Modern vs postmodern

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/pomo.html

What was Modernism?

As we know, each discourse concerned with history constructs its own historical objects. Postmodern theory constructs an image of modernism. Was there ever a pre-postmodern consensus about history, identity, core cultural values?

Differentiations:

the idea of the postmodern or post modernity as anhistorical condition or position (political/ economic/ social), an era we're still supposedly in regardless of anyone's state of awareness.

Uses of the term "postmodern"

after modernismsubsumes, assumes, extends the modern or tendencies already present in modernism, not necessarily in strict chronological succession, or working out questions and problems implicit in modernism without a break from core assumptions

contra modernismsubverting, resisting, opposing, or countering features of modernism

equivalent to "late capitalism"culture dominated by post-industrial, consumerist, multi- and trans-national capitalism, beginnings of globalization

the historical era following the modernan historical time-period marker, recognizing cultural, ideological, and economic shifts without a new trajectory (triumphalism) or privileging of values

artistic and stylistic eclecticism (aesthetic postmodernism)hybridization of forms and genres, combining "high" and "low" cultural forms and sources, mixing styles of different cultures or time periods, dehistoricizing and re-contextualizing styles in architecture, visual arts, literature, film, photography

"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.

Some features of postmodern styles:

Nostalgia and retro styles, recycling earlier genres and styles in new contexts (film/TV genres, images, typography, colors, clothing and hair styles, advertising images)

"History" represented through nostalgic images of pop culture, fantasies of the past. History has become one of the styles; historical representations blend with nostalgia.

"the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve... The information function of the media would thus be to help us to forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms of our historical amnesia" (Jameson).