Thursday 28 February 2013

Post Modernism

This reading starts with Angela McRobbie's quote on post modernism. She says Postmodernism has entered into a diverse number of vocabularies. The recent debates on Postmodernism are positive attraction and its usefulness to analyse popular culture. Postmodernism is described as what comes after modernism. This reading analyses the positives and negatives of postmodernism.  It has become the 'buzz word'. This seems to have a lot of meanings connotative to it.

There are three post modern aspects. Susan Sontag and Leslie fielder found it to be 'new sensibility'. In 1960, postmodernism shocked and disgusted the middle class.Thus, as Jamenson said, as there was the shift from opposition to hegemonic position of the classics of modernism,the people conquered the university,art galleries and museum.The most important consequence of the new sensibility is the abandonment of Mathew Arnold's theory. Where the claim he did between the three different classes stands less meaningful.

This theory also rejected Arnold's 'best of what is thought and said' and preferred Raymond Williams's 'whole way of life'. The example he uses to explain this is the British and the American pop.While considering pop, Andrew Warhol is a key theorist mentioned of pop art in this reading. This explains how the commercial art was considered as a 'real art' as this was chosen by the ruling class. Objecting Warhol's merging of popular art and the elitism John Rockwell says, 'Art is what we perceive as art'.

Lyotard one of the theorists had his particular focus on the status of function of scientific discourse and knowledge. He explains how the postmodern pedagogy would teach us how to use the knowledge as a form of cultural and economic capital.

One of the most famous postmodern theory is Best and Kellner's theory. Baulliard says 'How it is not possible to seperate the economic and productive realm from the ideologies of culture'.He suggests that postmodern culture is of 'simulacrum' where there is very little or no difference between the copy and the original.

Totally this was a slightly confusing text for me. I couldn't figure out whether post modernism is considered to be good or bad from the text.

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