Postmodernity

From MarxWiki

The difference between postmodernity and postmodernism is: the idea of the postmodern or postmodernity as a historical (political/economic/social) condition (an era we're still supposedly in whether we know it not) as opposed to an intentional movement in arts, culture, philosophy, and politics that uses various strategies to subvert what is seen as dominant in modernism or modernity.

Michel Foucault characterizes both modernism and post-modernism as attitudes (rather than an epochs or styles) (`Counternarratives` p14). In this light ,a postmodern attitude is an “incredulity towards metanarratives” and skepticism of beliefs about “truth,” “knowledge,” and “self” which are taken for granted (p3,4).

Ways in which the postmodern can be used/talked about:

after modernism (subsumes, assumes, extends the modern or tendencies already present in modernism, not necessarily in strict chronological succession)

contra modernism (subverting, resisting, opposing, or countering features of modernism)

equivalent to `late capitalism` (post-industrial, consumerist, and multi- and trans-national capitalism)

the historical era following the modern (an historical time-period marker)

artistic and stylistic eclecticism (hybridization of forms and genres, mixing styles of different cultures or time periods, de- and re-contextualizing styles in architecture, visual arts, literature)

`global village` phenomena: globalization of cultures, races, images, capital, products (`information age` redefinition of nation-state identities, which were the foundation of the modern era; dissemination of images and information across national boundaries, a sense of erosion or breakdown of national, linguistic, ethnic, and cultural identities; a sense of a global mixing of cultures on a scale unknown to pre-information era societies)

Common themes in postmodern theory are fragmentation, style, pastiche, parody, the influence of late-capitalism on media culture, nostalgia, subversion, skepticism. Writers include: Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frederic Jameson, Linda Hutcheonand many others. Topics in Postmodernism are as complex and numerous as their authors. In a word, it's really friggin complicated--there really is no one definition of postmodernism. But here's a useful chart: [1]