Introducing Postmodernism: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

by Chris Garratt

Cézanne was not a physicist, modern or otherwise. Nor indeed were his successors and heirs, the Cubists. What we have is one of those rare occasions in history when science and art arrive independently at complementary attitudes.

Cubists

Cubism rescued art from obsolescence and re-established its authority to represent reality in a way that photography could not.

Rescues art

Postmodern theory is a consequence of this century’s obsession with language. The most important 20th century thinkers – Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger and others – shifted their focus of analysis away from ideas in the mind to the language in which thinking is expressed. Philosophers or logicians, linguists or semiologists, they are all language detectives who seem to agree about one thing. To the

Thinkers

Foucault completely upsets our conventional expectations of history as something linear – a chronology of inevitable facts that tell a story which makes sense. Instead, he uncovers the underlayers of what is kept suppressed and unconscious in and throughout history – the codes and assumptions of order, the structures of exclusion that legitimate the epistemes, by which societies achieve their identities.

Identity

He showed how power and knowledge fundamentally depend on each other, so that the extension of one is simultaneously the extension of the other. In so doing, the reason of rationalism requires – even creates – social categories of the mad, criminal and deviant against which to define itself. It is thus sexist, racist and imperialist in practice.

Corruption

Eugenics, a pseudo-science of “racial improvement” based on Darwin’s idea of natural selection, drew on the new sciences of neurology, psychiatry and anthropology to distinguish the fit from the unfit.

Eugenics.. Exclusion

Lacan’s extreme marginalization of women has given a boost to postmodern feminist theory.

Feminism

If identity is a construction and not an absolute fixed reality, then this opens up immense scope for feminist thinking. The entire historical process by which identity has been represented as a self-evident certainty is thrown into question.

Feminism and construct id

Male theories of sexuality – Freud’s or Lacan’s – literally cannot think of women except as negatively imaginary, incomplete, an empty signifier (the vacant womb).

Must both be there

Liberal feminism is deep-rooted in modernity. It is a rationalist project of emancipation, originally inspired by the ideals of revolutionary Enlightenment in America and France, and classically formulated by

Liberal feminism

Metanarratives are the supposedly universal, absolute or ultimate truths that are used to legitimize various projects, political or scientific. Examples are: the emancipation of humanity through that of the workers (Marx); the creation of wealth (Adam Smith); the evolution of life (Darwin); the dominance of the unconscious mind (Freud), and so on.

Narratives

“The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training of minds … is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so.

Learning by regurgitation

The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending … to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume – that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its “use-value’”

Knowledge consumer fake news enabking

The irreversible change from knower to consumer of knowledge is the cornerstone of postmodernity. This is the real historic change which legitimizes postmodernism – and not, as is usually claimed, the “change” to postmodern architecture.

consumerism

postmodern revolution in science based on notions of holism, interconnection and order out of chaos and the idea of an autonomous, self-governing nature. Complexity

The hebraic connective thread

The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but deceit and fraud.

Tory weapon

This is advertising as a “social conscience”, an artificially constructed reality that projects an image of harmony to sell a brand name, while reproducing the stereotypes of Western culture.

Beneton

The destruction of the past is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991

Short 20th c

never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the Earth and of humanity… no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the Earth.

Neo conservatism