"A style and concept in the arts characterised by a distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions"
Postmodernists claim that in a media-saturated world, where we are constantly immersed in media, 24/7 - and on the move, at work, at home - the distinction between reality and the media representation of reality becomes blurred or even entirely invisible to us. In other words, we no longer have any sense of the difference between real things and images of them, or real experiences and simulations of them. Media reality is the new reality.
Some see this as a historical development: the modern period came before, during which artists experimented with the representation of reality. Postmodern came next, where this idea of representation gets 'remixed', played around with, through pastiche, parody and intertextual references - where the people that make texts deliberately expose their nature as constructed texts and make no attempt to pretend that they are 'realists'.
Basically, Postmodernism:
- Culture 'eats itself' as there is no longer anything new to produce or distribute.
- Everything is copied; remixed/transformed/sampled - nothing is original.
- Rejects the idea that any media product or text is of any greater value than another.
- Uses existing media/material, but goes so far away from the original origin that the meaning is confused and societies outlook changes upon it. Copies of this copy then project an ideological hyperreality, where images refer to each other as reality rather than some 'pure' reality that existed before the image represented it.
- So the distinction between media and reality has collapsed. Nothing is real. not anymore.
- All ideas of the truth are just competing claims, or discourses, and what we believe to be the truth at any point is merely the 'winning' discourse.
- PoMo is extremely cynical.
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