Approaches to Po-Mo  

Postmodernity vs. the postmodern vs. postmodernism	Differentiate: historical (political/economic/social) condition vs. intentional movement in arts, culture, philosophy, politics.   What was Modernism? Consensus of educated Western people about history, identity, core cultural values.   Jean-François Lyotard: Postmodern as a historical/cultural "condition" based on a dissolution of master narratives or metanarratives, a crisis in ideology when ideology no longer seems transparent (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)
Ways of working with the idea of the "postmodern"	Uses of the term "postmodern"  after modernism (subsumes, assumes, extends the modern or tendencies already present in modernism, not necessarily in strict chronological succession) contra modernism (subverting, resisting, opposing, or countering features of modernism) equivalent to "late capitalism" (post-industrial, consumerist, and multi- and trans-national capitalism) the historical era following the modern (an historical time-period marker) artistic and stylistic ecclecticism (hybridization of forms and genres, mixing styles of different cultures or time periods, de- and re-contextualizing styles in architecture, visual arts, literature) "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)
Postmodernity and the Crisis of the Referent	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" with a point of view and cultural/ideological interests.   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, to local and explicitly contingent histories. History and identity politics: who can write? 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)
Working with Frederic Jameson's categories ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society")	(1) "the transformation of reality into images" (cf. Debord and Baudrillard)  (2) "the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents"  "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. Discuss postmodern 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 Some features of postmodern styles: 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 woukd 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.
The Modern and the Postmodern: Contrasting Tendancies	The features in the table below are only tendencies, not absolutes. In fact, the tendency to see things in seemingly obvious, binary, contrasting categories is usually associated with modernism. The tendency to dissolve binary categories and expose their arbitrary cultural co-dependency is associated with postmodernism. For heuristic purposes only; don't try this at home.

Examples from the 691 Collective