What on earth is postmodernism?
In: 13
In short, the term comes from the art scene originally. There was this art movement called modernism around 1900, which was kind of a rebellion against the then dominating art and architectural traditions. Modernists didn’t want a continuation of the same style, but create NEW things and a better world.
Postmodernism takes that to a whole new level. Art should not necessary be beautiful, it just has to provoke a reaction, whether positive or negative.
People smarter than me: I encourage you to correct me.
There’s different definitions
There is postmodern art which is a mishmash of popular art that rejects usual rules to mix them all together to make something new.
Think Star Wars fusing old republic serials, Kurosawa samurai films, John Ford cowboy westerns
Postmodern philosophy is a rejection of “modernism”, suggests that there is no absolute truth, what is real or not real is not as straightforward as we like to believe.
Basically hang out on the internet long enough and you’ll realize Derrida was on to something but also don’t worry if you find Derrida or Foucault hard to read or understand (literally everyone struggles with it).
Postmodernism in philosophy is broadly the assumption that there is no common denominator in ‘nature’ or ‘truth’ that guarantees the possibility of neutral or objective thought.
The name indicates that it is what came after the modernist movement in art/literature/music/architecture/etc. (I’ll just say “art” for simplicity) which was itself happening from the 1940s-60s and focused on understanding WWII and the new post-war order.
More than any intellectual movement that came before it or (perhaps) since, post-modernism consciously rejects traditional structures and hierarchies. It challenges the idea that art is produced by an artist, imbued with a meaning of their choice, then consumed or decoded by an audience. Post-modernists attempted to create art without meaning or purpose, or that actively required the participation of the audience in its realization. Identities and definitions are constructed, often out in the open for everyone to see. Everything is open to experimentation and interpretation.
Prototypical post-modern works can be featureless (blank canvases or silent songs), obsessed with documenting their own intention and production (books that refer to themselves or the author), or actively reject traditional critique or interpretation (intentionally confusing or contradictory elements or themes)
When I think of modernism, I apply the art world to it in relation to historical context. A key factor of modernism is it’s response to a rapidly changing world. You have people taking much more interest in the introspective, and the general departure humans are taking from the traditional. We see a focus on how we move through the world (futurism), the idea of perspective (cubism), the absurdity of the mind (surrealism), and an emphasis self through our focus on the artist as the medium.
For people living through modernism, life brought up questions about different cultures, the capability to travel the world, changes in how we function as inter-and intra-societally. They witnessed the technological advancement of the world from cavalries in world war 1 in the 1910’s to chemical warfare, tanks, atomic bombs, long distance radio signals, flight bombers, etc. for these people, the traditional way of life was incompatible with the attempts to modernize so they conceived a world in which their role was pliable, and ever changing.
Post-modernism is difficult to define, as it is a response to modernism, and I would argue that we have been living in it since the 1960’s.
I find that the art we see now is one that focuses on the individuals plight in an unstable world. Unlike the artists we see in modernism, there’s a great sense of distrust in institutions. We can see that there’s a heavy influence among the surrealists for communist governments in modernist work, but it is exacerbated more recently with distrust in any and all institutions: we don’t know what truth is anymore so we recede into the only perspective we have- our own. There we war with our reality and that of others. We question ourselves there into absurdity.
There’s an meme infographic I really like that compares the themes of romanticism, modernism, and post-modernism. Essentially, post-modernism is the human plight of shaping reality.
[conflict in literature](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/77tgoy/conflict_in_literature/)
I can only really speak in the context of architecture, although modernism and postmodernism apply to much more diverse fields. Modernism was/is a school of styles that avoided non-functional ornamentation, and brings to the fore only the elements that are intrinsic to the design. That might mean celebrating concrete with Brutalism, or uninterrupted glass in Internationalism. Modernist items can definitely be beautiful, but they are not ornate.
Postmodernism is a rejection of that aesthetic, bringing back the ornaments of previous architectural eras but in new ways. You might see a grossly oversized pediment taken from Neoclassicism (see the work of Robert Venturi), or Beaux Arts windows and a massive cupola, or completely free forms.
The point is to include features because you want to, and you believe they add some aesthetic value, but also to use modern materials and techniques so as not to simply pastiche an earlier style.
In the most basic terms, it goes something like this:
Modernism holds that value derives from effort. The more work and skill something has behind it, the more valuable as a cultural object it should be.
Postmodernism holds that any object that exists should be valued and approached on its own terms and is equally worthy of being evaluated as a cultural object.
More important than “what is postmodernism” is “why is postmodernism important,” and that gets really interesting, because the two schools can’t really exist in this era without being in conflict with each other, they are each necessary for the other to exist.
The best, most approachable video I’ve ever seen on the subject is, and I’m absolutely not kidding, the [Regular Car Reviews PT Cruiser episode. ](https://youtu.be/hoxqtnI4I4c)
It’s a movement that started in perhaps the late 1950s across philosophy, art, literature, and architecture, movies, TV .. really everywhere.
Before po-mo, there was modernism, and by the late 50s that had become so serious and dull that everyone was fed up with it. You can think of po-mo as perhaps a rejection of seriousness by the post-war generation.
In philosophy, this rejection was part of a realization that there was no one truth, that everything is completely subjective, that all meaning is created by us. Culture is a game, and the only thing that matters is being amusing. It’s rather a despairing position in many ways.
You can also maybe imagine it as the final end of aristocracy and the ultimate triumph of democracy. All authority has evaporated.
Check out the Youtube channel Then and Now. He talks philosophy and breaks it down. He’s a bit obsessed with modernism and postmodernism, and has really good videos about them.
Basically it’s a rebellion against the modern system. Whatever rules or justifications the modern system uses, post-modernism rejects them. It says that those rules or justifications aren’t neutral or naturally occurring, they exist as something specific to your culture or society.
Let’s say one kid gets good grades in school, while another gets bad grades. You might think “oh Timmy is so smart, while Ricky is kinda dumb”. But that assumes that the school itself is fair, which you haven’t proven. Maybe Timmy has parents who spend 3 hours a night with him doing his homework, but Ricky’s mom is passed out drunk every night, and his dad ran off five years ago.
Post-modernism says that the basic assumptions that modernism accepts as being true, aren’t true. Or at least, they aren’t true all the time. And if you changed your assumptions, you’d get different results.
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