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.
