ยป Two Meanings of “Postmodern”
Artists and architects (or at least academics and historians thereof) have an insatiable need to label minute trends in their disciplines. As a result, the “postmodern period” in art took place during the summer of 1978 or something like that. In contrast, in philosophy and the social sciences, postmodernism started with/after Kant and is still slowly gathering steam. The (otherwise unremarkable) pop-architecture book The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities has a nice line about the difference:
Postmodernism has now been given a rather different implication and weight by sociologists and geographers, who are concerned with the way categories of knowledge develop within late capitalist society in harness with power and privilege.
This is a Foucaultian view in its emphasis on the study of power-relations. I have only recently come across the idea that postmodernism is an ontological pursuit (what exists?) compared to modernism as an epistemological pursuit (what can we know?), so I can’t say more about that.
When I think about what you have been teaching me about post modern, I think of it in terms of what exists and not what we know. Knowing reminds me of material aspects of life and exists is the internal values.
karen
5 Mar 09 at 4:41 pm
actually — post-modernism in architecture is already done. I’ve heard ‘super-modernism’, ‘digitmodern’, and ‘automatic architecture’.
= )
post-modern architecture is also concidered to be actually pre-modern in some respects…ie ‘take what you need from what period you want’ — the beaux arts mantra.
Stewart
30 Mar 09 at 9:48 pm