Postmodernism names many different kinds of cultural object and phenomenon in many different ways. Among these, perhaps three different applications of the term may broadly be distinguished.
First, postmodernism designates a number of developments in the arts and culture in the second half of the twentieth century. The reference point and the point of departure for this form of postmodernism are the various forms of modernism that flourished in the arts and culture in Europe in the first half of the century. Second, it describes the emergence of new forms of social and economic organization, again roughly since the end of the 1939-45 war. As such, its reference point and point of departure is the movement of modernization which characterized the early years of the
century, with the growth of industry, the rise of the mass market and the accelerations in automation, travel, and mass communication. Third, it signals a particular kind of theoretical writing and reflection, usually though not exclusively, writing and reflection which takes the first or second area as its object. It may be useful to distinguish these three areas of application with the terms postmodernism; postmodernity and the postmodern.
Postmodernity signifies the breakdown or radical transformation of the modes of social, economic, and political modernity that had been dominant in most Western industrial nations from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. There are a number of ways in which postmodernism in the arts is held to reflect or bear out these changes in the social and economic sphere. Many writers stress the parallels between the playful multiplication of styles and mixing media characteristic postmodernist art and literature and the move from centralization to decentralization, the sense of accelerated relativity of values, and the dissolution or stable norms and identities in social and political life generally. In a similar way, an art that pushes self-consciousness to the extreme, acknowledging and reveling in its status as fiction or image, seems appropriate to a world that seems to be more and more preoccupied with the fashioning and contemplation of images of itself.
For others, however, the very condition of postmodernity is one in which the relations between the separate realms of social and economic life on the one hand and art and culture on the other have undergone a more fundamental transformation. If it is true that there are powerful parallels between the innovative energies of the artistic modernism and the social and political turbulence of modernity, it is also true that artistic modernism is often characterized by its sense of implacable opposition to the modern world which it inhabits. Seen in this way, the very smoothness of the interchangeably between postmodernist art and social and economic postmodernity may seem less like a vital affinity and more like a collapse of the distance and differentiation necessary for art and literature to claim any serious or transforming function.
If one of the most important characteristics of the postmodern condition is the rise of a generalized self-consciousness in cultural life, then it may seem fitting that one of the most striking evidences of the condition is the emergence of ‘the postmodern’ as a style or sensibility within critical writing itself, such that certain forms of writing about postmodernism, whatever in philosophy, social theory, cultural studies, or literary criticism, come to perform and even consciously to promote the values or qualities that are its object.
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by Cristina Nuta -