6 Answers

  1. The psychological content of modernity is a sense of guilt. The modernist feels a longing for the lost classical “golden age”, for which he blames himself, among other things.

    Postmodernism is psychologically characterized by nihilism.In the psychological process, guilt is always replaced by nihilism, cynicism, and denial. If a mentally healthy person is blamed for a long time or reproached for something, in the end, he will not stand it, and will send everyone to work …. This is what Nietzsche, for example, called the transition from the camel stage to the lion stage.

    The next psychological stage, both according to Nietzsche and in general, is the stage of the child. Postmodernism is replaced by a phase of building a new world on a cleared place through one's own empirical experience. We stock up on popcorn and wait…)

  3. If we take postmodernism in the sphere of culture, where this term is usually used, everything is not so terrible. All Hollywood blockbusters, for example, are a manifestation of postmodernism. In the cultural sense, it boils down to the realization that everything has been invented for a long time, and all that has remained for a cultural figure (or show business) for some time is to make “okroshka” out of what was. Use old archetypes, cultural moves, plots, and so on, make fun of them, twist them in your own way.

    As it is formulated by Pelevin:

    People have already come up with everything they need. Once upon a time, humanity developed very rapidly – not only the things that surrounded people, but also the words they used, were constantly changing. In those days, there were many different names for a creative person-engineer, poet, scientist. And they were all constantly inventing new things. But that was the childhood of humanity. And then it reached maturity. Creativity has not disappeared – but it has become reduced to choosing from what has already been created. Figuratively speaking, we no longer grow grapes. We send for a bottle in the cellar.

  4. Postmodernism is quite difficult to define, since philosophers who are usually considered “postmodernists”, such as Derrida, Foucault, etc., have never identified themselves with a particular philosophical movement. Jean-Jacques Lyotard was the first philosopher to use the phrase “postmodern” in his work The State of Postmodernity. Simply put, he defined it as a complete rejection of metanarratives. Metanarratives are great explanations of the human condition or the entire human history, such as Christianity, Marxism / dialectical materialism, capitalism, etc.

    Postmodernists, rather, sought to complicate human life. Instead of accepting grandiose theories explaining why people behave the way they do, or how they should behave, they concluded that human existence is purely subjective (I know it's a buzzword, but it works to simplify things).

    The reason this is called postmodernism is because it is a reaction to the specific, Enlightenment-inspired ideas of the modernist movement. Movement should be understood in the context of the history of philosophy.

    For further study, I would suggest reading Nietzsche's essay entitled ” On Truth and Falsehood in an Extra-moral Sense.”

  5. Postmodernism is the culture of late modernity (post-industrial society, new capitalism, etc.). If the culture of modernity (classical industrial society) was built on hierarchical principles, which implied a hierarchy of values, which required either special education or special inclinations for one's own perception (“taste either exists or it does not exist”), then the culture of postmodernity is built on the destruction of any hierarchy. The necessary basis for the emergence of postmodernism was the formation of a mass consumer society, which no longer required a hierarchical “culture of the rich”, but an egalitarian “culture for all”.

    The reaction to the process of destroying the elite culture and replacing it with an egalitarian one can be traced already before the First World War (Simmel) and especially in the interwar period, when a huge number of European intellectuals (the most famous here is Ortega y Gasset with the “Revolt of the Masses”, but there were also Adorno and Horkheimer's “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, Alfred Weber's “Third and Fourth Man” and a lot more) begin to talk about the cultural crisis, which was described The actual logic of the development of capitalism, with the increasing “emancipation” of the individual, his separation from large and small social groups, the emergence of the middle class, white-collar workers, capable of providing mass demand for both mass-consumption goods and in the cultural market, destroyed the monopoly on consumption of the upper classes. And as a result, high culture loses its exclusive status, turning first into an ordinary prestigious consumption, and then completely becoming a kind of anachronism.

    A very good example here is the occurrence of the English word middlebrow. Traditionally, the culture was divided into highbrow and primitive, “lowbrow”. But in 1942, Virginia Woolf writes that there are supposedly decent people (actually highbrows) who read high literature based on their own taste, and there are despicable middlebrows who read books based on the opinion of others (because these upstarts don't have their own brains). In 1949, Harper's Magazine editor Russell Lines wrote an article�Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow, where, solely out of hooligan motives, and clearly relying on the then existing sociological theories, introduces the concepts of upper-middlebrow and lower-middlebrow (very similar to upper middle class and lower middle class). Moreover, he has a whole comparative table of tastes of all 4 groups of the population, which summarizes preferences in the field of art, as well as furniture, food, and so on. That is, there is no trace of the sacredness of high art: all banter and class gradation of consumption.

    Daniel Bell gives another, equally colorful example in this regard: until the mid-20th century, the writer was a mystical and mysterious figure. As a servant of the muses, he was allowed to do what mere mortals were not allowed to do. Even his very way of life was specific: he did not live in a boring homeland, but in Paris or Cuba, in Venice or Greece. For beauty, you also had to die in some “beautiful” and byronic way, for example, in exile like Wilde, or, even better, shoot yourself like Hemingway. And in the first half of the 20th century, literary criticism flourished, defending the right of the then highbrows to be them. It was a kind of community of jealous censors, protecting high art from rot and destruction. And suddenly, in the 60s, we see the American Susan Sontag, who writes that art by and large is even stupid to evaluate, and it can only be divided into things created in a mass way and exclusive (that is, in fact, describes the modern craft industry). In 1969, such a landmark work asCross the Border, Close the Gap (“Cross borders, fill up ditches”) Leslie Fiedler, where the author sharply criticizes elite literature, suggests blurring the boundaries between “high” and ” low ” genres.

    In general, in this context, postmodernism is the situation described in Harms ' famous short story:�

    Writer: I'm a writer!
    Reader: I think you're a piece of shit!
    (The writer stands for a few minutes, shocked by this new idea, and drops dead. It's being taken out.)
    II
    Artist: I'm an artist!
    Worker: I think you're a piece of shit!
    � � (The artist immediately turned as pale as a sheet,
    � � And like a reed swayed
    � � And he died unexpectedly.
    � �It's being taken out.)

    Here. And about the rhizome, deconstruction, and so on, I'm too lazy to write here, and others probably wrote richly.

  6. Postmodernism is a neo-Marxist anti-liberal socio-political doctrine designed to reformulate bankrupt Marxist dogmas, taking into account new social and political realities, while preserving the meaning originally invested in them.

    Postmodernism is not about art, it is about society and politics, although some representatives of postmodernism have shown themselves interesting and fruitful in the field of culture.

    So, in particular, society is again divided into oppressed and oppressors, only now instead of classes as subjects of social and political activity, “identity groups” – minority groups formed on racial, ethnic, gender, confessional grounds, LGBTQ and other groups, which, instead of protecting and asserting the natural rights of individuals, are charged with the task of fighting the liberal-democratic “system” up to its destruction.

    The class struggle has been replaced by an identity policy that pits blacks and people of color against whites, migrants against indigenous people, Muslims against Christians, women against men, and so on. We must all work together to fight the white people, the men, and the rich – these are the oppressors. Freedom and law only mask the brutal nature of capitalist society. Within the framework of this policy, identity groups are charged with the task of carrying out systematic radical actions leading to the change of the liberal-democratic structure of society to a collectivist or quasi-socialist one, with the restriction or destruction of private property as a right and its redistribution.

    As a doctrine, postmodernism took shape at the turn of the 1960s and 70s in the wake of movements for equal rights and against war, on the one hand, and the disillusionment of left-wing Western intellectuals with the Soviet communist experiment against the background of anti-Stalinist revelations.

    The most significant names of postmodernism are Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, Deleuze.

    Despite the prefix ” post “in its title and its supposed claim to change the direction of art, postmodernism actually directly opposes itself to” modernism “in a sense that is not found in Russian, which in English is denoted by the word modernity, whose closest translation into Russian is the word”modernity”. In essence, we are talking about the liberal ideology of the New Time. Postmodernism has declared war on the Age of Reason and Enlightenment.

    The epistemological basis of postmodernism is based on the statement that reality is unknowable, thought does not reflect reality, and reason is nothing more than the language of a madman; it is impossible to assert anything meaningful about an independently existing reality; nothing constrains or restricts either thought or feelings, and therefore a person has the right to say and do what he sees fit; it is not necessary to establish the truth-it is enough to; only a socio-linguistic perception of reality is available to a person. The main method of cognition of reality is its deconstruction and reinterpretation. Following Marx, who saw man as a product of class and class consciousness, postmodernists recognize man only as a construct of larger socio-linguistic groups.

    By renewing Marxism, postmodernists are bringing us back to a society based on hatred and violence.

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