I'm not a philosopher or artist, so I'm probably not the best person to describe it. But modernism involves striving to create something new and interesting with a sincere appreciation for grand ideals.
And postmodernism is something that is kind of presented as modernism, but with a kind of sarcastic, ironic detachment. Andy Warhol is kind of the first person I think of when I think of postmodernism.
If Johnny Carson is an example of Modernism, then Eric Andre is the post modern equivalent.
There's much more to it than that, but that's one of the key pillars.
Everything I know on the topic, I learned from Wisecrack, so I am far from an expert, but I know enough to recognize that he's using the term incorrectly.
Pretty well explained. And they do hate postmodernism, most obviously because it allows for other voices and points of view (mult-racial, feminist, lgbtq, etc.) and posits that there is no such thing as objectivity, uniting theories, or systems of describing everything, in the way that modernists attempted to do.
It's much more complicated than all that, as it more exists in opposition or contrast to modernism than by any overarching or unifying theoretical framework.
The confusing part to me, is that Modernism, on the other hand, should be conservative's bread and butter, it was the theoretical culmination of the centuries-long trajectory of the white, western patriarchal hegemony. Hemingway is a prime example of modernism in literature for example. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams are good examples in poetry. T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland, is the pinnacle, but it bleeds into proto-postmodernism in some ways.
I think it's more complicated the meme affords. Part of the problem is that there's not just one "modernism." Modernism is about breaking with old forms and assumptions about representation--on one hand, conservatives SHOULD love abstract expressionism, for example, because it's free expression and individualistic and American, but ALSO hate it because it resists narrative meaning and is somewhat complicated. Conservatives love simple stories--stuff like "America is great because we are free" or anything having to do with "founding fathers." Modernism wanted a literature (in one strain) that reflected the complexities of modern life--at the extremes Virginia Woolf, James Joyce--that was in opposition to 19th century realism which (allegedly) tended to simplify what (to the modernists) couldn't be simplified. To modernists, realism was real at all. Film and photography also pushed modernists to see what other stuff words and paint could do besides depict stuff. Think about all the music and drama sponsored by Koch money on PBS--it's all super conservative--classical music, Masterpiece theater. Nothing difficult, nothing abstract. It's not bad, it's just old. But then, Ezra Pound was a fascist.
I think Hemingway's an interesting example because we assume that Hemingway was simple because of his trademark straight-talk, but those books are much more complicated. I don't like Hemingway at all, but think about other literature from that time that was told in a straightforward way--hard boiled crime novels, for example--stuff that celebrated individuality, but also stuff that celebrated darkness. Those books (and Hemingway, and Gatsby, too) were also about the complexities and subtleties about how one performs oneself--back to the complexities of representation. Stuff that (I would think) goes against conservatives who want things to be simple--I'm good because I work hard, I'm good because I love America, guns are good because the founding fathers wanted us to have guns, etc.
Oh, and way more simply--so much of modernism was about depicting the horrors of war--to some, a central argument for where modernism comes from. Another example of modernism exposing, or investigating, something beyond the narrative--the actual horrors of war and its consequences on an individual rather than the simpler, more digestible propaganda.
See a lot of conservatives I know love this kind of stuff. But they're the older, well educated, engineering type conservatives. Not at all representative when I think about it.
Edit: realizing I don't actually know any conservatives under 50. Huh. I'm getting out of touch.
Ayn Rand is pretty firmly in the modernist camp, so how they gonna throw it all out with that consideration alone? I guess one shouldn't expect consistency anyway. lol.
In theatre, dada and the absurdist movement came as a reaction to the mechanization and arbitrary nature of warfare in ww1.
Courage, strength, intelligence and righteousness have no meaning when you can be killed by a cloud of poison gas or a machine gun that sprays bullets basically at random.
Very true. Many good points here. I think I was giving too much credit in thinking that some unicorn, aged intellectual conservatives with vast libraries would have the capacity to appreciate much of the modernist ouevre. But that would hardly include a memeing conservative, or in any way be representative of the vast majority. I was making the assumption that they were bragging about their very best here, but the flex about many books is more likely (at best) Hunt for Red October, Outliers, and Mein Kampf.
Yeah, though I think the conservative you're imagining--the "great books" intellectual--probably exists and may indeed love some of this stuff, possibly completely misinterpreting much of it.
To put it in very simple terms: modernism is the rejection of tradition to focus on objective truth, while post-modernism is questioning if that truth is really objective and what the subjective reality is. In terms of the Alt-Right, modernism is code for "people who think all races are equal" and post-modernism is code for "people who acknowledge that racial inequality exists due to centuries of oppression"
To add a very minor, less helpful amount then the other commenter:
Modernism can be seen as the overwhelming mentality in America after WW1. Exceptionalist, “We can do it” kind of mentality. Postmodernism is very obvious in the American culture after WW2, and more so during Vietnam. Kind of a more nihilistic “everything is terrible no matter how hard we try” thing. I might be off a bit, but this is how it was explained to me through the lens of pop culture.
This is incorrect. American modernism was not interested in American exceptionalism or a "we can do it" mentality. See The Great Gatsby, Gertrude Stein--the whole "Lost Generation"--Faulkner, Steinbeck, Beckett, Claude McKay, Nella Larson, and on and on and on. One might argue that certain strains of modernism (especially in visual art) were utopian and optimistic, obsessed with the future and technological innovation, the miracle of science and psychotherapy, but that's not so much exceptionalism but a kind of ecstatic love of the new. Edit: that's also where fascism and modernism start to cross paths--ideas about clean, functional lines (in architecture) and stuff like speed and technology leading to order (Italian futurism).
A simple way to think about it: Modernism is interested in new ways of representing reality--new art for the new, modern world while postnuclear, post-WW2 postmodernism questions whether you can represent reality at all, is there a reality to represent?
I view it more as post-modernism calling out modernism's contradictions and oversimplifications, even if modernism is internally a very optimistic, idealist aesthetic which often fails thanks to most people's lack of perspective
Super fukin (comparatively) short explanation for history/anthropology:
Modernism: Marxist historiography/Structuralism. Looking for big, data-driven, "objective" explanations for history/ also Marx-derived. Looking for "deep structures" in culture, especially if they are universal, and that most can be derived from language
Postmodernism: puts the quotes around objective in the last paragraph. Critical theory. Data failed many historians. Critiquing the formation of historical knowledge, and previously accepted axioms. Interested in the production of knowledge/pretty much post-structuralists, but they hate being called postmodernists. Language is never fixed, production of cultural meaning for objects, universal "deep structures" is be driven by bias and the cultural conditioning of the researcher.
For my MA I did two seperate papers that followed the careers of a local archaeologist and a sociologist during this transition period.
The archaeologist was always interested in the food ways of colonial American Indian settlements, but went from only tabulating rainfall, bones, flakes, and soil composition on each site, to looking at the actual "space" of the settlement, evidence of contact and trade, and change over time because of these.
The sociologist was looking at how intergrated Korean-Americans were, and went from statistics on how different ethnicities viewed Koreans in interviews and some pretty bonkers surveys (being Protestant was worth exactly 75% that speaking English was in terms of integration points. I'm not joking.) and then taking the results of those surveys and trying to statistically fit them to the perceptions of other ethnicities to argue that Koreans can never integrate, to pretending that he didn't do that at all, had much more "self-reporting" surveys and arguing for the formation of a "Korean-American" social space. Dude kinda sucked.
Those sound like interesting papers to say the least tho, also seems like these terms have varying definitions depending on when and in what field they are being used, which honestly I should have seen coming a mile away. I appreciate the new angle.
The "Disdain for modernism, post-modernism" immediately brought my mind to the video documentary Who's Afraid of Modern Art (29 minutes) by Jacob Geller which goes in depth about how white supremacists and nazis use "degenerate art" to stew up further disgust and hatred towards those who are inconvenient to the nazi world view.
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u/jayhawk618 22d ago edited 22d ago
One thing is certain - this guy definitely does not know what postmodernism means.
The kek flag and pepe memes are both examples of postmodernism.