Modernism vs Postmodernism

Modernism:

Modernism is what happened to art and philosophy in the early 20th century.  It was a reaction to technology and science, against the cultural norms that had come before. The Intentional movement in the arts, culture, philosophy, and politics that uses various strategies to subvert what is seen as dominant in modernism or modernity.

Modernist thought had its origins in the Enlightenment period. This era was a celebration of the liberating potentials of the social sciences, the materialistic gains of capitalism, new forms of rational thought, due process safeguards, abstract rights applicable to all, and the individual it was a time of great optimism (Milovanovic, 1992a, 1994a; Dews, 1987; Sarup, 1989; Lyotard, 1984; Baker, 1993). Postmodernists are fundamentally opposed to modernist thought. Sensitized by the insights of some of the classic thinkers, ranging from Marx, to Weber, to Durkheim, Freud, and the critical thought of the Frankfurt School, postmodernist thought emerged with a new intensity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. "Let us wage a war on totality" states one of its key exponents (Lyotard, 1984: 82). Most of the key concepts of modernist thought were critically examined and found to be wanting. In fact, the notion of the individual free, self-determining, reflective, and the center of activity was seen as an ideological construction, nowhere more apparent than in the notion of the juridic subject, the so-called reasonable man in law. Rather than the notion of the individual, the centered subject, the postmodernists were to advocate the notion of the decentered subject.

It's most clear in art, which introduced non-realistic forms of painting like impressionism.  Art draws attention to itself as medium or artifice. Art should not tell stories because that is the job of literature. The camera was doing the job of capturing an image, so painters began to experiment with ways that they could capture subjective senses and express emotion.  That same sensibility translated into other fields: poetry, art, psychology, music, and so on, freed from the structures that had become rigid in the 19th century.

Modernism: order, normality, transcendence, functionalism.

Reason will lead to universal truths all cultures will embrace.

Modernist thought. Great weight is placed on the dominance of the "me," that part of the self that dresses itself up with the persona demanded by the situation, struts upon the stage, and plays its part with various degrees of success to various audiences. A person is relegated to role-taking.

Postmodernism:

Postmodernism is simply "what came after modernism".  It can be thought of as modernism taken to its logical conclusion, from an Old Master's "this is what there is to see" to Picasso's modernist "this is the way I see it" to Jackson Pollock's postmodern "here's a blotch, see whatever the hell you want to see, now get me another drink or go the hell away".  It's the reaction of people reacting to modernism, once it had been around for a few decades to become something to be reacted to.

Postmodernity is associated with an awareness of societal and cultural transitions after World War II and the rise of mass-mediated consumerist popular culture in the 1960s-1970s. In culture and the arts, interpreters of this era describe the kinds of cultural hybrids that emerge from mixing (or rendering inoperative) the categories of "high" and "low" cultures, and hybrids in cultural forms that have developed in regions where local identities seek definition against, or in dialog with, Western "hegemonic" cultures (the mixing of "official" cultures and those defined as "other" in modernist ideologies). Postmodern views of history and national identity typically cancel a commitment to modern "master narratives" or "metanarratives" like progress and goal-directed history, and disrupt myths of national and ethnic identities as "natural" foundations of "unity."

A painting or book or literally anything can be thought of as meaning different things to different people, possibly without limit.  This had a nihilistic effect on culture and art, and that nihilism is what people most commonly associate with "postmodernism" today.  Postmodernity as a phase of knowing and practice, abandoning the assumptions, prejudices, and constraints of modernism to embrace the contradictions, irony, and profusion of pop and mass culture. "High" and "low" culture/art categories made useless and irrelevant, art from outsider and non-Western cultures embraced, consumer society turned inside out. The grand linear narrative of art history and Western cultural history is exposed as ideological and constructed for class interests.

Postmodernism: irony, constant change, orderly disorder, diversity, intertextuality, tolerance for the incommensurable, no permanent stable order is possible or even desirable.

Postmodernist Thought. Although still emerging, and which initially found its basis in its critique of modernism, has found grounding in the insights of chaos theory, Godel's theorem, catastrophe theory, quantum mechanics, emerging cosmological insights, topology theory, and Lacanian thought to name a few. Postmodernists begin their analysis with privileging disorder rather than order. Chaos theory is increasingly becoming a key element in postmodern analysis.

I associate "postmodernism" most closely with its philosophical expressions, trying to puzzle out the nature of "meaning" and discovering that in many ways meaning is more arbitrary than had previously been thought.

Contrary to many modernist critics, postmodernism is not fatalistic, cynical, and nonvisionary; rather, what the new paradigm offers is a more intense critique of what is, and transformative visions of what could be.

My Opinion:

I think I align more with postmodernism because I think orderly disorder and the concept of irony and interpreting something that way you see it, everything has a slightly different meaning to fit that of the individual. I disagree, however, that reason and science are Ideologies in the Marxist sense; myths created by man, as I think this is a slightly absurd viewpoint to obtain. Although I do agree that truth may exist independent of human consciousness but there is no objective means of nailing it down, unlike postmodernism who believe we can find the truth using reason, I don’t think it is that simple, and I like how postmodernism challenges the rigid view of modernism and creates a more abstract view of the world, art, literature etc. The idea that postmodernism is always trying to discover the meaning behind something, is what I feel we do and we critique what exists.