replace the large-scale production runs geared to satisfying homogeneous mass markets.
Dissatisfaction with the restrictions of the Modernist approach was also evident in the creative outlook of Italian designers associated with the Neo-Liberty style of the 1950s. They sought to revive the expressive, organic, forms of Art Nouveau and showed considerable respect for craft traditions—the antithesis of the standardized, machine-made forms of Modernist design. Prominent in the Neo-Liberty movement was the furniture designer Carlo Mollino. Also concerned with the possibilities of a richer visual syntax than that of Modernism in their exploration of the semantic possibilities of architecture and design were Italian writers such as the theorist and historian Gillo Dorfles and academic, novelist, historian, and cultural theorist Umberto Eco. Like the French sociologist Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957), Eco explored the field from the late 1950s onwards, his texts including A Theory of Semiotics (1976). Dorfles's writings included a 1969 edited book of essays entitled Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, its focus on popular culture being intrinsically opposed to the tenets of Modernism and associated ideas of ‘Good Design’. During the 1960s Italian avant-garde designers turned their backs on the dictates of mainstream manufacture in favour of experimentation, the publication of manifestos, involvement in research and education, and the mounting of exhibitions. Important amongst these was the 1972 Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Emilio Ambasz. Leading figures such as Ettore Sottsass Jr. and Anti-Design and Radical Design groups such as Archizoom and Superstudio drew on the iconography of Hollywood films and Pop and were also attracted to alternative lifestyle models such as those of the hippies. Colour, ornament, and decoration, together with kitsch, irony, and distortion of scale, were all key ingredients in Postmodernism. Following on from this was the work of Studio Alchimia, established by Alessandro Mendini in 1976 although its continuing commitment to design polemics rather than an exploration of the creative potential of design as a powerful agent for change in the world of production led Sottsass to form a new group, Memphis, in 1981. Associated closely with ‘New Design’, a term widely used in 1980s Italy that referred to design work that broke with international style and functionalism, Memphis in many ways epitomized the spirit of Postmodernism. However, Sottsass believed that the latter was American, academic, and restricted in its cultural references. Memphis embraced many design fields including furniture, textiles, carpets, lighting, clocks, ceramics, and interiors, drew on an eclectic range of sources including kitsch, Art Deco, and Pop and married cheap and expensive materials, popular and high culture references, thus imaginatively extending the contemporary design syntax.
Postmodernism was intrinsically bound up with notions of fashion and change associated with graphics, clothing, and retail design despite the fact that many of its original theoretical debates were bound up in the concerns of those who sought to open up fresh expressive possibilities in the more durable outputs of architecture. It flourished most vigorously during the 1980s when new markets for the conspicuous consumption of iconic products flourished and designers emerged as artistic celebrities. All of them stimulated, and catered for, the growing consumer demand for household goods endowed with cultural and aesthetic status. One particular, and often comparatively affordable, feature of Postmodern design was its increasing investment in the production of small-scale products for the table and kitchen—dinnerware, glassware, and metalware—a field where contemporary initiatives had for many years been heavily overshadowed by manufacturers' (and many consumers') preoccupation with traditional forms and patterns. Many of these products were closely associated with the preoccupation that many Postmodern designers, particularly the significant number who came from an architectural background, had with contemporary architecture on a vastly reduced scale. Such designs—including salt and pepper grinders, jugs, tea and coffee pots, sugar bowls, plates—were often referred to as items of ‘table architecture’ or ‘microarchitecture’. The first Swid Powell collection of porcelain dinnerware, silverware, and glass to embrace such trends was launched in 1984. The architecturally conceived Tea and Coffee Piazza project of 1980, coordinated for Alessi by Alessandro Mendini, did much to promote the company's tableware, also described as ‘domestic landscape’ and set the scene for related Alessi initiatives over succeeding decades.
Like Modernism, Postmodernism is an international language finding expression in much of the industrialized world including Europe, Scandinavia, the Far East—particularly Japan—and Australia. Catering for the new breed of design-conscious consumers keen to purchase affordable status symbols for the domestic environment were widely recognized companies such as Alessi, Ajeto, FSB (Franz Schneider Brakel), Källemo, Knoll, Swatch, Swid-Powell and WMF (Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik). The heightened media preoccupation with design in the years in which Postmodernism emerged led to considerably increased emphasis on the cult of the designer celebrity. In addition to the designers mentioned earlier, other well-known designers associated with Postmodernism include Andrea Branzi, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Toshiyuki Kita, Danny Lane, Javier Mariscal, Borek Sípek, Philippe Starck, Matteo Thun, and Stanley Tigerman.
A movement in art and ideas which challenges the aspirations to unity, purpose, and order. Emerging first as a rejection of the classical aesthetic principles of modern architecture, Postmodernism is exemplified by the Pompidou Centre at Beaubourg in Paris, which displays all its components and starkly contrasts with its surroundings. Jean-François Lyotard, in La Condition postmoderne (1979), generalized the idea into a diagnosis of the contemporary fragmentation of systems of knowledge. Postmodernism rapidly became a portmanteau term applied to a wide range of cultural phenomena, especially in art and cinema, but also extending to literature and philosophy. Throughout the 1980s it became a focus for debate in English-speaking intellectual circles, where it was seen, by supporters and opponents alike, as a reflection of and on the apparent success of free-market economics and culture, and the evident disarray of Marxist political and intellectual alternatives.
Like Post-Structuralism, from which it is often difficult to distinguish it, Postmodernism is not a readily identifiable school of thought in France. It is most usually associated with Lyotard and Baudrillard, but is often felt to include the later writings of Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, and Irigaray. A widely shared view was that there was a growing disintegration of the modern grands récits, the Hegelian, Marxist, or Freudian systems, each of which had sought to provide a coherent intellectual framework with which to understand and change the world. Their failure signalled the futility of any attempt to construct a Master Narrative, and could be construed as a liberation from the strait-jacket of totality and authority. The Postmodern posture was therefore to emphasize and enjoy difference (s) without seeking to bring them into unity; to disrupt fixed patterns or hierarchies which might exist or emerge; and to frustrate imperatives or directions which anyone might seek to impose on another. For this reason it is notably resistant to simple summary or definition.
Postmodernism shares many aspects of earlier cultural avant-garde movements, particularly Surrealism, anarchism, and Situationism, from which its members have drawn many techniques. A striking feature is the prevalence of pastiche in Postmodern works, drawing on elements from a variety of sources, which are then juxtaposed, often ironically. Beneix's film Diva (1981) exemplifies the approach, using elements of character, plot, setting, and composition from several cinematic genres. As with earlier modernism, these highly allusive works offer a special pleasure to the initiated. Critics of Postmodernism, such as Fredric Jameson and Jürgen Habermas, have suggested that it exacerbates the problems of personal and social disintegration, bewilderment, impotence, and despair which it attempts to portray.
[Michael Kelly]
Bibliography
In the culture generally, postmodernism is associated with a playful acceptance of surfaces and superficial style, self-conscious quotation and parody (although these are also found in modernist literature, such as that of James Joyce), and a celebration of the ironic, the transient, and the glitzy. It is usually seen as a reaction against a naïve and earnest confidence in progress, and against confidence in objective or scientific truth. In philosophy, therefore, it implies a mistrust of the grands récits of modernity: the large-scale justifications of western society and confidence in its progress visible in Kant, Hegel, or Marx, or arising from utopian visions of perfection achieved through evolution, social improvement, education, or the deployment of science. In its post-structuralist aspects it includes a denial of any fixed meaning, or any correspondence between language and the world, or any fixed reality or truth or fact to be the object of enquiry.
The tendency was anticipated, and perhaps most brilliantly expressed, by Nietzsche, whose perspectivism is seen as a philosophical technique for dissolving the presumption that there can be objective knowledge. Objectivity is revealed as a disguise for power or authority in the academy, and often as the last fortress of white male privilege. Logical or rational thought is revealed as the imposition of suspect dichotomies on the flux of events. Postmodernists differ over the consequences of such discoveries, sharing the sceptic's old problem of how to think and act in the light of the doctrine. While the dismantling of objectivity seems to some to be the way towards a liberating political radicalism, to others it allows such unliberating views as the denial that there was (objectively) such an event as the Second World War or the Holocaust, and to others such as Rorty (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 1989), it licenses the retreat to an aesthetic, ironic, detached, and playful attitude to one's own beliefs and to the march of events. This retreat has been criticized as socially irresponsible (and in its upshot, highly conservative). The postmodernist frame of mind, charted, for example, in The Postmodern Condition, 1984, by Jean-François Lyotard, may seem to depend on a cavalier dismissal of the success of science in generating human improvement, an exaggeration of the admitted fallibility of any attempt to gain knowledge in the humane disciplines, and an ignoring of the quite ordinary truth that while human history and law admit of no one final description, they certainly admit of more or less accurate ones, just as a landscape permits of no one unique map, yet there can be more or less accurate maps.
In the 1970s, "postmodernism" became a descriptive reference for certain changes occurring in American social, intellectual, and cultural life. The term had an elusive quality about it, and scholarly efforts to give it greater precision abounded. Post-modernism also yielded a critical literature as intellectuals pondered its political and ideological significance. Like "modernism," "postmodernism" conveyed different notions in the different categories in which the word was used. Examining the postmodern phenomenon in those categories does, however, suggest parallel meanings that paint a larger picture of American life in the late twentieth century. Causal interconnections are by no means self-evident, but common themes and motifs do appear.
Economic Affiliation
Postmodernism concurs with the emergence of postindustrialism. In the mid-1970s, the United States became, statistically, a service economy, with more workers employed in that category than in industrial jobs. Longstanding landmarks of the industrial era—steel, auto-mobiles—declined and service businesses—hotels, travel agencies, restaurants, medical and health care organizations, sports, health clubs, real estate—provided the growth sectors of the American economy. These outlets serviced the greater leisure and discretionary time available to many Americans. Family patterns and gender roles were changing and greater personal choice produced a "lifestyle" revolution. Postindustrialism also connoted an "information age." Communications, the television medium, research and development, and the dissemination of knowledge in all forms attained higher prominence and importance. By the century's end personal computers had become common household items and computer functions proved indispensable to virtually every business function in the postindustrial economy. The information age, with its ever-accelerating pace, compelled Americans to process data and symbols in a new sensory environment.
Social critics perceived the change. The futurist Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, a best-selling book of 1970, described the new "feel" of the "super industrial economy." The rapid pace of change, the accelerated mobility of the business world, the "throwaway society" of the consumer market, Tofler asserted, all created the transient and impermanent sense of life in the new era. Human relations became more ad hoc as older social structures dissolved, Toffler believed. Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism (1979) lamented the triumph of a hedonistic culture. Reflecting on the "political crisis of capitalism," Lasch recounted the emergence of a "therapeutic sensibility" and Americans' pervasive quest for psychic well-being. According to Lasch, Americans knew only the overwhelming present of the capitalist marketplace; self-preoccupation, indiscriminate hedonism, and anarchic individualism had become the normative social impulses of American life.
Postmodern Intellect
Impermanence, Pluralism, dissolution, and the decay of authority constituted thematic emphases in the intellectual dimensions of postmodernism. The major influence, in the fields of language and literary theory, came heavily from the French. In the late 1960s, American students began to hear of thinkers like Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and others. They provided the leads in the redirection in American literary studies, "the linguistic turn" that would have influence in many academic disciplines. Influenced by the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, the French thinkers sought to deflate the pretensions of the logocentric, or word-focused, culture of Western civilization. Literary and intellectual texts, they asserted, always, when under close examination, yield both multiple and contradictory meanings. They "deconstruct" themselves. They do not produce truth systems; they confront us only with an endless chain of signifiers. Meaning always recedes, and eludes the reader. Western thinking, the poststructuralists maintained, had always been a quest for metaphysical comfort—a quest for the Absolute. But the efforts, they asserted, collapse from their very excesses. Poststructuralists such as those associated with the Yale School of academics in the 1970s deprived literary texts of subject authority ("the disappearance of the author"), coherence (texts are "de-centered"), and social reference ("there is nothing outside the text"). On the other hand, in poststructuralism, loss of authority also signified the positive alternative of reading as personal freedom ("re-creation"); Barthes wrote of the "pleasure of the text." In the Yale School, Geoffrey Hartman urged that the very indeterminacy of language empowered a creative criticism that broke the shackles of univocal meaning.
Postmodernism in its poststructuralist mode challenged the European and American left. In France, it replaced a Marxism that had dominated in the universities into the 1960s. In the United States, a sustained attack came from the literary scholar Frank Lentricchia in his 1980 book After the New Criticism. Leftist scholars, and particularly Marxists, had long insisted that literature, like all culture, reflected the hegemony of the dominant classes in capitalism; thus it always had a social connection and a historical foundation. Lentricchia saw in the American poststructuralists merely a formalist and hermetic approach to literature, depriving it of social and political context. "Pleasures of the text" conveyed to Lentricchia only the habits of aesthetic indulgence in bourgeois appropriations of culture, in short, a familiar recourse to hedonism. The linguistic turn to this extent, he believed, registered the most damning aspects of American capitalist culture, dissevering literature from the class struggle and rendering it a decorative and therapeutic device that invites us to take our pleasure as we like it.
In philosophy, Richard Rorty moved in a similar postmodernist direction. His Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) sought, like the poststructuralists, to deflate the pretensions of his discipline. Western thinking, he insisted, had gone awry in its long-standing efforts to secure a foundational epistemology, to make mind the mirror of nature. Rorty faulted the ahistorical character of this quest. Philosophy became defensive, he charged, freezing reality in privileged forms or essences. Appealing to the American pragmatist John Dewey, Rorty wished to return philosophy to the problematical aspects of ordinary life. In this era of "post-" and "neo-" labeling, Rorty called for a "post-Philosophy" that abandons pursuit of the conditioning groundwork of all thinking; instead, philosophy should be a form of hermeneutics. Post-Philosophy, for Rorty, had a relaxed and playful manner; it becomes an aspect of conversation, rooted in social and historical conditions. Here, too, a therapeutic quality stands out: philosophy helps us cope.
Postmodernism had a major social voice in the brilliant writings of the French thinker Michel Foucault. Though a voice of the political left, Foucault represents the postmodernist diminution of Marxism. To many post-structuralists like Foucault, Marxism conveyed traditional Western habits of logocentrism and notions of totality, from Hegel and onto "Western" Marxist humanism in the twentieth century. Foucault added to textual analysis the ingredient of power and saw language systems and intellectual discourse as vehicles of control. Foucault, however, read society like poststructuralists read literary texts, as decentered systems. In contrast to Marxists, he described power not as hegemony but as multiplicities, localities of activities, spaces, in which resistance and subversion are always at work. Foucault faulted Marxism as an intellectual residual of nineteenth-century ideology. Postmodernists like the French critic Jean-François Lyotard, in his influential book The Post-Modern Condition (1979), distrusted all holistic theorizing and "metanarratives." Absolutism in thought, he believed, led to totalitarianism in the political realm, the Gulag.
Postmodernist Arts
Postmodernism had specific references to the visual arts and redefined trends in painting and architecture. In the 1960s the reign of modernism in painting weakened. Nonrepresentational forms, of which the most often highlighted was abstract expressionism, gave way to stark contrasts, as in pop art. New styles proliferated: photo-realism, pattern and decorative art, high-tech art. Although some new genres—such as feminist and performance art—often suggested a subversive intent, generally commentators saw that postmodernism took painting away from the critical edge and alienated mood of modernism. They found in the newer varieties a relaxed posture. And against the arctic purity of modernism, its successor forms invited a sensual indulgence, not only in the marketplace of suburban America, but also in older art forms obscured or discredited by the modernist imperium. Museums sponsored revivals and retrospective exhibits of all kinds.
Architecture saw a similar shift. Sleek, glass rectangular skyscrapers, born of the severe rationalism of the Bauhaus school decades previously, had long dominated the main streets of America's large cities. Revolting against this restrictive formalism of modernist architecture, Robert Venturi led a postmodernist protest. His book Learning from Las Vegas (1972) celebrated the "ordinary and ugly" buildings of that American playground. Then in 1978, Philip Johnson, a noted practitioner of modernism, surprised the critics in revealing his design for the new AT&T building in New York City. Johnson affixed to the top of the slender rectangular slab a 30-foot-high pediment, broken in the center by a circular opening, an orbiculum that capped the building with a stylistic crown. It looked to some like the crest of an old grandfather clock. Almost overnight, it seemed, Johnson's "Chippendale" effect gave architects a license to appropriate freely from any and all older mannerisms. Post-modernist architecture signified a pervasive and playful eclecticism.
These directions raised more critical voices, mostly on the cultural left. The Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson provided the most trenchant attack in his Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Everywhere postmodernism signified to Jameson the loss of critical distance, the triumph of "kitsch," the collapse of all signs and symbols under the global marketplace of international capitalism. Under postmodernism, he said, historicity dissolved. The past presented itself only as commodifiable pastiche. Postmodernism, in Jameson's account, meant the flattening out of all historically conditioned realities that constitute the vehicle of social reconstruction. It leaves only the reign of simulacra, the therapeutic salve, the pseudo-reality of a dehumanized civilization.
Postmodernist culture reflected the proliferating diversity of American life in the late twentieth century. It fostered a mood of acceptance and democratic tolerance. Some resented its anti-elitism and found it meretricious and too comfortable with the commercial nexus. The postmodernist era brought a politics of diversity and group identity—in women's rights, gay liberation, black, Indian, and Chicano ethnic movements. Here, too, postmodernism broke down prevailing norms and idealizations of American life. Some saw in the effects a healthy, democratic tolerance. Others wondered whether there remained any unifying force or any center in American life.
Bibliography
Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge, 1995.
Hoeveler, J. David, Jr. The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.
Kellner, Douglas, ed. Postmodernism: Jameson Critique. Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1989.
Silverman, Hugh J., ed. Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Arts. New York: Routledge, 1990.
The term postmodernism is probably most specific and meaningful when used in relation to architecture, where it designates an international architectural movement that emerged in the 1960s, became prominent in the late 1970s and 80s, and remained a dominant force in the 1990s. The movement largely has been a reaction to the orthodoxy, austerity, and formal absolutism of the International Style. Postmodern architecture is characterized by the incorporation of historical details in a hybrid rather than a pure style, by the use of decorative elements, by a more personal and exaggerated style, and by references to popular modes of building.
Practitioners of postmodern architecture have tended to reemphasize elements of metaphor, symbol, and content in their credos and their work. They share an interest in mass, surface colors, and textures and frequently use unorthodox building materials. However, because postmodern architects have in common only a relatively vague ideology, the style is extremely varied. Greatly affected by the writings of Robert Venturi, postmodernism is evident in Venturi's buildings and, among others, in the work of Denise Scott Brown, Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, Arata Isozaki, and the later work of Philip Johnson.
See also contemporary art.
Bibliography
See P. Goldberger, On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Postmodern Age (1983); A. Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986); C. Jencks, What is Post-Modernism? (1986); S. Gaggi, Modern/Postmodern (1989); D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (1989); J. Tagg, ed., The Cultural Politics of Postmodernism (1989); D. Kolb, Postmodern Sophistications (1990); H. Risatti, ed., Postmodern Perspectives (1990); F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991); Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates on Houses and Housing (1992); T. Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (1993); P. Jodidio, Contemporary American Architects (1993); D. Meyhofer, Contemporary European Architects (1993); N. Wheale, ed., The Postmodern Arts (1995); S. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (1996).
A movement, particularly in architecture, that reacted against the pared-down modern school by reintroducing classical and traditional elements of style. An example of this style is Philip Johnson's AT&T Building in New York City.
Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism.
Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated Pomo[1]) was originally a reaction to modernism (not necessarily "post" in the purely temporal sense of "after"). Largely influenced by the disillusionment induced by the Second World War, postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality.[2]
Postmodernity is a derivative referring to non-art aspects of history that were influenced by the new movement, namely the evolutions in society, economy and culture since the 1960s.[3]. When the idea of a reaction to - or even a rejection of - the movement of modernism (a late 19th, early 20th centuries art movement) was borrowed by other fields, it became synonymous in some contexts with postmodernity. The term is closely linked with poststructuralism (cf. Jacques Derrida) and with modernism, in terms of a rejection of its bourgeois, elitist culture.[4]
The term was coined in 1949 to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, leading to the postmodern architecture movement.[5]. Later, the term was applied to several movements, including in art, music, and literature, that reacted against modern movements, and are typically marked by revival of traditional elements and techniques.[6] Postmodernism in architecture is marked by the re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, and non-orthogonal angles. It may be a response to the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style.
If used in other contexts, it is a concept without a universally accepted, short and simple definition; in a variety of contexts it is used to describe social conditions, movements in the arts, and scholarship (incl. criticism) in reaction to modernism.
Postmodernist ideas in the arts have influenced philosophy and the analysis of culture and society, expanded the importance of critical theory, and been the point of departure for works of literature, architecture, and design, as well as being visible in marketing/business and the interpretation of history, law and culture, starting in the late 20th century. These developments — re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from industrial to service economy) that took place since 1950/1960, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968 — are described with the term postmodernity, as opposed to the "-ism" referring to an opinion or movement. As something being "postmodernist" would be part of the movement, "postmodern" would refer to aspects of the period of the time since the 1950s, a part of contemporary history; still both terms may be synonymous under some circumstances.
Postmodernism is a movement of ideas arising from, but also critical of elements of modernism. Because of the wide range of uses of the term, different elements of modernity are viewed as being coterminous; and different elements of modernity are held to be critiqued.
Each of the different usages of 'postmodernism' is also inevitably related to some argument about the nature of knowledge, known in philosophy as epistemology. Individuals who invoke the expression nowadays are implicitly arguing either that there is something fundamentally different about the transmission of meaning in postmodern works of art; or else that there inheres in modernism certain fundamental flaws in its epistemology.[citation needed]
The argument against the need for the concept is that the "modern" era has not yet arrived at its term; and that the most important social and political project of our age remains modernism's project of replacing counter-enlightenment and emotionalist tendencies, as well as combating widesperead cultural ignorance, pervasive superstition, and mindless resistance to technological and social innovations. From this perspective, the realities of the modern era, and its philosophical underpinnings, are being challenged by a backlash from precisely that reactionary quarter against which modernism in fact began its initial late 19th-century crusade. On the other hand more nuanced non-postmodernist thinkers and writers (quoted below) hold that postmodernism is at best simply a period following upon modernism; a hybrid variety of it; or an extension of modernism into contemporary times; and therefore not a separate period or idea which represents a quantum leap from the theories of art familiar to us from Stravinsky, Mann, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Baudelaire.
As with all questions of division, there is a range of viewpoints between the hardened extremes of declaring that modernity has been completely replaced, and the other which sees postmodernism as a useless term that describes nothing. However, the term applies particularly well to revisionist and deconstructive literature and visual art. It is a contemporary evidence of what historians meant by Mannerism.
Postmodernist scholars argue[citation needed] that a global, decentralized society such as ours inevitably creates responses/perceptions that are described as postmodern, such as the rejection of what are seen as the false, imposed unities of meta-narrative and hegemony; the breaking of traditional frames of genre, structure and stylistic unity; and the overthrowing of categories that are the result of logocentrism and other forms of artificially imposed order. Scholars who accept the division of postmodernity as a distinct period believe that society has collectively eschewed modern ideals and instead adopted ideas that are rooted in the reaction to the restrictions and limitations of those ideas, and that the present is therefore a new historical period. While the characteristics of postmodern life are sometimes difficult to grasp, most postmodern scholars point to concrete and visible technological and economic changes that they claim have brought about the new types of thinking.
Critics of the idea claim[citation needed] that it does not represent liberation, but rather a failure of creativity, and the supplanting of organization with syncretism and bricolage; this latter concept can only be described as anti-intellectual. They argue that postmodernism is obscurantist, overly dense, and makes assertions about the sciences that are demonstrably false.
There is a great deal of disagreement over whether or not recent technological and cultural changes represent a new historical period, or merely an extension of the modern one. Complicating matters further, others have argued that even the postmodern era has already ended, with some commentators asserting culture has entered a post-postmodern period. In his essay "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond", Alan Kirby has argued that we now inhabit an entirely new cultural landscape, which he calls "pseudo-modernism".[7] This idea has been extended by A. Carlill and S. Willis, with the latter describing postmodernism as "more the rough outline of a set of self-referential ideals than a genuine cultural movement". [8]
As with many other divisions, the use of the term is subject to the lumpers and splitters problem. There are those who use very small and exact definitions of postmodernism, often for theories perceived as relativist, nihilist, counter-Enlightenment or antimodern. Others believe the world has changed so profoundly that the term applies to nearly everything, and use postmodernism in a broad cultural sense. People who believe postmodernism is really just an aspect of the modernist period (1920s) may instead use terms such as "late modernism".
| “ | Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, 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, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on [...] Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? - Jean-Francois Lyotard[9] | ” |
Additional references to postmodernism:
Writers such as John Ralston Saul among others have argued that postmodernism represents an accumulated disillusionment with the promises of the Enlightenment project and its progress of science, so central to modern thinking.
The movement of Postmodernism began with architecture, as a reactionary movement against the perceived blandness and hostility present in the Modern movement. Modern Architecture as established and developed by masters such as Walter Gropius and Philip Johnson was focused on the pursuit of an ideal perfection, harmony of form and function[15] and dismissal of frivolous ornament[16]. Critics of modernism argued that the attributes of perfection and minimalism themselves were subjective, and pointed out anachronisms in modern thought and questioned the benefits of its philosophy.[17] Definitive postmodern architecture such as the work of Michael Graves rejects the notion of a 'pure' form or 'perfect' architectonic detail, instead conspicuously drawing from all methods, materials, forms and colors available to architects. Postmodern architecture began the reaction against the almost totalitarian qualities of Modernist thought, favoring personal preferences and variety over objective, ultimate truths or principles. It is this atmosphere of criticism, skepticism and subjectivity that defines the postmodern philosophy.
Thinkers in the mid and late 19th century and early 20th century, like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, through their argument against objectivity, and emphasis on skepticism (especially concerning social morals and norms), laid the groundwork for the existentialist movement of the 20th century. Other notable precursors of postmodernism include Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy, Alfred Jarry's 'Pataphysics, and the work of Lewis Carroll. Art and literature of the early part of the 20th century play a significant part in shaping the character of postmodern culture. Dadaism attacked notions of high art in an attempt to break down the distinctions between high and low culture; Surrealism further developed concepts of Dadaism to celebrate the flow of the subconscious with influential techniques such as automatism and nonsensical juxtapositions (evidence of Surrealisms influence on postmodern thought can be seen in Foucault's and Derrida's references to Rene Magritte's experiments with signification). Some other significant contributions to postmodern culture from literary figures include the following: Jorge Luis Borges experimented in metafiction and magical realism; William S. Burroughs wrote the prototypical postmodern novel, Naked Lunch and developed the cut up method (similar to Tristan Tzara's "How to Make a Dadaist Poem") to create other novels such as Nova Express; Samuel Beckett attempted to escape the shadow of James Joyce by focusing on the failure of language and humanity's inability to overcome its condition, themes later to be explored in such works as Waiting for Godot. Writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus drew heavily from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and other previous thinkers, and brought about a new sense of subjectivity, and forlornness, which greatly influenced contemporary thinkers, writers, and artists. Karl Barth's fideist approach to theology and lifestyle, brought an irreverence for reason, and the rise of subjectivity. Postcolonialism after World War II contributed to the idea that one cannot have an objectively superior lifestyle or belief. This idea was taken further by the anti-foundationalist philosophers: Heidegger, then Ludwig Wittgenstein, then Derrida, who examined the fundamentals of knowledge; they argued that rationality was neither as sure nor as clear as modernists or rationalists assert. Both World Wars contributed to postmodernism; it is with the end of the Second World War that recognizably postmodernist attitudes begin to emerge. It is possible to identify the burgeoning anti-establishment movements of the 1960s as the constituting event of postmodernism. The theory gained some of its strongest ground early on in French academia. In 1971, the Arab-American Theorist Ihab Hassan was one of the first to use the term in its present form (though it had been used by many others before him, Charles Olson for example, to refer to other literary trends) in his book: The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature; in it, Hassan traces the development of what he called "literature of silence" through Marquis de Sade, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Beckett, and many others, including developments such as the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau roman. In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard wrote a short but influential work The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Also, Richard Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes are also influential in 1970s postmodern theory.
Movements and contributors:
Influencer Year Influence Dada movement c.1920 a focus on the framing of objects and discourse as being as important, or more important, than the work itself Karl Barth c.1930 fideist approach to theology brought a rise in subjectivity Martin Heidegger c.1930 rejected the philosophical grounding of the concepts of "subjectivity" and "objectivity" Ludwig Wittgenstein c.1950 anti-foundationalism, on certainty, a philosophy of language Thomas Samuel Kuhn c.1962 posited the rapid change of the basis of scientific knowledge to a provisional consensus of scientists, popularized the term "paradigm shift" W.V.O. Quine c. 1962 developed the theses of indeterminacy of translation and ontological relativity, and argued against the possibility of a priori knowledge Jacques Derrida c.1970 re-examined the fundamentals of writing and its consequences on philosophy in general; sought to undermine the language of western metaphysics (deconstruction) Michel Foucault c.1975 examined discursive power in Discipline and Punish, with Bentham's panopticon as his model, and also known for saying "language is oppression" (Meaning that language was developed to allow only those who spoke the language not to be oppressed. All other people that don't speak the language would then be oppressed.) Jean-François Lyotard c.1979 opposed universality, meta-narratives, and generality Richard Rorty c.1979 philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods; argues for dissolving traditional philosophical problems; anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism Jean Baudrillard c.1981 Simulacra and Simulation - reality created by media
Deconstruction is a term which is used to denote the application of postmodern ideas of criticism, or theory, to a "text" or "artifact", based on the architecture deconstructivism. A deconstruction is meant to undermine the frame of reference and assumptions that underpin the text or the artifact.
In its original use, a "deconstruction" is an important textual "occurrence" described and analyzed by many postmodern authors and philosophers. They argue that aspects in the text itself would undermine its own authority or assumptions and that internal contradictions would erase boundaries or categories which the work relied on or asserted. Poststructuralists beginning with Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, argued that the existence of deconstructions implied that there was no intrinsic essence to a text, merely the contrast of difference. This is analogous to the scientific idea that only the variations are real, that there is no established norm to a genetic population, or the idea that the difference in perception between black and white is the context. A deconstruction is created when the "deeper" substance of text opposes the text's more "superficial" form. This idea is not isolated to poststructuralists but is related to the idea of hermeneutics in literature; intellectuals as early as Plato asserted it and so did modern thinkers such as Leo Strauss. Derrida's argument is that deconstruction proves that texts have multiple meanings and the "violence" between the different meanings of text may be elucidated by close textual analysis.
Popularly, close textual analyses describing deconstruction within a text are often themselves called deconstructions. Derrida argued, however, that deconstruction is not a method or a tool but an occurrence within the text itself. Writings about deconstruction are therefore referred to in academic circles as deconstructive readings.
Deconstruction is far more important to postmodernism than its seemingly narrow focus on text might imply. According to Derrida, one consequence of deconstruction is that the text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words but the entire spectrum of symbols and phenomena within Western thought. To Derrida, a result of deconstruction is that no Western philosopher has been able to escape successfully from this large web of text and reach that which is "signified", which they imagined to exist "just beyond" the text.
The more common use of the term is the more general process of pointing to contradictions between the intent and surface of a work and the assumptions about it. A work then "deconstructs" assumptions when it places them in context. For example, someone who can pass as the opposite sex may be said to "deconstruct" gender identity, because there is a conflict between the superficial appearance and the reality of the person's gender.
Often opposed to deconstruction are social constructionists, labelled as such within the analytic tradition, but not usually in the case of the continental tradition. The term was first used in sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's book The Social Construction of Reality.
Usually in the continental tradition, the terms structuralism or poststructuralism are used. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is seen as the biggest contributor to structuralism, which is epitomized in the philosophy of Claude Levi-Strauss. Michel Foucault was also a structuralist but then turned to what would be termed poststructuralism, although he himself declined to call his work either poststructuralist or postmodern. Structuralism historically gave way to poststructuralism; often the role of postmodernism within the analytic tradition is played down, although works by major figures of the analytic tradition in the 20th century, including those of Thomas Kuhn and Willard Van Orman Quine, show a similarity with works in the c
