Postmodernism

IMKE Intro 05.09.2006

Last time: Virtual realityWhat’s reality?What’s virtual?

Postmodernism

Why on this course?• ...has a lot to do with (mass) media• ...has a close relation with constructivism

• ...is anchored to present phenomena• Need to analyse the relation of PM to new media... understanding ongoing discussion

...modernism

• Historically positioned end of 1800 - WW2

• Related to– belief in scientific progress– industrialism– mechanical techno-optimism– economical rise

• ”Killed” by WW2

Nature of postmodernism• cultural• philosophical• esthetical• follows European (French!) attitude

• reflects social and technologcal changes after WW2, end of 20th century

Postmodernism

• Relativism w.r. truth and reality

• Constructivism• Analysis of mass-media dominated society

• Postmodernity ≈ social and cultural implications of postmodernism.

Walter Benjamin

• era of mechanical reproduction.

• art has taken on a new meaning and is changing significantly from what it once was

Jean Baudrillard

Critic of postmodernism• "hyperreality" - "simulation" • Unreal nature of contemporary culture in an age of mass communication and mass consumption

• Starting point: postmodern art - framing reality (to non reality)

Baudrillard: Loss of meaning• Lament the loss of reality in post-modern culture• Simulation has become more and more realistic• Actual meaning replaced by a virtual meaning• Reality has been replaced by simulation• There is no more fiction• Models [simulation, VR...] no longer constitute an

imaginary domain with reference to the real• No more fiction

Roland Barthes

• ”The writer's language is not expected to represent reality, but to signify it. (Mythologies, 1957)”

• Semiotics

Michel Foucault

"My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed." - Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (continued)• Truth ≈ instrument of (media) power• Each society creates a "regime of truth" according to its beliefs, values, and mores.

• "Truth," is the construct of the political and economic forces that command the majority of the power within the societal web.

• There is no truly universal truth at all; therefore, the intellectual cannot convey universal truth.

Jacques Derrida

Deconstruction: • an attempt to open a text (literary, philosophical, or otherwise) to several meanings and interpretations

=>multi-perspectivalness

Bruno Latour

• Departed from social constructionism

• truth is multilayered, unascertainable

• ”realistic realism”• critic of technollogy, ”tech dream gone wrong”

More postmodern theorists

Post-Postmodernism?

• What will follow postmodernism?• What arguments are there against postmodernism?

• Will there be a dominating pattern of thought?

• How will interactive bottom-up media and new forms of participation change culture and philosophy?

• Etc.