Attempts to identify post-modernism will come in many different forms as different people have different ideas in regards to what the term means. This being said, most people who be a part of the question over modernism and postmodernism share a consensus that postmodernism might be many things, but it definitely is associated with the development of popular culture in the overdue twentieth century in the West. Quite simply, postmodernism can be seen as a fresh historical moment, a new sensibility, or a new cultural style, but popular culture can be referenced as the website which these changes can be most easily found. Postmodernism is a point of view which will reject lots of the accepted ideals of modernism. It requires a reinterpretation of gender assignments and the differenced usually put on them. It requires a more global point of view in its view of cultural and countrywide distinctions, and rejects stereotypes of most kinds. At exactly the same time, it embraces the idea of nostalgia in art work (film, television, advertising) and uses multiple referencing (among other strategies) to converse on a variety of symbolic levels. This article will research the type of postmodernism and use it to a body of film, tv, or advertising materials. It will the give attention to a single example and analyze it as typical of postmodern creative form. Out of this essay it will be clear that postmodernism symbolizes a blurring of the boundaries between degrees of culture, plus the Simpsons is a typical example of postmodernist imaginative form.
It was the overdue 1950s and early on 1960s that the movements that people now come to know as postmodernism began to emerge. In the words of Susan Sontag, a critic of American culture, it came with the emergence of any "new sensibility", which will involve a blurring of the difference between "high" and "low" culture. Anyway, the difference becomes less significant.
The post-modern new sensibility didn't follow along the same lines as the social elitism of modernism. Although modernism seems to have an important devote popular culture, it is designated by a substantial suspicion of all things popular. It had been those items that were associated with elite culture that were accepted under modernism. Culture was whatever would be conveniently accepted into a museum, it was that which experienced a homologous romance with the elitism that is inherent in school society. This implies that the drive towards post modernism in the past due 1950s and 1960s was associated with the growing invasion on the elitism of modernism. The introduction of postmodernism signaled a refusal of "the great divide a discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture, " furthermore, "to a big level, it is by the distance we have traveled out of this great divide between mass culture and modernism that we can measure our very own ethnic post modernity. "
A good early on example of the new wave of post-modern popular culture is seen in the American and British pop art motion of the 1950s and 1960s as it declined the section between high culture and popular culture. This is reported to be "postmodernism's first ethnical flowering. "
One of pop art's first visible theorist, Lawrence Alloway explains that "the area of contact was produced in higher quantities urban culture: videos, advertising, technology fiction, pop music. We thought none of them of the dislike of commercial culture standard among intellectuals, but accepted it as an undeniable fact, discussed it in detail, and used it enthusiastically. " This acceptance of the new activity of postmodernism allowed visitors to treat popular culture in the world of serious art work, and not a second tier of culture.
When seen from this point of view, postmodernism first came out of your refusal by the different generations to abide by the categorical certainties of high modernism. It had become regarded as taboo to keep to maintain a complete distinction between high and popular culture. This is very evident in the way that art work and popular music merged. Among this is seen in just how Peter Blake designed leading cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Team Band and just how Andy Warhol designed the cover of the Rolling Stone's record Sticky Fingertips.
By the center of the 1980s, the post-modern new sensibility possessed become deeply engrained into popular culture, and for a few, a reason to despair. The postmodern condition is one that is marked by a crisis in the position of knowledge in American societies. This served to provide intellectuals less eminence as the "academy" regularly lost its credibility. Iain Chambers argues this point from another type of point of view. He says the controversy over postmodernism can in part be understood as "the indicator of the disruptive ingression of popular culture, its appearance and intimate alternatives, into a recently privileged area. Theory and academic discourses are confronted by the wider, unsystemized, popular sites of cultural creation and knowledge. The intellectual's privilege to explain and deliver knowledge is threatened. "
Another social theorist, Angela McRobbie agrees with this as she considers it as "the coming into being of these whose voices were historically drowned out by the (modernist) metanarratives of mastery, which were subsequently both patriarchal and imperialist. " She put forth the discussion that postmodernism has enfranchised a new sect of intellectuals who speak from the margins from a point of view of difference, including ethnic, class, gender and sexual preference differences. These are individuals whom she identifies as "the new technology of intellectuals. " An identical point is manufactured by Kobena Mercer as she views postmodernism as partially an unacknowledged reaction to the growing identities and voices of these individuals who have surfaced from the margins, and this opens a fresh way of discovering and understanding.
Hyperrealism can be reported to be a component of postmodernism. Inside the sphere of the hyperreal, the real and the imaginary continually touch each other. Simulations begin to be experienced as something that is more real than real itself. The data in favor of this argument is seen throughout our Traditional western society. For example, we are in a world where people write words to the individuals they see on tv set, asking them out on schedules, and offering them places to have. This can be called the dissolution of tv set into life, or the dissolution of life into tv set.
It was said by John Fiske that postmodern multimedia does not, enjoy it once do, "provide supplementary representations of reality: they influence and produce the truth that they mediate. " On top of that, Fiske argues that those incidents inside our lives that 'subject' must be synonymous with advertising occurrences. The arrest of O. J. Simpson was a good example of this. As the news of his storyline unfolded, people in the area rushed to his house in order that they could participate the news cycle. They wished to be indistinguishably live people and advertising people. That is an feature of the postmodern period. These folks were aware that the media was not merely confirming of circulating the news, these were creating it. Therefore, if people wanted to be part of the news of the event, it was not sufficient to be there on the landscape, to actually be part of this event, that they had to be on television. This is a testament to the actual fact that in the hyperreal world of the postmodern, the distinction between a real event and its media representation loses its distinction.
Frederic James who's an American critic of culture as is well versed in postmodernism argues that it is a culture of pastiche. To him, postmodern culture is "a global in which stylistic advancement is no longer possible, all that is still left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum. " Postmodernism is a culture that is put together from various places it can be said to be "a culture of quotations. " Our cultural production is the result of other cultural creation. "Postmodern cultural text messages do not merely quote other civilizations, other historical moments, they arbitrarily cannibalize those to the point where any sense of critical or historical distance ceases to exist - there is merely pastiche. "
This craze of the pastiche is obvious in both body of film and tv. It can be seen in the 'nostalgia film' that is noticeable in both tv and film. Some films that would get into this category of the postmodern nostalgia film would be Back again to the Future as it seeks to recreate the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of America in the 1950s. Other motion pictures like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Robin Hood and Lord of the Rings act similarly as they induce a feeling of narrative certainties of the past. In this way, "the nostalgia film either recaptures and signifies certain varieties of viewing days gone by. " These films seek to make ethnic misconceptions and stereotypes about days gone by. They provide "false realism: movies about other movies, representations of other representations. "
As this review of postmodernism in popular culture advances, it is useful to use it to an individual example, and then evaluate it as typical of postmodernist artistic form. The Simpsons is a spectacularly popular show of the lat two decades and it symbolized the first leading time animated series since the Flintstones. Since its inception, this show has emerged as a cultural phenomenon. It is for that reason immense success which the Simpsons represents a worthy thing of analysis for ethnical critics.
There is no doubt that this television series can be positioned in the category of the postmodern. Every one of the rhetorical devices that are synonymous with postmodern theory are present within the Simpsons: pastiche, quotation, intertextuality and reflexivity. The Simpsons, because of the way it uses reflexivity and intertextuality specifically is a superb example of the postmodern at the job.
All elements of this show are related to a network of intertextual sources to popular text messages of other. In particular there are four ways in which The Simpsons uses intertextuality in recurrent forms. First of all, there are solitary elements in the show that take many intertextual sources. A good example of this is the simple fact that the name of the town how the Simpsons stay in is called Springfield. This is significant because it is the same name as the town that the classic television show Daddy Knows Best was occur. This might be a rather obvious mention of the nostalgic, but there are a lot more subtle sources in the show that make it surely a postmodern creation. For example, the curator of Springfield's museum is known as after a couple of dormitories at Harvard University. Also they build on nostalgic phrases on the past, "two cars atlanta divorce attorneys car port, and three eyes on every fish. " In this way The Simpsons can be said to be a assortment of quotations.
Many of the scenes from your Simpsons are also extracted from other films or television shows. There is that episode that includes "22 Short Motion pictures about Springfield, " which in particular serves as a parody of Pulp Fiction, another important creation in the postmodern milieu. In fact, there are whole episodes of The Simpsons that are whole parodies of other shows. For instance, the instance "Bart of Darkness" is a parody of Alfred Hitchcock, and there are even echoes of Jimmy Stewart in "Itchy and Scratchy Land. " On top of that, the show is one that heavily displays internal references. This creates on the actual fact that each occurrence reaches its outset freestanding. Even though the main personas do not develop, they posses a recollection of past shows and the accommodating heroes do change.
The Simpsons can also be reported to be postmodern due to way that it is a good example of reflexive tv, one in which the wording is a reference to its condition of ingestion and production. This can be observed in four ways. First, The Simpsons is seen to be reflexive from an study of the beginning credits where in fact the family rushes home to crowd the couch watching television. This shows the fact that the show is approximately the procedure of watching television, and television ingestion is a required element of family life. The Simpsons also possesses a commentary on the celebrity system. In a single way, the show consists of a television world where television celebrities are created. One such example is Krusty the Clown whose goal is to fulfill the ongoing process of use and merchandizing. In another way, real superstars make cameo looks on the show providing their voices characters that either stand for themselves of other numbers. The show may also serve as a parody of the computer animation industry within the animation industry. There can be an episode where in fact the evaluations of the new "Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" has poor rankings. This episode is interesting since it highlights a caricature of market research process which utilizes the pulse meter for evaluating how new heroes are received when they have emerged by the audiences for the first time. That is a great example of how The Simpsons is reflexive television.
The Simpsons may also refer to what has been dubbed postmodern hyperconscious. It is a kind of commentary on the role that they play in popular culture. An example of this comes when Homer is enjoying a particular date and Apu ask Homer if he is on television set as he appears familiar. Homer says, "sorry pal, you got me perplexed with Fred Flintstone. " That is reflexive in that it shows that the series' designers are aware of the links between their show and their predecessors.
These are are just some of the many good examples that produce The Simpsons a great exemplory case of postmodern culture, although their use of the rhetorical devices is organized. What is the explanation for this shows particular way, and therefore unlike the other cartoons on tv set, The Simpsons is very unique? It is because the show is not intended to get the same people as other cartoons, it give a social commentary and it is thus attractive to the sophisticated consumer. The Simpsons really works within an interesting way as its form assists to encourage the intake of popular culture. The show uses postmodern strategies to make politics and interpersonal commentary in a way that is non partisan and in a manner that is appealing to the public. The designers of the show clearly do not want to build divisions among its followers.
In this newspaper it has been shown that efforts to define postmodernism can be considered a trial, but there are simple ways to make clear it. A very important factor for certain though is the fact postmodernism is associated with the progress of popular culture in the overdue twentieth century in the Western. Postmodernism is a point of view which will reject lots of the accepted ideals of modernism. It includes a reinterpretation of gender functions and the differenced customarily put on them. It requires a far more global perspective in its view of cultural and nationwide distinctions, and rejects stereotypes of most kinds. At the same time, it embraces the idea of nostalgia in art (film, television, advertising) and uses multiple referencing (among other strategies) to speak on a variety of symbolic levels. It had been then shown how the Simpsons is a perfect exemplory case of postmodern pop culture as it is nostalgic and reflexive, and also uses rhetorical devices which are normal in postmodernism. From this essay it is clear that postmodernism symbolizes a blurring of the restrictions between degrees of culture, as well as the Simpsons is a typical example of postmodernist imaginative form.
