Introducing Postmodernism

A Graphic Guide

Chris Garratt, Richard Appignanesi

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781848317604
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: History of Art

What connects Marliyn Monroe, Disneyworld, "The Satanic Verses" and cyber space? Answer: Postmodernism. But what exactly is postmodernism? This Graphic Guide explains clearly the maddeningly enigmatic concept that has been used to define the world's cultural condition over the last three decades. Introducing Postmodernism tracks the idea back to its roots by taking a tour of some of the most extreme and exhilarating events, people and thought of the last 100 years: in art - constructivism, conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol; in politics and history - McCarthy's witch-hunts, feminism, Francis Fukuyama and the Holocaust; in philosophy - the work of Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault and Heidegger.The book also explores postmodernism's take on today, and the anxious grip of globalisation, unpredictable terrorism and unforeseen war that greeted the dawn of the 21st century.Regularly controversial, rarely straightforward and seldom easy, postmodernism is nonetheless a thrilling intellectual adventure. Introducing Postmodernism is the ideal guide.

PART ONE: THE GENEALOGY OF POSTMODERN ART

We could begin by visiting an installation by the Conceptual artist Daniel Buren (b.1939), entitled On two levels with two colours (1976), which features a vertically striped band at the floor levels of two adjoining gallery rooms, one at a step up from the other. Empty rooms, nothing else…

HOW DID WE GET TO THIS? DO WE WANT TO STAY? HOW DO WE LEAVE, IF WE WANT TO?

Buren’s installation is not necessarily a representative example of art in the postmodern age. But it is a good place to start from, in the sense of where modernism itself has arrived at through a persistent history of innovation.

What’s Modern? The Shock of the Old

Modern comes from the Latin word modo, meaning “just now”. Since when have we been modern? For a surprisingly long time, as the following example shows.

Around 1127, the Abbot Suger began reconstructing his abbey basilica of St. Denis in Paris. His architectural ideas resulted in something never seen before, a “new look” neither classically Greek nor Roman nor Romanesque.

Suger didn’t know what to call it, so he fell back on the Latin, opus modernum. A modern work.

JUST A MINUTE…HOW CAN YOU CALL YOURSELVES MODERN IF YOU’RE REVIVING SOMETHING THAT’S ANCIENT?
BECAUSE NATURE AND REASON HAVE SHOWN US THAT THE CLASSICAL IS THE ONLY TRUE AND PERENNIALLY MODERN STYLE.

Suger helped to inaugurate an immensely influential architectural style which became known as the Gothic.

Gothic was in fact a term of abuse, coined by Italian Renaissance theorists, meaning a northern or German barbaric style. The ideal style of Renaissance architects and artists was the classical Greek, or what they called the antica e buona maniera moderna – the ancient and good modern style.

Ever since then, architects have been arguing about what best represents a perennial style – classical, gothic, modern or even postmodern.

Dialectical Antagonism

At least since medieval times, there has been a motivating sense of antagonism between “then” and “now”, between ancient and modern. Historical periods in the West have followed one another in disaffinity with what has gone before. A rejection of one’s immediate predecessors seems almost instinctively generational.

The result of this historical dialectic (from the Greek, debate or discourse) is that Western culture recognizes no single tradition.

History is carved up into conceptual periods –

and so on. These antagonistic periods are Western culture’s sets of tradition, a sort of “periodic table” of tradition.

Tradition in the West is constituted and indeed energized by what is in combat with it.

Another peculiarity of Western culture is its strongly historicist bias, a belief that history determines the way things are and must be.

WHAT WE PRODUCE IS ALWAYS MILES AHEAD OF WHAT WE THINK.
Darling. it’s arrived…WORKLESS WASHDAYS at last!

Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism provided the classic historicist formula.

Marxism established a structural difference between society’s traditional or cultural institutions and its economic productive forces. Rapid-paced progress occurs in the infrastructure, the economic sphere of productive activities which supports but also subverts the superstructure, the social sphere of ideology which includes religion, art, politics, law and all traditional attitudes. The superstructure evolves more slowly and is more resistant to change than the economic infrastructure, especially in the modern industrial age of advanced capitalism.

The ways we think – or better, those assumptions we take for granted – are pre-established by superstructural ideologies.

TOO CRUDE, TOO MECHANICAL. IF THINKING IS ALL PRE-ESTABLISHED BY IDEOLOGY, WHERE DOES THE FREEDOM TO THIHK SCIENTIFICALLY COME FROM? AND WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR FREEDOM TO CRITICIZE? THE TAIL DOESN’T WAG THE DOG.

“Mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve…we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”

Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

What’s MODERNISM?

The Marxian formula is still useful for understanding the different speed-lanes of change in the traditional and productive spheres of society.

Modernism, in the infrastructural productive sense, begins in the 1890s and 1900s, a time which experienced mass technological innovations, the second tidal wave of the Industrial Revolution begun nearly a century before.

New Technology

•the internal combustion and diesel engines; steam turbine electricity generators

•electricity and petrol as new sources of power

•the automobile, bus, tractor and aeroplane

•telephone, typewriter and tape machine as the basics of modern office and systems management

•chemical industry’s production of synthetic materials – dyes, man-made fibres and plastics

•new engineering materials – reinforced concrete, aluminium and chromium alloys

Mass Media and Entertainment

•advertising and mass circulation newspapers (1890s)

•the gramophone (1877); the Lumière brothers invent cinematography and Marconi the wireless telegraph (1895)

•Marconi’s first radio wave transmission (1901)

•first movie theatre, the Pittsburgh Nickelodeon (1905)

Science

•genetics established in the 1900s

•Freud launches psychoanalysis (c.1900)

•discovery of uranium and radium radioactivity by Becquerel and the Curies (1897–9)

•Rutherford’s revolutionary new model of the atom overturns classical physics (1911)

•Max Planck’s quantum theory of energy (1900) revised by Niels Bohr and Rutherford (1913)

•Einstein’s Special and General theories of Relativity (1905 and 1916)

It isn’t difficult to see how these innovations extend logically to postmodern scientific and information developments. Two examples…

1. The foundations of postmodern cosmology – atomic theory, quantum and Relativity – were laid down between the 1890s and 1916.

2. The modern copper telephone wire replaced with the postmodern fibre-optic cable increases the information data-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• First, let’s consider the WORD…
• Part One: The Genealogy of Postmodern Art
• Part Two: The Genealogy of Postmodern Theory
• Part Three: The Genealogy of Postmodern History
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Biographies
• Index