Postmodernism - Lecture Notes

Themes 

•  Fragmentation (what has been made is now coming apart). 
• Repetition (nothing is unique)

Cyclical time, e.g. seasons

An irreversible break in the past.

After Roman empire, events of moving forward

After the Middle Ages - new time.

Thoughts move away from nature and God, it is man who rises in enlightenment and can manipulate the world without God. 

Intrinsic ability to know the world.

Defining the world with our own mental capacities. 

Modern

• Always advancing
• Self overcoming
• Progress and development 

Modernisation - shift from agrarian proaction to factory production. 

Harrison Wood - Modernisation

Modernity is the development. 

Modernism is the art. 

Impressionism - innovation of technical peans.

• Application of paint. 
• Reduction and purification
• Shock and de-familiarisation
• The focus of painting is visual experience

Historical Avant Garde

Dada and Surrealist

Reimagining society. 

As the modern intensifies, movement towards the future rejects what is present now. 

They anticipate a change. 

Avant garde want a particular future. 

Postmodernism - things becoming more modern after modernism. 

Modernity continues to become more modern. A continuation. The ever new. 

Modernism is trailing off into the past. 

The notion of contemporary. 

‘ever new but always in its newness, the same.’

Pursuit of novelty

Doubling - a new novelty must refer back to old novelty. 

‘The Present Age’

The media and press hold the nation together - a culture of representation. 

Marx 

• Commodities 
• Use value
• Satisfy human needs
• Things require and exchange value
• Exchange value is dependent on need
• Derealisation
• Workers have an exchange value

Less connection with factory made products than handmade artefacts. 

‘All that is solid melts into air’

Nietzsche

• Building on metaphors
• Nerve stimulus -> Image -> Oral -> Mental concept

Specular order of promotion - product advertising, wants and desires. 

Having commodities - more interested in appearance. 

Postmodernism - end of grand narratives. 

Knowledge is reduced to conceptual notions. 

Lyotard - language is ancient city, a combination of old and new, with additions from other ages. 

Use value is lost, stronger desire for form, colour, social standing. Needs disappear into products. 

Advertising - making desire stay ‘relevant’ to commodities. 

Baudrillard - window displays and store layouts. Eclectic, and a feast for the eyes. 

The way we understand the world is the way advertising portrays it to us.