Kamis, 14 Juni 2012

Post Modernism


According to Steven Best and Kellner, although the term ‘postmodern’ had been in cultural circulation since the 1870s, it is only in the late 1950s and 1960s that we see the beginnings of what is now understood as postmodernism. In the work of Susan Sontag (1966) and Leslie Fiedler (1971) we encounter the celebration of what Sontag calls a ‘new sensibility’ (1966: 296). It is in part a sensibility in revolt against the canonization of modernism’s avant-garde revolution; it attacks modernism’s official status, its canonization in the museum and the academy, as the high culture of the modern capitalist world. It laments the passing of the scandalous and bohemian power of modernism, its ability to shock and disgust the middle class. Instead of outraging from the critical margins of bourgeois society, the work of Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Bertolt Brecht, Igor Stravinsky and others, had not only lost the ability to shock and disturb, but also become central, classical: in a word – canonized. Modernist culture has become bourgeois culture. Its subversive power has been drained by the academy and the museum. It is now the canon against which an avant-garde must struggle. As Fredric Jameson (1984) points out,
This is surely one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which ‘weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living’, as Marx [1977] once said in a different context (56). Jameson (1988) argues that postmodernism was born out of;
the shift from an oppositional to a hegemonic position of the classics of modernism, the latter’s conquest of the university, the museum, the art gallery network and the foundations, the assimilation . . . of the various high modernisms, into the ‘canon’ and the subsequent attenuation of everything in them felt by our grandparents to be shocking, scandalous, ugly, dissonant, immoral and antisocial (299).
For the student of popular culture perhaps the most important consequence of the new sensibility, with its abandonment of ‘the Matthew Arnold notion of culture, finding it historically and humanly obsolescent’ (Sontag, 1966: 299), is its claim that ‘the distinction between “high” and “low” culture seems less and less meaningful’ (302). In this sense, it is a sensibility in revolt against what is seen as the cultural elitism of modernism. Modernism, in spite of the fact that it often quoted from popular culture, is marked by a deep suspicion of all things popular. Its entry into the museum and the academy was undoubtedly made easier (regardless of its declared antagonism to ‘bourgeois philistinism’) by its appeal to, and homologous relationship with, the elitism of class society. The postmodernism of the late 1950s and 1960s was therefore in part a populist attack on the elitism of modernism. It signalled a refusal of what Andreas Huyssen (1986) calls ‘the great divide . . . [a] discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture’ (viii). Moreover, according to Huyssen, ‘To a large extent, it is by the distance we have travelled from this “great divide” between mass culture and modernism that we can measure our own cultural post modernity’ (57).
The American and British pop art of the 1950s and 1960s presented a clear rejection of the ‘great divide’. It rejected Arnold’s definition of culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said’ (see Chapter 2), preferring instead Williams’s social definition of culture as ‘a whole way of life’ (see Chapter 3). British pop art dreamed of America (seen as the home of popular culture) from the grey deprivation of 1950s Britain. As Lawrence Alloway, the movement’s first theorist, explains,
The area of contact was mass produced urban culture: movies, advertising, science fiction, pop music. We felt none of the dislike of commercial culture standard among most intellectuals, but accepted it as a fact, discussed it in detail, and consumed it enthusiastically. One result of our discussions was to take Pop culture out of the realm of ‘escapism’, ‘sheer entertainment’, ‘relaxation’, and to treat it with the seriousness of art (quoted in Frith and Horne, 1987: 104).
Andy Warhol was also a key figure in the theorizing of pop art. Like Alloway, he refuses to take seriously the distinction between commercial and non-commercial art. He sees ‘commercial art as real art and real art as commercial art’ (109). He claims that ‘“real” art is defined simply by the taste (and wealth) of the ruling class of the period. This implies not only that commercial art is just as good as “real” art – its value simply being defined by other social groups, other patterns of expenditure’ (ibid.). We can of course object that Warhol’s merging of high and popular is a little misleading. Whatever the source of his ideas and his materials, once located in an art gallery the context locates them as art and thus high culture. John Rockwell argues that this was not the intention or the necessary outcome. Art, he argues, is what you perceive as art: ‘A Brillo box isn’t suddenly art because Warhol puts a stacked bunch of them in a museum. But by putting them there he encourages you to make your every trip to the supermarket an artistic adventure, and in so doing he has exalted your life. Everybody’s an artist if they want to be’ (120).
Huyssen (1986) claims that the full impact of the relationship between pop art and popular culture can only be fully understood when located within the larger cultural context of the American counterculture and the British underground scene: ‘Pop in the broadest sense was the context in which a notion of the postmodern first took shape, and from the beginning until today, the most significant trends within postmodernism have challenged modernism’s relentless hostility to mass culture’ (188). In this way, then, postmodernism can be said to have been at least partly born out of a generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism. The insistence on an absolute distinction between high and popular culture came to be regarded as the ‘un-hip’ assumption of an older generation. One sign of this collapse was the merging of pop art and pop music. For example, Peter Blake designed The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album; Richard Hamilton designed their ‘white album’; Andy Warhol designed the Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers. Similarly, we could cite the new seriousness emerging in pop music itself, most evident in the work of performers such as Bob Dylan and The Beatles; there is a new seriousness in their work and their work is taken seriously in a way unknown before in considerations of pop music.
Huyssen also detects a clear relationship between the American postmodernism of the 1960s and certain aspects of an earlier European avant-garde; seeing the American counterculture – its opposition to the war in Vietnam, its support for black civil rights, its rejection of the elitism of high modernism, its birthing of the second wave of feminism, the welcome it gave to the gay liberation movement, its cultural experimentalism, its alternative theatre, its happenings, its love-ins, its celebration of the everyday, its psychedelic art, its acid rock, its ‘acid perspectivism’ (Hebdige, 2009) – ‘as the closing chapter in the tradition of avantgardism’ (Huyssen, 1986: 195).
By the late 1970s the debate about postmodernism crossed the Atlantic. The next three sections will consider the responses of two French cultural theorists to the debate on the ‘new sensibility’, before returning to America and Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism as the cultural dominant of late capitalism.


A.    Jean Francois Lyotard
As one of the post-modern figure, Lyotard is known through his books “The The Postmodern Condition”, published in France in 1979 and translated into English in 1984. This book is Lyotard’s principal contribution to the debate on post-modernism which has the enormous influence to the debate. In many respects it was this book which introduced the term post-modernism into general circulation.
For Lyotard, the condition of post-modern is marked by a crisis in the status of knowledge in Western societies. This is expressed as “incredulity towards metanarratives”. In this context, metanarratives are grand stories in the tradition that are followed and used as a tool to measure an action and legitimized. Post-modernism as the age in which metanarratives have become bankrupt because postmodern people do not believe in metanarratives. They feel that there are no grand stories which give meaning to all of life and which define what is true.
Lyotard’s particular focus is the function of narrative within scientific discourse and knowledge. Science is important for Lyotard which has the task to play a central role in the gradual emancipation of humankid. However, Lyotard claims that since the Second War the legitimating force of science’s status as metanarrative has waned considerably. According to Lyotard knowledge in postmodernity has largely lost its truth-value, or rather, the production of knowledge is no longer an aspiration to produce truth. Science is no longer seen to be slowly making progress on behalf of humankid towards absolute knowledge and absolute freedom. Its goal is no longer truth but performativity. Similarly, higher education is called upon to create skills and no longer ideas. Knowledge is no longer seen as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. Like science, education will be judged by its performativity.

B.     Jean Baudrillard
            Jean Baudrillard (Reims, 20 Juni 1929Paris, 6 Maret 2007) is an expert cultural theory, pholosopher, politic cometator, and photograper from France. He is also a sociologist identifies early modernity as the period between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, modernity as the period at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and postmodernity as the period of mass media (cinema and photography). He said that nowadays the economic and social development cannot be separated from the realms of ideology or culture, since cultural artefacts, images, representations, even feelings and psychic structures, its become the part of world economic. It’s meant that nowadays a human more systematic. In consumerism society, object consumtion not any longer commodity that just has a usage and price, but more than that. nowdays its indicate status, prestice, honor and lift the self confident. For he example  a Marcedes saw because of not only the benefit as a transportation or its high price, but also as a symbol a life style, prestice, luxurious and social statuse the owner.
For Baudrillard, postmodernism is not simply a culture of the sign: rather it is a culture of the ‘simulacrum’ (identical copy without an original). Cannot be identified which one is original or real and which one is copy. the distinction between original and copy has itself now been destroyed, he calls this process ‘simulation’. for the example it would make no sense for someone having seen Mission Impossible 4 Ghost Protocol in Newcastle to be told by someone having seen the film in Tokyo or Berlin that he had seen the original and she had not.
Baudrillard (1983) calls simulation ‘the generation by models of a real without origins or reality: a hyperreal. Hyperrealism, he claims, is the characteristic mode of postmodernity. In Hyperealism someone regard something unreal is more than something real, world imitation is more real than the truth world. Baudrillard’s own example of hyperrealism is Disneyland: he calls it ‘a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. He claims that the success of Disneyland is not due to its ability to allow Americans a fantasy escape fromreality, but because it allows them an unacknowledged concentrated experience of‘real’ America.

C.    Frederic Jameson
Fredric Jameson is an American Marxist cultural critic who has written a number of very influential essays on postmodernism. Where Jameson differs from other theorists is in his insistence that postmodernism can best be theorized from within a Marxist or neo-Marxist framework.
For Jameson, postmodernism is more than just a particular cultural style: it is above all a ‘periodizing concept’ (1985: 113). Postmodernism is ‘the cultural dominant’ of late or multinational capitalism. His argument is informed by Ernest Mandel’s (1978) characterization of capitalism’s three-stage development: ‘market capitalism’, ‘monopoly capitalism’ and ‘late or multinational capitalism’. Capitalism’s third stage ‘constitutes . . . the purest form of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas’ (Jameson, 1984: 78). He overlays Mandel’s linear model with a tripartite schema of cultural development: ‘realism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ (ibid.). Jameson’s argument also borrows from Williams’s (1980) influential claim that a given social formation will always consist of three cultural moments (‘dominant’, ‘emergent’ and ‘residual’). Williams’s argument is that the move from one historical period to another does not usually involve the complete collapse of one cultural mode and the installation of another. Historical change may simply bring about a shift in the relative place of different cultural modes. In a given social formation, therefore, different cultural modes will exist but only one will be dominant. It is on the basis of this claim that Jameson argues that postmodernism is ‘the cultural dominant’ of late or multinational capitalism (modernism is the residual; it is unclear what is the emergent).
Having established that postmodernism is the cultural dominant within Western capitalist societies; the next stage for Jameson is to outline the constitutive features of postmodernism. First, postmodernism is said to be a culture of pastiche: a culture, that is, marked by the ‘complacent play of historical allusion’ (Jameson, 1988: 105). Pastiche is often confused with parody; both involve imitation and mimicry. However, whereas parody has an ‘ulterior motive’, to mock a divergence from convention or a norm, pastiche is a ‘blank parody’ or ‘empty copy’, which has no sense of the very possibility of there being a norm or a convention from which to diverge. As he explains,
Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody (1984: 65). Rather than a culture of supposed pristine creativity, postmodern culture is a culture of quotations; that is, cultural production born out of previous cultural production.
It is therefore a culture ‘of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense’ .A culture of images and surfaces, without ‘latent’ possibilities, it derives its hermeneutic force from other images, other surfaces, the exhausted interplay of intertextuality. This is the world of postmodern pastiche, ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum’ (1985: 115). Jameson’s principal example of postmodern pastiche is what he calls the ‘nostalgia film’. The category could include a number of films from the 1980s and 1990s: Back to the Future I and II, Peggy Sue Got Married, Rumble Fish, Angel Heart, Blue Velvet. He argues that the nostalgia film sets out to recapture the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of America in the 1950s. He claims that ‘for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire – not merely the stability and prosperity of a pax Americana, but also the first naive innocence of the countercultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs’ (1984: 67). He also insists that the nostalgia film is not just another name for the historical film. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that his own list includes Star Wars. Now it might seem strange to suggest that a film about the future can be nostalgic for the past, but as Jameson (1985) explains, ‘[Star Wars] is metonymically a . . . nostalgia film . . . it does not reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality; rather, by reinventing the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period’.
Films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Mummy Returns and Lord of the Rings operate in a similar way to evoke metonymically a sense of the narrative certainties of the past. Therefore, according to Jameson, the nostalgia film works in one or two ways: it recaptures and represents the atmosphere and stylistic features of the past; and it recaptures and represents certain styles of viewing of the past. What is of absolute significance for Jameson is that such films do not attempt to recapture or represent the ‘real’ past, but always make do with certain myths and stereotypes about the past. They offer what he calls ‘false realism’, films about other films, representations of other representations (what Baudrillard calls simulations: see discussion in the previous section): films ‘in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces “real” history’ (1984: 67). In this way, history is supposedly effaced by ‘historicism . . . the random cannibalisation of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion’ (65–6). Here we might cite films like True Romance, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill.
According to Jameson, when compared to ‘the Utopian “high seriousness” of the great modernisms’, postmodern culture is marked by an ‘essential triviality’ (85). More than this, it is a culture that blocks ‘a socialist transformation of society’ (ibid.). Despite his rejection of a moral critique as inappropriate (‘a category mistake’), and regardless of his citing of Marx’s insistence on a dialectical approach, which would see postmodern culture as both a positive and a negative development, his argument drifts inexorably to the standard Frankfurt School critique of popular culture. The postmodern collapse of the distinction between high and popular has been gained at the cost of modernism’s ‘critical space’. The destruction of this critical space is not the result of an extinction of culture.

D.    Postmodern pop music
A discussion of postmodernism and popular culture might highlight any number of different cultural texts and practices: for example, television, music video, advertising, film, pop music, fashion. I have space here to consider only one examples, pop music.
For Jameson (1984) the difference between modernist and postmodernist pop music is quite clear: The Beatles and The Rolling Stones represent a modernist moment against which punk rock (The Clash, for example) and new wave (Talking Heads, for example) can be seen as postmodernist. Andrew Goodwin (1991) has quite correctly pointed out that Jameson’s compressed time-span solution – pop music culture’s rapid progression through ‘realism’ (rock’n’roll), ‘modernism’, ‘postmodernism’ – enabling Jameson to establish a modernist moment against which to mark out a postmodernist response, is a very difficult argument to sustain. As Goodwin convincingly argues, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are as different from each other as together they are different from The Clash and Talking Heads.
 In fact, it would be much easier to make an argument in which the distinction is made between the ‘artifice’ of The Beatles and Talking Heads and the ‘authenticity’ of The Rolling Stones and The Clash. Goodwin himself considers a number of ways of seeing pop music and pop music culture as postmodernist. Perhaps its most cited aspect is the technological developments that have facilitated the emergence of ‘sampling’. He acknowledges that the parallel with some postmodern theorizing is interesting and suggestive, but that is all it is  interesting and suggestive. What is often missed in such claims is the way in which sampling is used. As he explains, ‘textual incorporation cannot be adequately understoodas “blank parody”. We need categories to add to pastiche, which demonstrate how contemporary pop opposes, celebrates and promotes the texts it steals from’ (173). We also need to be aware of ‘the historicizing function of sampling technologies in contemporary pop’ (ibid.), the many ways in which sampling is ‘used toinvoke history and authenticity’ (175). Moreover, in regard to Jameson’s argument about nostalgia replacing history, ‘it has often been overlooked that the “quoting” of sounds and styles acts to historicize contemporary culture’ (ibid.). Rap is perhaps thebest example of sampling being used in this way. When asked to name the black means of cultural expression, the African American cultural theorist Cornel West (2009),answered, ‘music and preaching’.
 He went on to say, rap is unique because it combines the black preacher and the black music tradition, replacing the liturgical ecclesiastical setting with the African polyrhythms of the street.
 A tremendous articulateness is syncopated with the African drumbeat, the African funk, into an American postmodernist product: there is no subject expressing originary anguish here but a fragmented subject, pulling from past and present, innovatively producing a heterogeneous product. The stylistic combination of the oral, the literate, and the musical is exemplary . . . it is part and parcel of the subversive energies of black underclass youth, energies that are forced to take a cultural mode of articulation because of the political lethargy of American society(386).
This is a rejection of Jameson’s claim that such work can be dismissed as an example of postmodern pastiche. The intertextual play of quotations in rap is not the
result of aesthetic exhaustion; these are not the fragments of modernism shored against aesthetic ruin and cultural decline, but fragments combined to make a voice to be heard loudly within a hostile culture: the twisting of dismissal and denial into defiance.

E.     Postmodern television
Television, like pop music, does not have a period of modernism to which it can be ‘post’. But, as Jim Collins (1992) points out, television is often seen as the ‘quintessence’ of postmodern culture. This claim can be made on the basis of a number of television’s textual and contextual features. If we take a negative view of postmodernism, as the domain of simulations, then television seems an obvious example of the process – with its supposed reduction of the complexities of the world to an ever changing flow of depthless and banal visual imagery. If, on the other hand, we take apositive view of postmodernism, then the visual and verbal practices of television can be put forward, say, as the knowing play of intertextuality and ‘radical eclecticism’ (Charles Jenks in Collins, 1992: 338), encouraging, and helping to produce, the ‘sophisticated bricoleur’ (Collins, 1992: 337) of postmodern culture. For example, a television series like Twin Peaks both helps to constitute an audience as bricoleurs and is watched in turn by an audience who celebrate the programme’s bricolage. According to Collins,
Postmodernist eclecticism might only occasionally be a preconceived design choice in individual programs, but it is built into the technologies of media sophisticated societies. Thus television, like the postmodern subject, must be conceived as a site – an intersection of multiple, conflicting cultural messages. Only by recognising this interdependency of bricolage and eclecticism can we come to appreciate the profound changes in the relationship of reception and production in postmodern cultures. Not only has reception become another form of meaning production, but production has increasingly become a form of reception as it rearticulates antecedent and competing forms of representation.

F.     The global postmodern
One way in which the world is said to be becoming postmodern is in its increasing globalization. Perhaps the dominant view of globalization, especially in discussions of globalization and culture, is to see it as the reduction of the world to an American ‘global village’: a global village in which everyone speaks English with an American accent, wears Levi jeans and Wrangler shirts, drinks Coca-Cola, eats at McDonald’s, surfs the net on a computer overflowing with Microsoft software, listens to rock or country music, watches a mixture of MTV and CNN, Hollywood movies and reruns of Dallas, and then discusses the prophetically named World Series, while drinking a bottle of Budweiser and smoking a Marlboro cigarette. According to this scenario, globalization is the supposed successful imposition of American culture around the globe, in which the economic success of American capitalism is underpinned by the cultural work that its commodities supposedly do in effectively destroying indigenous cultures and imposing an American way of life on ‘local’ populations.
The first problem with globalization as cultural Americanization is that it operates with a very reductive concept of culture: it assumes that ‘economic’ success is the same as ‘cultural’ imposition. In other words, the recognition of the obvious success of American companies in placing products in most of the markets of the world is understood as self-evidently and unproblematically ‘cultural’ success. For example, American sociologist Herbert Schiller (1979) claims that the ability of American companies to successfully unload commodities around the globe is producing an American global the Coca-Colonization of China. The role of media corporations, he claims, is to make programs which ‘provide in their imagery and messagery, the beliefs and perspectives that create and reinforce their audiences’ attachments to the way things are in the system overall’. There are two overlapping problems with this position. First, it is simply assumed that commodities are the same as culture: establish the presence of the former and you can predict the details of the latter. But as John Tomlinson (1999) points out, ‘if we assume that the sheer global presence of these goods is in itself token of a convergence towards a capitalist monoculture, we are probably utilising a rather impoverished concept of culture one that reduces culture to its material goods’ (83). It may be the case that certain commodities are used, made meaningful and valued in ways which promote American capitalism as a way of life, but this is not something which can be established by simply assuming that market penetration is the same as cultural or ideological penetration. Another problem with this position is that it is an argument that depends on the claim that commodities have inherent values and singular meanings, which can be imposed on passive consumers. In other words, the argument operates with a very discredited account of the flow of influence. It simply assumes that the dominant globalizing culture will be successfully injected into the weaker ‘local’ culture. That is, it is assumed that people are the passive consumers of the cultural meanings that supposedly flow directly and straightforwardly from the commodities they consume.
A second problem with globalization as cultural Americanization is that it operates with a limited concept of the ‘foreign’. First of all, it works with the assumption that what is foreign is always a question of national difference. But what is foreign can equally be a question of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, generation, or any other marker of social difference Moreover, what is foreign in terms of being imported from another country may be less foreign than differences already established by, say, class or generation. Furthermore, the imported foreign may be used against the prevailing power relations of the ‘local’ this is probably what is happening with the export of hip hop. Another problem with this very limited notion of the foreign is that it is always assumed that the ‘local’ is the same as the national. But within the national, there may well be many ‘locals’. Moreover, there may be considerable conflict between them, and between them and the dominant culture (i.e. ‘the national’). Globalization can therefore both help confirm and help undo local cultures; it can keep one in place and it can make one suddenly feel out of place. For example, in 1946, addressing a conference of Spanish clerics, the Archbishop of Toledo wondered ‘how to tackle’ what he called ‘woman’s growing demoralization caused largely by American customs introduced by the cinematograph, making the young woman independent, breaking up the family, disabling and discrediting the future consort and mother with exotic practices that make her less womanly and destabilize the home’ (quoted in Tomlinson, 1997: 123).
A third problem with the model of globalization as cultural Americanization is that it assumes that American culture is monolithic. Even in the more guarded accounts of globalization it is assumed that we can identify something singular called American culture. George Ritzer (1999), for example, makes the claim that ‘while we will continue to see global diversity, many, most, perhaps eventually all of those cultures will be affected by American exports: America will become virtually everyone’s “second culture.