Summary
The word postmodernism was first used in the 1970s in different areas. Postmodernism in simple words means that which comes after modern. Postmodernism has been used in theory in a critical sense to refer to a point of differentiating works of design, drama, architecture, literature, as well as in business and marketing and also as a point of interpreting culture, history, and law in the late years of the 20th century, this was a hypothesis of Fyfe.
According to Haward postmodernism was an aspect introduced by the Western European disillusion that was an effect of the Second World War and it was a reaction to modernism originally. It appropriately refers to lack of clear organized central hierarchy in artistic works, and also in the cultural and intellectual works, or lack of a principle that is organized in a complex manner, or one that is ambiguous, diverse, contradicts, or which is not well connected, such that it cannot be distinguished or not referenced from a paradoxical context. This leads to a situation of fraud in the long run as a charge.
The aspect of postmodernism as was expressed by Hall and was derived from non-artistic points of history which were influenced by new movements, for example, culture and economy and also developments in the society which evolved from the 1960s. At the time when the concept of postmodernism was borrowed, it became synonymous in most concepts. Poststructuralism is closely connected with the concept of post-modernity. It is also very closely linked with the modernism concept when it comes to bourgeois terms rejection.
The Extent and Application of postmodernism concept
Postmodernism whether viewed as a buzzword or in a critical sense, its usage and range can never be underrated. Hedge in his hypothesis expressed that when the society can use the word postmodern in describing a building’s design, documentaries of an art, constructions of a video or of a record, layout in a page of a journal or of a magazine, the attacks of the one sense of metaphysics, an image fascination, the cultural hierarchies collapse, the university decline, economic and societal shifts to a media, if all this things plus many others can be described by use of an abbreviation ‘post’ then it is clear that the buzzword presence is applied and significant in such a case
Case scenarios of the modern and postmodern features
A good example is shown from the city of London in the way there existed a relationship between the city and the cinemas. The city of London has its representation within the cinema and also the construction of the city had a lot of representation in the cinema. Film studies in the recent period have found good connections in cross pollination with sociology, geography and architecture and in the question of speciality with the urban areas.
The screening city volume has used the example of the Eastern and central European cinemas of the twentieth century that match up with the political and social situations in the first half of the century. The second part of the cinema is characterised by the North Americas realistic cinema that explains post modernity, a word which the editors said had brought a distinction between the modern period and the post modernity. However this has at some point not been perfect in trying to explain the social realities that were seen in the second half of that century. Strathausen city located in Vertov is used in the last half century and it discusses modernity, Berlin is also another example. Strathausen catches a lot of aspects of modernity and finds expressions which are symptomatic in the uncanny. The play had features of the dead being brought back to life in architecture as well as in the urban landscape. Whitehand posited that the film failed to mount important analysis on the city, the two cinemas also failed to emphasise a lot on aesthetic issues, and lacked distinct plots. This at the end leaves the film as only sources of entertainment instead of capturing the important lessons. The desire to come up with the aspect of transparency to view everything and to practice uncanny also fails.
The other cinema presents the problem of adoption where Taylor talked of brothers who animated puppets with the wish to adopt Bruno’s dread world made a story. They tried to force it into the subjective transformational time. The approach of the city here was one of an urbanised city which destroys civilisation. The cinema topic on punishment and discipline where a figure of a wordless death is composed of a body made of vegetables and fruits, brings in the process a rotting scene of the vegetables and their smell. The rotting figure is to be viewed as nature’s death and the incapability of the body belonging to that city. This portrays the difference between the structure and image of the city and the construction self-image. It in turn shows the necessary relationship between the city’s structure and self.
The effects of the films are to show the economic, social and political environments in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, even if part of the actions go on to explain the second half of the century. There is a representation of the urban space in the second half of the century, which recognizes the opposite of the interaction between the city and the film. It states that the film’s contents show a representation of the city, the shape as well as the memories that lead us to capture the social space of that time. This also leads to the attraction of spectators into the city thus leading to the intervention by people of different cultures and as a result, changing the cultural space in the city. This also gives an explanation as to how the society changes affect the film, and also how the society that is linked to the city would change the city as well. Madthud posited a very different shift from the generic transformation which is when siege approaches the subject of the modern media and the phase of the Internet, to show how these components affect homogenization in the real sense in urban places.
Mark focusing on Woody Allen shows the geographical difference between the European cities and the United States as well as the Far West Coast, as the capitalists changed in their radical movement from imperialist stage to the error of modernism and at the end to postmodernism or what we can also call late capitalism. The Allen city is therefore changing with the changes in the capitalism error.
New York City is very relevant in the study for it is the paradigm that boosts modernity. Despite the difficulties in human relations within the city, the invention of television technology as a way of responding to the needs of modern technology and global capitalism pressures are some of the major emblematic conditions of postmodernism. All of this explains a need to conform to postmodernism and a nostalgia that is intimately connected with modernity, in the cities where the actions take place.
Gormelly went ahead to give a good description differentiating the relationship between the urban space and the body through the experience he had gotten from the cinematic expressions. The film starts by portraying images of very dark bodies but later mimics the temporal relationship between the urban space and the body. The black body is portrayed as a symbol that is feared by the white and most especially a black male body which is deemed to be violent and a dangerous body. The response of the audience’s emotions explains a visceral response of the cultural imaginations of the white, towards their perceived perception of what violence would appear like from the film.
Pulp Fiction has in a different way extended the use of the black body to demonstrate fetish and horror films of rape. The urban space neighborhood is the center of all the makes of the scene as opposed to the thinking that the black body is the center of the meaning-making. The black neighborhood around the town of Los Angeles and New York become the center of the meaning. This gives an appreciation of time in the aspect that it gives direction to the black realism in the neighborhood and recognizes that a neighborhood is a powerful site when it comes to representation in a film.
Gandy departs from the aspects of the city to the relationship between a country and the city at large. He explains how the aspect of the city and country are exploited in the show of the film while showing the anti-urban settlement in trying to compare it with the new back-to-nature thinking. The debate that goes ahead to the field of chemical production also explains a metaphor for contagion and also for the causes of diseases and harmful conditions to human health.
Darrell uses the body to give a demonstration. He uses a human body without organs put on the highway where it is damaged and crushed. This body gives illusions of very violent figures that kill the renegade computer author and scientist Wenders. Here though we do not have a good connection between violence and location as in the first demonstration of the black body which demonstrates the black neighborhood effects to the whites in the New York surrounding. The violence of the crashed body in the latter state could occur in any population within the city or even in any location, hence it would be difficult to be specific about location and this would lead to a generic threat which would be caused by the film.
The difference between postmodernism and modernism as drawn by the authors has been demonstrated by the cinemas in the above theories and in their specific different era and also differentiated by the specified cut line of the geographical sections. The New York City is used as a representation of a small part of the environmental dangerous poisons while the injured body on the highway represents a generic aspect. This could represent scenarios that take place in many of the cities in the global film cinema. The whole of the cities which are used as examples whether they are in the American or European countries ,they actually capture and give a clear view of the films used in the mid century or early period, those which straddle the postmodern and the modern.
Development of the concept of architecture was the core origin of development of the movement. This was a reaction against the hostile atmospheres put in place by the modern movement. Scholars of the modern movement such as Philip Johnson and Walter Gropin established the modern architecture which was put in place with the view to attaining perfection, and harmony of form and of function as well as ambiguous ornament. Those who criticise modernism say that the essence of minimalism and perfection is subjective, that it points out anonymous questions in the capability to benefit philosophy. Scholars of postmodernism architecture oppose the concept of a perfect and pure architectonic artwork.
The scholars of postmodernism reacted against the modernism totalitarianism qualities that are objective and instead focuses on giving preference to personal preferences, principles and variety. It is under this environment of scepticisms and criticism that the postmodern philosophy was formed.
The application of postmodern criticism ideas is defined by the term deconstruction. Deconstruction on the other hand underrated assumptions, or frame of reference which does not appreciate the artefact or the text. The writer, Heidegger came up with this concept and was asking for the removal of the concept of ontology. He was in this essence criticising the post Socratic point of view. This term has been criticised as well as analysed by the postmodern philosophers. They argued that the term would bring in contradictions that the work previously relied on. Jacques was of the view that the idea of deconstruction is not an effective theory to apply as it denotes that a text lacked the intrinsic sense.
The social contractions often oppose the ideas of deconstruction, which are labeled in this term only in the analytic tradition but not in the continental tradition. Thomas advocates for continental structuralism and is of the opinion that the social constructs in reality as power dissimulates and that this in return leads to people being powerless. Both the analytic and continental are supporters of subjectivity which they borrow from Emmanuel Kant but they at the same time reject his posterior differences. A big point of differentiating continental postmodernism and analytic postmodernism is that the latter supports the ideology of liberalism while continental postmodernism supports the Marxist school of thought.
Views for and against postmodernism
David Harvey has argued that the emergence of postmodernism had brought about changes in the social, political and economic aspects in various disciplines and also fields in the city. He said that this aspect had brought a difference of the arrangement in the capitalist regime. Harvey believed that the postmodernism had brought a new paradigm in the cultural aspect that would call for great concern. The aspect of postmodernism has not completely done away with modernism but rather brought in a culturally dominant aspect that is new, where a lot of emphasis and weight is added to the aspects that formally were found in the modernism regime. The aspect also refuses to represent immutable patterns of totality and ordered patterns which are meant to show out, fragment influx and differences. Harvey looks at positive points of postmodernism, for instance that it is concerned with improving the modern world, the concern for difference and plurality which are not looked into by most of the modern aspects.
Harvey has however criticised postmodernism for putting kindness in the aesthetics values instead of the ethical values. He said that this aspect has avoided the realities of global capitalism and also those of the political economy and refuses the chances of having positive politics which is guided by normative rules.
Scientists such as the Social Affair critics have criticised the postmodern theory as meaningless where Sokal in 1999, wrote and published an article on mathematics and physics in relation to the postmodern theory. In his writing, he criticised and mocked the postmodern theory. Darkins Richard has also stated in his writing that the postmodernists are charlatans in the intellectual field, who just use complicated words that are meaningless only to confuse people.
Chomsky also has stated that the postmodern theory is meaningless and does not add any value when it comes to analysing theory both in the empirical and also in the analytical sense. He questions the postmodernism for their inability to respond to physics, mathematics, and biology and also in various related areas when there is need to respond. He also stated that the postmodern theory only explains what is very obvious and does not have strong evidence of its existence in the current field.
Politicians have also criticised the postmodern theory. Michael Foulchart for example stated that postmodernism breaks with trance dental and the utopian sense and went ahead to call out for the universal enlightenments to look into the question. He refuses to accept the ethical, universal and a normative judgement which is a concept of the postmodern theory.
The Marxist school of thought has also criticised the postmodern theory. Clinicals in 1984 was really against the postmodernism and stated that they have disappointed a revolutionary generation and have also disappointed the unity of the revolutionary members and also distorted the middle professional class. He described the postmodern theory as a tool that has frustrated the political arena and also caused social mobility. He lastly said that, the aspect of postmodernism had failed to bring about an intellectual success or a successful cultural phenomenon which should have been its chore objective.
Bibliography
Fyfe, Nicholas. (2005). The Urban Geography: Political Introduction. Chicago. Routledge publishing press: The introduction of the term postmodernism, its meaning and how it was adopted in different areas. Postmodernism is introduced as an aspect that was a reaction of the modernism culture in the second half of the 20th century.
Hayward, Thomas M. (2004). City limits: Crime, Consumer, Culture and Urban Experience. New York. Rutledge press: Postmodernism is an aspect introduced by the Western culture and a reaction against modernist culture.
Hall, S. and Gibe, B. (1992). Formations of Modernity: Cambridge University Press: A close connection between poststructuralism and the postmodernity concept and also a close link with modernism. The three aspects in one way or another are linked up and appear different in different regimes as shown in the London and the European films among many others.
Hall, Patmal. (1996). Cities of Tomorrow: ‘The City of Capitalism Rampant’. Oxford press publishers. Blackwell. Routlet publishers (1979-1993’): A critic of the concept of postmodernism as one that does not offer any solution to the needs of the current regime and its inability to have supportive evidence of its existence. The author used the example of physics and mathematics to criticize and clearly show that the concept of postmodernism had failed in its application to solve problems in the scientific world.
Jenkins, C. (1996). postmodernism? London: Academy Editions: How extensively the term postmodernism is applied despite critics by the authors who argue that the word is ambiguous. The author elaborates that wherein the critical theory the words ‘post’ can be used for instance in the construction of a film and in many other related areas, then we are in the buzzword of the postmodern era.
LeGates, R and Stout, F. (1999). The City Reader: Culture in urban modernism. New York and London: Routledge publishers: The screening city volume which in the first half-century gives an expression of modernism and in the second half of the 20th century introduces the aspect of postmodernism.
Madthu, D. (2003). Black Literary PostModernism. 2nd Ed. Chicago University Press: Portrays the relationship between the city and the self by use of a black body: The body shows how the whites react to blacks in the surrounding environment of New York City.
Taylor, N. (1999). Urban Planning Theory Since 1945 London: Sage (Ch 1 to 3): A demonstration of a black body on the street is used to show the relationship between the film and the city. The black body of a male person is viewed as an image representing violence. The emotional reaction of the whites in the film shows a specific location in the city as a connection of the effect of the film to urban postmodernism.