Cultural Theory and Postmodernism

Critical theory and cultural activists, although opposed about how they effect the audience, they are in tune to the idea of the meaning of popular culture in the ways in which traditional capitalist systems mirror the use of popular culture today.

Defining Postmodernism

• Concept difficult to define—has been adopted and used by many different disciplines.
  • Art
  • Psychologists
  • Sociologists
  • Geography
• Basic premise for each of the above—postmodernism—the end of dominant ideology
• Dominant Ideologyreplaced by a series of competing, subjective discourses
  • Nothing more than particular opinions
  • Series of competing subjective discourses
  • Sociology itself can be seen as the ruling ideologies
  • Doesn’t exist but there will always be competing thoughts
• Discourse– a way of conceptualizing and representing a particular topic
  • Will always be a way to talk about competing ideologies.
• Frederic Jameson
  • Our whole notion of what reality is is changing radically from modernity to post-modernity
  • History is no longer anything that gives us an understanding of our world, it’s just a representation of a series of opinions
  • We are social subjects; we are no longer the summation of our ethnic backgrounds, our national culture, or whatever. We are essentially fragmented
  • A new depthlessness and a consequent weakening of historicity: the “waning” of effect; a fragmentation of the subject; the omnipresence of pastiche and prevalence of the nostalgia mode
• Factors argued to have given rise to postmodernism include:
  • Loss of faith in rational, scientific explanations
  • Declining centrality of work in daily life
  • The onset of post-industrialism and increasing emphasis on consumerism and leisure.
  • Increasing role of media in circulating texts and images.
• Modernity grounded in principles of enlightenment project
• After WWII, faith in enlightenment ideas began to wither.
• Postmodernism (PM) coincides with decline in dominance of modernist thinking
• According to Lyotard, PM – deligitimation of modernity’s claim to ideological and moral authority.
• Postmodernity characterized by a plurality of discourses – pivotal in this respect is introduction of new media technologies from 1950s onwards.
• If it is all around us, the way it is being taken advantage of is very striking in the past years. Basically what you have in the world of popular culture is the circulation of competing narratives, competing discourse, fragmatic texts and discourses. It is not beyond the realm of plausibility, to say that the media itself now function in an increasingly arbitrary fashion but they are continually decontextualizing and reconceptualizing images, of not only sound, but images from varies centuries of histories and they also cut across spatial and discursive histories.
• Much like rap, you get the mix of arrays of music such as jazz, blues, etc…until Rap came in and combined all together, like electronic sampling and now you have an even more seamless approach to putting music into newer tracks.
• The “sign” and the “signified”
  • Baudrilliard argues that PM has disturbed this once fixed relationship
  • Signifiers no longer tied to sign – signifiers are now ‘free-floating’
  • According to Best and Kelltier
    • “Signifiers is free to float and establish its meanings through its manipulation in coded and differences and associated chains”
  • Postmodern identity is one that has no longer a connection with class, locality, etc… identity is now a free-floating self-made concept of influence.
  • Identities are liberating, through postmodern identity people get to see through themselves, more freedom in it

Category: Communications, Popular Culture