Grand Narrative Definition

Any theory or intellectual system which attempts to provide a comprehensive explanation of human experience and knowledge. Religion, science, Freudian psychology and political ideologies such as Marxism, nationalism and neoliberalism all produce competing grand narratives (also referred to as master narratives and metanarratives). Grand narratives are particularly associated with Enlightenment ( q.v. ) and modernist thinking, in that they are organized around the ‘story’ of human progress and perfectibility. Postmodern thinkers, most prominently Jean-François Lyotard, have pointed to what they see as the dangers inherent in such ‘totalizing’ visions of history.

In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) Lyotard contends that blind faith placed in the singular explanations provided by the grand narratives of modernity has led to an intolerance of difference. This intolerance led directly to the horrors of the 20th c. Instead, Lyotard argues, we should embrace a multiplicity of theoretical viewpoints in order to appreciate the heterogeneity of human experience, and employ petits récits , ‘little narratives’, to enable a better comprehension of and ability to respond to, local, contingent and temporary circumstances.

POMO - definition 2

Label given to Cultural forms since the 1960s that display the following qualities:

Self reflexivity: this involves the seemingly paradoxical combination of self-consciousness and some sort of historical grounding

Irony: Post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression, but it also abuses, installs, and subverts conventions and usually negotiates contradictions through irony

Boundaries: Post modernism challenges the boundaries between genres, art forms, theory and art, high art and the mass media

Constructs: Post modernism is actively involved in examining the constructs society creates including, but not exclusively, the following:

• Nation: Post modernism examines the construction of nations/nationality and questions such constructions
• Gender: Post modernism reassesses gender, the construction of gender, and the role of gender in cultural formations
• Race: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of race
• Sexuality: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of sexuality

POMO - definition 1

Postmodern texts deliberately play with meaning. They are designed to be read by a literate (ie experienced in other texts) audience and will exhibit many traits of intertextuality. Many texts openly acknowledge that, given the diversity in today's audiences, they can have no preferred reading (check out your Reception Theory) and present a whole range of oppositional readings simultaneously.
Many of the sophisticated visual puns used by advertising can be described as postmodern.
Postmodern texts will employ a range of referential techniques such as bricolage, and will use images and ideas in a way that is entirely alien to their original function (eg using footage of Nazi war crimes in a pop video).

Characteristics of Postmodern Film

Bricolage: the process of assembling artefacts from bits and pieces of other things

• Genre Cross-Over
• recycling old forms
• mixing high and low culture (kitsch)

Intertextuality: the multiple ways in which a text is entangled with or contains references to other texts.

Pastiche (copying in tribute) and Parody (copying in jest).

Style over content; the image and visual excitement over narrative coherence

Confusions over time and space; the subversion of classical cinematic conventions; fragmented narratives; time-bending.

Self-reflexiveness / self-referentiality: texts that openly reflect upon their own processes of artful composition.

Metafiction: fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with fiction and its conventions

Flattening of Affect: Technology, violence, drugs and the media lead to detached, emotionless lives

Hyperreality: Technologically created realities are often more authentic or desirable than the real world

Altered States: Drugs and technology provide a darker, sometimes psychedelic, gateway to new internal realities

More Human than Human: Artificial intelligence, robotics and cybernetics seek to enhance or replace humanity

Features of postmodern films

Pastiche

Self-referential, tongue-in-cheek, rehashes of classic pop culture

Flattening of Affect

Technology, violence, drugs, and the media lead to detached, emotionless, unauthentic lives

Hyperreality

Technologically created realities are often more authentic or desirable than the real world

Time Bending

Time travel provides another way to shape reality and play "what if" games with society

Altered States

Drugs and technology provide a darker, sometimes psychedelic, gateway to new internal realities

More Human than Human

Artificial intelligence, robotics, and cybernetics seek to enhance, or replace, humanity

Postmodern ideas

We no longer have any sense of the difference between real things and images of them, or real experiences and simulations of them.
The distinction between media and reality has collapsed, and we now live in a ‘reality’ defined by images and representations – a state of simulacrum.
Postmodernism rejects the idea that any media product or text is of any greater value than another. All judgments of value are merely taste.
Culture ‘eats itself’ and there is no longer anything new to produce or distribute.
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.
Postmodern texts are said to be intertextual and self-referential – they break the rules of realism to explore the nature of their own status as constructed texts.

In the postmodern world, media texts make visible and challenge ideas of truth and reality, removing the illusion that stories, texts or images can ever accurately or neutrally reproduce reality or truth.

Postmodern Audiences

The impact of postmodern media on audiences and the ways in which we think about texts.

How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation? In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a post-modern world?

• have audiences become accustomed to the stimulation and excitement of spectacular films/games and a sense of spectacle has become something that (young?) audiences increasingly demand from cultural experiences?

• has narrative coherence become less important for audiences?

• in terms of ideas, has cultural material become more simplistic and superficial, and audiences are no longer so concerned with the process of understanding a text. Think here about a film like Moulin Rouge where the plot is in some sense irrelevant to the overall impact of the film.

• has the attention span of audiences reduced as they become increasingly accustomed to the spectacle-driven and episodic nature of postmodern texts

• in its ‘waning of affect’, has postmodernism contributed to audiences become emotionally detached from what they see. They are desensitised and unable to respond ‘properly’ to suffering and joy.

• has postmodernism contributed to a feeling among audiences that arts and culture does not really have anything to tell us about our own lives and instead simply provides us with somewhere we can escape or retreat to

Postmodernism and Audience Theory

Two commentators have developed some interesting ideas about postmodernism and audiences.

Alain J.-J. Cohen has identified a new phenomenon in the history of film, the ‘hyper-spectator’. ‘Such spectator, who may have a deep knowledge of cinema, can reconfigure both the films themselves and filmic fragments into new and novel forms of both cinema and spectatorship, making use of the vastly expanded access to films arrived at through modern communications equipment and media. The hyper-spectator is, at least potentially, the material (which here means virtual) creator of his or her hyper-cinematic experience’ (157)

‘VCRs and laserdisc-players or newer DVDs have produced, and are still producing, a Gutenberg-type of revolution in relation to the moving image.’

Anne Friedberg has argued that because we now have much control of how we watch a film (through video/dvd), and we increasingly watch film in personal spaces (the home) rather than exclusively in public places, ‘cinema and televison become readable as symptoms of a “postmodern condition”, but as contributing causes.’ In other words, we don’t just have films that are about postmodernism or reflect postmodern thinking. Films have helped contribute to the postmodern quality of life by manipulating and playing around with our conventional understanding of time and space. ‘One can literally rent another space and time when one borrows a videotape to watch on a VCR….the VCR allows man to organize a time which is not his own…a time which is somewhere else – and to capture it.’


Anne Friedberg: ‘The cinema spectator and the armchair equivalent – the home-video viewer, who commands fast forward, fast reverse, and many speeds of slow motion, who can easily switch between channels and tape; who is always to repeat, replay, and return – is a spectator lost in but also in control of time. The cultural apparatuses of television and the cinema have gradually become causes for what is now…described as the postmodern condition.’

Postmodern & Media Industries

Whereas modernism was generally associated with the early phase of the industrial revolution, postmodernism is more commonly associated with many of the changes that have taken place after the industrial revolution. A post-industrial (sometimes known as a post-Fordist) economy is one in which an economic transition has taken place from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This society is typified by the rise of new information technologies, the globalization of financial markets, the growth of the service and the white-collar worker and the decline of heavy industry.

Postmodernism and the Film Industry

It has been argued that Hollywood has undergone a transition from ‘Fordist’ mass production (the studio system) to the more ‘flexible’ forms of independent production characteristic of postmodern economy.

The incorporation of Hollywood into media conglomerates with multiple entertainment interests has been seen to exemplify a ‘postmodern’ blurring of boundaries between industrial practices, technologies, and cultural forms.

Orpheus

Supremely gifted minstrel who attempted to rescue his dead wife from the Underworld. Orpheus had been taught to play the lyre by Apollo, and such was his skill on the instrument, together with the sweetness of his singing voice, that he could charm wild animals and even cause trees to uproot themselves and follow in his steps. Jason and the Argonauts took him along when they quested after the Golden Fleece, and Orpheus saved them from shipwreck by drowning out the treacherously alluring voices of the Sirens with his own musical stylings.

Orpheus fell in love with a nymph named Eurydice and blissful was their life together until one day she was pursued by a son of Apollo, the minor deity Aristaeus. In her headlong eagerness to escape, she stepped on a poisonous snake, was bitten and died. Disconsolate, Orpheus found a cave which lead to Hades and followed Eurydice to the Underworld. Here his musical charms were so persuasive that the King of the Dead permitted the minstrel to take his sweetheart home with him - on one condition.

This condition was so simple that it takes some explaining to account for Orpheus's failure to heed it. Perhaps he could not bear to keep his eyes off their beloved object for a moment longer. Perhaps he wanted to share his rapture at birdsong and sunshine as they approached the mouth of the cave. Or maybe he wanted Eurydice to hear the latest lick that he had worked out on his lyre. In any case, he did the one thing he had been forbidden. He turned around and looked at Eurydice, and she was lost to him forever.

Orpheus swore he would never love another, and it may have been the steadfastness of this vow which caused certain wild women of Thrace to tear him limb from limb in a fit of jealousy. They threw his head into a river, and it kept on singing all the way to the sea.

Jameson on postmodernity

FREDRIC JAMESON, in his magisterial work, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), has offered us a particularly influential analysis of our current postmodern condition. Like Jean Baudrillard, whose concept of the simulacrum he adopts, Jameson is highly critical of our current historical situation; indeed, he paints a rather dystopic picture of the present, which he associates, in particular, with a loss of our connection to history. What we are left with is a fascination with the present. According to Jameson, postmodernity has transformed the historical past into a series of emptied-out stylizations (what Jameson terms pastiche) that can then be commodified and consumed. (See the next module on pastiche.) The result is the threatened victory of capitalist thinking over all other forms of thought.

Jameson contrasts this postmodern situation with the modernist situation that has been superceded. Whereas modernism still believed in "some residual zones of 'nature' or 'being,' of the old, the older, the archaic" and still believed that one could "do something to that nature and work at transforming that 'referent'" (ix), postmodernism has lost a sense of any distinction between the Real and Culture. For Jameson, postmodernity amounts to "an immense dilation of [culture's] sphere (the sphere of commodities), an immense and historically original acculturation of the Real" (x). Whereas "modernism was still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself," postmodernism "is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process" (x). That apparent victory of commodification over all spheres of life marks postmodernity's reliance on the "cultural logic of late capitalism." (See Marx: Modules: Jameson: Late Capitalism.)

Following from this economic base for thinking about postmodernity, Jameson proceeds to pinpoint a number of symptoms that he associates with the postmodern condition:

1) the weakening of historicity. Jameson sees our "historical deafness" (xi) as one of the symptoms of our age, which includes "a series of spasmodic and intermittent, but desperate, attempts at recuperation (x). Postmodern theory itself Jameson sees as a desperate attempt to make sense of the age but in a way that refuses the traditional forms of understanding (narrative, history, the reality obscured by ideology). For postmodernists, there is no outside of ideology or textuality; indeed, postmodern theory questions any claim to "truth" outside of culture; Jameson sees this situation as itself a symptom of the age, which in turn plays right into the hands of capitalism: "postmodernism is not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order..., but only the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself" (xii). Jameson calls instead for the return of history; hence, his mantra: "always historicize!" Jameson pinpoints a weakening of history "both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose 'schizophrenic' structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts" (Postmodernism 6). As Jameson explains, the schizophrenic suffers from a "breakdown of the signifying chain" in his/her use of language until "the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time" (Postmodernism 27). Our loss of historicity, according to Jameson, most resembles such a schizophrenic position.

2) a breakdown of the distinction between "high" and "low" culture. As Jameson puts it, the various forms of postmodernism "have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole 'degraded' landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no long simply 'quote,' as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance" (Postmodernism 3).

3) "a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary 'theory' and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum" (Postmodernism 6). This depthlessness is, of course, supported by point # 5. The depthlessness manifests itself through literal flatness (two dimensional screens, flat skyscrapers full of reflecting windows) and qualitative superficiality. In theory, it manifests itself through the postmodern rejection of the belief that one can ever fully move beyond the surface appearances of ideology or "false consciousness" to some deeper truth; we are left instead with "multiple surfaces" (Postmodernism 12). One result is "that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism" (Postmodernism 16).

4) "the waning of affect" (Postmodernism 10) and "a whole new type of emotional ground tone—what I will call 'intensities'—which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime" (Postmodernism 6). The general depthlessness and affectlessness of postmodern culture is countered by outrageous claims for extreme moments of intense emotion, which Jameson aligns with schizophrenia and a culture of (drug) addiction. With the loss of historicity, the present is experienced by the schizophrenic subject "with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect" (Postmodernism 28), which can be "described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity" (Postmodernism 28-29).


5) a whole new technology (computers, digital culture, etc.), though Jameson insists on seeing such technology as "itself a figure for a whole new economic world system" (Postmodernism 6). Such technologies are more concerned with reproduction rather than with the industrial production of material goods.