MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

What is the relationship between modernism and postmodernism? Is the distinction between them valid?

The concepts of modernism and postmodernism refer to cultural experience, artistic style or aesthetic forms, and philosophical position. Both terms are used in a variety of context to describe movements in the arts, economic and social conditions, and scholarship. Modernism is a tendency based on the idea that the traditional form of art, literature, social organisation, and daily life had become outdated. Since the traditional forms were believed to be static, monotonous, and believed that they would not improve society and human condition, therefore they needed to be changed or even to be got rid of. For many historians and scholars postmodernism is a movement of ideas arising from, but also critical elements of modernism. This essay will discuss the relationship between modernism and postmodernism. It also will explore the validity of the distinction between them and will be explain in turn in this essay.

Modernism and postmodernism are cultural and epistemological concepts. The relationship between modernism and postmodernism is the concepts of the two concern cultural formations and cultural experience. For example modernism as the cultural experience of modernity and postmodernism as the cultural experience and formation of postmodernity. Both concepts also concern artistic and architectural styles and movements. For instance modernism as a style of architecture (Le Corbusier) or writing (Kafka, Brecht) and postmodernism in film (Blade Runner, Kill Bill, The Matrix 1,2,3), photography (Cindy Sherman) or the novel (E.L. Doctorow, Salman Rusdhie). Finally the concepts of modernism and postmodernism concern a philosophical position that asserts the character of knowledge and truth. Modernism is associated with the enlightenment philosophy of Rousseau, Marx, Weber, and others, whereas postmodernism in philosophy has been associated with thinkers such as Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault, and others.

It was the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Europe that set the ground-work for artistic modernism. “The Enlightenment philosophers believe that through the application of reason they could create a new society unrivalled in its fairness and equality. Progress promised a more just society, liberated from the tyrannies of the past: monarchy, religion, superstition, fixed social hierarchy.” (Murphy & Potts, 2003 : 41). In other words the enlightenment philosophers believe that reason and rationality form the basis for human progress. Reason is the source of progress in knowledge and society that will improve human condition. According to Marx (1995 : 20 in Murphy & Potts 2003 : 41) “the Enlightenment idea of progress was absorbed into the new inflection of technological progress, whose aim was “the continuing improvement of technology’ itself.” It means that better technology would produce a better world.

The central cultural experience of modernism marked not only by change, innovation and dynamism, but also ambiguity, doubt, risk, uncertainty, and fragmentation. These characteristics underpinned by the social and cultural processes of individualisation, urbanisation, rationalisation, commodification, and bureaucratisation. It happened as the result of industrialism, capitalism, surveillance (control of information and social supervision), and military power (control of the means of violence through the industrialisation of war). As industry, technology and communications systems have transformed the human world at a breathless pace, which celebrate technological speed, dynamism, and innovation, so they have also dissolved the beliefs of tradition. Thus cultural modernism is an experience in which, to paraphrase Marx, ‘All that is solid melts into air’, which suggests change, uncertainty and risk. Here, for example, is Berman’s (1982 : 15) description:To be modern is to find ourselves in environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology; in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity; it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’

Many artists at that period of time have responded enthusiastically to these technological and social transformations. The avant-garde movements such The Futurists, The Constructivists, The Dadaists, The Surrealists, and others were group of modernists who represented and emphasised the notion of technological speed, dynamism, innovation, newness, and contemptuous of tradition in their piece of arts. Modernism reject the idea that it is possible to adequately represent the ‘real’ so that representation is not an act of mimesis or copying but an aesthetic expression or conventionalised construction of the ‘real’. It means that modernism emphasised the creativity of individualism, originality and uniqueness of every piece of arts. These are the representation of the ‘real’.

As Jameson puts it

The great modernisms were predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body…the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style. (Foster 1983 : 112).

In contrast postmodernism asserts that originality is no longer possible. All possible styles have been done. Art now consists of creative arrangement of diverse style. As a cultural style postmodernism marked by what according to Jameson one of the most significant features in postmodernism is pastiche. Jameson in Foster (1983 : 115) defines:Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor: pastiche is to parody what that curious thing, the modern practice of a kind of blank irony.In this sense pastiche is the act of copying a piece of style from somewhere else then mix it with other different styles to recreate and reuse the original one. Pastiche is found in both literary and non-literary works include art and music. Many DJs and musicians often engage in the practice of pastiche. Adagio For Strings by DJ Tiesto for instance is a pastiche of American composer Samuel Barber. The films of Quentin Tarantino are often described as pastiches, as they often imitate pulp novels, blaxploitation (the films were made to attract the urban African American audience) e.g. Pulp Fiction and Chinese Kung Fu films e.g. Kill Bill.

Postmodern culture is also marked by an indication of hyperrealism. Baudrillard (1984 : 2) defines hyperreality as following: “Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” In other words the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Our consciousness has lost its ability to distinguish reality from fantasy. We begin to engage with fantacy without understanding what it is doing.What we think as the real world has shifted into the world of the hyperreal. Hyperreality is best illustrated in The Trilogy of Matrix.

Wag The Dog is another example of how the mass media creates hyperreality by showing that the idea of war as a creation of the media.

As Baudrillard (1984 : 3) puts itThe real is produced from miniaturised units, from matrices, memory banks and command models – and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.The development of technology has given the world a massive progression of machines, gadgets, and/or any computer based-technology that we would have never thought decades ago. Such massive development of technology has allowed the world to create another world that seems exist only in a fantasy world. The ‘real’, the originality is no longer real. Reality has been swept aside by simulation, artificial, imitation, that is to say hyperreality.

As a philosophical movement, postmodernism rejects ‘grand-narrative’ (that is, universal explanations of human history and activity) in favour of irony and forms of local knowledge. As Lyotard (1984 : xxiv) puts it “I define post-modern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” Postmodernism rejects the Enlightenment philosophy of universal reason and progress. In postmodernism concept knowledge is not a question of discovering that which already exists, rather it involves the construction of interpretation about the world that are taken to be true. The truth is the consequence of power, that is, of whose interpretations count as truth. Therefore the postmodern condition is said to involve a loss of faith in grand narrative or metanarrative.

In conclusion, it appears that the relationship between modernism and postmodernism is the concepts of the two concern cultural experience, artistic style and a philosophical position that emphasises knowledge and the truth. Modernism as a cultural experience marked by change, innovation and dynamism, ambiguity, doubt, risk, uncertainty, and fragmentation. These characteristics occurred as a result of industrialism, capitalism, surveillance, and military power. Postmodernism as a cultural experience marked by one of the most significant practices in postmodern era, pastiche. Postmodernism also marked by a sign of hyperrealism and the loss of faith in metanarrative or grand-narrative. It seems that there is a valid distinction between modernism and postmodernism, through the exploration of these characteristics that marked both terms of cultural and epistemological concepts.

REFERENCE

Baudrillard, J., Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1984.

Berman, M., All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London:
Verso, 1983.

Jameson, F., “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”. In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essay On
Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983

Lyotard, JF., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University
Press, 1984.

Murphy, A. & John Potts, Culture and Technology. London: Palgrave, 2003.