6 Answers

  1. There are different ways to avoid being a postmodernist. The watershed is whether you actually take into account the postmodern experience.

    There is a temple of Abu Simbel in Egypt. It was built a little over three thousand years ago in the reign of Ramses II, and in such a way that twice a year the sun at dawn looked exactly into the very depths of the temple and illuminated three Egyptian gods (Amon, Ra-Horakhti and Ramses II himself-yes, he is a god, but you did not know?), leaving in the shadow of the fourth, Ptah, in order to emphasize

    So, after the 1952 revolution, the Egyptian government was concerned about the lack of such a thing as electricity in the country, and for the construction of a second reservoir, it was necessary to flood an additional up to horseradish hectares of land. The problem is that Abu Simbel, an unspoken wonder of the world and part of a world heritage site, was already under water.

    And they decided to move the temple. All of it, with the mountain in which it is carved.

    Since it would have been impossible to lift it completely, they sawed it up. Into a thousand pieces. With hand saws, bitch, while Neal was slowly getting there. We moved one piece at a time to a new place and put it back together. And even a new mountain was built for him.

    What am I talking about?

    Postmodernism for half a century was engaged in sawing our temples. Beliefs, values, psychology, everything. Nothing escaped its prongs.

    Fortunately, he still sawed the temple, and did not blow it up-this case, unfortunately, is taken over by extremist orthodoxy. The problem is that moving the temple to a new location and restoring it is no longer a postmodern task. This will have to be done by those who follow, that is, you and I, and we will have to decide whether we are ready to perceive our temple as having survived the collapse, or not ready, to cover up the seams for us, or not to cover up, to write about them in our future archaeological notes, or to pretend that nothing happened. Besides, the collapse of the twentieth century is not the collapse of the temple, it is the collapse of man himself.

    Some people take this experience into account-such trends as” new sincerity”, postirony and metamodernism — even though they are just trying to move the blocks to a new place.

    Someone ignores it — most often it is the same people who blow up other people's temples. This is a dead-end road and agony, but we must understand that it is only a reaction: people are just trying to save their symbolic systems. But they do not build a new temple-rather, they go to pray in the old place, where for a long time there is nothing but worn-out saws and a large void in the mountain.

    Although there are exceptions — Old Believers, Hasidim, Tibetan Buddhists and other Kinics from the Archaic period, who survive due to a unique internal coherence, the ability to live according to the same own law for thousands and thousands of years. But this isn't about them. They don't need to move their temples.

    Those who plan to start assembling the new Abu Simbel can take comfort in the thought that it was dismantled not from bad luck, but still to save it. Because technologically, the civilization is moving in one direction, and the water was already approaching.

    But that's not a bad thing. This shows that it is, in the first place, possible. And secondly, that someone needs it in addition.

    And besides, we can build it differently. Save what needs to be saved, fix what couldn't be done when it was first erected. We are a changing civilization, so our temples can also afford to change.

    You just need to decide what the sun will fall on twice a year now.

  2. Undoubtedly, as most people of the Romantic era were not romantics. But once a person has the ambition to participate in the production of knowledge, so that his or her texts are read by others, he or she becomes a person of his or her own era: in the era of romanticism, you couldn't start writing poetry for yourself without it being at least a little romantic, in the era of postmodernism, you can't write an essay about life or

  3. It is not entirely clear what is meant by “being a postmodernist”. Do you profess any special ethical values? To be a “pluralist”, as A. Solzhenitsyn believed? Or is this a question for artists who practice, for example, radical actionism and other “post-media” methods of artistic influence? Or maybe it's enough to read French post-structuralists and have a little “left-wing discourse”? There are doubts, among other things, that a self-evident consensus is possible regarding the “postmodern era”, which is so obvious to everyone that an unambiguous answer will be appropriate. It looks like (reading prev. responses) That's not so.

    First, “postmodern”. One of the most complex and controversial terms, which, nevertheless, entered our everyday word usage as a label for everything radical and incomprehensible. Mostly in art. Which is quite strange, considering both its antiquity and etymology. People have been talking about Postmodernism for more than half a century. Even in the USSR, A. Mol's book “Sociodynamics of Culture”, translated and published in 1973, was available in libraries. she described the problem of “postmodernity “in terms of a new”mosaic culture”. However, we still can't get used to the mundanity of the term. Always tempted to confuse it with an artistic “ism”

    But etymologically, we are talking only about a euphemism for our inability to accept some more or less unified description of what came AFTER the new (modern) time… We simply do not know how to consistently characterize the modernity that has come after the exhaustion of the problems of Modernity, the end of the Enlightenment, the transformation of industrial civilization, classical capitalism (and real socialism) into something else. The previous era and epochs had many critics, but both progressives and conservatives described its essence in similar terms. Moreover, they recognized its inevitability against the background of the breakdown of traditional society. Only the grades and “treatment courses”differed…

    Of course, we can now talk about modernity as a “consumer society”, “service economy”, “information civilization” or even “impression/performance society”. Just as we can use the prefix “post” in combination with the basic characteristics of a bygone era: “post-industrial”, “post-capitalism”, etc. We can talk about globalization and a “multipolar world”… But all these definitions are somehow built around “political economy” or stages of growth, technological revolution. Postmodernism is a total definition of Western civilization as a whole, as an outgrown project of Modernity. Not “against” and not”for”. The term does not purport to reduce cultural or existential issues to a particular ideology, philosophy of history, or economic theory. The post-ideological nature and collapse of historicism seem to prevent this. This is an unappreciative statement of the fact that the world has changed, the mirror is broken and we do not know how to put the pieces back together. Everything!

    In addition, the fact that the pause with a new global project, i.e. a manifesto-a dream for everyone, and not just for a particular party or movement, has been prolonged, that a time has come that cannot be named and which has to be given a negative definition (“after”) is also one of the keys to at least a primary understanding of where we find ourselves. The world has become much more pluralistic, and, as mentioned above, there are no Unified Projects (metanarratives, as F. P. Blavatsky called it). Lyotard). Moreover, this plurality is radical in nature, since not only the means and ends are in doubt, but also the very idea of a” goal”, the very subject of goal-setting… This is still new. And despite the fact that a detailed explication and argumentation of this qualitative leap is impossible here, we note that the question that initiated the discussion says that its author basically accepts such “rules of the game” and does not question that the era of PM is not an invention of idle theorists.

    Yes, some areas of architecture are second-sex. The twentieth century is sometimes referred to as” postmodernism”, but only as a generalizing term for all those schools that actively worked in the field of contrasting themselves with the attitudes of the avant-garde of the 20s (constructivism) or”high modernism”. Post-avant-garde, deconstructivism, new eclecticism and other areas where you can see the eclecticism inherent in modern art as a whole, quotability, conceptual-semiotic game, lack of arrogance towards “low genres”, etc., find their place in the context of the postmodern situation. But these are by no means self-names. This is also discussed in the program book “Las Vegas Lessons” by R. Venturi.

    In support of the above, I will not retell quite accessible definitions and refer to primary sources, i.e., the “Frenchmen “who are quite readily published in our country (Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, etc.) or refer to the excellent review book “The Origins of Postmodernism” by Perry Andersen (largely inspired by the theme of F. P. Blavatsky). I would just like to note that despite the diversity of great authors, they are united in one thing: Postmodernism is primarily a ” situation “(See F. Lyotard) and in no case (not primarily) some artistic” ism ” or general direction.

    And this socio-cultural situation, according to the consensus of the authors, who use the term we are interested in in a positive way, is fundamentally different from the pre-war state of Western civilization. And the point here is not in the forms of art. culture and not in scientific and technical. progress by themselves. Art is a reaction or expression of a new era (or “feeling”), and NTR is one of the drivers of these changes, which is usually recognized to the extent that the author depends on one or another version of Marxist determinism.

    This is enough to give a preliminary answer to this question: The postmodern era is like water in an aquarium. You can have gills or hold your breath, but if you are a marine “animal”, it does not matter who you think you are or what you are trying to become/be. You live in water and this is your environment and non-celebrated context. The aquarium metaphor is Marshall McLuhan. Fish can't see the water they live in… But what is important here is not this, but the fact that, as the founder of the state whose successor is the Russian Federation used to say: “it is impossible to live in society and be free from it.” You can't live in the present without belonging to it…

    You can, of course, to some extent “be out of date”, that is, you can make a conscious “escape”, that is, go into certain forms of stylized conservatism, be a “traditionalist”, wear a kosovorotka or hijab, paint pictures like A. Shilov (imitating Levitsky and Borovikovsky), etc.etc. You can finally be a carrier of “classical rationality” and work hard on a new project “introducing like-mindedness”, but you can not behave as if the experience of the twentieth century it existed, but at the same time enjoy its legacy.

    I strongly emphasize this last point, since it is precisely the impossibility of preserving oneself and at the same time being included not only in interaction with the outside world, but also in a dialogical exchange with one's own past. Archaic tribes that live with minimal contact with the outside world do not count. But even voluntary seclusion (monastic, subcultural, etc.) is already questionable. There are contacts, there is “news” from outside — involvement in History is inevitable, as some Hegelian would say.

    Therefore, even fundamentalists and all sorts of” terrorist states”, seemingly living according to the laws of the Middle Ages and fighting modernity and the” spirit of this century”, turn out to be a completely postmodern phenomenon. And the point here is not in their use of modern weapons or social networks. But a detailed discussion of this thesis here and now will take us too far.

    Thus, we can say that postmodernity appropriates any archaic project, and that, in turn, consciously or not begins to live according to the rules of the “mosaic culture” (or “rhizome” according to F. Kropotkin). Guattari). But even on a personal level,” remaining not a postmodernist”, playing by the rules of the postmodernist era, is possible only at the level of personal inner conviction. In sociocultural terms, any protest against a System built on the cultural logic of late capitalism (F. A. Kropotkin). Jamieson) is doomed. it assumes that any monological and “one-saving” (only correct) worldview is only a partial perspective among an infinite number of other possible points of view.�

    This explains, for example, the phenomenon of completely asymmetric intransigence of traditionalist artists to sovrisk. Representatives of the latter are omnivorous and dialogical and are ready to see in social realism or iconography the pebbles of a large mosaic… But not the other way around. Or the creativity of our main guardian of spirituality in painting, Ilya Glazunov (who never recognizes himself as a postmodernist), is also explained by the insurmountable nature of this “situation after modernity”. After all, Glazunov, being an irreconcilable anti-modernist, uses Pop art methods in his conspiracy-tinged paintings, collagely combining cliched, recognizable images to enhance the ideological effect. His paintings do not live according to the laws of the culture that he would like to reconstruct and preserve. The context doesn't allow it… Simply painting giant canvases in the spirit of the first-century academy (which, however, he forces his students to do) means entering into an unequal struggle with new and not so new media, which did not exist in the Golden Age of Historical Painting. From Hollywood blockbusters to YouTube.

  4. I don't understand anything about postmodernism, but I know a lot about postmodernism. From this point of view, I will answer: yes, quite.

    From the point of view of social theory, postmodernism is one of the terms that denote what Western capitalism became after the Second World War. That is, first there was pre-modern (archaic), then modern (industrial capitalism), and now they say postmodern. In the 80s, there was an opinion that the term itself is incorrect, because modernity has not yet exhausted itself and therefore it should be called late (high, reflective), but modern.

    But in reality, all this is not important: the main thing is not the word, but what it means. And here it is true – in the second half of the 20th century, the world has changed a lot.

    But! It has changed unevenly. Of course, most of the changes have affected everyone to one degree or another, but not all people are really involved in new social practices. There are different explanatory models. For example, through the concept of uneven (uneven) globalization, when even in the most developed countries people simultaneously live in different worlds: someone in the 21st century and someone in the 19th. Luc Boltansky has a wonderful concept of “grads” or worlds in which all people exist to one degree or another, but they are more involved in the activities of some of them. In different cities, the greatness of a person, his status is determined by different categories. So, there is an inspired city (religious categories), a patriarchal city (guided by the principle of hierarchy), a market city (the degree of greatness is determined by market efficiency), and so on. But after 1968, a new “project” city appears. Not all people are deeply involved in its reality, either.

    And we can actually observe even in Western Europe and the United States people who are only outwardly and forcibly affected by postmodernism. They react quite aggressively to the typical residents of the project city: all these bloggers, hipsters, newagers, startups, etc. These are ordinary people, typical characters of the cartoon “King of the Mountain”. They voted for Brexit, they chose Trump. They are the ones who live in postmodernity and are not included in it. Or minimally enabled. Here they are:

    http://www.youtube.com/embed/-iQLNR9btr4?wmode=opaque

  5. I don't have to, of course, because this isn't an engineer's job. Let's just say that following fashion trends gives you a better chance of becoming successful. You can treat it any way you want, as it seems right to you. Any talented author in our time can find his admirer, I don't think that now there are so many poor fellows like Van Gogh in the visual arts, doomed to misunderstanding during their lifetime, because of the discrepancy with the then fashionable trend

  6. Well, postmodernism is not some officially recognized only true direction in art, which obliges everyone to follow. For example, when everyone wrote beautiful nude goddesses and heroes, Bosch wrote funny little men in various obscene poses, but he is still a genius. That's why I advise you to treat authors according to their talent, not their chosen style.
    And then, the refusal to create works of postmodernism in the postmodern era is also in some way postmodernism:)

Leave a Reply

Categories