Can Postmodernism define our state?

[osho]

Life today is changing fast and so is literature. But does this change in life go in tandem with the same in literature? I do not think our literature is full-grown enough to be the expression of the day. I come across almost every day something bizarre is going on. Marriage- few want to be wedded since they know they will have to go through an odious and arduous moments. Men and women come together suddenly, in fact impulsively but to fall back to their bitter and worst realities. They want sex and get bonded and once this is fulfilled each become a burden to each other and the tie breaks.
Our desires are not our own and we are not the masters of our move and thought. Commercialism goes concurrently with our action. We buy and eat commercially provoked foods, have commercial sex and live commercial lives and the designers of our thought processes are not our family members, for we live in a single member family structure.
Our dresses become reflective of our lifestyles. Heterosexuals lost their sheen over their counterpart homosexuals and no children, no regeneration ensuing that stage.
Language lost its original charm as it is already a proven fact that our conservative language style is not expressive or communicative enough to correspond to our complex thoughts and feelings.
Imagine yourself in a stage an urge surges inside you to suddenly have sex with a same-sex person at the moment you are having it with your spouse.
Or you are fed up with birthing kids and will have to part with your spouse on that count.
Or suddenly you are in furor and want to relocate to China or India lashing your national pride and blunting your sense of cultural pride. The passion is split up and you cannot say love is in its full blown form the way you read in Shakespearian love sagas.
This is an age of netizenship and forget you live in particular realism. There are undefined territories you choose to risk in, gambling, drugs and the repercussion you get annihilated. You live a half-life and see a deferred dream.

I do not know how to express the spirit of postmodernism

[fb0252]

possibly that day to day life fails to hold up under detailed logical analysis. interesting observation though. maybe somebody would post some 21st century literature that captures life these days and and also equates writing such as e.g. goethe. how does one find such books unless read every last one on the best seller lists?

[Arrowni]

Language has never been enough for us to express.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Can Postmodernism define our state?

No. Postmodernism is a childish fad that we are getting over if we have not already past .


Life today is changing fast and so is literature.

I'm pretty sure that it has almost always felt like that, no matter what age you lived in; there's nothing extra special about today. I'm sure someone standing on the edge of the collapse of the Roman Empire would have said the same, as would those looking at the dissolution of the monasteries in Britain, or industrialisation or the world wars or the rise of Christianity or the fall of Christianity or a thousand other things; postmodernism is no different, certainly not better and probably an inferior fad than a thousand other events in world history. I just don't buy the 'whole uniqueness' of the postmodern era. I'm rather of the camp that human motivation has remained somewhat constant throughout our short evolution and nothing much has basically changed those attributes from then and now.

[Ecurb]

No. Postmodernism is a childish fad that we are getting over if we have not already past .

.

Actually, it is Modernism that was a fad. Post modernism has not replaced modernism, but it is a very effective critique of it.

[PeterL]

Since postmodernism can be whatever one wants it to be, it can define anything in whatever way one wishes.A completely elastic philosophy can be very useful.

[kinesj]

Actually, it is Modernism that was a fad.

Given that many of the structural and stylistic innovations of modernism are standard today, it was not so much a fad as an evolution.

[blazeofglory]

It is interesting of Osho to bring the subject into discussion. Postmodernism in itself a sheer nothing, a hogwash idea. However it is a theoretical lens through which we can know or describe some of the complex human phenomena. Values have changed and people are getting freer today than they were a century or just a few decades ago. We read Victorian novels and that forms our critical judgment and points of view on things.

The world is changed; our love affairs do not go the same way in which a Victorian love story did. Women are freer; they are working and prove themselves as breadwinners.

The seismic change we are witnessing now is in our understanding of human behaviors. Today you cannot love a girl or boy to carry out or with the hope of carrying out the affair throughout your life and you have a presentiment that it will stop at some point and you will prepare yourself for the worst.

The other extreme case in which you find yourself is you are incapable of loving the way your pas or grandpas did. You switch to another form of love affair. That leads to same sex marriage.

This is one aspect of life and there are a thousand and one problems and intricacies a postmodern novel can address. It unrolls some untold realities and unveil some of the darkest and most grotesque human tendencies. We do not ordinarily or in our wakefulness behave the way we do unconsciously. I mean if you are allowed to listen to your impulses or your uncensored urges or thoughts you tend to behave irrationally, and such subconscious drives find their expressions in postmodern novels.

Osho tries to justify this thru this post

[osho]

Blaze of Glory has added to what I wanted to say about postmodernism.

We of course live in a very complex situation. Today in an age of websites we are connected globally more than ever before and we can text each other across national and international boundaries. I can have a cyber love / virtual anywhere else in the world and that can materialize into an actual love. Sex is rampant and is short-lived. Few believe Platonic or Victorian love. And people have multiple relationships or poliamorous relationships.

Man is beyond the visible veneer is a brute and morals, systems, religions are very superficial impressions, skin-deep. Postmodernism is all about this deep rooted human instincts.

It deconstruct human values, systems and harmonies that get us together through marriages and some other socioeconomic cultures and institutions.

In other words postmodernism close in on to actual human nature.

[blazeofglory]

Today literature is incapable of mirroring human natures and behavioral patterns the way it is fully and maybe we are as writers running short of the words as Osho has said to give expression to human situations

Maybe we have yet to coin the words that can express our sensibilities.

I always feel I have not done enough justice to my readers. Maybe a writer to do justice to his readers must read extensively and write inventively. But life is too short for all this.

Anyway I am unconvinced of our capacity for all this

[NiMROD]

We've had the words, humans just aren't as deep as we like to pretend. Our societal infrastructure is nothing more than our own contrivances, bought into by enough individuals to make it real enough that people refrain from purely pursuing sex and death. All these "movements" are nothing more than how we grapple with hazy layer between.

People are as coarse and as vile as we've ever been. We're simply evolving the means of self-delusion.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

No matter how much I read the Wikipedia synopsis, I never do understand what "postmodern" theory really means. As far as I can tell, postmodernism's main claim is that there is no objective truth, and whatever we do consider an objective truth is only relative to its time, place, and cultural surroundings. If this is any way correct, I don't see why it is considered a "childish fad."

[OrphanPip]

I think the idea that we live in a postmodern age is perhaps fadish, in that I doubt most people out in the streets would agree with many of the ideas postmodernism espouses. I don't see much postmodern thought going on in the Islamic world, or in the rhetoric of American political discourse, or even the political discourse of any nation.

Also, I think much of what is being expressed above as a result of the postmodern world is itself unconnected to postmodernism. The social acceptance of poliamorous affairs has little to do with postmodernism, as such affairs have been accepted in many pre-modern societies.

Same-sex marriage is hardly the result of postmodern thinking, but of what a postmodernist marxist might call the changing equilibrium of hegemony. Because culture is not fixed in its values, it is capable of moving to encompass and absorb new "normals." The emergence of same-sex marriage is not a product of postmodernism, but it may illustrate an aspect of postmodern theory. Just as the fact that in the West we moved from the marriage being the exchange of female property (from the father to the husband, including any possible lands or allowances attached to her) to being a concept of equality and love in the late 19th century to the post-war era. Marriage has never meant one thing in history, and it is the recognition of that fact that is postmodern, rather than same-sex marriage itself, which can be entirely justified within a modern rights based discourse without needing to go into postmodernism.

[blazeofglory]

Reading different points of view about postmodernism is widening my knowledge-scope and this has at the same time steered clear some of the myths I hold to be postmodernist. What I took something postmodern is modern. Modernism has to basically to do with realism and what we call real real is also not necessarily real and there are of course layers of realities and once we come across another layer of realism the former layer turns out to be an illusive reality. We have yet to discover what reality is. It is like a multilayer-ed onion and once we peel off one layer we will instantly come upon another layer and even if we continue peeling to arrive at the core of it we will still end up with the layer only.

There are so many theorists and I do not like to run after them to understand post modernism academically and yet I try to understand it through pieces and bits I come upon different circumstances

[henriquefb]

It is really complex to try and understand all the motivations and consequences of what was called modernism and its immediate aftermath, post-modernism. But I do think that it may be a little bit silly to dismiss it as a childish fad.
Modernism was very important as a general movement in worldwide art to break with most things that were deemed "basic" or "natural", and the effort in subverting those things. Even if one does not agree with this subversion, the act of subversion itself enables us to understand more deeply what is art about. Even if you think Free Jazz sucks, you can understand "traditional" jazz better after learning what it is all about. Even if you think James Joyce sucks, you can understand better older literature as Joyce's and Ornette Coleman's and all other "moderns' "efforts to bring in the new help expose what was deemed natural.
In fact, quite a few things are really natural. Most others are just social constructions, and to put a light on this stuff is very enlightening. You don't have to hate Homer or Shakespeare or Jane Austen to love modernism. You don't have to hate Beethoven to love John Coltrane.
I believe that modernism was absolutely necessary as the "spirit our times" and, even if it indeed faded away, our understanding of things is better nowadays because of it.

[stlukesguild]

You don't have to hate Homer or Shakespeare or Jane Austen to love modernism. You don't have to hate Beethoven to love John Coltrane.

This is the problem I see that plagues most of those who make sweeping statements dismissing Modernism or Post-Modernism. Modernism was not an attempt to sweep away the past... to smash the whole of tradition in art and music and literature... although there were certainly those iconoclasts who argued in favor of just such a thing (but haven't we always had them?) Picasso, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Matisse, T.S. Eliot were all fully aware of history and tradition... and in most cases enamored of it. At the same time they recognized that art needed to confront the realities of the present as they perceived them. Modernism opened up the possibilities of art... added to them. Post-Modernism... as a critique of Modernism... questions the dogmatic aspects of Modernist theory, but again... it essentially offers just one more body of possibilities to the whole of that which is available to the artist.

Can Post-Modernism define our state? I don't know. Can you define Post-Modernism?

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Well said, StLukes.

When it comes to applying all these philosophies to art, I don't really care much what the philosophy says ... it just comes down to whether or not I like the art. I like modern and postmodern literature, not so much when it comes to the visual arts, though (at least the abstract stuff).

[LitNetIsGreat]

Pah, the postmodern age is well dead and buried anyway, welcome to the age of post postmodernism, hyper modernism or pseudo-modernism.:cornut:

http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

Hopefully then, no more will readers have to endure novels where the author himself suddenly makes an 'appearance' into the text in order to draw attention to the work as a literary construct, posing 'faddish' pseudo questions about the nature of art and reality, blurring the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture and questioning the reliability of grand narratives and other such stuff.:prrr:

Of course I'm not dismissing the whole movement/theory/age completely, not at all, Pulp Fiction was a great film for example, but boy I find/found postmodernism very irritating at times.

Bums aloft, there she goes in a steatopygous perspective!

[YesNo]

Pah, the postmodern age is well dead and buried anyway, welcome to the age of post postmodernism, hyper modernism or pseudo-modernism.:cornut:

http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

Hopefully then, no more will readers have to endure novels where the author himself suddenly makes an 'appearance' into the text in order to draw attention to the work as a literary construct, posing 'faddish' pseudo questions about the nature of art and reality, blurring the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture and questioning the reliability of grand narratives and other such stuff.:prrr:

Of course I'm not dismissing the whole movement/theory/age completely, not at all, Pulp Fiction was a great film for example, but boy I find/found postmodernism very irritating at times.

What is it that makes Pulp Fiction postmodern? I do remember liking the movie, but I had no idea it was postmodern.

In the article you cited, Alan Kirby seems to think we are in a "pseudo modern" period, where irony is replaced by trance-like interactivity which I don't understand any better than postmodernism. He does make a good point: if a university has a class on postmodernism the texts they use to illustrate postmodernism should include at least one written during the lifetime of the students taking the class.

[LitNetIsGreat]

What is it that makes Pulp Fiction postmodern? I do remember liking the movie, but I had no idea it was postmodern.

In the article you cited, Alan Kirby seems to think we are in a "pseudo modern" period, where irony is replaced by trance-like interactivity which I don't understand any better than postmodernism. He does make a good point: if a university has a class on postmodernism the texts they use to illustrate postmodernism should include at least one written during the lifetime of the students taking the class.

Yes I think a lot of Tarantino films fit the postmodernism tag really, Kill Bills are another example. They have all the features of postmodernism – playfulness of style, parody, pastiche and allusion to other works and styles, self-referential (think of the title or in John Travolta’s dance) and the non-linear/ broken narrative – they are prime example of postmodern works (that are done right).

Yes there is a fog that surrounds itself around the whole postmodernism issue and there are no really clear definitions that all people agree on. I've studied it a little and know as much as I probably want to on the matter, having had my nose bitten with too many faddish pseudo elements.

I suppose the question of the thread should really be - can post postmodernism (or hyper modernism, or pseudo modernism) define our state?

(A question of which I'll leave for moment, as I was up since 2.30am last night and have headache.)

[stlukesguild]

Coming from the realm of the visual arts, I long ago came upon this quote by the painter, R.B. Kitaj concerning Post-Modernism.

The term Post-Modernism means very little to me. But... it would depend upon complex issues and definitions. For example, if Cezanne in 1906, Degas in 1917, Kafka, Joyce, and Eliot in 1925, Matisse in 1953, Picasso in 1971, Auerbach in 1991, etc... etc... are Modernists, then so am I. If not, not. If Post-Modernism means that the stranglehold of Greenberg/Duchamp/Warhol/Beuys et al on post-war art and theory is now balanced by other bloodlines, well, maybe there's an interesting case for the term Post-Modernism. If, as I suspect, a modernist impetus has become institutionalized, if the interesting legacies of the formalist and dadaist years have created a new "Pompier" Art, then I would hope and pray to be post-that!

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6166/6155995193_66cac579e7_z.jpg

Kitaj has been categorized as a Pop Artist... and as a central figure of the so-called School of London. If appropriation of imagery, freely shifting from style to style, fragmentation, self-referentiality, and irony are central elements of Post-Modernism... then Kitaj is clearly a Post-Modernist. Of course... one might then just as well apply the same definition to this artist:

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6153/6156553632_1854f8e756_z.jpg

Again... how do we define Post-Modernism? Is J.L Borges a Post-Modernist? Julio Cortazar? John Barth? Thomas Pynchon? Anne Carson? If so, I am quite open to the Post-Modernism. However, I have little or no patience with theory and dogma. My own thoughts lean toward the fact that at some point in the 1950s or 1960s it was recognized that Modernism was running out of steam... or rather, that it was no longer what it once was. Where it once represented the avant garde, it had become, as Kitaj suggested, the Academy... the institutionalized art of our time. Modernism wrought an incredible array of possibilities to the arts... but ultimately these represent just further possibilities within the whole of that which is possible to artists. I see very little that suggests Post-Modernism exists as a movement with a clear agenda or common intentions... certainly not in the visual arts. The sole unifying element of Post-Modernism seems to be a recognition that we are no longer living in the Modernist era. Artists are struggling to come to terms with all that Modernism brought about... and to re-examine much that Late Modernist dogma proscribed... from the popular arts (and the very notion that art can resonate with an audience) through the old masters.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Certainly one of the features of postmodernism is that it is (was) hard to define; its very nature seeming to resist definition. Statements such as the one below are all too common:


Ask 5 people what post-modernism means and you'll likely get five different reactions or none at all. It's one of those elusive academic terms applied to many different fields of study. Everyone appears to understand what it means individually, but few agree collectively. Jon Mattox

You can easily go around and get dictionary definition of what postmodernism was, for example things like this:

http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0242.html

3. postmodernism: A rejection of the sovereign autonomous individual with an emphasis upon anarchic collective, anonymous experience. Collage, diversity, the mystically unrepresentable, Dionysian passion are the foci of attention. Most importantly we see the dissolution of distinctions, the merging of subject and object, self and other. This is a sarcastic playful parody of western modernity and the "John Wayne" individual and a radical, anarchist rejection of all attempts to define, reify or re-present the human subject.
Or you can get a Wikipedia entry as follows:


Postmodernism is a philosophical movement away from the viewpoint of modernism. More specifically it is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the problem of objective truth and inherent suspicion towards global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. It involves the belief that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. Rather, it holds realities to be plural and relative, and dependent on who the interested parties are and what their interests consist of.

Or other such definitions but despite of this they are all somewhat unsatisfactory and lacking. Postmodernism seem to mean slightly different things to different people as if the boundaries of postmodernism, what it means to be postmodernist is blurred, there are no absolute truths or complete definitions. Paradoxically, I suppose, this is exactly what some element of postmodernism was getting at, for example the article below depicts postmodernism as much closer to Marxist thought than ever I thought previously:


http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/postmodernism.htm
Postmodernists believe that the West’s claims of freedom and prosperity continue to be nothing more than empty promises and have not met the needs of humanity. They believe that truth is relative and truth is up to each individual to determine for himself. Most believe nationalism builds walls, makes enemies, and destroys “Mother Earth," while capitalism creates a “have and have not” society, and religion causes moral friction and division among people.

It seems that what postmodernism is comes very close to what the individual wants it to be! Whatever it was it seems dead as a current movement/philosophy/age anyway, as even seems apparent from news articles such as this one from the Telegraph depicting Koons as a high priest of a past postmodernist movement:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/8765965/Post-
modernism-Style-and-Subversion-1970-1990-VandA.html
In 1986, an exhibition opened in New York showcasing the work of four artists, including a young Jeff Koons. In it, Koons presented his Statuary series – flawless replicas in stainless steel of everyday objects, including an inflatable toy rabbit and a dime-store bust of Louis XIV.

For his next show at the Sonnabend Gallery in 1988, he plunged deeper into the cesspit of mass culture, while plundering the techniques of the past. The sculptures in his Banality series, including his famous gilt-edged white porcelain portrait of Michael Jackson with his pet chimpanzee Bubbles, were meticulously handmade by European craftsmen. It would be hard to imagine more tasteless works of art – but in hindsight, Koons was capturing the spirit of his age, and staking his claim as the master of post-modern irony. Today his early work is synonymous with the Eighties – and post-modernism.

If there is any irony here it is at the end of the article which suggests that postmodernism (their version of it) has died out due to it becoming “commoditised and capitalist” the very things that some aspects of it, apparently, sought to react against! Irony killed by irony. (Such would be expected of New Marxist thinkers such as Dick Hebdige if my memory is correct here, but anyway...)

The suggestion that postmodernism is dead and “pseudo modernism” or post postmodernism now stands in its place, or has for a while, seems fairly clear, though what that means I'm sure nobody knows. I'm sure however that postmodernism in universities has still got another ten years shelf life where postmodernist texts will feature heavily on reading lists at the expense perhaps of more worthy, but less fashionable, alternatives.

[MarkBastable]

...postmodernist texts will feature heavily on reading lists at the expensive perhaps of more worthy, but less fashionable, alternatives.

That implies a very postmodernist measure of worth.

[LitNetIsGreat]

That implies a very postmodernist measure of worth.

Ha, yes, expense, "at the expense of..."

Edit: where would Litnet be without Mr Bastable, grammar police? :lol:

[MarkBastable]

Ha, yes, expense, "at the expense of..."

Edit: where would Litnet be without Mr Bastable, grammar police? :lol:

Actually, I didn't even notice that. What I meant was that the idea that different people might have different estimations of the worth of given texts, dependent on the context of fashion, is a very postmodernist view.

[Seasider]

The Victoria & Albert Museum in London is staging an exhibition PostModernism-Style and Subversion 1970-1990 opening on the 25th September and running till 15 January 2012. In the brief notice of it in today's Observer there was no mention of Literature in the scope of the exhibition.It explores how postmodernism evolved from a provocative architectural movement in the early 70s into something that influenced all areas of popular culture, including design, art, music, film and fashion.

No mention of Literature here but then Literature is not something that can easily be represented visually.

[stlukesguild]

Seriously, I suspect that Modernism, and Romanticism, and even the Renaissance would have been just as difficult to define at the moment of their inception.

[Seasider]

Yes I often wonder what people living in the Middle Ages called it.

[MarkBastable]

Yes I often wonder what people living in the Middle Ages called it.

Tuesday.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Tuesday.

:lol:

[osho]

I found many revealing ideas about postmodernism and of course I have read something about post postmodernism and it proves there is an evolution in thought processes and in our imaginative faculties and we are growing forward and backward. Forward when we are advancing scientifically and our homes have more gadgets than our grandparents and we move much faster today and we have many cures and preventive measures than a few decades ago. We are united and have been global citizens and our approach has been different and our domains of understanding and information more pervasive. Maybe a post modern novels diverges from writing a simple romantic love and it tired to unroll some complex forms and situation about love. It unravels some secrets earthed in the recesses of human minds remaining uncharted in human history. Maybe more than that a postmodern or a post postmodern novel does.