Defining Modernism and Post-Modernism

Defining Modernism and Post Modernism

 

Modernism

 

This progressive movement of society is associated with what has been described as modernity or modernism. It is essentially a historical period in Western culture and has its origins in the Enlightenment at the end of the 18^th century(1890) and for academic purposes can be seen to be over by 1940.

 The Enlightenment, and the historical period that it brought in,  can be argued, as characterised by three major tenets.

 

• Intellectually, there was the power of reason over ignorance

 

• There was the power of order over disorder

 

• There was the power of science over superstition

  These three statements were regarded by many as universal truths. It was believed by the left wing intellectual elite, that by accepting these fundamental changes in social control/behaviour, that the old ruling classes  predominantly supporting the outmoded hegemony of rule by church and state  could be defeated. Modernity was ‘revolutionary’ and in many respects the French Revolution of 1789 was the personification of these features. They heralded the advent of capitalism as a new mode of production and a transformation of the social order. These basic beliefs provided the basis upon which humanity was to be able to achieve progress. Instead of looking backwards to a Golden Age, enlightenment was now seen as possible in the present through the application of reason. It was through reason that enlightenment, the conceiving of infinite possibilities, would enable the emancipation of humanity to take place: emancipation from ignorance, poverty, insecurity and violence. 

Until quite recently, there was a common belief that despite all the trials and tribulations suffered throughout the world, there was a general movement towards human emancipation. This was especially true in western civilisation, and from 1850 onward there was the ability to examine this progress via the mechanism of the photographic image. Social disorder quietened, and it was truly felt that society was making progress. There were blips in this movement, it was not smooth: wars, famine, natural and man-made disasters took place, but in the main these were resolved and the forward motion continued. In art terms the socio-political advances that were manifest during the modernist era, had less to with social order, than with an overturning of any notion of romanticism, or pictorialism. The modern was defined as being the age of man and machines. Function mediated with form- simplicity in ascendance over the ornate. Art, in context reflecting the utopian ideal of man at the centre of rational thought, shedding the shackles of superstition, and building a brand new age; The age of the machine.

Europe was once again at the forefront of this vanguard. In particular Northern Europe. Bauhaus in Germany-Structuralism in Russia- linguistics in France- Science in Britain. Art reflected this brave new world, Buildings adopted a new aesthetic, industrial design (a new concept born in the Modernist era) furnishing these building and Art, Print-Photography-and sculpture in particular winning out over painting. Dada, Surrealism, cubism and finally the expressionists, all finding a new way of working to express this modern age.

Moving forward to the late 1950’s, a movement began amongst French intellectuals, that questioned this view of society as moving onwards and upwards, and that there was some unseen driving force within society. It rejected any notion that we were still within the modern era brought in by the Enlightenment two hundred years earlier. The modern world according to these new thinkers had clearly brought in the era of industrial capitalism and scientific thinking but it had also brought in the world of Auschwitz, of the possibility of nuclear war, the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, of neo-colonialism, Euro centrism, racism and Third World hunger. If this was the legacy of modernism, it wasn’t very pleasant. Had the ideas of the Enlightenment brought us to this? If it had, they thought, to what extent had it been justified by grand theories of society? Wasn’t it more appropriate to see these theories as quite dangerous? They also felt that if modernism had brought in the type of society loosely described as modern industrial society then surely we had now gone beyond it? Had we not now entered a new age, and age that would not be truly resolved until the late 1970’s – the age of post-modernism?

 

It is against this climate that we must examine the concept of post modernism.

 So what is post-modernism? 

A major problem we have is trying to find a useful definition of post-modernism. Most definitions are hopelessly vague and often inconsistent with each other. There is a considerable amount of confusion about the terms: modernity, modernism, post-modernity and post-modernism. Modernism and post-modernism have tended to be associated with aesthetic ad intellectual movements such as that in architecture and literature; modernity and post-modernity have tended to be used to refer to changes in social and economic institutions However, this is not a hard and fast distinction. Much of the talk of post-modernism has been concerned with social and economic change.

To get any further we need to examine distinct trends.

 Art 

Firstly, there is post-modern art – not just painting and sculpture but also architecture, music, literature, drama etc. It’s main features are a lack of depth and of meaning. There is a diversity of forms and content. The art critic Suzy Gablik gave a talk in Los Angeles where she spoke about the

… ‘multidimensional and slippery space of post-modernism [where] anything goes with anything, like a game without rules. Floating images … maintain no relationship with anything at all, and meaning becomes detachable like the keys on a key ring. Dissociated and decontextualized, they slide past one another failing to link up into a coherent sequence. Their fluctuating but not reciprocal interactions are unable to fix meaning.”

While this may sound strange, you do not have to go to Los Angeles to see what she was talking about. Throughout the UK, for example, new buildings have been going up over the last decade or so that seem completely out of keeping with anything that has gone before. Many of our cities have been ‘rejuvenated’ by architects who have been given free reign to satisfy their professional fantasies. London Docklands is a good example here. Take the Docklands Light Railway through what used to be one of the world’s busiest ports and you will see post-modern architecture in all its glory. Similarly, adverts and pop videos are good examples of post-modern art. Using operatic arias to promote football matches, classical music to persuade us to fly a particular airline, watching Pavarotti in the Park – there is no longer a distinction between high and popular culture (‘anything goes with anything, like a game without rules’).

Culturally, the growth and influence of the media whether it is the advertising industry, television or film has also led to tremendous changes in how people see the world. Many post-modernists would argue that image is everything, image is reality. Disneyland, MTV, MacDonald’s is real life. Real life is what we see on television, television becomes real life. Krishan Kumar maintains that post-modernists see the media in a quite different way to those who regard it as merely a method of communication.

For them the media today do not so much communicate as construct. In their sheer scale and ubiquity they are building a new environment for us, one which demands a new social epistemology and a new form of response. The media have created a new ‘electronic reality’, suffused with images and symbols, which has obliterated any sense of an objective reality behind the symbols … In hyperreality it is no longer possible to distinguish the imaginary from the real …” krishan kumar

 

The second trend within post-modernism is a philosophical one. In the 1970s, the group of French philosophers, I have already mentioned, mainly on the Left, had become disillusioned with the heady days of the late 1960s when Western Europe and the United States were in political turmoil. For a short period in 1968, there seemed a strong possibility that major political changes could take place throughout the Western world as a result of action by students, trade unionists, anti-Vietnam war protesters, liberal Communists and militant Socialists. This was not to be and in France where the struggle was arguably the most intense, this led to a waning of the huge influence previously wielded by the large Communist Party (to which most of these intellectuals owed allegiance). This disillusionment led to their disengagement with politics and their distrust of grand theories, such as Marxism, which they felt attempted but failed to explain the reality of social life and began to form ideas that slotted in to the themes explored by contemporary artists. Despite their many disagreements, they stressed the fragmentary and plural character of reality. They denied human thought the ability to arrive at any objective account of that reality. Any ideology or social theory that justified human action as a means to progress or order was condemned as meaningless. The grand social theory or narrative that justified human activity, whether it was Marxism, liberalism or Fascism is no longer credible, they argued. There are no universal truths. All they have done in the past is legitimate the power of those who know and deny power to those who do not know.

 

New Times

 

Thirdly, these two trends, in art and philosophy, seemed to reflect what was going on in the social world. It was felt by many, particularly on the British Left, that we were actually living in what they called ‘New Times’. At the heart of these ‘New Times’ was the shift from the old mass-production Fordist economy to a new, more flexible, post-Fordist order based on computers, information technology and robotics. Marxism Today, wrote (in 1988) that our world is being remade.

Mass production, the mass consumer, the big city, big-brother state, the sprawling housing estate, and the nation-state are in decline: flexibility, diversity, differentiation, mobility, communication, decentralization and internationalisation are in the ascendant In the process our own identities, our sense of self, our own subjectivities are being transformed. We are in transition to a new era.

Many people accept that we do live in a different kind of society today to that of a relatively few years ago. However, what type of society is it that we now live in? A number of theories have already been put forward, some of which you may be familiar with.