Postmodernism and Ways of Knowing

Chapter 8

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Postmodernity/Postmodernism
• Postmodernity: the historical period after World War
II, especially after 1968
– questioned truth claims, foundations, totalizing theories
– no precise moment of rupture from modernity
– master narrative: framework that aims to
comprehensively explain all aspects of a society

• Postmodernism: turn in cultural production toward

valuing popular and everyday culture and design
– Frederic Jameson
– parody, bricolage, appropriation, and ironic reflexivity
– opposed to modernism’s aesthetic signifiers of corporate
wealth
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Denise Scott Brown in Las Vegas, 1968

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Postmodernity/Postmodernism

• Las Vegas strip inspired

postmodernist architects
– popular styles embraced
– architectural history
acknowledged and
enjoyed, elements from
different eras mixed
together

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Simulation and the Politics of Postmodernity

• Simulation: the process by which an action or

process is imitated
– simulacrum: the substitution for the real, requiring no
preexisting object, that a simulation creates
– Jean Baudrillard: simulation often acceptable basis for
knowledge, unnecessary to visit the real

• Hyperreal: condition offered by experience in a world

in which simulacra take precedence over the real

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Simulation and the Politics of Postmodernity
• Major difference between modernist and
postmodernist critical sensibility: within the latter we
cannot occupy a position outside of what we analyze
or ideological context in which we live
– Enlightenment-based concept of man as unified entity
widely theorized as a social, historical, and linguistic
construction

• Rhizome: decentralized plant structures that follow a

nonhierarchical pattern of growth, used by Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari to describe the growth of new ideas and
practices

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Reflexivity and Distanced Knowing
• Postmodern texts speak to viewers as subjects in the
know about codes of representation and simulation
– citation and quotation used to address audience of
consumers who have seen most everything before
– reflexivity: when a text refers to its own means of
production
– distantiation: set of techniques introduced by Brecht to
lead viewers to extract themselves from unconscious
immersion in the world of a narrative and break
identification with its characters

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
Damian Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991)

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Pastiche
• Pastiche: imitation that announces itself as such and
combines elements from other sources
– seemingly limitless recycling of ephemera and fragments
of signifying artifacts that fill postmodern world
– reflects postmodernity’s freeing of historical signifiers
from demand that they yield truth of their pasts
– questions status of original history, reminding us that the
copy itself has legacy of a devotion to fast reproduction

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Jeff Wall, Picture for Women (1979)

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Postmodern Space, Architecture, and Design
• Postmodern space focuses on simulation and
nonplaces
– nonplaces: sites where we are solitary, disconnected,
and distracted
– virtual space: defies laws of Cartesian space in that it is
not mappable or graspable, demanding new models for
situating ourselves in space

• Irony is mode through which we see postmodernism’s

critiques of modern design in full force

• Pastiche, as mixing of historical styles, is key strategy

of postmodern architecture

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Embedded railroad tracks on the High Line, New York

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Postmodern Space, Architecture, and Design

• The High Line

– design incorporates
plants that grew there
when it was wild
– plays off railroad
aesthetic
– refers to history of site
and experience of
looking
– locations along the way
where people are
encouraged to see
cityscape as form of
theater
– a park that integrates
nature into urban space
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 Popular Pastiche

Find an example of pastiche in music,

film, TV, or art.

How is this pastiche a reworking of the

past?

How is this work a questioning of the status

of the original?

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.
 A Glossary of Haunting (2013)
Eve Tuck and C. Ree

How does the text engage “Postmodern” strategies

that we have discussed?

How does the text challenge the notion of

“Postmodernism”?

Is “Postmodernism” a useful concept or definition?

What are its limitations?

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.