Which is more postmodern?
"The painter is in principle that only fully independent producer, who as a rule needs no further intermediation to realize a work of art." (p.94)
v.
"Television, which was so decisive in the passage to a new epoch, has no modernist past. It became the most powerful medium of all in the postmodern period itself." (p.122)
Conclusion:
"The arrival of novel kinds of connexion and simulation will tend unify rather than divide the urban centers of coming century, even across vast differences in average incomes. So long as the system of capital prevails, each new advance in the industry of images increases the radius of the postmodern." (p.123)
I feel like the television business (commercials and media corporations) is the anti postmodern, but seinfeld, the office, etc are the definition of postmodern. Everywhere I see contradictions, yet they all seem to make sense, kinda... Thoughts???
I think - and I may be wrong about this - that giving either Television or Visual Arts the postmodernism heavyweight belt, based on just the above quotes, ignores the weird ambivalence that discussions of postmodernism tend to turn on, and may also end up ignoring the polysemy of the term 'postmodernism' itself. So when an author (and which author?) identifies a lot of postmodern energies (and what energies?) in television, does the author perceive this as a good thing or a bad thing? It will probably depend on how that author feels about postmodernism, and what she identifies it as. For Harvey, the duplication and disposability of images and the instantaneous collapse of space may very well be aspects of postmodernity, and ones that find their ultimate expression in the television industry, but this doesn't seem like an uncomplicatedly good or positive thing for him, seems less 'positively' postmodern than, say, the 'representation of the unrepresentable,' or the staging of failures of representation, that both Jameson* and Lyotard find liberating examples of in the visual arts. And obviously Adorno and Horkheimer, to the degree that they'll call television 'postmodern' at all, will do so pejoratively, maybe as against Anderson in the quotes you've pulled.
But yeah, if by 'which is more postmodern' you just mean 'which has more postmodern attributes,' without regard to whether those attributes are positively or negatively charged, then coming to some sort of decision Re Painters vs. The Boob Tube might be more cut and dry.
*Although it's worth noting that the installation piece Jameson highlights as staging a failure of representation particularly successfully does so by recourse to television screens.
--Guattari Hero
Your confusion with how these contradictions exist yet still make sense reminds me of our class discussion last week. The question was posed about whether works that we view as postmodernism are those that fall under this title due to characteristics that we relate postmodernism to, or whether these are postmodern because it creates a reflective questioning and objectivity to our situation.
These seem to be simply two different takes on postmodernism, but nonetheless both contribute to the understanding of postmodernism. Therefore, it allows such an example, like of the role of television, to incorporate these contradictions without much conflict.