L22 Postmodernism Theorists And Quotes

Postmodernism: Theorists and Quotes Purple notes are direct quotes that require quotation marks and must be memorised word for word Green notes are ideas and concepts which can be paraphrased but must be credited to the correct theorist

Jean Francois Lyotard (1924-1998) A French philosopher, sociologist and literary theorist. He wrote The Postmodern Condition – A Report on Knowledge (1979) 1. He defined postmodernism as an “incredulity towards metanarratives”. Metanarratives (or grand narratives) are widely accepted ideologies.

This quote could be used when talking about: 2. “Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.”

This quote could be used when talking about: 3. “In contemporary society and culture — postindustrial society, postmodern culture (…) the grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation. ”

This quote could be used when talking about: Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) 4. A French philosopher, sociologist, cultural theorist, political commentator and photographer. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981) he postulated that we inhabit a society made up wholly of simulacra – simulations of reality that replace any “pure” reality. “Pure” reality is replaced by the hyperreal where any boundary between the real and the imaginary is eroded. The hyperreal is "more real than real": something fake and artificial comes to be more definitive of the real than reality itself.

This idea could be applied to: 5. “He who hangs on to truth has lost”

This quote could be used when talking about: 6. “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

This quote could be used when talking about: 7. “The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void”

This quote could be used when talking about: Fredric Jameson 8. In his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Capital of Late Capitalism (1991) postulated that postmodernism is no longer shocking and has become part of the establishment – it has become its own metanarrative. “As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features – from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism – no longer scandalise anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalised and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society.”

This quote could be used when talking about: Other Theorists: 9. Slavoj Zizek: “Virtual reality simply generalises the procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance, of the hard resistant kernel of the Real – just as decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being real coffee, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being so.” 10. Filiciak: The dissemination of new ways of thinking which make the real and the virtual equal is only a matter of time. Videogames, and especially networked games, are one of the most accurate metaphors of contemporary life. Games are the medium that most perfectly describe our existence and express the way the human self functions in the contemporary world, It is on screen that we can compose our hyper-identity in the most imposing way. Having a free hand when

creating our own images is a commonly- accepted convention in internet but not in the offline world; or rather not yet, because the future belongs to interactive media and hyperidentity. 11. In The New Tolerance (1998) Josh McDowell & Bob Hostetler offer the following definition of postmodernism: “A worldview characterized by the belief that truth does not exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.” Truth is “created by the specific culture and exists only in that culture. Therefore, any system or statement that tries to communicate truth is a power play, an effort to dominate other cultures.”

This quote could be used when talking about: 12. As the cultural theorist Terry Eagleton puts it: “now we ha[ve] a whole society which perform[s] permanently before the looking-glass, weaving everything it d[oes] into one vast mega-text, fashioning at every moment a ghostly mirror-image of its world which double[s] it at every point” (2002)

This quote could be used when talking about: 13. ‘After nearly forty years of watching TV ads, viewers had grown too acclimatized to advertising's routinized messages and reading rules. […] Savvy, media-literate viewers now present advertisers with a challenge. Bored and fatigued, these viewers restlessly flip around the channels in search for something that will momentarily arrest their attention and fascination’ (Goldman and Papson 1994). The creativity, humor, and reflexivity that are typical of intertextual advertisements, constitute an exciting way of appealing to advertising-literate viewers who ‘see through’ classic advertising strategies. If viewers recognize the intertextual references, the advertisement may function as ‘a source of ego enhancement’. By positioning the viewer as the holder of the necessary cultural capital, the advertiser ‘appears to speak to the viewer as a peer’ (Goldman and Papson 1994:). Furthermore, the enjoyment and pleasure that viewers derive from such advertisements, potentially contribute to positive attitudes towards the ad, and hence to the brand (Hitchon and Jura 1997). Also, Stam et al. (1992) point out with regard to intergeneric intertextuality that ‘the self-referential humor signals to the spectator that the commercial is not to be taken seriously, and this more relaxed state of expectation renders the viewer more permeable to the commercial message’. Proctor et al. (2002) even state that the vagueness of such advertisements makes the audience vulnerable to manipulation and confusion.

These ideas could be used when talking about: 14. Cecily Long on the website FlamingoMumbai “Culture asymptotically approaches reality in these works; it cannot fully replicate it. There is no such thing as an undistorted lens”

This quote could be used when talking about: Quotes about the impact of the internet (digimodernism) 15. The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing: you, your family, your education, your neighbourhood, your job, your government, your relation to "the others. And they're changing dramatically." Marshall McLuhan in “The Medium is The Massage” Quotes by Alan Kirby in “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond” 16. The terms by which authority, knowledge, selfhood, reality and time are conceived have been altered, suddenly and forever. 17. But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them. 18. The culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far). 19. pseudo-modernism makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. 20. Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular player. 21. The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet.

22. [Digimodernism] gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product. 23. What is central now is the busy, active, forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate 24. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert. 25. For now we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing almost nothing of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value – anything which human beings might look at again and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time. 26. There is a physicality to the actions of the pseudo-modern textmaker, 27. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. 28. Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-

modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts.