Study in Lund: Five Faces of Modernity // Modernism and Postmodernism in the 20th Century- LUND UNIVERSITY Spring 2016

Modernism and Postmodernism in the 20th Century- LUND UNIVERSITY Spring 2016

Matei Calinescu’s On Postmodernism 

(Five Faces of Modernity, p. 265-312).

 

Calinescu was a literary critic from Romania and a professor at Indiana University in the United States. He wrote extensively about the “form of criticisms of tradition”, using terms such as “modern,” “modernity,” and more recently “modernism,” as well as number of “relation notions” (p 3). He suggests that in “the last hundred and fifty years or so” (p 3) the cultural, political and scientific landscapes of society have gone through “five faces of modernity”: modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch and postmodernism. Modernity began to be dominant in society sometime in the 18^th century, becoming more dominant in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The values of society have changed as time has passed so that each uncertain time period has its own term. It’s uncertain because, as Calinescu says, “It is impossible to say precisely when one can begin to speak of the existence of two distinct and bitterly conflicting modernities” (Calinescu, 1987: p.41).

The classic idea of modernism is positive – it was regarded as the “doctrine of progress” (Calinescu, 1987: p.41), changing and moving forward, coming out from darkness of the Middle Ages; however, this positive aspect transformed with industrialization to represent something negative (for example, in modern times, time equals money and modernity implies consumerism and capitalism). Over the decades, society has undergone shifts in in terms of modernity, beginning from romantic modernism to radical avant-garde, to delusional decadence and to tasteless kitsch. And as Calinescu suggests after WWII world changes and a new term “Postmodernity” appeared.

In this paper I will not focus on all five faces of modernity as Calinescu calls them, but instead I will look at postmodernity which Calinescu calls the “new face of modernity” (p 265). He questions how the notion of postmodernity has developed a certain distinction from all other faces of modernity (p 265). He states that to find such extreme differences, we need to look at history, as the term postmodern remains vague and meaningless when not examined properly.

Calinescu describes the clash between modernism and postmodernism and references Jean-Francois Lyotard, who rejected modernity and claimed it was destined to disintegrate. He states that “once modernity disintegrates, the cardinal value of the new postmodern consciousness becomes dissent – dissent as a guiding principle or dissent for the mere sake of dissent” (p274) which is perhaps a direct attack on the modernist slogan "Art for art's sake" from the early 19th century which expresses a philosophy that real or true art should be stripped from any suppression of expression based of moral or utilitarian function or idea of “usefulness.”

Postmodernism regards modernism as a failure; Calinescu states that modernism upheld an “Enlightenment metanarrrative of progress through knowledge,” (p274) of trying to constantly build a new and improved civilization through advancements in science and culture, but that these “modern (ideological) metanarratives have lost their credibility” (p275). These metanarratives tried to portray an absolute value of human civilization, tearing down and destroying the old and building something new and better, but postmodernism leaned more towards “relative values” of the world, different ideas running together. Rather than “the experimental cutting edge of modernity […] to destroy and to invent” (p275), postmodernism goes back to modernism and reinvents, recycles the old, incorporating it so that many ideas coexist together. Calinescu states that by “opting for logic of renovation rather than radical innovation, postmodernism has entered into a lively reconstructive dialogue with the old and the past” (p276).

My understanding of postmodernism is that it arose from what some see as the “failure” or modernism. Modernism valued the idea of building a better world, of the progress of human civilization through knowledge, science, intellectualism and refinement of culture. Particularly in art and literature, modernist attempted to move away from strict classical, traditional modes such as realism. They found a new way of expressing their thoughts and new inventive and experimental art styles. However, postmodernists found modernism to have failed because it wasn’t challenging enough.

Postmodernism brought forth even more experimental art forms, literature and architecture. Calinescu discusses how “The postmodernist response to the utopian rigidities of the modernists was to call for a (modern) city with memory” (p 282). Postmodern architects designed building that deviated from the standard view of how buildings should look (for example the architecture of Las Vegas which is kitschy and chaotic, but reinvents art from the past, even the Pyramids and architecture from the ancient Greeks).

Calinescu states that the postmodernists were influenced a lot by artists from the end of the modernist age who experimented with absurdism or avant garde styles such as Beckett, Nabokov and Borges (p298). I feel we can see this influence in postmodern art and literature and in what Calinescu calls “the emergence of the postmodern willingness to revisit the past” (p276). Postmodern writers and artist were radical, used collage and cut-up techniques, recycling and ornamenting work from popular culture (for example, Andy Warhol and William S. Burroughs). In this sense, they reacted to culture with a kind of counterculture, challenging the mainstream.

Musical artist such as David Bowie can also be seen as a postmodern icon as he challenged gender norms and societal views of what was acceptable to express about sexuality. Postmodern film also changed the perceived idea that a film needs to tell a clear chronological accessible story, for example the films of Luis Bunuel and nowadays David Lynch don’t necessarily have any distinct, definite narrative – one person watching their films could say the plot was one thing, somebody else watching their films could say the plot was something else entirely, and neither person could be said to be right or wrong because the narrative is open to interpretation.

                     

Overall, I feel that postmodernism has a positive side and a negative side. For me, the positive side is that it allows people to express themselves in new and challenging ways, to express ideas that had previously been thought of as unrepresentable. There were problems facing mainstream society such as racism and civil rights, feminism, and the sense of depression or being beaten down by the system. Postmodernism gave people a new voice to challenge the oppression in society, and express themselves more openly.

On the negative side, I feel that the digitalization of culture and advances in technology that have occurred in the postmodern age could actually be harmful to human connectedness. This might sound contradictory because nowadays people from all over the world can easily connect via the internet, but I feel that computers and smartphones can actually inhibit genuine human contact, they can create a false sense of reality that ends up alienating people more than connecting people as people become more addicted to social networks and pay less attention to the people and the world around them. Calinescu states that “postmodernism looks very much like kitsch or camp” (p312) and I feel that this can be seen in the digital age; social networks are a result of a consumer society where collecting facebook friends is kind of like playing a video game or buying cheap but disposable mass-produced things that you don’t really need.