Postmodernity

Times Square, New York.

The term postmodernity or postmodernity is used to generally designate a wide number of artistic, cultural, literary and philosophical movements of the 20th century, which extend to today, defined in different degrees and ways by their opposition or overcoming of the trends of Modernity.

In anthropology and sociology, on the other hand, the terms postmodern and postmodernization refer to the cultural process observed in many countries during the 20th century, identified in the early 1970s This other meaning of the word is explained under the term postmaterialism.

The different currents of the postmodern movement appeared during the second half of the 20th century. Although it applies to very diverse currents, all of them share the idea that the modern project failed in its attempt to radically renew the traditional forms of art and culture, thought and social life.

One of the biggest problems when dealing with this subject is precisely in reaching a precise concept or definition of what postmodernity is. The difficulty in this task results from various factors, such as current events —and therefore the scarcity and imprecision of the data to be analyzed— and the lack of a valid theoretical framework to be able to extend it to all the events that occur throughout of this complex process called postmodernism.

Areas of influence

Postmodernism is usually divided into three sectors, depending on its area of influence: as a historical period, as a philosophical attitude, or as an artistic movement.

Historically, ideologically and methodologically diverse, these sectors nonetheless share a family resemblance centered on the idea that the radical renewal of traditional forms in art, culture, thought and social life driven by the failure of the modernist project in its attempt to achieve the emancipation of humanity, and that such a project is impossible or unattainable under current conditions. Faced with the rigorous commitment to innovation, progress, and criticism of the artistic, intellectual, and social vanguards, which it considers a refined form of authoritarian theology, postmodernism defends hybridization, popular culture, decentering of intellectual and scientific authority. and distrust of the grand narratives that society currently presents in the face of such a movement.

Bauhaus School, example of modern architecture

Features

The main characteristics of postmodern thought are:

• Antidualist. Postmoderns assert that Western philosophy created dualisms and thus excluded from thought certain perspectives. On the other hand, postmodernism values and promotes pluralism and diversity (more than black against white, west against east, man against women). It ensures to seek the interests of "the others" (the marginalized and oppressed by modern ideologies and the political and social structures that supported them).

• Question of texts. Postmoderns also claim that the texts—historical, literary or other—do not have inherent authority or objectivity to reveal the author’s intention, nor can they tell us “what actually happened”. Rather, these texts reflect the particular prejudices and culture of the writer.

• The linguistic twist. Postmodernism argues that language moulds our thinking and that there can be no thought without language. So language literally creates reality.

• Truth as a Perspective. Moreover, truth is a matter of perspective or context rather than something universal. We do not have access to reality, to the way things are, but only to what seems to us.
• Recognizes that there are different types of knowledge

Where and when postmodernity emerged

Although the more frequent meaning of postmodernity became popular after the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard in 1979, several authors had used the term before. It is very important to note that the terms modernity and postmodernity should not be confused with modernism and postmodernism, respectively. Modernity refers to a very broad historical period that involves referring to its political, social, economic, etc. characteristics. Thus, we could, for example, speak of modern civilization or culture in a very broad sense, and that is the meaning that is generally given to it in the field of political philosophy, sociological theory, and critical theory. Following the same example, one can speak of postmodern culture. On the other hand, the pair modernismo and postmodernismo is used to refer to an aesthetic current that emerged first in literature, in the plastic arts and then in architecture. Thus, in this second case, we can talk about modernist or postmodernist literature, just like in art. For example, it is often said that the City of Las Vegas in the US is a paradigmatic case of postmodern architecture.

The confusion between both planes has generated many difficulties of understanding and must always be taken into account.

Banksy occupying a very simple resource to talk about the contradictions in our society.

For example, in the aesthetic sense, the English painter John Watkins Chapman designated as «postmodernism» a pictorial current that tried to overcome the expressive limitations of impressionism without falling back into the conventionalism of academic painting; the term did not catch on, preferring the designation "post-impressionism" suggested by the critic Roger Fry. Although postmodernism in this sense is only distantly related to postmodernism as it is commonly understood—generally agreeing, indeed, with the theoretical and methodological principles of artistic modernism—the relationship of ambiguity between overcoming and overcoming conservation that makes its definition difficult is already apparent here. In the broadest cultural sense—or rather in the civilizational sense—Arnold J. Toynbee's use of the term to indicate the crisis of humanism since the 1870s is related to wide fractures that far exceed the aesthetic aspects and relate to the social organization as a whole, as would also be observed by Marx, Freud and Nietzsche.

In 1934, the literary critic Federico de Onís used postmodernism for the first time as a reaction against the experimental intensity of modernist or avant-garde poetry, identified above all with the production of Rubén Darío's early period; de Onís suggests that the different movements of return or recovery —of lyrical simplicity, of the classical tradition, of sentimental prosaism, of naturalism, of the bucolic tradition, etc.— are caused by the difficulty of the avant-garde, which isolates them from the public. Several of these traits will reappear in later analyses, although Onís's work did not leave a direct trace in the theoretical tradition.

The use of the term by Bernard Smith in 1945 to designate the critique of abstraction by Soviet realism and by Charles Olson to indicate the poetry of Ezra Pound straddled the two previous conceptions. Although it underlined the break with the tendencies of modernism, there was a lack of a theoretical framework that would make it possible to distinguish the production of the avant-garde—in itself complex and multiform—from that of its critics in a decisive way.

Only in the late 1950s, beginning with the work of literary critics Harry Levin, Irving Howe, Ihab Hassan, Leslie Fiedler, and Frank Kermode, did the term begin to be used in a systematic way to designate the break from postwar writers with the emancipatory and avant-garde features of modernism, conceived of the latter as the programmatic exploration of innovation, experimentalism, critical autonomy and separation from the everyday. The conception was not without difficulties, and some authors whom Levin and Howe—both “committed” and left-wing intellectuals—criticized, such as Samuel Beckett, were simultaneously perceived by other cultural theorists—among them Theodor Adorno, a modernist prominent in its own right—as the most refined form of modernism. However, what is central to this notion—postmodernism as a renunciation of the emancipatory teleology of the avant-garde—is still considered the most distinctive feature of postmodernism.

The fundamental feature of the break was not in correcting the coldness and architectural deficiencies of modernist buildings, but in the absolute rejection of the possibility of producing a truly radical innovation. The axis of modern thought —both in the arts and in the sciences— had been centered on the idea of evolution or progress, understood as the reconstruction of all areas of life from the substitution of tradition or convention for the examination radical not only of transmitted knowledge—such as the symphonic form in music, the court portrait in painting, or the classical doctrine of the soul in philosophical anthropology—but also of the accepted ways of organizing and producing that knowledge—such as tonality, perspective or the primacy of consciousness; the notion of discontinuity had acquired philosophical dignity through the Marxist and Nietzschean interpretation of Hegel's dialectic.

In the cultural or civilizational sense, we can point out that postmodern trends have been characterized by the difficulty of their approaches, since they do not form a unified current of thought. We can only indicate some common characteristics that are actually a source of opposition to modern culture or indicate certain crises of it. For example, modern culture was characterized by its claim to progress, that is to say, it was assumed that the different advances in the various areas of technique and culture guaranteed a linear development always marked by the hope that the future would be better. Faced with this, postmodernity proposes the rupture of that temporal linearity marked by hope and the predominance of a nostalgic or melancholic emotional tone. Likewise, modernity raised the firmness of the Enlightenment project from which all modern political currents, from liberalism to Marxism, were fed —in varying degrees—, our current definition of democracy and human rights. Postmodernism raises positions that indicate that this Enlightenment nucleus is no longer functional in a multicultural context; that the Enlightenment, despite its contributions, had an ethnocentric and authoritarian-patriarchal character based on the primacy of European culture and that, therefore, either there is nothing to rescue from the Enlightenment, or, even if it were possible, would no longer be desirable. For this reason, postmodern philosophy has had as one of its main contributions the development of multiculturalism and difference feminisms.

The main opponents of postmodernism have been members of critical theory and more contemporary Marxists who, while recognizing the failures of modernity and its Enlightenment center, recognize certain democratic values of equality as valuable and inalienable and citizenship. Said values, propose these authors, —such as, for example, Jürgen Habermas— are the only safeguard against social fragmentation and the precariousness of the nation state. For this reason, they propose that, rather than seeking a postmodernity, it is necessary to carry out —as a philosophical and political project— a new Enlightenment of modernity.

After the attacks of September 11 and the profound geopolitical changes that they entailed, in addition to the weakening of the binding legal force of human rights, the discussion of postmodernity lost momentum, since, as we have said before, this it is characterized ―at least up to now― by its denial definitions. The term Postmodernity has given way to others such as late modernity, liquid modernity, risk society, globalization, late or cognitive capitalism, which have become more efficient categories of analysis than Postmodernity. On the other hand, Postmodernism continues to be a category that in aesthetic fields has proven to be very productive and not necessarily contradictory with respect to the ones just indicated.

As a historical period

After the end of the Cold War as a consequence of the Revolutions of 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) as its main symbol, the end of the polar age became evident. This results in the crystallization of a new global paradigm, whose maximum social, political and economic exponent is globalization.

The postmodern world can be differentiated and divided into two great realities: the historical-social reality, and the socio-psychological reality. Next we will give its characteristics.

Historical-social characteristics

• In contrast to Modernity, postmodernity is the era of disenchantment. Utopias and the idea of overall progress are renounced. He bets on the race for individual progress.
• The supposed limits of modern sciences are preached in terms of the generation of true, cumulative and universal knowledge.
• There is a change in the capitalist economic order, moving from an economy of production to an economy of consumption.
• The great charismatic figures disappear and there are countless small idols that last until something more novel and attractive comes up.
• The revaluation of nature and the defense of the environment are mixed with compulsion to consumption.
• The mass media and the mass consumption industry become power centers.
• Stop importing the content of the message, to revaluate the way it is transmitted and the degree of conviction it can produce.
• Ideology disappears as a form of choice of leaders being replaced by the image.
• There is an excessive emission of information (often contradictory), through all media.
• The mass media become transmitters of the truth, which is expressed in the fact that what does not appear by a mass media simply does not exist for society.
• The receiver moves away from the information received by removing it from reality and relevance, making it mere entertainment.
• The privacy and life of others becomes a show, especially in the context of social networks.
• Disacralization of politics.
• Dismitification of leaders.
• Questioning of great religions.

Sociopsychological characteristics

• Individuals only want to live the present; the future and the past lose importance.
• There's a search for the immediate.
• Process of loss of individual personality through a contradictory procedure, as it seeks to differentiate itself from others by emulating social fashions.
• The only revolution the individual is willing to carry out is the interior.
• It worships the body and personal liberation.
• Attraction for the alternative: plastic art, music, cinema, etc., in the quest to differentiate themselves from others.
• It becomes mystical as a justification for events.
• There is constant concern about major disasters and at the end of the world.
• Loss of faith in reason and science, but in counterpart worships technology.
• Man bases his existence on relativism and the plurality of choices, just as subjectivism permeates the view of reality.
• Loss of faith in public power.
• Despreoccupation with injustice.
• Disappearing idealisms.
• Loss of personal ambition of self-improvement.
• Disappearance of the valuation of the effort.
• There are diverse revelations about the Church and belief in deities.
• Great changes appear around the various religions.
• People learn to share fun via the internet.

As a philosophical attitude

As an artistic movement

The Sydney Opera.

Postmodernity in an artistic sense encompasses a large number of currents from the 1950s to the present; It is difficult to define in general the limits between the most daring achievements of modernism and the first postmodern works, although some arts—among which architecture stands out—enjoyed a programmatic and organized postmodern movement from very early on. The most notable features of postmodern art are the appreciation of industrial and popular forms, the weakening of barriers between genres and the deliberate and insistent use of intertextuality, frequently expressed through collage or pastiche.'.

Cinema and television are today some of the media most capable of expressing the characteristics of this art.

Architecture

Postmodern architecture developed around the years 1960-1980, discarding the values and languages of the Modern Movement and postulating new orders based on the recovery and deliberate and banal transformation of classical orders. simply as an anthropomorphic concept.

Plastic arts and music

La transvanguardia (1979) is the first clearly postmodern artistic movement and some artistic movements of the 1980s such as the Madrid Movida could also be framed within postmodernism in the plastic arts and music, although their authors were not strictly aware of it. its inclusion.

Cinema

One of the most significant social symptoms of postmodernism is found in the Matrix film series and others such as Blade Runner, Buffalo '66 , American Beauty, Fight Club, Linha de Passe, Spring Breakers and all of Larry Clark's filmography in general, especially in Kids, Ken Park, and Wassup Rockers where the enhancement of aesthetics and the absence of causal guilt, together with the perception of an uncertain future and reality, become evident. In all of them the preeminence of the fragments over the whole, a break in temporal linearity, the abandonment of the aesthetics of the beautiful in the Kantian style, the loss of social cohesion and, above all, the primacy of a melancholic and nostalgic emotional tone, can be observed.

Literature

Although it is not easy to talk about postmodern authors, characteristics of postmodernity are recognized in many of the authors of contemporary literature, such as the Americans David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster, Giannina Braschi, John Fowles, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, the German Winfried G. Sebald, the Italian Susanna Tamaro, the Mexican Felipe Montes, the French Michel Houellebecq, Ariel Garaffo, and Juan Manuel Tucky, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Chuck Palahniuk along with many others. If one tried to atomize postmodernity into two works, one could choose The name of the rose by Umberto Eco and If a winter night a traveler by Italo Calvino.

Characteristics, according to Alberto Fuguet:

• Development of a new realistic memesis, product of the consideration of the world as an ontological problem (and not just epistemological).
• Reconfiguration and new treatment of the author, the narrator, the characters and the reader, as a result of the consolidation of the weak subject of representation.
• Preference for heterotopic spaces and temporary confusion.
• Recurso, at the macrostructural level, of metafiction, recursivity, pastiche, parody and appropriation.
• At the microstructural level, staged a postmodern anti-course: recourse to literal metaphor, allegory, polyphony and spatialization.
• Hedonism and end of utopia as a thematic map.
• Attention to mass culture and aesthetic democratization as a result of its purpose to unite the novel with life.^{[chuckles]required]}

This last point is the one that interests the most in the relationship between literature and popular culture, insofar as postmodernism is closely related to the consolidation of the phenomenon of the massification of art, which in general is manifested by the integration (at above all through citation and pastiche) of canonical codes and massive codes and that in the particular field of literature gives rise to the term «paraliterature».

Definitions and critiques of postmodernity according to authors

Jürgen Habermas: For this author, postmodernism actually presents itself as antimodernity. He defines postmodernists as "young conservatives" and says that they recover the basic experience of aesthetic modernity; they claim as their own the confessions of something that is subjective, freed from the obligations of work and utility, and with this experience they take a step outside the modern world. This author defended the diversity of different cultures under the primacy of human rights as a normative basis for "a life free from domination." This means carrying out a second Enlightenment of modernity, which corrects its failures, while preserving its civic and democratic achievements.

Jean-François Lyotard: this author criticized modern society for the realism of money, which accommodates all trends and needs, as long as they have purchasing power. He criticized the meta-discourses: idealists, illuminists, the Christian, the Marxist and the liberal, incapable of leading to liberation. Postmodern culture is characterized by disbelief regarding meta-narratives, invalidated by their practical effects and currently it is not a question of proposing an alternative system to the current one, but of acting in very diverse spaces to produce concrete changes. The current operational criterion is technological and not the judgment about what is true and fair. He defended cultural plurality and the richness of diversity.

Giannina Braschi: Based in New York, this postmodern poet is known for her urban fantasy and linguistic and structural renewals that break down the barriers between fiction, poetry, and drama. Her work, written in three languages —Spanish, Spanglish, and English—, expresses the cultural process of so many Hispanics who have immigrated to the United States and explores the political options of Puerto Rico: nation, colony, and State. She is the author of the celebrated bilingual novel Yo-Yo Boing! and the postmodern classic The Empire of Dreams. In her new book, written in English, United States of Banana, Braschi dramatizes the fall of the US empire, declaring the independence of Puerto Rico and granting US passports to all Latin American citizens.

Andreas Huyssen: for this author, there is a relationship between aesthetic modernism and post-structuralism (which is a variant of confident modernism in its rejection of representation and reality in its denial of the subject, the history, etc.) This author defends that postmodern culture should be captured in its achievements and its losses, in its promises and perversions and tries to defend with his works (Hidden Dialecta, Guide to the postmodernity…) that if the vanguards tried to change the world, technology, the cultural industry, did more. The emergence of postmodern culture was due to the new technologies that rely on language: the media and the culture of the image. According to Lyotard, communication technologies have produced an information society.

Gianni Vattimo: For Vattimo, we have entered postmodernity, a kind of “informative babel”, where communication and the media take on a central character. Postmodernity marks the overcoming of modernity led by univocal conceptions of closed models, of great truths, of consistent foundations, of history as a unitary trace of events. Postmodernity opens the way, according to Vattimo, to tolerance, to diversity. It is the passage from strong, metaphysical thought, from well-defined philosophical worldviews, from true beliefs, to weak thought, to a form of weak nihilism, to a carefree passing and, consequently, away from existential acrimony. For Vattimo, the ideas of postmodernism and weak thinking are closely related to the development of the multimedia scenario, with the taking of a media position in the new scheme of values and relationships.

Based on the work of this author, multiple works have been carried out on the theory of the media in postmodernity.

Jesús Ballesteros: for Ballesteros, the technocratic model, based on increasing production at the lowest economic cost, seems to be increasingly imposed in the world, which is accompanied by social inequalities. In contrast to this society, in which he dominates what the author calls «postmodernity as decadence», he proposes to radicalize the demands of reason and democracy, delving into their roots. It is what "postmodernity as resistance" intends, the answer that the author gives to the perplexities of our time.

Rosa María Rodríguez Magda: for this author, if postmodernity postulated the end of the Great Stories, now we would have entered a new stage that she calls transmodernity, characterized by the appearance of a new Great Stories: globalization. This paradigm must recover the challenges of Modernity, assuming postmodern criticism. Her theory is in line with the contributions made by Baudrillard, Bauman and Zizek.

Miguel Ángel Garrido Gallardo: the director of the Spanish Dictionary of International Literary Terms defines Postmodernity: «A period in the history of Western culture whose episteme (or 'vision of the world') is characterized by the notes of nominalism, agnosticism, relativism, disinterest in truth and scientism. These notes are related to each other and with consequences such as eclecticism, predominance of the formal, search for new ways of expression or lack of commitment.