The packet first defines what the postmodern era is and explains how these claims prove this is the era we are living in today. His first claim is that the ideas of progress, rationality, and scientific objectivity in the past are no longer accepted because they don’t take cultural differences into account. There are less absolute right and wrongs than there were in the past. For example, in the 1960’s society’s morals included anti-abortion, anti-premarital sex, anti-homosexuality, anti-women in the work place, etc. In today’s society, these morals no longer apply. His second claim is that high quality art is no longer more valued than low quality art. The distinction that separated the two is slowly going away and many people who visit museums may not be able to tell the difference. The third claim is that it is no longer to tell the difference between the “real” from the “copy”. Pictures can be manipulated and papers can be photocopied.
The opposition of postmodernism and modernism began in the Modern Movement that is classified as 1910 to 1945. The concept of things being worldwide was impossible during this time period and the world was much bigger and it was harder to communicate messages to people. The idea of modernity is related to the principle that it is possible and necessary to break with tradition and begin a new way of living and thinking. The idea of progress at that time was the “development of the arts, technology, knowledge and liberty that would be profitable to mankind as a whole. (Lyotard, 172) It’s tougher to tell high-quality art from low-quality art but it applies across the scale. This means that mankind deals with complexity. As we have more information bombarded at us, life will become more confusing. However, despite how confusing life may be we will always have psychological needs such as demands for security, identity, and happiness and we will always be living and social beings. The division of mankind can be made into two parts. One part is confronted with the challenge of complication while the other part is confronted with the ancient task of survival. In a complex society, such as ours, we fill our lives with art, literature, philosophy, and politics.
Even though the great modernisms predicted on the invention of a personal, private style, this would cause many problems because if we all followed this theory we would all be talking different languages – there has to be some uniformity if we expect to effectively communicate among one another. Individualism in the social and family structure exists less and less especially in a corporate capitalistic country where even the top people in a company report to their bosses and live in their organization hierarchy.
The author’s theory is that eventually we will see the failure of art and the aesthetic and the failure of the new because there are only a limited number of combinations possible and classic modernism has been around for 70 or 80 years meaning that eventually we will be living in a world where stylistic innovation is no longer possible. The author mentions the nostalgia mode, which means one can look back on movies and by doing so, one can know the specific generational moments of that time period. Examples of this are American Graffiti in 1973, Chinatown in the 1930’s, Raiders of the Lost Ark in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
“If there is any realism left here, it is a ‘realism’ which springs from the shock of grasping that confinement and of realizing that, for whatever particular reasons, we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out of reach. (Jameson, 1284)
Reference:
- Jameson, Lyotard, Theatre Arts Class Lecture and Text
