Postmodernism

1. Postmodernism

2. Origins of Postmodernism • The beginning of the postmodern debate essentially began in 1979 with the publication of the essay “The Postmodern Condition” (translated into English in 1983) by French literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard. • Lyotard is widely regarded as one of the most influential postmodern theorists.

3. Postmodernism • Postmodernism is a term used to encompass a wide range of attitudes. It can be said to be immediately relevant to the realms of the arts, philosophy, politics and sociology.

4. Postmodernism • Postmodernism is a label given to a time period in which the abrupt influx of technology and ever-increasing cultural multiplicity must be met with new methods of representation.

5. Fragmentation • Fragmentation. • The postmodernist employs it with a tone of exhilaration and liberation (Barry, 2002: 84).

6. Intertextuality • Intertextuality in The Simpsons through pastiche, parody, and self-reflexivity.

7. High and low art. • Postmodernists regard popular arts as no less crucial to our culture than the more classic arts. • In the postmodern realm it is not infrequent that High and Low Art are mixed together.

8. Intertextuality. • Intertextuality is a prominent aspect in many postmodern art forms, in which works of art or literature frequently refer to each other through parody or pastiche. • Pastiche openly imitates a work in order to make use of its original style. • In the case of parody, a work is imitated with playful satire.

9. Hate authority and hierarchy. • Postmodernism has reacted to the authoritarian hierarchization of culture by subverting conventions, blurring previously distinct boundaries and rejecting traditional aesthetic values. • If the postmodern spirit were to be summed up in simple terms, it might lie in this inherent struggle to avoid hierarchy in any way it manifests itself.

10. Self-reflexivity • Self-reflexivity also characterizes many postmodern works, which explicitly refer to themselves in order to indicate how aware they are of their own constructive character.

11. Lyotard • Lyotard believes knowledge has become a commodity and consequently a means of empowerment. • Lyotard sees knowledge as being communicated through narratives, or different ways of interpreting the world.

12. Lyotard • Grand narratives are authoritative, establishing their political or cultural views as absolute truths beyond any means of criticism. • They have a totalizing effect on the culture, reducing it to universal codes which usurp their local counterparts

13. Lyotard • In a culture driven by grand narratives, the ideology of the predominant regime essentially has a monopoly on knowledge, which Lyotard opposes by calling for a new world of knowledge based on mininarratives.

14. Mini - narratives • Mininarratives do not contain any universal truths but together they form a body of knowledge more adept at describing the contemporary condition than the generalizing ideologies of grand narratives.

15. No metanarratives • For Lyotard, the postmodern culture distances itself from this centralizing effect on knowledge. • Postmodern culture does away with the hierarchy political and religious movements Marxism and Islam seem to enforce.

16. Lyotard • Lyotard announces that “the grand narrative has lost its credibility” (Lyotard, 1984: 37), praising local and temporary knowledge instead. • This is the stage onto which the postmodern artist or writer emerges, each contributing her or his own mininarrative in the form of liberating postmodern expressions.

17. Lyotard • Lyotard’s theory of metanarratives influences the anti-authoritative tendencies in The Simpsons.

18. Habermas – critic of Postmodernism • Habermas disagrees with Lyotard and calls for an end to “artistic experimentation” . He wants “order, unity and security” (Lyotard, 1993: 40).

19. Habermas – critic of Postmodernism • The unity which Habermas desires is dismissed by Lyotard as an illusion which represses the ever-increasing plurality of contemporary culture. • This dismissal is the basis for his theory of grand narratives, or metanarratives.

20. Jameson • In 1984 Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson emerged as one of the most prominent critics of postmodernism with the publication of his essay, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, which he later expanded into a book.

21. Jameson • In the essay, Jameson argues that “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally”. • He describes postmodernism as a cultural dominant driven primarily by the forces of consumer multinational capitalism.

22. Jameson’s thoughts • Jameson described the postmodern condition as “a new kind of flatness, of depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense”.

23. No history any more. • In “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, Jameson describes the loss of historical reality in writing. • “We can no longer represent the historical past; but can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about the past” (Jameson, 2001: 79).

24. Jameson – the loss of historical reality. • In the postmodern era our historical past is represented “not through its content but through glossy stylistic means, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image”

25. Looking back – pastiche. • Jameson says instead of creating our own unique styles we look to the past and imitate old, dead styles through pastiche (Jameson, 2001: 74).

26. Jameson and the loss of historical reality. • We will see that there are parallels between ‘The Simpsons’ and Jameson’s theory on the loss of historical reality in the postmodern era.

27. Baudrillard Cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard appeared on the scene in the early 1980s.

28. Loss of the real! • Baudrillard is associated with the postmodern “loss of the real.” He says there is a problem of representation that comes from themass media’s relentless play with signs and images.

29. Simulacra and Simulation • In “Simulacra and Simulation”1994, Baudrillard says “the distinction between what is real and what is imagined is continually blurred and meaning is systematically eroded.”

30. Hyperreality. • Baudrillard’s most important contribution to postmodernism is the theory of hyperreality.

31. Hyperreality. • According to Baudrillard, the world once consisted of signs that could be associated with their actual referents in reality. • This has been replaced by the postmodern simulacrum, a system in which signs have lost their association with an underlying reality.

32. Simulations of reality • The postmodern world consists of simulations of reality, or hyperrealities, wherein signs refer not to an external reality but to other signs. • The result is a culture in which surface and depth become indistinguishable and superficial appearance is all that can be achieved.

33. No longer real ! • Under the bombardment of images from the dominant media of popular culture – TV, film and advertising – the real becomes subordinate to representation. • Whereas the media once mirrored, reflected or represented reality, the postmodern culture faces the problem of media constructing a hyperreality (see Douglas Kellner, 1989: 68).

34. Beaudrillard • Baudrillard proposes that simulations of reality end up becoming “more real than the real”. • The Gulf War Never Happened!

35. Beaudrillard • Beaudrillard wrote a book “The Gulf War Never Happened”. In this book he claimed that the BBC did not report the truth but propaganda provided by the American and British Governments.

36. Baudrillard • We were told there were ‘smart missiles’ that would only target military targets. This was a lie. Civilian casualties were not reported on television.

37. Beaudrillard • The reason Governments do not want a free press reporting the war goes back 50 years. In the 1960s the news channels reported what was really happening in Vietnam. The public were shocked and distressed at the bombing of civilians. Opinion turned against the war.

38. Baudrillard • In the Gulf War, the Governments wanted to prevent this happening again. Journalists were ‘embedded with the armed forces’ and told what to report. Any journalist who went ‘off message’ was denied information to report.

39. Beaudrillard • The same thing happened in the Iraq war. The public were told Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That was a lie. The public were told there was a link between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorism. That was a lie.

40. “The war You Don’t See” (2010) • John Pilger’s film and television documentary, “The war You Don’t See” (2010) makes clear that much of the news we are presented with is a simulacra of reality. Pilger stresses the difference between what we see and reality.

41. “The war You Don’t See” (2010) • In the Gulf War, BBC journalists who were ‘embedded’ with the armed forces were unwitting accomplices in presenting a postmodern simulacrum of the war. Al Jazeera, a news outlet that refused to report the simulacra, was targeted and bombed by the American forces. Pilger describes Bush and Blair as war criminals

42. “Outfoxed” • This manipulation of news to create simulacra of reality is not just confined to war reporting. It affects politics too. The 2004 film, “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism” by Robert Greenwald highlights the way this news channel deliberately misleads the public.

43. “Outfoxed” • The Fox Logo “Fair and Balanced: You Decide” could not be further from the truth. In America, Fox News supports the Republican Party. As the film progresses, we see that, as a deliberate policy, it is impossible to separate news from commentary.

44. “Outfoxed” • The film maintains Murdoch wants news to be all about opinion. Ex Fox News Reporters speak of a climate of fear. No report can be unbiased. Everything has to have a right wing agenda.

45. “Outfoxed” • An excellent example was in the aftermath of the Iraq war. Fox presented post Saddam Iraq as a success for President Bush by focussing on some jobs being created and one school being re-opened. No mention was made of bombings, unemployment or the chaos that formed part of most people’s lives.

46. “Outfoxed” • It was fascinating to watch the Fox News coverage of the last Presidential Election between Obama and Romney. The bias was undisguised. Even as the results came in, some Fox commentators refused to accept Obama had won.

47. Simulacra of reality • Why does this matter? Why is it controversial? • In a democracy, voters need to make an informed choice. It is impossible for voters to personally interview candidates and the public has to rely on unbiased news reporting to understand different policies.

48. Simulacra of reality • With a biased news channel where a simulacrum is presented as reality, it is impossible for viewers to make an informed choice.

49. Simulacra of reality • The United Kingdom has possibly been spared from the worst excesses of Murdoch by the phone hacking scandal. Due to this, he was unable to purchase all of B Sky B. Had he done so, he might have introduced British Fox News.

50. “Homer Badman” Season 6 Disc 2. Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality can be applied to “The Simpsons”. The role of the mass media in the construction of postmodern hyperreality can be seen in. • “Homer Badman” Season 6 Episode 9. • We will analyse this key episode in detail later.