Precis: Week 8

Postmodernism
Postmodernism at its core is a negative reaction to Modernism. Whereas modernists
were idealistic in their viewpoints, the postmodernist is a realist if not a cynic. Their
way of thinking can be seen quite clearly in Foucalts chapter titled Panopticism
where the concept of disciplinary mechanism is applied using the innate properties
of the city to isolate and contain a group of people rather than using those same
properties to bring them together. This disciplinary mechanism is deeper than just
isolation as Foucalt himself states, Rather than the massive, binary division
between one set of people and another, it called for multiple separations,
individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an
intensification and ramification of power (Foucalt, 198). Postmodernism dismantles
conventional ways of thinking before repurposing it for another means.
This is the essence in which the Panopticon operates, as Foucalt goes on to
describe, which utilizes the disciplinary mechanism among other techniques to keep
the inmate in a state of perpetual anxiety. They may or may not under surveillance
by the guard tower above them, the possibility of relief along with the doubt creates
a perfect storm in the inmates mind that keeps them in check by no force of will
other than inmate themselves. This kind of postmodernist thinking which is imbued
within the Panopticon itself showcases how the theory can undermine the very
elements that make Modernism what it is.
This is also why Postmodernism deeply inhabits subjectivity among our five
theoretical frameworks, as it inherently acts to deconstruct the reality around its
application even when nothing is actually occurring. Returning to the example of the
guard tower, it is what it is, a guard tower. The inmate is essentially defeating
themselves in this action rather than the actual guard tower, which could very well
be unoccupied. This can also be seen in Frederic Jamesons Postmodernism and
Consumer Society, which points to the existence of the abundance of the carbon
copy pastiche over genuine parody as a social sign of the cultural wasteland our
civilization exists in. Yet from this wasteland innovation inevitably arises from the
very act that deconstruction provides in its wake. As Jameson says, But this means
that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind
of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the
necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment
of the past (Jameson, 18). As they say, everything old is new again. This is
Postmodernism in action.