What does 'postmodern' actually mean? How can something be postmodern?
Started roughly in the 70's, the whole movement began when artists because disillusioned with modernism - it was too 'formal'. An example of postmodernism was the exhibition of three basketballs - yes that's right - in an 'art' gallery. The point was however, to challenge what we perceive as art.Postmodernism is usually designed for its shock effect, for being pessimistic, and for being very temporary. Marilyn Diptych by Andy Warhol is a very famous piece.On one level, postmodern is a word used to describe major changes in the underlying ways people think---especially the way people view truth and reality. Postmodern is a term of contrast which implies modern. But before modern, there was pre-modern. To understand postmodern, it helps to consider the main differences in the way each of the three “moderns” approached truth and reality.Pre-modern era was one in which religion was the source of truth and reality. God’s existence and revelation were givens in the culture. In the modern era, science became the source for truth and reality. During this period, religion and morality were arbitrarily demoted to the subjective realm. In the present, postmodern era, there is no single defining source for truth and reality beyond the individual. Postmodernism simply radicalized relativism and individualism and then applied them to all spheres of knowledge—even science.In a postmodern world, truth and reality are understood to be individually shaped by personal history, social class, gender, culture, and religion.
Dreams of Postmodernism and Thoughts of Mortality: A Twenty-Fifth Anniversary
Retrospective of Blade Runner
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner opened twenty-five years ago to scornful critics and a disappointed public confronted by a moody, violent and densely layered science fiction film governed by existential themes and Marxist tendencies. Most journalistic critics found the film’s tone aloof, its themes remote and its story too stark to digest. Although the film was valorised for its bold and rich production design and was praised as the cinematic phenomenon of technological artistry, Blade Runner was largely condemned and discarded as a curious and expensive debacle – full of powerful images yet plagued by inert intellectual rewards. Diverse American critics such as Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann complained that the hero’s humanism lacked depth and verve, and that the story is clouded by confusing themes. Scott, they said, was far too interested in developing style rather than content, more interested in detailing his sets than developing his script. These views were (and are) unsatisfying.
Academic and independent critics, however, were more patient in their efforts, more meditative in their appraisals. Over the years, they have created a richly sedimented body of criticism that has settled beneath the flotsam of journalistic reviews. Unlike any other effort in recent cinematic history, the critical recovery ofBlade Runner has been a long and intense affair. This recovery began unofficially with Michael Dempsey’s literate and sensitive critique in Film Quarterly in 1982. He greeted Scott’s film with a qualified ambivalence but was enthusiastic about the film’s powerful visual motifs. A few years later, David Desser (1985) tied Blade Runner to its literary inheritance, while Susan Doll and Greg Faller (1986) explained why movie reviewers mishandled this work of avant-garde cinema. By the late 1980s and early ’90s, the movement to taxonomize this film still remained strong. Critics from diverse disciplines committed themselves to discussing the film’s many themes. Judith B. Kerman’s Retrofitting Blade Runner (1991) collected an outpouring of interpretations that broadened and expanded how academics saw Blade Runner from their own disciplinary spheres. In “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner”, Guiliana Bruno (1993) applied Fredric Jameson’s theory of pastiche to explain Blade Runner’s postmodernist vision. M. Keith Booker (1994) included Blade Runner in the canon of dystopian literature, while Scott Bukatman (1993, 97) and Paul M. Sammon (1996, 99) explained in separate accounts the contemporary artistic influences on the film’s meticulously detailed production design. Two years ago, Will Brooker’s The Blade Runner Experience (2005) focused its critical light on the objects created in the penumbras of the film, such as games, varying DVD versions of the film, a bookish sequel and academic criticism.
Of course, not all of these appraisals were positive; however, the majority of these critics encouraged their readers to re-view and reinterpret the film’s many ideas. These interpretive acts moved the discussion of the film to smaller, discourse-specific audiences and asked them to examine the critical disputes over the film’s thematic meanings. In this sense, academics have kept the discussion of the film open. This recursive act (regarding one film) is at odds with the normative practices of journalistic movie reviewers, but academics, with some exceptions, have not been overtly privileging their interpretations and practices over their journalistic counterparts. Rather, academics have been engaging this film in true rhetorical fashion by interpreting and arguing about this film to specific audiences in different contexts at particular times. (senseofcinema.com)
Post-Modernism by Unboring Learning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO_gaxFIRXw
This is a good sumamry of the definition of Pot-Modernism, but into layman's terms.
Postmodernism
A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.
Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself." (http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html)
This is a good sumamry of the definition of Pot-Modernism, but into layman's terms.
Postmodernism
A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.
Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself." (http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html)
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