Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. Many of the sophisticated visual puns used by advertising can be described as postmodern. Postmodern texts will employ a range of referential techniques such as
bricolage, and will use images and ideas in a way that is entirely alien to their original function, for example using a war scene in a pop video.
Labels given to culture forms, display the following qualities:
Self reflexivity: this involves the seemingly paradoxical combination of self-consciousness and some sort of historical grounding
Irony: Post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression, but it also abuses, installs, and subverts conventions and usually negotiates contradictions through irony
Boundaries: Post modernism challenges the boundaries between genres, art forms, theory and art, high art and the mass media
Constructs: Post modernism is actively involved in examining the constructs society creates including, but not exclusively, the following:
- Nation: Post modernism examines the construction of nations/nationality and questions such constructions
- Gender: Post modernism reassesses gender, the construction of gender, and the role of gender in cultural formations
- Race: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of race
- Sexuality: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of sexuality
"Postmodernism is cultural movement that came after modernism, also it follows our shift from being a industrial society to that of an information society. Markers of the postmodern culture include opposing hierarchy, diversifying and recycling culture, questioning scientific reasoning, and embracing paradox. Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding modernism".
"Postmodern style is often characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche, and irony. Postmodern theorists see postmodern art as a conflation or reversal of well-established modernist systems, such as the roles of artist versus audience or seriousness versus play".
A few key terms that you’ll find it useful to know. These terms can form the basis of analysis when looking at a text from a postmodern perspective:
• intertextuality – one media text referring to another
• parody – mocking something in an original way
• pastiche – a stylistic mask, a form of self-conscious imitation
• homage – imitation from a respectful standpoint
• bricolage – mixing up and using different genres and styles
• simulacra – simulations or copies that are replacing ‘real’ artefacts
• hyperreality – a situation where images cease to be rooted in reality
• fragmentation – used frequently to describe most aspects of society, often in relation to identity
Ritzer suggested that postmodern culture is signified by the following:
• The breakdown of the distinction between high culture and mass culture. Think: Black Swan-a film about a prima ballerina laced with a liberal dose of crowd pleasing sex and (psychological) violence.
• The breakdown of barriers between genres and styles. Think: Django Unchained a mixture of spaghetti western, drams, action film, serious comment on slavery.
• Mixing up of time, space and narrative. Think: Inception or The Mighty Boosh.
• Emphasis on style rather than content. Think: Little Mix, One Direction.
• The blurring of the distinction between representation and reality. Think: TOWIE or Celebrity Big Brother.
The French theorist Baudrillard argues that contemporary society increasingly reflects the media; that the surface image becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the reality. Think about all the times you have heard an actor on a soap-opera say, that when they are out and about, people refer to them by their character’s name. Look at The Sun’s website and search stories on Nicholas Hoult when he was in Skins: he is predominantly written about as though he is ‘Tony’, his character in Skins.
