POSTMODERNISM

LYOTARD: ANSWERING THE QUESTION: WHAT IS POSTMORDEN

 WHAT IS DEFINITION

Is this an art?
If yes
What makes it an art?
If not
Why it not?

Marcel Duchamp Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1966

The Urinal Tate Gallery, London
 SHIFT IN THOUGHT
VICTORIAN MODERN POSTMODERN
•bourgeois Self reflexivity Intertexuality
Parody and pastich
domesticity, Search for
psychological and Fragmentation
•duty, subjective truth Loss of metanarratives
•work, Experimentation in art Hyperreality
Paranoia
•decorum, In representation
Late capitalism
•referentiality, Breakdown in Nothing is absolute
convention
•utilitarianism, Truth= error
Fragmentation Authority is illusion
•industry, Ambiguity Original cannot be
•realism Parody achieved
Morality is personal
 CHARACTERISTICS
1) postmodernism as a reaction to the aesthetic "modernism" of the first half
of the twentieth century in architecture, art, and literature; and

2) postmodernism as a reaction to the long-standing "modernity" tradition of

the Enlightenment from the eighteenth century.
Knowable self knowledge through reason mode of knowledge is
science science produces truth this truth helps in progress reason is
ultimate judge constant truth, good and right only science is the valid tool
for knowledge language must be transparent
 CHARACTERISTICS
• Lack a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle,
• embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and
interconnectedness or interreferentiality.
• a rejection of grand narratives;
• a rejection of absolute and universal truth;
• non-existence of signified;
• disorientation;
• a use of parody;
• simulation without the original;
• late capitalism;
• globalization
 CHARACTERISTICS
• Postmodernism is inclined to stay with meaninglessness, playing with
nonsense
• Celebrates tragic and fragmentation
• Extreme self reflexivity
• Parody and pastiche
• Breakdown between high and low art form
• Juxtaposition of retro and modern
• Visuality and simulacrum
• disorientation
 DECONSTRUCTION
• The postmodern philosophy
• truth itself is always relative to the differing standpoints and predisposing
intellectual frameworks of the judging subject.
• Language is play of signifiers so there cannot be any final meaning or
definition
• the relationship of language to reality is not given, or even reliable, since all
language systems are inherently unreliable cultural constructs.
• It is an illusion that the meaning of a word has its origin in the structure of
reality itself and hence makes the truth about that structure directly present
to the mind
 POSTMODERNISM AGAINST
MODERNISM
• Postmodernity is, as is expressed especially by Lyotard, the critique of grand
narratives, the awareness that such narratives in favor of "order" serve to mask the
contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or
practice even including Marxist society.
• There are only signifiers. Signifieds do not exist.
• This means that there are only copies, i.e., what Baudrillard calls "simulacra," and
that there are no originals.
• Knowledge is not good for its own sake. Its functionality or utility is more important.
• Knowledge is also distributed, stored, and arranged differently thought the
emergence of computer technology, without which it ceases to be knowledge. The
important thing about knowledge is not to assess it as truth (its technical quality), as
goodness or justice (its ethical quality), or as beauty (its aesthetic quality), but rather
to see who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided.
In other words, says Lyotard, knowledge follows the paradigm of a language game.
 LYOTARD
• A part of the modern
• A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus
understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is
constant.
• If it is true that modernity takes place in the withdrawal of the real and according to
the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable, it is possible,
within this relation, to distinguish two modes (modern and PoMo)
• Powerlessness of presentation
• Nostalgia for the presence (unified subject)
• Obscure and futile will
• jubilation
• which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be it pictorial, artistic, or
any other
 HIS LIFE
• Born 1924- died 1998
• French philosopher- studied Literature and philosophy- university of Paris-
friends with Gilles Deleuze
• interest in philosophy of indifference- reality and social structure
• Early interest in marxism and socialism
• First book- On Phenomenology 1954
• The study of structure as consciousness experienced from the first person
point of view.
 THE POSTMODERN CONDITION
• we now live in an era in which legitimizing ‘master narratives’ are in crisis and
in decline.
• Kantianism
• Hegelianism
• Marxism
• Christianity
• Constitution (by founding fathers with some founding principles)
• Knowledge doesn’t have unity and it can’t liberate us.
• I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives’. These
metanarratives traditionally serve to give cultural practices some form of
legitimation or authority
• Analyses the notion of knowledge in postmodern society- the end of grand
narratives, a necessary feature of modernity
• A persistent opposition to universal, metanarrative and generality
• Originally written as a report on the influence of technology in science
 METANARRATIVE
• the basic attitude of postmodernists was a scepticism about the claims of
any kind of overall, totalizing explanation.
• by doing so they could side with those who didn’t ‘fit’ into the larger stories –
the subordinated and the marginalized
• even the arguments of scientists and historians are to be seen as no more
than quasi narratives. They are another form of fiction.
• Metanarratives attempt to keep some social groups in power, and others out
of it. E.g. orientalism and the narrative of Flaubert and Kuchuk Hanem
• a typical postmodernist conclusion, that universal truth is impossible, and
relativism is our fate.
 LYOTARD’S THEORY OF
METANARRATIVES
• Concept given by Lyotard
• Any general theory
• Attempts to provide an explanation for a range of things- universal,
objective- intended to apply to everyone
• Modernism- a metanarrative based on the idea of progress through reason,
science and technology.
• Should be viewed with suspicion- the diversity of human experience
• To be replaced with micro-narratives
 CONTINUED
• All cultures-legitimacy- telling and retelling of the narratives- purpose and
meaning
• European enlightenment- the age of reason- West vs. rest- metanarrative of
the present- meaning
• The Heroic West- Freedom (democracy)- reason (science)- Marxism and
Christianity
• Faith and trust in metanarratives- dominant story- true- others are outsiders,
illegitimate, deviant, and threat
• After WW II- horrors, genocide, totalitarian rule, fascism, holocaust
• Counterculture attack- 50s beat generations, 60s civil rights movement
 THUS
• A reaction against the failings of the modernism- moral, philosophical.
Scientific
• Not a result but cause of other change
• A playful engagement with many conflicting micronarratives
• Not a neat process
• The attempt to construct grand narratives dismiss the naturally existing chaos
and disorder of the universe, the power of individual event
• MN are created and reinforced by power structures so untrustworthy
 CONCLUSION
• Knowledge is now commodity not an end
• In order to be valuable, learning must be able to be reformatted into these
packets of information in computer language, so that they can be sent
through that channel of communication
• Legitimization: The definition of knowledge is determined by intertwining
forces of power, authority, and government. So the genres of history and
science were questioned
• Language games put us in constantly changing positions and roles based on
the type of discourse
• society is a machine, and knowledge is a wheel in the system that keeps it
running.