Semiotics

About 19 pages (5,653 words)

Semiotics Summary

Postmodernism

A movement in the arts and humanities known as post-modernism gained a foothold in Western society in the 1980s and 1990s. The term was coined originally by architects in the early 1970s to designate an architectural style that aimed to break away from the dominant modernist style, characterized by indistinct boxlike skyscrapers, apartment complexes, and government buildings that had degenerated into a sterile and monotonous structural formula. Postmodern architects called for greater individuality, complexity, and eccentricity in design, along with the use of symbols with historical value. Shortly after its introduction into architecture, the term started to catch on more broadly, adopted by many in other arts and the humanities.

Philosophical Roots

Postmodernism became fashionable as the articulation of a continuing cultural reaction against "scientific modernism" that initially emerged in Europe during the Romantic period. The origin of scientific modernism is generally traced to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, also known as the "Age of Reason." Enlightenment philosophers believed that scientific reason was the best method for discovering truth and that science could eventually solve all the mysteries of life. In the early nineteenth century, the dizzying growth of technology and the constantly increasing belief that science would triumph over religion further entrenched scientific modernism into Western culture. By the end of the century, Friedrich Nietzsche's famous assertion that "God is dead" encapsulated the radical worldview of modernity. This modernist triumph was manifest in architecture and design. Buildings were constructed with new industrial materials such as steel and concrete, and many consumer goods were given a streamlined design. (Modernism in literature, however, was more ambiguous. It both imitated science and technology in some areas, as with experimentation in form and adapting techniques influenced by cinematic montage, while often criticizing science and technology in its content, as in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.)

Actually, Nietzsche's assertion signaled at the same time the beginning of a reaction against modernism itself. By the early decades of the twentieth century, artists and composers en masse started to express this very reaction through new and unorthodox forms of representation—forms that came to have wide appeal, no matter how different from tradition. When architects rejected the sterile formulas of modernist style, their coinage of the term postmodern (literally "after the modern") caught on widely, because it expressed what had, in effect, been happening in the content of other arts for a considerable period of time.

In postmodernism, nothing is for certain. Even science and mathematics are perceived to be constructs of human invention, as subject to human vagary as are the arts. The essence of the postmodern perspective is irony. This is why it is often described as a "deconstructive" approach to knowledge and representation. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has perceptively remarked, postmodernism constitutes "a state of mind marked above all by its all-deriding, all-eroding, all-dissolving destructiveness" (1992, pp. vii–viii). By the early twenty-first century, postmodernism had become a topic of study under various academic rubrics, from semiotics and philosophy, to popular culture studies. Among those who are considered to provide significant critical frameworks for any discussion of postmodernism are Jean-François Lyotard (1984), Frederic Jameson (1991), and Jean Baudrillard (1998).

Postmodernity Versus Postmodernism

By the early 1980s Western society itself was being labeled increasingly as being "postmodern." For this reason, a distinction emerged between postmodernity and postmodernism. The former was coined to refer to the social tendency to view absolute systems of truth (such as religious ones) with skepticism, and the latter to any representational technique that exemplifies this tendency. An often-cited example of the latter is Godfrey Reggio's brilliant 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi. The movie shows how fragmented the postmodern world is through a series of discontinuous, narrativeless images of cars on freeways, atomic blasts, litter on urban streets, people shopping in malls, housing complexes, buildings being demolished, and so on, all of which mirror the world's spiritual fragmentation. The collage of images paints a turgid, gloomy world populated by countless cars, decaying buildings, and crowds bustling aimlessly about. Reggio incorporates the mesmerizing music of Philip Glass (b. 1937), which reflects the images tonally. Glass's slow rhythms tire viewers with their heaviness, and his fast tempi—which accompany a demented chorus of singers chanting in the background—assault viewers' senses.

Implicit in Reggio's movie is the view that technology has been a destructive force in Western society, rather than constructively—a postmodern theme that runs through many contemporary movies such as The Matrix (1999). The struggle of humanity against its technological machinery is seen by postmodernists as part of the contemporary human condition, as is its struggle against deviance and abnormality, portrayed in such postmodern movies as Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott and Blue Velvet (1986), directed by David Lynch.

Ultimately, the aim of postmodernism is to critique the contemporary world and its overreliance on scientific approaches to human behavior, such as psychology. As a critical movement, therefore, it has had an important impact on how people perceive science and all kinds of approaches based on reason and logic. In post-modern representations, human beings are typically portrayed as fulfilling no particular purpose for being alive, and life is depicted as a meaningless collage of actions on a relentless course leading to death and a return to nothingness. But this bleak portrait of the human condition somehow forces a person to think about that very condition, paradoxically stimulating a profound reevaluation of the meaning of life.

Summary

Postmodern ideas have been destabilizing the rationalistic and logocentric (language-influenced) worldview that took shape in the Renaissance. As a cultural movement, postmodernism has made people more inclined to question belief systems in every domain of society, including the scientific one. (Scientists have entered the postmodern debate, either supporting the basic principles of postmodern ideology or rejecting it outright. The principle of indeterminacy in physics, for example, is based on an implicit postmodern tenet—namely, that the observer's interpretation of a physical phenomenon cannot be eliminated from the observation itself. Physics became unconsciously postmodern when it transformed itself into a study of quantum phenomena which entail participation of the observer in the observed.) The main reaction against postmodernism is the age-old one against the concept of relativism—that all truths are constructed—vs. the notion of an objective world where truth can be discovered by reason alone.

This does not mean, however, that postmodernity is devoid of ethics or a sense of truth and reality. As mentioned, postmodern artists ask the fundamental questions of life: What is a human being? What is real? Is there any meaning to existence? It is true, however, that they approach these questions in ways that are radically different from previous ethical traditions. Postmodern discourse has had a great impact on modern-day society, influencing the ways in which people perceive such issues as right and wrong, real and unreal, and so on. But the postmodern way of seeing things seems to be losing its social grip during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Like all ideological and intellectual movements of the past, postmodernism has probably run its course, as new social and intellectual trends now embrace a reinvigorated sense of purpose beyond the purely ironic.