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eastchance.com essays feature
Author: Keti Kurmashvili
Modernity and Post-Modernity
For the past two decades, the debates between modern and postmodern dominated the cultural and intellectual science in many fields. In aesthetic and cultural theory, different kinds of polemics were held, whether modernism in the arts was or was not dead and what sort of postmodern art was succeeding it. In philosophy, debates were connected with whether or not the tradition of modern philosophy had ended and many began to celebrate a new postmodern philosophy associated with Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, and others. Advocates of the postmodern turn aggressively criticized traditional culture, theory and politics.
To begin we might distinguish between modernity which is regarded as the modern age and postmodernity as a term for describing the period which follows modernity. There are many directions of modernity and the term refers to a variety of economic, political, social and cultural transformation. Modernity as it is described by Marx, Weber, and others is a historical periodizing term that refers to the epoch that fallows the “Middle Ages” or feudalism. Modernity is opposed to traditional societies and characterized by innovation, novelty and dynamism. Single person gained autonomy and faced huge cultural, social and technique influence. As Simmel describes eighteenth century pushed man to free himself from historical bonds, from religion, morality, afterwards he was demanded to be motivated on work, so the motivation and specialization made him incomparable from another. Simmel describing Metropolitan life tries to focus on the characteristic features of individual, who are standing aside and acting with the voice of head but not heart. Money economy and intellect becomes the most important and have very close link. “Modern mind has become more and more calculating…the relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into a chaos”. As Simmel mentions, it derives from the money economy. It really becomes common and central value. As it seems big cities are very important places of money exchange than smaller towns and the result of it is the cities “blasé attitude” and individual’s personal freedom which they lack in Antiquity or in the middle ages, that itself set barriers against free relationship towards outside world. It has some similarities with small town, where he feels himself limited. “Just as in the feudal age, the free man was the one who stood under the law of the land, that is, under the law of the largest social orbit, and the unfree man was the one who derived his right merely from the narrow circle of a feudal from the larger social orbit. Today metropolitan man is “free” in a spiritualized and refined sense, in contrast to the pettiness and prejudices which hew in the small town man.” Modernity life as Simmel mentions is associated with property increases, independence of individual personalities and it is regarded to be of great importance and not in the negative way .
There is, in fact, the word “post” has some kind of confusion. On the one hand “post” describes a “not” modern that can be read as an active term of negative meaning, which attempts to move beyond the modern era and its theoretical and cultural practices. Thus, postmodern discourses and practices are frequently characterized as anti-modern interventions which break with modern ideologies, styles and practices. Postmodernity can be interpreted as a deep regression, as a loss of traditional values, still valuable elements of modernity.
As discusses within the influential French authors by Foucault, Derrida, Baudlliard, post-modernism represents the deconstruction of the social and abandonment of universal truth, morality. Postmodernism simply is like an advanced capitalism which has two kinds of traditional boundaries between popular, erudite, intellectual and the mass culture the substitution of the alienated subject.
According to Jean-François Lyotard postmodern era has three separated basis: first of all those ideas of progress, rationality and scientific objectivity, which was characterized to modern western era came to end, secondly prevailing highly respected “high” and avant-garde art and culture have no more value, and low or popular culture substituted it, and third, it is getting impossible to separate “real” from “copy” or the “natural” from the “artificial”. For Lyotard the “post” in the term post-modernism is associated with a new direction after previous one. He mentions the idea of modernity was tightly connected with the principle that it is necessary and important to break with tradition and start and create the new way of thinking and living. The second is the strive of survival. “The question of post-modernity is also the question of the expression of thought, art, literature, philosophy, politics. You know that in the field of art, for example, and more especially the plastic arts the dominant idea is that the big movement of avant-garde is over.”
To distinguish between modernity and postmodernity, post-modern plays an important role in the field of cultural theory, in the arts. Modernism could be used to describe the art movement of the modern age like impressionism, expressionism, surrealism and other avant-garde movements while postmodernism can describe those forms which came after and break with modernism. Postmodern also appear in the field of theory and focus on the critique of modern theory in search for a foundation of knowledge and to make it universal, but on the contrary defenders of modern theory blame post-modern in irrationalism and nihilism.
Postmodern theorists, however, claim that in the contemporary high media society the process of change and transformation produce a new post-modern society and its defenders claim that the era of post-modernity creates a new stage of history and new social and cultural formation, which requires new concepts and theories. Theorists of post-modernity claim that technologies such as computers and media, new forms of knowledge and changes in social and economic system produce a post-modern social formation, knowledge and technology. As it may say post-modern offers everything or nothing. A more negative definition of a postmodern age emerges in Mills “Sociological imagination”. He argues that we are at the end of what is called the Modern Age. Just as Antiquity was followed by several centuries of oriental period, which westerners call “The dark Ages” so now the modern age is being succeeded by a postmodern period. He believes that our basic definition of society and of self are changed by new realities, it is necessary to make the order of changes which take place in entering new epoch. He described post-modern regarded as new age of revolutionary developments in science and technology, by tradition from individualism to mass society and new outlook and new forms of culture.
While the term postmodern was occasionally used in the 1940-19950s to describe new form of architecture or poetry, it wasn’t widely used in the field of cultural theory to describe new artifacts which emerge after modernism. During this period many cultural and social theorists began to discuss radical breaks with the culture of modernism and emergence of new post-modern artistic forms.
The 1960 was the period of pop art, film, culture, happening, multi-media, light shows, rock concerts and new cultural forms. Postmodern forms in literature, poetry, painting and architecture continued developing in the 1970 and1980s. In architecture were strong reactions against high modern style celebrated post-modern style based on populism and helped to underline the concept of post-modern.
Against modernist values of individuality, seriousness, post-modern exhibits new elements of culture and political critique that deserves historical avant-garde and desire for radically new art forms to be replaced. In the mid-1970s, more books appear which used the term postmodern to light a new era in history: the end of era that views humans action and social relationship particularly of economic exchange in the last 200 years. Post-modern age exhibits rebellious, antibourgeois emotion, post-modern means a sense of ending and beginning something new, new demands that we must develop new categories, theories and social and cultural situation. It creates new cultural categories, thought and writing and values to overcome modern practices.
To summarize modernity has began in the age of capitalism, the rise of modern philosophy and science, at the time when painting become portable and the music left the churches. The crises of modernity coincide with the crises of the rule of reason; it was a slow process. What is called modernism in the arts was a phase of transition between modernity and post-modernity. Modernism is characterized by the deconstruction of the codes and values of the modern. The difference which marks the change from modernism to the post-modernism is in the growth of skepticism with regard to the ideas and the utopian dreams of modernism which occurred after 19960s. the loss of beliefs and dreams provoked by this postmodern skepticism resulted in a cultural tendency to emphasize values opposed to the ones which reason had prescribed in the modern age. This explains the tendency to irrationalism, relativism by which the postmodern has been defining its own profile.
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