| |
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
|
An
introduction to postmodern theory by Mary Klages
|
Postmodernism
and the Media, Andreas Saugstad
|
Popculture.org
[lots of theoretical essays on postmodernism]
|
The
Simpsons as a postmodern text
|
Postmodernism
and Science Fiction Films
|
The
journal, Postmodern Culture |
| |
For further reading:
|
| Alemany-Galway, M. (2002). A
postmodern cinema. New York: Rowan & Littlefield.
|
Bignell, J. (2000). Postmodern
media culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
|
Daspit, T., & Weaver, J. (1998).
Popular culture and critical pedagogy: Reading, constructing,
connecting. New York: Garland.
|
Giroux, H. (1997). Counternarratives:
Cultural studies and critical pedagogies in postmodern spaces.
New York: Routledge.
|
Green, B., & Fitzclarence, L.
(1999). Schooling the future: Education, youth and postmodernism.
Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis.
|
Kelly, U. (1997). Schooling desire:
Literacy, cultural politics, and pedagogy. New York: Routledge.
|
Marshall, B. K. (1992). Teaching
the postmodern: Fiction and theory. New York: Routledge.
|
McRobbie, A. (1994). Postmodernism
and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge.
|
Raschke, C. (2002). The digital
revolution and the coming of the postmodern university. New
York: Routledge.
|
|
|
Application: In what ways
does the Secret ad play with alternative versions of “being
successful”? | |
|
