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 1929–Paris, 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.
