Rauschenberg
Modernism is defined in part by "Seriousness of intention and purpose, middle-class earnestness," contrasted with postmodernism's "Play, irony, challenge to official seriousness, subversion of earnestness."
(From Georgetown's authority on all things postmodern.)
What's worth being earnest about? We don't want to look stupid or uncool. No wonder we have a hard time with life, and death, and communication and engaging in the world with the world in a meaningful way, or one that transcends the realm of the immediate and the individual.
However, postmodernism is also indicative of "Subverted order, loss of centralized control, [and] fragmentation" versus modernism's "Hierarchy, order, [and] centralized control." So even if we're scrambling to pick up the fragments of what was previously unquestionable authority, at least we can put re-build them into a shape that better suits our wildest dreams of equality and freedom, on a micro-level that leaves room for interpretation at the individual level. If we're having a collective existential crisis, it can be cured by taking refuge in the "Rejection of totalizing theories; pursuit of localizing and contingent theories": postmodernism, now, means you're actually allowed, encouraged, to define your own way of living. The rules are already broken, and we get to take what we want from the shards on the floor.
1 comment:
this makes me miss my hipster prof. sean witters.
i think we're all experiencing a simultaneous existential crisis but instead of people creating and living by their own rules, people just become insecure and thus irony is born. because we all know how uncool it is to show "seriousness of intention and purpose, middle-class earnestness."
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