Chapter 4: Post-Modernism

Modernism was after WWI (1914-1918 and after). It was a series of cultural movements. There were systems in place that promised people that their needs would be fulfilled and that failed them. They were disillusioned, angry and anxious; and they expressed this through art, literature, architecture etc. This was the beginning of the avant-garde movement.

• Hemingway's zero endings
• Ezra Pound - "make it new"
• stream of consciousness
• impressionism
• self-reflexivity

People began to question everything, including the existence of God.

Modernists recognized that the old order had crumbled - they were happy that the old had given way to the new, but were deeply anxious about how to set up a new world order

• rejected certainty of Enlightenment Age thought (such as belief in experiments and rationality) - chaos and disorder was more real for them
• rejected the existence of an all-powerful creator
• saw traditional forms of art as outdated
• no fixed answer
• avant-garde: self-conscious (aware of change; conscious of breaking conventions)
• Janus face of modernism

Modernists find nostalgia in fragmentation; they lament it, they mourn it as a tragic loss. The world as they see it is completely divided and only through writing can we achieve a unified sense of the world, and coherence. They recognize the need for a past.

There is a tone of fierce ascetism and repulsion toward 19th century art among modernists. 

Characteristics of literary modernism:

• emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity (how we see rather than what we see)
• shift from apparent objectivity in terms of narration and narrator
• discontinuity and disruption approved of
• rejected smooth change => fragmented form
• reflexivity, spontaneity, experimentation and innovation

Post modernism:

The return of modernism, but with two key differences:
1. The modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernist celebrates it.
2. Modernists take on a tone of refined asceticism whereas postmodernists believed in excesses, gaudiness, and 'bad taste'.

Discontinuity, fragmentation and ambiguity made sense, and logical coherence was no longer necessary.

Jean Baudrillard:
Analogy of shopping: Say you wish to purchase something. Why that particular thing? Because it matches your tastes. The commodities you use become signifiers of your identity (~identity is a product of the signifiers we are surrounded and we surround ourselves with).

Mass media (TV, radio etc) are signifiers that are completely disconnected from reality. So for us, the image becomes the real, the original, even though it is no more than a copy. We have no access to the actual real. In a world of signifiers with no signifieds, there is no reality.

The split (dissociation) between signifier and signified is known as simulacrum:

• [when it becomes more than the original (hyper-real, like music CDs w.r.t. the original records)]
• [you are not consuming images that are not original and hence not real]
• [imitations with no originals]

Eg: when you possess an Elton John CD you say it is so, you don't say it's a copy of a copy of a copy; you have accepted the copy to be the original.

Theory of Representation:

• discrepancies between image and expectation
• endless circulation of copies of copies in post-modern world
• reproduction of great works from copies
• we become passive consumers
• original disappears, copies exist
• image constitutes our knowledge of reality/original - simulation
• no distinction between real and artifice (representation) [eg: Mumbai attacks, Twin Towers]

mass media disseminates simulacra everywhere:

• we do not consume objects but signs - implosion
• nothing outside of representation

hyperreal - world of excessive simulations and signs

• urban capitalism (consumerism w.r.t. signs)
• every sign merely refers to other signs (since there is no signified)

FOUR STAGES:

1. Sign represents a basic reality
2. Sign misrepresents or distorts the reality
3. Sign disguises the fact that there is no reality beneath
4. Sign has no relation to any reality

Jurgen Habermas:

• is a critic of postmodernism
• modernity - an incomplete project
• w.r.t. Lyotard's incredulity towards grand narratives: are all grand narratives that bad? After all, modernism and post-modernism are also grand narratives

• Modern period begins with Enlightenment: mid 17th-18th C
• 'twas the age of reason, meaning (break with tradition) + (reason and logic) = (solution to societal problems)

Martian poetry was a short-lived but fun movement in postmodern literature.