Late Modernism and Postmodernism

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Late Modernism and Postmodernism
Jay Mechling American Studies 1A Fall 2002
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Modernization

• an economic and social process
• 19th century industrialization urbanization
• coming together of technology and bureaucracy
  (Max Weber)

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Modernism

• late 19th century
• the modernization of consciousness
• 1910 as watershed year

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American Modernism

• Daniel Joseph Singal sees American Modernism as
  an attempt to bring order to the disordering
  forces of modernization

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The Paradigm Change

• What was being disordered was an
  Enlightenment-based Victorian culture and its
  bedrock assumptions
• belief in predictable universe, immutable natural
  laws (made by a benevolent God)
• faith that humans could find a unified set of
  truths
• clear line between what was human and what
  animal
• a moral dichotomy viewing world in polar terms

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Re-integration, Authenticity, and Revitalization

• Put simply, the quintessential aim of Modernists
  has been to reconnect all that the Victorian
  moral dichotomy tore asunderto integrate once
  more the human and the animal, the civilized and
  the savage, and to heal the sharp divisions that
  the nineteenth century had established in areas
  such as class, race, and gender. (Singal, 1987
  12-13)
• demand for authenticity
• revitalization movements (A.F.C. Wallace)

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A paradox

• this integration will never arrive except
  through self-contained intellectual systems
  formal systems
• Late Modernism of the 1950s-60se.g., cool jazz

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Postmodernism emerges in the 1950s out of two
conditions

• dissatisfaction with Modernisms solutions
• genuinely new conditions in the culture of the
  United States in the wake of World War II

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New Circumstances after the War

• responses to Holocaust and to the Bomb
• failure of rationality and emergence of
  post-rational philosophy
• increased debate over the social responsibility
  of scientists
• technological utopianism
• golden age of science fiction
• golden age of hard-boiled detective fiction, film
  noir

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New Circumstances after the War (cont.)

• rise of postwar consumption, an element in Late
  Capitalism
• shift from entrepreneurial to bureaucratic New
  Middle Class
• rise of advertising as a cultural system
• rise of television and its visual style (e.g.,
  pastiche)

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New Circumstances after the War (cont.)

• rise of postwar consumption, an element in Late
  Capitalism (cont.)
• rise of tourism, including history as a commodity
• a crisis in masculinity
• new experience of cultural pluralism
• liberal democratic internationalism

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Postmodernism defined 6 elements

• post-rational
• populist and pluralist
• Depthlessness
• repudiates the four great models of depth in
  MODERNISM
• essence/appearance
• latent/manifest
• authentic/inauthentic
• signifier/signified

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Postmodernism defined 6 elements (cont.)

• 4. intensities
• 5. pastiche
• 6. parodic

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Andy Warhol

• born Andrew Warhola, Jr., Oct. 28, 1930, in
  Forest City, PA
• created fake birthday of August 6, 1928, in
  Pittsburgh, PA
• graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology
  with a degree in pictorial design changed name
  to Andy Warhol in 1953

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Andy Warhols Postmodernism

• post-rational he destroys the autonomous
  rational subject
• populist pluralist he erases distinctions
• depthlessness he makes no distinctions between
  surface and meaning, in most cases celebrating
  surfaces substitutes nostalgia for history

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Andy Warhols Postmodernism

• intensities feelings over ideas
• pastiche Warhols paintings, prints and film
  are all pastiche
• parodic all of Warhols work is highly
  self-referential and parodic

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The Velvet Underground

• formed in 1965, dissolved in 1971
• Lou Reed (1942- ) on guitar, John Cale (1940-
  ) on electric viola, piano, and bass guitar,
  Sterling Morrison (1942-1999) on rhythm and bass
  guitar, and Maureen A.M. Tucker (1945- ) on
  drums
• 1967, Warhol produced their first album, The
  Velvet Underground and Nico (1967)

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The Velvet Underground as Postmodern

• post-rational the bands interest in noise and
  feedback
• populist pluralist blends rock classical
  elements (Reed Cale)
• depthlessness no distinctions between surface
  and deep meanings

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The Velvet Underground as Postmodern (cont.)

• intensities
• pastiche the band pieced together music from a
  number of sources
• parodic the feedback experiments are the height
  of this self-referential, parodic sensibility

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Postmodern Architecture of Miami Beach and Las
Vegas
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Performance Art Why the 1970s?

• interactivity of modern life
• the body
• new media
• multiculturalism
• failures of science

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Performance Art Why the 1970s? (cont.)

• Vietnamloss of value-free science
• oil environmental crisis
• nuclear accidentThree Mile Island
• human/animal boundary challenged
• the pill and its sexual revolution