Chapters in British Literature and Culture

Postmodernism

Enlightenment and its antecedents

• Francis Bacon (1561-1626)scientific methodology: empirical methods instead of speculation (induction, applied science, empiricism)

Charles Darwin, 1809-1882

The Origin of Species (1859)man as a part of the biological universe

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900

• Universe is structureless and irrational

• ‘God is dead’

Henri Bergson, 1859-1941

•Time and Free Will

•Consciousness: a flow of memories

Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939

The Unconscious(The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900)

The split self:•Ego•Id•Superego

• modernism (early 20th c.): breaks with artistic traditions and conventions, experimentation

• with time the experiment becomes conventional

• No clear barrier between modernism and post-modernism (cultural history: palimpsest)

Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987.

• Modernism PostmodernismForm (closed) Anti-form (open)Purpose PlayDesign ChanceHierarchy AnarchyFinished Art Object Process/PerformanceDistance ParticipationTotalization DeconstructionDepth SurfaceDeterminacy Indeterminacy

Postmodernism• vague and fashionable term• meaning and value: disputed

no (little) perspective (How to define our own age?)

• poststructuralism and deconstruction”meaning is neither inherent in language, nor in the world of things but is ‘constructed’ by conventional frameworks of thought and language” (Gray, 1992)

• individuality, human character, freedom: constructs of a particular culture and time(vs. universal truths, absolute authenticity relativised)

• Most often reproduced image

Man no longer the centre of the universe – no centre

Pale blue dot

Rhizome

• Structure, sign and play (Jacques Derrida, 1966) ”even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.” Centerless system (Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995)

Postmodern

• Centerless system

• Threats of extinction of humanity (nuclear holocaust, despoiling the environment/planet, overpopulation)breaking up of traditional communities=> sense of despair and disillusionment (vs. 60s)

• result of meaninglessness: play with styles and values

• a sense of disjunction or deliberate confusion, irony, playfulness, reflexivity, a kind of cool detachment

• A postmodern insistence on process rather than product: a “postmodern” cultural artifact is one that consistently questions itself and the context that it seems to fit within.

•Nealon, Jeffrey, and Susan Searls Giroux. The Theory Toolbox. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD THE POSTMODERN CONDITION

(1979)Discourse of science as opposed to narrative discourse

Grand narratives

“incredulity toward metanarrative”

• Postmodernism […] leaves us without direction. The postmodern artwork foregrounds the complexity of our epoch, thereby remaining an elitist diversion for a leisure class of overeducated white folks who “get the joke.”

Nealon, Jeffrey, and Susan Searls Giroux. The Theory Toolbox. Lanham and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012, 145

popularity? entertaining capacity?these may overlap: cf. Opening Ceremony of

London Olympic Games

Fiction and reality

”We are all in flight from the real reality.”

Modernist fiction – epistemological uncertainties: How do we know?

Postmodernist fiction – ontological uncertainties:

Which is the real world?

Historical fiction: Real compared to what?

language: not a passive reflection (imitation) of the world, but active modelling.History (and also nature) is conveyed as it is organized in accordance with cultural conventions.

• postmodern texts

look at themselves as texts (Ø illusion, isolated from author and extratextual reality) often reveal the instability of language meanings are constructionsontological uncertainty: which is the real world?

• freedom of interpretation (limitless?)

• Postmodernism, celebrates the freedom of possibility, but it also seems to make agency or concrete decision impossible.

• How far is it relevant in the 21st century?post-postmodernism? re-evaluation of traditional values and communities (religion, nation)

• Alan Kirby: Digimodernism1990s: decomposing postmodernism (hybrid)

21st c. new cultural paradigmPoMo obsolete (once fresh), creative period over

Return of the grand narrative

• aftershock of 1960s radicalism, intellectual millenarism (all post-s / the past is dead)

• PM: rhetoric of disruption (everything has to be new, break in human experience) heroic age of theory

• Incredulity toward metanarratives (Lyotard)progress, enlightenment, Christianity

• Habermas: modernity continued all through PM as an unfinished project

• now PM (used to be fresh) is obsolete 2000 aftermath of PM’S creative period

• 2000: West forced to reflect on the foundations of its own civilization„seek to make sense of the grand narratives”

Return of modernism?

• http://www.stuckism.com/ 1999• new paradigm: remodernism • manifesto: ”Modernism has progressively lost its

way, until finally toppling into the bottomless pit of Post Modern balderdash”

PM’s failure to answer or address any important issues of being a human being

Hypermodernity / Supermodernity?

• Gilles Lipovetsky Hypermodernity (2004) social and historical: ethos of consumerism (hyperconsumption) modernity speaks of limitless individualism, freedom from social obligations, emancipation from oppressive duties, the pursuit of pleasure and personal autonomy

in HM all these become concrete experiencepremodern structuring principles (family, church) stripped from HM world (?)no rhetoric of ends and posts (not millenarian), not countercultural, not nihilistic (human rights, love, others’ well-being)

• Charles Jencks: critical modernism: dialectic between modernism and its criticism, modernism2

• Linda Hutcheon: values (modernism: trad. values not accepted, lack, pomo: values no longer seeked for)

• F Jameson: PM comes in the 1950s with the institutionalization of modernism – by 2000 PM also has its canon

institutionalized and dead

Computerization of text

• > new form of textuality

• evanescence and anonymous, social and multiple authorship (Wikipedia)triggered by the redefinition of textuality and culture by the spread of digitalization

• reality TV, Web2.0, videogames, radio shows: reader/viewer intervenes

• Barthes „From Work to Text”: ”the text is experienced only in an activity of production”(as music traditionally)

Reading is linear, but: clicking your way around the internet: adjacency without necessarily a logics, rather a history

• Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Cildren (1981)

‘But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next:”At this rate” – Padma complains – ”you’ll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth.”

• pressures of ‘what-happened-nextism’

• ‘Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings.’ (cf. Fowles)

A. Kirby: Digimodernism• prestige of publishing goes down; internet includes

all; greater stratification and hierarchy will be neededvast expansion in the activity of reading, yet ”decline in qualitative reading as they become ever less capable of engaging mentally with complex and sophisticated thought expressed in written form”

• text (sms) exists in the act of creation; lowest form of recorded communication

• Youtube etc: user or author?„viewser” – engagement with TV

• democratic? Democracy presupposes education

• PM: objectivity does not exist, truth is social construct Facebook e-friendship between accounts (well designed, so the e-textualization often invisible) for many: indistinguishable from actual friendship

Digimodernist Culture

• modernism: cinema; PM: tv; DM: videogame

supersubjectivity: you play through your gaming self/selves (self-identification neccessary)  

• digimodernist textuality (live, right-now):dm endlessness _> inconclusiveness