Postmodern philosophies

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Postmodern philosophies
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• Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998)
• Jean Baudrillard (1929)
• Susan Sontag (1933- 2004)
• Gianni Vattimo (1936)

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Postmodernism as philosophy(The term
Postmodernism was created by the historian
Arnold Toynbee).

• The term Postmodern in philosophy refers to a
  very complex ideological movement which affected
  the whole cognitive field, from music to
  architecture, from film to philosophy, from
  technology to sociology.
• As an academic subject or an object of studies,
  is born at the middle of the eighties.
• as an historic process, its origins can be found
  already in Nietzsche.

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Jean- François Lyotard and the Postmodern
Condition

• According to Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998)
  the postmodern condition come up, when modern
  society tried to represent that which can not be
  represented.
• Then, the mind represent instead differences.
• He found the postmodern condition only in the
  most developed societies.

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Criticizing metanarratives (grand narratives)

• Lyotard presents the Postmodern in his book The
  Postmodern Condition published in 1979 as
• incredulity towards metanarratives (grand
  narratives) or metadiscourse
• where metanarratives are understood as totalising
  stories about history and the goals of the human
  race that ground and legitimise knowledge and
  cultural practises.
• An example of metanarrative could be the ideology
  of democracy in USA, where the liberal political
  ideal reach the category of a myth. According to
  this metanarrative only representative democracy
  can bring happiness to human kind.
• The same can be said about Marxism and the dream
  of a communistic society in which any injustice
  would disappear.

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Lyotards idea of modernity

• As Modern Lyotard understands the scientific
  discourse when it develops into a metadiscourse
  (metanarrative).
• The Postmodern Condition then, is the
  consequence of peoples distrust in any
  metadiscourse.
• The Postmodern Condition is also an expression of
  a new form of tolerance, a feeling for the
  incommensurable, a feeling for the different an
  for mini-discourses.

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The Culture of copies

• Postmodern society is also a global society
  which works in direction to achieve a maximum of
  standardization in every manifestation of
  culture, from food-culture to clothes, from
  technological products to religions practices.
• At the other hand, because postmodern
  massification is eclectic (that is work combining
  many different aesthetics) favor that which is
  heterogenic and make resistance to
  homogenization. .

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Jean
Baudrillards Simulacra

• According to Jean Baudrillard (1929) the
  Postmodern age characterizes by copies which he
  call simulacra.
• Western societies have undergone a process in
  which the simulacrum become truth, whereby the
  copy has come to replace the original.
• According to Baudrillard, present day society is
  a simulated copy which has superseded the
  original, so the map has come to precede the
  territory.
• The mass production of commodities valorized the
  existence of copies independently from the
  originals.
• The situation of knowledge changes as well, and
  the application of knowledge became its purpose.
  There is clear utilitarian goal in the Postmodern
  cognitive ideal.

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Simulacra in art - the culture of copies
Andy Warhol Cow-wallpaper, 1966
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Andy Warhol

• Andy Warhol, (Andrew Warhola) (1928 1987), was
  an American artist, avant-garde filmmaker, writer
  and social figure. Warhol also worked as a
  (magazine) publisher, music producer and actor.
  With his background and experience in commercial
  art, Warhol was one of the founders of the Pop
  Art movement in the United States in the 1950s.

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Gianni Vattimo and Postmodernism as the End of
history

• For Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche and Heidegger teach
  us a lesson when they speak about anticipation
  and about the End of History.
• They sowed that the representation of reality as
  a well ordered reality, was in fact the product
  of a primitive and barbarous civilization.
• To achieve emancipation from these barbarisms,
  delusion was necessary, because delusion
  permitted the stand out of differences.
• The process of emancipation, will be achieved
  through the cultivation of each own linguistic
  dialect and from this situation shall growth a
  perplexity which permit the visions which make
  identity possible.

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If the Modern man believed that Modernity implied
civilization because it implied order and reason,
science and technology The Postmodern man
believe that order and reason conduced mankind
to a primitive and barbarous civilization.
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The philosophy of Nietzsche anticipates
Postmodernism

• According to Vattimo, we understand that we are
  different at the same time that we understand
  that we are one of many.
• In the same way that we understand our own
  linguistic dialect, shall we see to our
  religious, ethnic and political values.
• As a consequence of this, we understand that we
  are in a multicultural world, that is what
  Nietzsche told us when he spoke about the mission
  of the future super-human.

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The aesthetics of the Postmodern Age
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Susan Sontag What are
postmodern aesthetics? From http//it.stlawu.edu
/pomo/mike/aesthetic.html

• Postmodern aesthetics is marked by an emphasis of
  the figural over the discursive.
• What this means is that Postmodernism values the
  impact of art over the meaning of art, and the
  sensation of art over the interpretation of it.
• Such postmodern preferences, however, were first
  notably articulated by art critic Susan Sontag
  (1933- 2004) in the mid 1960's. Sontag claimed
  that Modernism's favoring of the "intellect" in
  art, came "at the expense of energy and sensual
  capability.
• Sontag believed that interpretation was "the
  revenge of the intellect upon art," and that a
  work of art should not be a "text, but rather
  another "sensory" product in the world.

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The pictorial turn

• Thus to the postmodernist, it's no longer about
  what art means, but what it does.
• And then, the sense of control that language has
  over art, is definitively gone.

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To make art is to perform

• Wrapped Reichtag, Berlin, 1995. Christo and
  Jeanne-Claude

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Happening and performance
Christo och Jeanne-Claude.
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The aesthetics of the sublime
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Postmodernism no longer equates aesthetic value
with beauty

• What Lyotard suggests instead, is an aesthetic of
  the sublime.
• Lyotard views the sublime as being a mixture of
• pleasure and pain,
• of sweetness and sin,
• of the cute and of the dirt.
• It is to "present the unpresentable" to find
  religion in the streets, and not in the Church.

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• This aesthetic of the sublime, transcends moral
  categories like
• that feeling is good,
• that feeling is bad,
• that smells good,
• that smells bad,
• that looks nice,
• that looks bad,
• brake down the barriers between art and other
  human activities, such as commercial
  entertainment, industrial technology, fashion and
  design, and politics"

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The sublime as the conflict of qualities

• While the beautiful has to do with the harmony
  of qualities
• the sublime has to do with their intern
  conflicts.
• The sublime which was very important in the
  aesthetics of Kant refer to an idea of the
  limits of harmony and of beauty, and reminds us
  the undefined, that which make us anxious and
  make the mind alert.

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The Politics of Aesthetics

• Postmodernism guide us to the preference of
  aesthetics over ethics,
• of image over text,
• not just in art, but in all discourse.
• Aesthetics became ethics.
• This aestheticization of everything, is denoted
  as Postmodernisms nihilistic aesthetic attitude
  
• because its is built on the distrust of any
  metanarrative.