Post Modernity & Visual Culture

Lecture Notes

Keywords

Modernism 
An art and philosophical movement of the 19th and 20th centuries that valued rationalism and scientific/industrial culture.
Post-Modernism
An intellectual movement succeeding modernism, often question or outright rejecting values of modernism.
Anti-Modernism
The idea that post modernism diametrically rejects modernist values and ideas.
Hyper-Modernism
The emphasis on the value of new technology like modernism but being very much focused on individuality. 
Post-Internet
A movement in art and criticism concerned with the impact of the Internet on art and cultured – this is often done within a post-modernist framework.
Meta/Grand Narrative 
An overarching narrative about narrative of historical, experiential or mythological meaning, that legitimises individuals into the narrative. Providing a unified identity to groups of individuals.
Personal Narrative
A personal take on culture.
Detournement
​To reroute or hijack.
Fordian Economics 
An economic theory focused around mass production and mass consumption.
Anti-Foundational
Rejection of rationalism, truths, certainties, doctrines and unstable belief systems – i.e. there is no universal truth or philosophy.
Iconoclastic
Criticizing or attacking cherished beliefs or institutions.
Rationalism
The practise or principle of basing opinions and actions on reason and knowledge rather than religious belief of emotional response.
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On “Postmodernism and Philosophy” by Stuart Sim

Sim identifies postmodernism mainly by its rejection of the “grand narratives” of western culture. The universal theories it produces, are no longer worth engaging with since they have now lost credibility. This is due to the scepticism of postmodernism which undermines other philosophical theories and is in effect “anti-foundational”. He identifies Friedrich Nietzsche as a philosophical inspiration to the movement with his “call for ‘revaluation of all values’”.  This scepticism is coupled with an anti-foundational bias and a reflexive dislike of authority, in Sims writing.

He then goes onto describe different facets of postmodernism, such as poststructuralism. Poststructuralism is a change in understanding across numerous intellectual fields, Sims goes on to discuss its presence in science, feminism, semiotics, politics, psychoanalyse, Marxism and philosophy.  Poststructuralism calls into question cultural certainties which structuralism up held mainly the belief that the world is fully knowable through the use of systems.
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Semiotics under the poststructuralism is criticised for the overall tidiness and the in ability to account the instability of language. Sims uses Jacques Derrida’s to elaborate on the topic of semiotics, wherein he poses his concept of différance. In this he suggests that the meaning of words have “slippage”, with words gaining alternate meanings and association over time because they are “containing echoes and traces of other words, with their sound quality, for example”. Derrida’s concept is emphasized more as an identification of a feature already present in language than a theory, reportedly expressing a fondness for this feature as it allows for pun and word-play.