On Tue, 2010-02-02 at 12:23 +0000, David Bircumshaw wrote:
> could one say that post-modern simply means contemporary industrial
> systems as applied to arts. No need for imagination there, for all the
> rhetoric of innovation
Yeah, except I wouldn't say simple. It would be an interesting
etymological excise to trace the various usages of postmodern. I tend to
agree with the marxist left that it is a reactionary political ideology.
I can remember reading stuff in the 80s like no more original or
inventive art is possible. All we can do is repeat what has already been
done; an eternal hell of the same. (This is why Deleuze's writings on
art can seem like a breath of fresh air.)
One of the first uses of the term was applied to Rauschenberg's use of
silk screen printed photo stencils on a painted canvas which lays out a
new ground for painting (as in post-impressionism.) But after that it
took off with another meaning altogether. So the term now used in art is
late modernism. A lot of the art theory and history which first used the
term is very interesting and useful formalism. Michel Foucault's
comments on the discursive positions of marxism and formalism, beginning
with the Russian revolution, seems an interesting direction to follow
up, as well. Words have always been invented by the ruling class; they
do not denote a signified, they impose an interpretation. (MF Essential
works, p 276.)
Today, postmodernism seems to mean ideological confusion and to
interpret confusion is an eternal confusion as that of an eternal
repetition of the same confusion, since it cannot be clarified and so
must remain confusion, anyway, best wishes, cj
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