Name : Asari Bhavyang .M
Roll no :-3
Enrollment No:-3069206420200002
Course:-M.A (English)Sem3
Subject:-Cultural Studies
Topic:-What are postmodernism and popular culture?
Teacher Name:- Dilip Barad sir
Batch :- 2021-2023
Email:- asaribhavyang7874@gmail.com
Department:- Department of English
Q-1 What are postmodernism and popular culture?
- Postmodernism and Popular Culture:-
Most contributions to the debate on postmodernism agree that whatever else it is or might be, postmodernism has something to do with the development of popular culture in the late twentieth century in the advanced capitalist democracies of the West. That is, whether postmodernism is seen as a new historical moment, a new sensibility, or a new cultural style, popular culture is cited as a terrain on which these changes can be most readily found.
- POPULAR CULTURE AND THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNISM:-
It is in the late 1950s and early 1960s that we see the beginnings of what is now understood as postmodernism. In the work of the American cultural critic, Susan Sontag , we encounter the celebration of what she calls a ‘new sensibility. As she explains: ‘One important consequence of the new sensibility is that the distinction between high” and “low” culture seems less and less meaningful.’The postmodern ‘new sensibility’ rejected the cultural elitism of modernism. Although it often ‘quoted’ popular culture, modernism was marked by a deep suspicion of all things popular. Its entry into the museum and the academy as official culture was undoubtedly made easier by its appeal to, and homologous relationship with, the elitism of class society. The response of the postmodern ‘new sensibility’ to modernism’s canonization was a re-evaluation of popular culture. The postmodernism of the 1960s was therefore in part a populist attack on the elitism of modernism. It signaled a refusal of what Andreas Huyssen in After the
Great Divide (1986) calls ‘the great divide … discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture. Moreover, according to Huyssen, ‘To a large extent, it is by the distance we have traveled from this “great divide” between mass culture and modernism that we can measure our own cultural postmodernity.’ The American and British pop art movement of the 1950s and the 1960s, with its rejection of the distinction between popular and high culture, is postmodernism’s first cultural flowering. As pop art’s first theorist Lawrence Alloway explains:
The area of contact was mass-produced urban culture: movies, advertising, science fiction, pop music. We felt none of the dislike of commercial culture standard among most intellectuals, but accepted it as a fact, discussed it in detail, and consumed it enthusiastically. One result of our discussions was to take Pop culture out of the realm of ‘escapism’, ‘sheer entertainment, ‘relaxation’, and to treat it with the seriousness of art.
Seen from this perspective, postmodernism first emerges out of a generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism. The insistence on an absolute distinction between high and popular culture came to be regarded as the ‘unhip’ assumption of an older generation. One sign of this collapse can be seen in the merging of art and pop music. For example, Peter Blake designed the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant-Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Richard Hamilton designed the cover of their ‘white album’; Andy Warhol designed the cover of the Rolling Stones’ album, Sticky Fingers. By the mid-1980s, the postmodern ‘new sensibility’ had become a condition and for many a reason to despair. According to Jean-Francois Lyotard, the postmodern condition is marked by a crisis in the status of knowledge in Western societies. This is expressed as incredulity towards ‘metanarratives‘, such as God, Marxism, scientific progress. Steven Connor suggests that Lyotard‘s analysis may be read ‘as a disguised allegory of the condition of academic knowledge and institutions in the contemporary world’. Lyotard’s ‘diagnosis of the postmodern condition is, in one sense, the diagnosis of the final futility of the intellectual’. Lyotard is himself aware of what he calls the contemporary intellectual’s ‘negative heroism’. Intellectuals have, he argues, been losing their authority since ‘the violence and critique mounted against the academy during the sixties’. Iain Chambers makes much the same point but from a different perspective. He argues that the debate over postmodernism can in part be understood as ‘the symptom of the disruptive ingression of popular culture, its aesthetics, and intimate possibilities, into a previously privileged domain. Theory and academic discourses are confronted by the wider, unsystematized, popular networks of cultural production and knowledge. The intellectual’s privilege to explain and distribute knowledge is threatened.’
Like Chambers, Angela McRobbie welcomes postmodernism, seeing it as ‘the coming into being of those whose voices were historically drowned out by the metanarratives of mastery, which were, in turn, both patriarchal and imperialist’. Postmodernism, she argues, has enfranchised a new body of intellectuals; voices from the margins speaking from positions of difference: ethnic, gender, class, sexual preference; those whom she refers to as ‘the new generation of intellectuals. Kobena Mercer makes a similar point, seeing postmodernism as in part an unacknowledged response to ‘the emerging voices, practices and identities of dispersed African, Caribbean and Asian peoples [who have] crept in from the margins of postimperial Britain to dislocate commonplace certainties and consensual “truths” and thus open up new ways of seeing, and understanding’.
For Jean, Baudrillard hyperrealism is the characteristic mode of postmodernity. In the realm of the hyperreal, the ‘real’ and the imaginary continually implode into each other. The result is that reality and what Baudrillard calls ‘simulations’ are experienced as without difference operating along a roller-coaster continuum. Simulations can often be experienced as more real than the real itself ‘ even better than the real thing’, in the words of the U2 song.
The evidence for hyperrealism is said to be everywhere. For example, we live in a world in which people write letters addressed to characters in soap operas, making them offers of marriage, sympathizing with their current difficulties, offering them new accommodation, or just writing to ask how they are coping with life. Television villains are regularly confronted in the street and warned about the possible future consequences of not altering their behavior. Television doctors, television lawyers, and television detectives regularly receive requests for advice and help. Baudrillard calls this ‘the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV.
John Fiske claims in Media Matters that postmodern media no longer provide ‘secondary representations of reality; they affect and produce the reality that they mediate’. Moreover, in our postmodern world, all events that ‘matter’ are media events. He cites the example of the arrest of O. J. Simpson: ‘Local people watching the chase on TV went to O. J.’s house to be there at the showdown, but took their portable TVs with them in the knowledge that the live event was not a substitute for the mediated one but a complement to it. On seeing themselves on their own TVs, they waved to themselves, for postmodern people have no problem in being simultaneously and indistinguishably live people and media people.’ These people knew implicitly that the media do not simply report or circulate the news, they produce it. Therefore, in order to be part of the news of O. J. Simpson’s arrest, it was not enough to be there, one had to be there on television. In the hyperreal world of the postmodern, there is no longer a clear distinction between a ‘real’ event and its media representation. In the same way, O. J. Simpson’s trial cannot be neatly separated into a ‘real’ event that television then represented as a media event. Anyone who watched the proceedings unfold on TV knows that the trial was conducted at least as much for the television audience as it was for those present in the court. Without the presence of the cameras, this would have been a very different event indeed.
Fredric Jameson is an American Marxist cultural critic who has written a number of very influential essays on postmodernism. According to his account postmodernism is a culture of pastiche, disfigured by the ‘complacent play of historical allusion’. Postmodern culture is a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum’. Rather than a culture of pristine creativity, postmodern culture is a culture of quotations. Instead of ‘original’ cultural production, we have cultural production born out of other cultural production. It is a culture ‘of flatness or deathlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense. A culture’ ~ images and surfaces, without ‘latent’ possibilities, it derives its hermeneutic force from other images, other surfaces. Jameson acknowledges that modernism itself often ‘quoted’ from other cultures and other historical moments, but he insists that there is a fundamental difference postmodern cultural texts do not just quote other cultures, other historical moments, they randomly cannibalize them to the point where any sense of critical or historical distance ceases to exist – there is only pastiche. Perhaps his best-known example of the postmodern culture of pastiche is what he calls the ‘nostalgia film’. The category could include a number of films from the 1980s and 1990s: Back to the Future I and II, Peggy Sue Got Married, Rumble Fish, Angel Heart, Blue Velvet. He argues that the nostalgia film sets out to recapture the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of America in the 1950s. But the nostalgia film is not just another name for the historical film. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that Jameson‘s own list includes Star Wars. Now it might seem strange to suggest that a film about the future can be nostalgic for the past, but as Jameson explains in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society‘ .
Films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Independence Day, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves operate in a similar way to evoke a sense of the narrative certainties of the past. In this way, according to Jameson, the nostalgia film either recaptures and represents the atmosphere and stylistic features of the past and/or recaptures and represents certain styles of viewing of the past. What is of absolute significance for Jameson Postmodernism is that such films do not attempt to recapture or represent the ‘real’ past, but always make do with certain cultural myths and stereotypes about the past. They offer what he calls ‘false realism’, films about other films, representations of other representations. In this way, history is effaced by ‘historicism … the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion’. Here we might cite films like True Romance or Pulp Fiction. More than this, Jameson insists that our awareness of the play of stylistic allusion ‘is now a constitutive and essential part’ of our experience of the postmodern film. Again, it is an example of a culture ‘in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces “real” history. This relates to a second stylistic feature Jameson identifies, what he calls schizophrenia. The schizophrenic, he claims, experiences time not as a continuum, but as a perpetual present, which is only occasionally marked by the intrusion of the past or the possibility of a future. The ‘reward’ for the loss of conventional selfhood is an intensified sense of the present – what Dick Hebdige, in Hiding the Light, calls ‘acid perspectivism’.
To call postmodern culture schizophrenic is to claim that it has lost its sense of history. It is a culture suffering from ‘historical amnesia, locked into the discontinuous flow of perpetual presents. The temporal culture of modernism has given way to the spatial culture of postmodernism.
TWO EXAMPLES OF POSTMODERN POPULAR CULTURE
A discussion of postmodernism and popular culture might highlight any number of different cultural forms and cultural practices: television, music video, film, pop music, advertising. I will consider here two prime examples: pop music and television.
POSTMODERN POP MUSIC :-
As Frith and Home point out in Art into Pop, ‘Pop songs are the soundtrack of postmodern daily life, inescapable in lifts and airports, pubs and restaurants, streets and shopping centers and sports grounds’. Connor argues that pop music is perhaps ‘the most representative of postmodern cultural forms’.Jameson distinguishes between modernist and postmodern pop music, making the argument that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones represent a modernist moment, against which punk rock and the new wave can be seen as postmodern. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are as different from each other as together they are different from, say, the Clash and Talking Heads. In fact, ‘it would be much easier to make an argument in which the distinction is made between the “artifice” of the Beatles and Talking Heads and the “authenticity” of the Rolling Stones and the Clash’.
POSTMODERN TELEVISION
Television, like pop music, does not have a period of modernism to which it can be ‘post’. This claim can be made on the basis of a number of television’s textual and contextual features. If we take a negative view of postmodernism, as the domain of Baudrillardian simulations, then television seems an obvious example of the process – with its supposed reduction of the complexities of the world to an ever-changing flow of depthless and banal visual imagery. If, on the other hand, we take a positive view of postmodernism, then the visual and verbal practices of television can be put forward, say, as the knowing play of intertextuality (the way one text is inscribed with other texts) and ‘radical eclecticism’, encouraging and helping to produce the postmodern ‘sophisticated bricoleur’ . For example, a television series like Twin Peaks, both constitutes an audience as bricoleurs and in turn is watched by an audience who celebrates its bricolage.
Collins uses Twin Peaks as a means of bringing together the different strands of the relationship between postmodernism and television. Twin Peaks is chosen because it ‘epitomizes the multiple dimensions of televisual postmodernism’. He argues that the postmodernism of the series is the result of a number of interrelated factors: David Lynch’s reputation as a filmmaker, the stylistic features of the series, and, finally, its commercial intertextuality. At the economic level, Twin Peaks represents an attempt by American network television to win back affluent sections of the television audience lost to cable and video. In this sense, Twin Peaks marks a new era in network television’s view of the audience. Instead of seeing the audience as a homogeneous mass, the series was part of a strategy in which the audience is seen as fragmented, consisting of different segments – stratified by age, class, gender, geography, and race – of interest to different advertisers. The mass appeal now involves attempts to intertwine the different segments to enable them to be sold to different sections of the advertising market. The significance of Twin Peaks, at least from this perspective, is that it was marketed to appeal to those most likely to have been tempted away from network television by VCR, cable, and cinema. In short, the so-called ‘yuppie’ generation.
Collins demonstrates this by addressing the way the series was promoted. First, there was the intellectual appeal- Lynch as auteur, Twin Peaks as avant-garde television. This was followed by Twin Peaks as soap opera. Together with the two appeals soon coalesced into a postmodern reading formation in which the series was ‘valorized as would-be cinema and would-be soap opera’. This was supported and sustained by the polysemic play of Twin Peaks itself. The series is, as Collins suggests, ‘aggressively eclectic’, not only in its use of conventions from Gothic horror, police procedural, science fiction, and soap opera but also in the different ways- from straight to parody – these conventions are mobilized in particular scenes. Collins also notes the play of ‘tonal variations … within and across scenes’ moving the audience from moments of parodic distance to moments of emphatic intimacy, continually playing with our expectations. Although this is a known aspect of Lynch’s filmic technique, it is also a characteristic ‘reflective of changes in television entertainment and of viewer involvement in that entertainment’. In other words, this fluctuation in generic conventions ‘describes not just Twin Peaks but the very act of moving up and down the televisual scale of the cable box. Viewing perspectives are no longer mutually exclusive, but set in perpetual alternation.’ What makes Twin Peaks different from other soap operas is not that it produces shifting viewing positions, but that it ‘explicitly acknowledges this oscillation and the suspended nature of television viewing doesn’t just acknowledge the multiple subject positions that television generates; it recognizes that one of the great pleasures of the televisual text is that very suspension and exploits it for its own sake.’ In this way, Twin Peaks is not a reflection of postmodernism, nor is it an allegory of postmodernism, it is a specific address to the postmodern condition – a postmodern text – and as such it helps to define the possibilities of entertainment in the contemporary capitalist world.
