Primary Problem:
Constructing Trajectories of History and Culture

For philosophers, historians, artists, and theorists who have developed arguments about these historical moments or movements, "Modernism/Modernity" and "Postmodernism" are all caught up in a web of discourses with assumptions and ideologies that need a self-reflexive critique.

Much of the debate presupposes the possibility of a critique of history, conceptualized as having a trajectory, goal, end (telos > teleology), which was, or was not, fulfilled in the modernist philosophies, hopes, and aspirations of the 1930s-1950s.

What was Modernism?

As we know, each discourse concern 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 postmodernity as an historical condition or position (political/economic/ social), an era we're still supposedly in regardless of anyone's state of awareness.

vs. an intentional movement in the arts, culture, philosophy, and politics that uses various strategies to subvert what is seen as dominant in modernism or modernity.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define the postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.
--Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard:
The postmodern as a historical/cultural "condition" based on a dissolution of master narratives or metanarratives (totalizing narrative paradigms like progress and national histories), a crisis in ideology when ideology no longer seems transparent but contingent and constructed (see The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge).

Frederic Jameson:
Postmodernism as a movement in arts and culture corresponding to a new configuration of politics and economics, "late capitalism": transnational consumer economies based on global scope of capitalism (See Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism).

Post-Modern Artists' views:
Postmodernity as a phase of knowing and practice, abandoning the assumptions, prejudices, and constraints of modernism to embrace the contradictions, irony, and profusion of pop and mass culture. "High" and "low" culture/art categories made useless and irrelevant, art from outsider and non-Western cultures embraced, consumer society turned inside out. The grand linear narrative of art history and Western cultural history is exposed as ideological and constructed for class interests.

after modernism
subsumes, 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 modernism
subverting, resisting, opposing, or countering features of modernism

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

the historical era following the modern
an 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

Crises in the Representation of History

Postmodern historians and philosophers question the representation of history and cultural identities: history as "what 'really' happened" (external to representation or mediation) vs. history as a "narrative of what happened" a "mediated representation" with cultural/ideological interests.

Art works are likewise caught up in the problem of representation and mediation--of what, for whom, from what ideological point of view?

Jameson:
"history is only accessible to us in narrative form". History requires representation, mediation, in narrative, a story-form encoded as historical.

Dissolution of the transparency of history and tradition: Can we get to the (unmediated) referents of history?

Multiculturalism, competing views of history and tradition.

Shift from universal histories, from the long durée (long time-span of historical periods), to local and explicitly contingent histories. History and identity politics: who can write or make art? for whom? from what standpoint?

Walter Benjamin's recognition of the non-neutrality of history:

"Where are the empathies [of traditional historicism?] The answer is inevitable: with the victor. Hence empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment... They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism... [A historical materialist] regards it as his task to brush history against the grain." 

"For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably." 

(From "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt) 

"the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture" (Jameson).

Pastiche and parody of multiple styles: old forms of "content" become mere "styles"

stylistic masks, image styles, without present content: the meaning is in the mimicry

"in 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" (Jameson).

No individualism or individual style, voice, expressive identity. All signifiers circulate and recirculate prior and existing images and styles.

The postmodern in advertising: attempts to provide illusions of individualism (ads for jeans, cars, etc.) through images that define possible subject positions or create desired positions (being the one who's cool, hip, sexy, desirable, sophisticated...).

"our advertising...is fed by postmodernism in all the arts and is inconceivable without it" (Jameson)

Po-Mo as late capitalism: transnational capitalism without borders, only networks and info flows.

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).

Jameson's own nostalgia? Did this ever exist?

Culture on Fast Forward: Time and history replaced by speed, futureness, accelerated obsolescence.

Critique: note the image of the past and origins presupposed in the view of history and the postmodern, the sense of Hegelian trajectories with no possible future in view to be argued for.