Modernism & Post-Modernism (as Binary Opposites...?)

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Modernism/Modernity	Postmodern/Postmodernity
Master Narratives and metanarratives of history, culture and national identity as accepted before WWII (American-European myths of progress). Myths of cultural and ethnic origin accepted as received. Progress accepted as driving force behind history.	Suspicion and rejection of Master Narratives for history and culture; local narratives, ironic deconstruction of master narratives: counter-myths of origin. "Progress" seen as a failed Master Narrative.
Faith in "Grand Theory" (totalizing explanations in history, science and culture) to represent all knowledge and explain everything.	Rejection of totalizing theories; pursuit of localizing and contingent theories.
Faith in, and myths of, social and cultural unity, hierarchies of social-class and ethnic/national values, seemingly clear bases for unity.	Social and cultural pluralism, disunity, unclear bases for social/national/ ethnic unity.
Master narrative of progress through science and technology.	Skepticism of idea of progress, anti-technology reactions, neo-Luddism; new age religions.
Sense of unified, centered self; "individualism," unified identity.	Sense of fragmentation and decentered self; multiple, conflicting identities.
Idea of "the family" as central unit of social order: model of the middle-class, nuclear family. Heterosexual norms.	Alternative family units, alternatives to middle-class marriage model, multiple identities for couplings and childraising. Polysexuality, exposure of repressed homosexual and homosocial realities in cultures.
Hierarchy, order, centralized control.	Subverted order, loss of centralized control, fragmentation.
Faith and personal investment in big politics (Nation-State, party).	Trust and investment in micropolitics, identity politics, local politics, institutional power struggles.
Root/Depth tropes. Faith in "Depth" (meaning, value, content, the signified) over "Surface" (appearances, the superficial, the signifier).	Rhizome/surface tropes. Attention to play of surfaces, images, signifiers without concern for "Depth". Relational and horizontal differences, differentiations.
Crisis in representation and status of the image after photography and mass media.	Culture adapting to simulation, visual media becoming undifferentiated equivalent forms, simulation and real-time media substituting for the real.
Faith in the "real" beyond media, language, symbols, and representations; authenticity of "originals."	Hyper-reality, image saturation, simulacra seem more powerful than the "real"; images and texts with no prior "original". "As seen on TV" and "as seen on MTV" are more powerful than unmediated experience.
Dichotomy of high and low culture (official vs. popular culture). Imposed consensus that high or official culture is normative and authoritative, the ground of value and discrimination.	Disruption of the dominance of high culture by popular culture. Mixing of popular and high cultures, new valuation of pop culture, hybrid cultural forms cancel "high"/"low" categories.
Mass culture, mass consumption, mass marketing.	Demassified culture; niche products and marketing, smaller group identities.
Art as unique object and finished work authenticated by artist and validated by agreed upon standards.	Art as process, performance, production, intertextuality. Art as recycling of culture authenticated by audience and validated in subcultures sharing identity with the artist.
Knowledge mastery, attempts to embrace a totality. Quest for interdisciplinary harmony. Paradigms: The Library and The Encyclopedia.	Navigation through information overload, information management; fragmented, partial knowledge; just-in-time knowledge. Paradigms: The Web.
Broadcast media, centralized one-to-many communications. Paradigms: broadcast networks and TV.	Digital, interactive, client-server, distributed, user-motivated, individualized, many-to-many media. Paradigms: Internet file sharing, the Web and Web 2.0.
Centering/centeredness, centralized knowledge and authority.	Dispersal, dissemination, networked, distributed knowledge.
Determinacy, dependence, hierarchy.	Indeterminacy, contingency, polycentric power sources.
Seriousness of intention and purpose, middle-class earnestness.	Play, irony, challenge to official seriousness, subversion of earnestness.
Sense of clear generic boundaries and wholeness (art, music, and literature).	Hybridity, promiscuous genres, recombinant culture, intertextuality, pastiche.
Design and architecture of New York and Berlin.	Design and architecture of LA and Las Vegas
Clear dichotomy between organic and inorganic, human and machine.	Cyborgian mixing of organic and inorganic, human and machine and electronic.
Phallic ordering of sexual difference, unified sexualities, exclusion/bracketing of pornography.	Androgyny, queer sexual identities, polymorphous sexuality, mass marketing of pornography, porn style mixing with mainstream images.
The book as sufficient bearer of the word. The library as complete and total system for printed knowledge.	Hypermedia as transcendence of the physical limits of print media. The Web as infinitely expandable, centerless, inter-connected information system.

Bibliography

The literature in all fields on the questions of modernism/modernity, postmodernism/postmodernity, and the more recent questions about the post-postmodern is vast. The following works (spanning philosophy, art theory, architecture, and cultural theory) have played a major role in defining the discourse and arguments of this field of study, or are useful syntheses for orientation and overviews.

• Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London, UK: Verso, 1998.
• Aylesworth, Gary. “Postmodernism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
• Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings and et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
• ———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 217-252. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. [Older version in English.]
• Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. 1st ed. New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 1995.
• Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory. 1st ed. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 1991.
  ———. The Postmodern Turn. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 1997.
• Bourriaud, Nicolas. Altermodern: Tate Triennial. London; New York: Tate Publications and Harry Abrams, 2009.
• ———. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. 2nd ed. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005.
• Buskirk, Martha. The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
• Crimp, Douglas. On the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Corrected ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
• Drolet, Michael, ed. The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts. New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 2003.
• Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: New Press, 2002.
• Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004.
• Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter Memory, Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.
• ———. The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. New York,  NY: Pantheon, 1982.
• ———. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Vintage, 1990.
• Habermas, Juergen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987.
• Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 1st ed. Routledge, 1990.
• Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 1988.
• ———. Politics of Postmodernism. 2nd ed. New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 2002.
• Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
• ———. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. London, UK; New York, NY: Verso, 1998.
• Jencks, Charles. Language of Post-Modern Architecture. 5th ed. New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1988.
• Letham, Jonathan. “The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism.” Harper’s Magazine, 2007. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
• McCaffery, Larry. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk & Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 1991.
• Natoli, Joseph P. A Postmodern Reader. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.
• Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange. Second Edition. Lanham, MD; Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.
• Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 2nd ed. Princeton  N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980.
•  ———. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Sandler, Irving. Art Of The Postmodern Era: From The Late 1960s To The Early 1990s. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1996.
• Smith, Terry, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds. Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
• Venturi, Robert, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown. Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Revised. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977.