Page 180 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

POSTMODERNISM

feeling’ is a sense of the fragmentary, ambiguous and uncertain nature of living in
the context of a speed-up in its apparent pace. This feeling operates in tandem with
an awareness of the centrality of contingency in contemporary life. These social and
cultural changes are at the leading edge of Western societies but do not necessarily 157
represent a sharp break with the modern.
Postmodern culture is often argued to be a more visual culture than previously
encountered and is connected to a general aestheticization of everyday life. It is also
distinguished by a blurring of modern historical, aesthetic and cultural boundaries,
including those between culture and art, high and low culture, commerce and art,
culture and commerce. Bricolage is the central cultural style of the postmodern and
is observable in architecture, film and popular music video. For example, MTV is
noted for the blending of pop music from a variety of periods and locations, and the
film Bladerunner is frequently cited as a movie that mixes the genres of film noir,
horror, sci-fi, romance etc.
Postmodern culture is marked by a self-conscious intertextuality, that is, citation
of one text within another. This involves explicit allusion to particular cultural
products and oblique references to other genre conventions and styles. This
intertextuality is an aspect of enlarged cultural self-consciousness about the history
and functions of cultural products. Stylistically, the markers of postmodernism in
Art, film and television include aesthetic self-consciousness, self-reflexiveness,
juxtaposition/montage, paradox, ambiguity and the blurring of the boundaries of
genre, style and history.
The significance or in-significance of postmodern culture has been hotly
debated. For some critics (for example, Baudrillard and Jameson), contemporary
culture is constituted through a continual flow of images that establishes no
connotational hierarchy. It is not only depthless and meaningless but also the
modern distinctions between the real and the unreal, the public and the private, art
and reality have broken down. This is a hyperreality in which we are overloaded
with images and information.
However, other writers (for example, Hebdige, McRobbie, Kellner) have claimed
a transgressive and progressive role for postmodern culture and its collapsing of
boundaries. It is said that postmodernism makes the whole idea of representation
problematic even as it is complicit with it. That is, postmodernism is marked by an
ironic knowingness that explores the limitations and conditions of its own
knowing. Further, in the context of a consumer culture, we act as self-conscious
bricoleurs selecting and arranging elements of material commodities and
meaningful signs into a personal style. Thus, the postmodern can be read as the
democratization of culture and of new individual and political possibilities.
Links Aesthetics, bricolage, hyperreality, intertextuality, irony, modernism, postmodernity

• A philosophical movement that rejects ‘grand-narratives’ (that is, universal
explanations of human history and activity) in favour of irony and forms of local
knowledge.