Sem-2 Paper-8 Assignment

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Name: Joshi Riddhi

Topic: Post Modernism and Popular Culture

Roll no: 30

Paper no 8: Cultural; Studies

M.A: Sem-2

Enrolment no. : 2069108420180028

Year: 2017-19

E-mail: Www.riddhij8@gmail.com

Submitted to:

S.B. Gardi Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji

Bhavnagar University

Most contributions to the debate on postmodernism agree that whatever else it is or might be, postmodernism has something to do with the development of popular culture in the late twentieth century in the advanced capitalist democracies of the West. That is, whether postmodernism is seen as a new historical moment, a new sensibility or a new cultural style, popular culture is cited as a terrain on which these changes can be most readily found.

POPULAR CULTURE AND THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNISM

It is in the late 1950s and early 1960s that we see the beginnings of what is now understood as postmodernism. In the work of the American cultural critic, Susan Sontag (Against Interpretation (1966», we encounter the celebration of what she calls a ‘new sensibility’. As she explains: ‘One important consequence of the new sensibility [is] that the distinction between  high” and “low” culture seems less and less meaningful.’

The postmodern ‘new sensibility’ rejected the cultural elitism of modernism. Although it often ‘quoted’ popular culture, modernism was marked by a deep suspicion of all things popular. Its entry into the museum and the academy as official culture was undoubtedly made easier (despite its declared antagonism to ‘bourgeois philistinism’) by its appeal to, and homologous relationship with, the elitism of class society. The response of the postmodern ‘new sensibility’ to modernism’s canonization was a re-evaluation of popular culture. The postmodernism of the 1960s was therefore in part a populist attack on the elitism of modernism. It signalled a refusal of what Andreas Huyssen in After the
Great Divide (1986) calls ‘the great divide … [a] discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture’. Moreover, according to Huyssen, ‘To a large extent, it is by the distance we have travelled from this “great divide” between mass culture and modernism that we can measure our own cultural postmodernity.’ The American and British pop art movement of the 1950s and the 1960s, with its rejection of the distinction between popular and high culture, is postmodernism’s first cultural flowering. As pop art’s first theorist Lawrence Alloway explains:

The area of contact was mass produced urban culture: movies, advertising, science fiction, pop music. We felt none of the dislike of commercial culture standard among most intellectuals, but accepted it as a fact, discussed it in detail, and consumed it enthusiastically. One result of our discussions was to take Pop culture out of the realm of ‘escapism’, ‘sheer entertainment’, ‘relaxation’, and to treat it with the seriousness of art (quoted in John Storey, An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (1997».

Seen from this perspective, postmodernism first emerges out of a generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism. The insistence on an absolute distinction between high and popular culture came to be regarded as the ‘unhip’ assumption of an older generation. One sign of this collapse can be seen in the merging of art and pop music. For example, Peter Blake designed the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant-Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Richard Hamilton designed the cover of their ‘white album’; Andy Warhol designed the cover of the Rolling Stones’ album, Sticky Fingers.

POPULAR CULTURE IN THE DEBATE ON POSTMODERNISM

By the mid-1980s, the postmodern ‘new sensibility’ had become a condition and for many a reason to despair. According to Jean-Francois Lyotard the postmodern condition is marked by a crisis in the status of knowledge in Western societies. This is expressed as incredulity towards ‘metanarratives‘, such as God, Marxism, scientific progress. Steven Connor (Postmodernist Culture (1989)) suggests that Lyotard‘s analysis may be read ‘as a disguised allegory of the condition of academic knowledge and institutions in the contemporary world’. Lyotard’s ‘diagnosis of the postmodern condition is, in one sense, the diagnosis of the final futility of the intellectual’. Lyotard is himself aware of what he calls the contemporary intellectual’s ‘negative heroism’. Intellectuals have, he argues, been losing their authority since ‘the violence and critique mounted against the academy during the sixties’. Iain Chambers (Popular Culture (1988)) makes much the same point but from a different perspective. He argues that the debate over postmodernism can in part be understood as ‘the symptom of the disruptive ingression of popular culture, its aesthetics and intimate possibilities, into a previously privileged domain. Theory and academic discourses are confronted by the wider, unsystemized, popular networks of cultural production and knowledge. The intellectual’s privilege to explain and distribute knowledge is threatened.’

Like Chambers, Angela McRobbie (Postmodemism and Popular Culture (1994)) welcomes postmodernism, seeing it as ‘the coming into being of those whose voices were historically drowned out by the (modernist) metanarratives of mastery, which were in turn both patriarchal and imperialist’. Postmodernism, she argues, has enfranchised a new body of intellectuals; voices from the margins speaking from positions of difference: ethnic, gender, class, sexual preference; those whom she refers to as ‘the new generation of intellectuals (often black, female, or working class)’. Kobena Mercer (Welcome to the Jungle (1994)) makes a similar point, seeing postmodernism as in part an unacknowledged response to ‘the emerging voices, practices and identities of dispersed African, Caribbean and Asian peoples [who have] crept in from the margins of postimperial Britain to dislocate commonplace certainties and consensual “truths” and thus open up new ways of seeing, and understanding’.

For Jean Baudrillard (Simulations (1983)), hyperrealism is the characteristic mode of postmodernity. In the realm of the hyperreal, the ‘real’ and the imaginary continually implode into each other. The result is that reality and what Baudrillard calls ‘simulations’ are experienced as without difference – operating along a roller-coaster continuum. Simulations can often be experienced as more real than the real itself ‘ even better than the real thing’, in the words of the U2 song.

The evidence for hyperrealism is said to be everywhere. For example, we in the West live in a world in which people write letters addressed to characters in soap operas, making them offers of marriage, sympathizing with their current difficulties, offering them new accommodation, or just writing to ask how they are coping with life. Television villains are regularly confronted in the street and warned about the possible future consequences of not altering their behaviour. Television doctors, television lawyers and television detectives regularly receive requests for advice and help. Baudrillard calls this ‘the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV’.

John Fiske claims in Media Matters (1994) that postmodern media no longer provide ‘secondary representations of reality; they affect and produce the reality that they mediate’. Moreover, in our postmodern world, all events that ‘matter’ are media events. He cites the example of the arrest of O. J. Simpson: ‘Local people watching the chase on TV went to O. J.’s house to be there at the showdown, but took their portable TVs with them in the knowledge that the live event was not a substitute for the mediated one but a complement to it. On seeing themselves on their own TVs, they waved to themselves, for postmodern people have no problem in being simultaneously and indistinguishably live people and media people.’ These people knew implicitly that the media do not simply report or circulate the news, they produce it. Therefore, in order to be part of the news of O. J. Simpson’s arrest, it was not enough to be there, one had to be there on television. In the hyperreal world of the postmodern, there is no longer a clear distinction between a ‘real’ event and its media representation. In the same way, O. J. Simpson’s trial cannot be neatly separated into a ‘real’ event that television then represented as media event. Anyone who watched the proceedings unfold on TV knows that the trial was conducted at least as much for the television audience as it was for those present in the court. Without the presence of the cameras this would have been a very different event indeed.

Fredric Jameson is an American Marxist cultural critic who has written a number of very influential essays on postmodernism. According to his account postmodernism is a culture of pastiche, disfigured by the ‘complacent play of historical allusion’. Postmodern culture is ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum’. Rather than a culture of pristine creativity, postmodern culture is a culture of quotations. Instead of ‘original’ cultural production, we have cultural production born out of other cultural production. It is a culture ‘of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense’. A culture’ ~ images and surfaces, without ‘latent’ possibilities, it derives its hermeneutic force from other images, other surfaces. Jameson acknowledges that modernism itself often ‘quoted’ from other cultures and other historical moments, but he insists that there is a fundamental difference postmodern cultural texts do not just quote other cultures, other historical moments, they randomly cannibalize them to the point where any sense of critical or historical distance ceases to exist – there is only pastiche.

Postmodernism:

Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s, and is probably still continuing. Postmodernism can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanization of the post-Second World War era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism.

The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism. Modernism was an earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the Modernist stance.

Postmodernism shares many of the features of Modernism. Both schools reject the rigid boundaries between high and low art. Postmodernism even goes a. step further and deliberately mixes low art with high art, the past with the future, or one genre with another. Such mixing of different, incongruous elements illustrates Postmodernism’s use of lighthearted parody, which was also used by Modernism. Both these schools also employed pastiche, which is the imitation of another’s style. Parody and pastiche serve to highlight the self-reflexivity of Modernist and Postmodernist works, which means that parody and pastiche serve to remind the reader that the work is not “real” but fictional, constructed. Modernist and Postmodernist works are also fragmented and do not easily, directly convey a solid meaning. That is, these works are consciously ambiguous and give way to multiple interpretations. The individual or subject depicted in these works is often decentred, without a central meaning or goal in life, and dehumanized, often losing individual characteristics and becoming merely the representative of an age or civilization, like Tiresias in The Waste Land.

In short, Modernism and Postmodernism give voice to the insecurities, disorientation and fragmentation of the 20th century western world. The western world, in the 20th century, began to experience this deep sense of security because it progressively lost its colonies in the Third World, worn apart by two major World Wars and found its intellectual and social foundations shaking under the impact of new social theories an developments such as Marxism and Postcolonial global migrations, new technologies and the power shift from Europe to the United States. Though both Modernism and Postmodernism employ fragmentation , discontinuity and decentredness in theme and technique, the basic dissimilarity between the two schools is hidden in this very aspect.

Modernism projects the fragmentation and decentredness of contemporary world as tragic. It laments the loss of the unity and centre of life and suggests that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, continuity and meaning that is lost in modern life. Thus Eliot laments that the modern world is an infertile wasteland, and the fragmentation, incoherence, of this world is effected in the structure of the poem. However, The Waste Land tries to recapture the lost meaning and organic unity by turning to Eastern cultures, and in the use of Tiresias as protagonist

In Postmodernism, fragmentation and disorientation is no longer tragic. Postmodernism on the other hand celebrates fragmentation. It considers fragmentation and decentredness as the only possible way of existence, and does not try to escape from these conditions.

This is where Postmodernism meets Poststructuralism —both Postmodernism and Poststructuralism recognize and accept that it is not possible to have a coherent centre. In Derridean terms, the centre is constantly moving towards the periphery and the periphery constantly moving towards the centre. In other words, the centre, which is the seat of power, is never entirely powerful. It is continually becoming powerless, while the powerless periphery continually tries to acquire power. As a result, it can be argued that there is never a centre, or that there are always multiple centres. This postponement of the centre acquiring power or retaining its position is what Derrida called differance. In Postmodernism’s celebration of fragmentation, there is thus an underlying belief in differance, a belief that unity, meaning, coherence is continually postponed.

The Postmodernist disbelief in coherence and unity points to another basic distinction between Modernism and Postmodernism. Modernism believes that coherence and unity is possible, thus emphasizing the importance of rationality and order. The basic assumption of Modernism seems to be that more rationality leads to more order, which leads a society to function better. To establish the primacy of Order, Modernism constantly creates the concept of Disorder in its depiction of the Other—which includes the non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-adult, non-rational and so on. In other words, to establish the superiority of Order, Modernism creates the impression- that all marginal, peripheral, communities such as the non-white, non-male etc. are contaminated by Disorder. Potmodernism, however, goes to the other extreme. It does not say that some parts of the society illustrate Order, and that other parts illustrate Disorder. Postmodernism, in its criticism of the binary opposition, cynically even suggests that everything is Disorder

Works Cited

https://literariness.org/2016/03/31/postmodernism/

https://literariness.org/2018/03/29/postmodernism-and-popular-culture/