Postmodern Theory

Postmodern theory challenges the modernist’s beliefs or “master narratives” associated with “progress,” “truth,” “human improvement,” “high art,” “science,” “technology” — the assumption that these “narratives” will lead humans to a greater sense of happiness and fulfillment. Postmodern perspectives are evident in much of contemporary art, film, architecture, fiction, and music, that challenges and even parodies traditional forms. For example, the Wiseman Art Museum uses alternative designs to spoof traditional forms of box-like buildings.
A leading theorist of postmodernism is Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard posits that we are living in a word of “hyperreality” constructed largely of surface media images that challenges and undermines modernist notions of reality and truth. Douglas Kellner summarizes his thinking.
Baudrillard’s analyses point to a significant reversal of the relation between representation and reality. Previously, the media were believed to mirror, reflect, or represent reality, whereas now the media are coming to constitute a (hyper)reality, a new media reality — “more real than real” — where “the real” is subordinate to representation leading to an ultimate dissolving of the real. In addition, in “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media,” Baudrillard claims that the proliferation of signs and information in the media obliterates meaning through neutralizing and dissolving all content — a process which leads both to a collapse of meaning and the destruction of distinctions between media and reality. In a society supposedly saturated with media messages, information and meaning “implode,” collapsing into meaningless “noise,” pure effect without content or meaning. Thus, for Baudrillard: “information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or neutralizes it. The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving and dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media .... Information devours its own contents; it devours communication and the social .... information dissolves meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy” (SSM, pp. 96-100).
Baudrillard cites the example of Disney World as an artificial construction of reality:
At Disney World in Orlando, they are even building an identical replica of the Los Angeles Disneyland, as a sort of historical attraction to the second degree, a simulacrum to the second power. It is the same thing that CNN did with the Gulf War: a prototypical event which did not take place, because it took place in real time, in CNN’s instantaneous mode. Today, Disney could easily revisit the Gulf War as a worldwide show. The Red Army choirs have already celebrated Christmas at Euro Disney. Everything is possible, and everything is recyclable in the polymorphous universe of virtuality. Everything can be bought over. There is no reason why Disney would not take over the human genome, which, by the way, is already being resequenced, to turn it into a genetic show. In the end [au fond], they would cryogenize the entire planet, just like Walt Disney himself who decided to be cryogenized in a nitrogen solution, waiting for some kind of resurrection in the real world. But there is no real world anymore, not even for Walt Disney. If one day he wakes up, he'll no doubt have the biggest surprise of his life. Meanwhile, from the bottom of his nitrogen solution he continues to colonize the world — both the imaginary and the real — in the spectral universe of virtual reality, inside which we all have become extras [figurants]. The difference is that when we put on our digital suits, plug in our sensorial captors, or press the keys of our virtual reality arcade, we enter live spectrality whereas Disney, the genial anticipator, has entered the virtual reality of death.
The New World Order is in a Disney mode. But Disney is not alone in this mode of cannibalistic attraction. We saw Benetton with his commercial campaigns, trying to recuperate the human drama of the news (AIDS, Bosnia, poverty, apartheid) by transfusing reality into a New Mediatic Figuration (a place where suffering and commiseration end in a mode of interactive resonance). The virtual takes over the real as it appears, and then replicates it without any modification [le recrache tel quel], in a pret-a-porter (ready-to-wear) fashion.
If this operation can be so successful in creating a universal fascination with only a tint of moral disapproval, it is because reality itself, the world itself, with its frenzy of cloning has already been transformed into an interactive performance, some kind of Lunapark for ideologies, technologies, works, knowledge, death, and even destruction. All this is likely to be cloned and resurrected in a juvenile museum of Imagination or a virtual museum of Information.
Click here for more material on Baudrillard.
Michael Real (1996) outlines some of the basic qualities of postmodernism:
Pastiche — combining together different styles and content from different periods within the same text, creating unusual combinations of borrowed styles from different eras. Music videos use a montage of images n from classic films, advertising, television, or rap, and filmed with unusual, non-traditional techniques.
breakdowns of master narratives featuring the final triumph of good over evil through science or human problem-solving, as well as a clear distinction between reality and fiction. This is evident in much of contemporary fiction by DeLillo, Carver, and Atwood, as well as films: Blue Velvet, Pulp Fiction, Mulholland Drive, Run Lola Run, and Memento, and the television series, Twin Peaks. The texts continually elude definitive interpretation of “true meanings,” by parodying and playing with alternative narrative development and assumptions about the meaning of images. The seemingly tranquil town in Blue Velvet is anything but tranquil. Pulp Fiction plays with three different versions of a crime story as borrowed from detective novels and B-crime films. Mulholland Drive, Run Lola Run, and Memento create alternative narratives around the same events, challenging audience assumptions about “what really happened.” Mulholland Drive portrays one version of events based on the traditional story of the innocent female who arrives in Hollywood to become a successful movie star, only to juxtapose that story against a darker version of the same events. Run Lola Run portrays three different versions of the same event. And Memento shows events occurring in reverse, dealing with issues of memory and time. Challenging traditional narratives or ways of knowing conveys the important role of the media in shaping perceptions of reality — that experience as mediated through media images and discourses.
the ways in communication technology creates mass reproduction of texts, creating copies for which there is no original, what Baudrillard (1983) described as a “hyperreality” based on simulation of reality. Much of contemporary art plays with the idea of endless copies or parodying of texts that only create a simulation of reality that focuses on the image or surface of reality. The sculpture, Jeff Koons, creates glossy statues of pop stars such as Michael Jackson, that parody the constant reproduction of pop star images.
the domination of conspicuous consumerism in which everything is commodified or commercialized; to some degree, postmodernism both celebrates and parodies consumer products, as evident in Target ads portraying multiple images of consumer products.
the fragmentation of sensibility and the plurality or multiplicity of perspectives evident in the often random juxtaposition of images in music videos or contemporary art. Films such as Pulp Fiction parodies different versions of reality by using a lot of references to images from previous films, including the image of John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever. This fragmentation and focus on surface images creates self-reflexivity — the need to reflect on the lack of coherent meaning, as well as an ironic humor.
The Po-Mo Page: discussion of different aspects of postmodern theory
Introduction guide to postmodern theory [Dino Felluga]
The Postmodern Turn: Paradigm Shifts in Theory, Culture, and Science
Postmodernism and the Media, Andreas Saugstad
The Simpsons as a postmodern text
Postmodernism and Science Fiction Films
The journal, Postmodern Culture