Postmodernism

Postmodernism is the term used to refer to the non-realist and non-traditional literature and art of the post-Second World War period. Literature and art during this period took certain modernist characteristics to an extreme limit. The term is also used to refer to the general human condition in the “late capitalist” world of the post 1950s.
The term postmodernism was first used emphatically in the 1960s by critics such as Leslie Fielder and Ihab Hassan for the change of sensibility that occurred during the period. Arnold Toynbee became the first person to use the term outside the specific literary critical sense, when he announced in 1947 that we were entering the postmodern age. In the mid 1970s the term gained importance and comprised first architecture, and later dance, theatre, painting, film and music. Jean Francois Lyotard is undoubtedly one of the most important early theoreticians of postmodernism.  Lyotard, a French philosopher, was commissioned by the Council of Universities of Quebec in the late 1970s to do a survey of the state of knowledge in the Western world. In his seminal work The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, first published in 1979 in French and later translated into English in 1984 he decided to used the word “postmodern” to describe the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies. He posited a simple definition for the idea of ‘postmodern’ as “incredulity to metanarratives.” By metanarrative Lyotard  means   all   those   grand   narratives   or   intellectual   discourses   which aim to   offer a comprehensive frame in which to understand some aspect of modern life.  The Enlightenment belief  in   progress, Darwinian theory of evolution, Marxism,  Freudian psychology are   all metanarratives.

Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist was concerned with the transformation that occurred to signs in the passage of time. For him in the postmodern times it is the “Map that precedes the territory” instead of territory preceding the map. Now it is simulation opposed to representation. Simulation is “the radical negation of sign as value.” For him the four successive stages, the image goes through are the following:

a     a )  It is the basic reflection of reality.

b     b )  It masks and perverts a basic reality.

c     c )  It masks the absence of a basic reality.

d     d )  It bears no relation to any reality whatever; it is its own pure simulacrum.

Another important postmodern theoretician is Frederic Jameson who wrote the foreword to Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition. Jameson’s two influential articles on postmodernism are, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” later expanded and elaborated as, “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” and “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodern Debate.” In the first essay he explores the important features of postmodernism of which to him the most important is pastiche. Pastiche is a patchwork of words, sentences or complete passages from various authors or one author. It is like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style. It is a neutral practice, but unlike mimicry it does not have hidden motives and satirical aim. In postmodernism “text” is supplemented or displaced by “discourse.” A keynote feature of postmodernism is the fading of boundaries between genres.