Postmodernism in Media Studies

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Postmodernism is notoriously tricky to pin down, as evidenced here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/ – it can refer to a general condition of contemporary life in which representations, reality, surfaces and styles are chaotically intermingled, or it can refer to specific modes of communication which are arch, self-referential and knowing (irony is often referred to as exemplary of the postmodern mode). 


What is postmodernism? As characteristics emerge around pastiche, intertextuality and parody it will be possible to put these ideas to the test in relation to some media texts. 

Learners should be encouraged to identify what sorts of repertoires of knowledge and experience are necessary in order to make sense of certain media texts, and how they might function ‘dialogically’ – that is, say one thing, but invoke other meanings through referencing or quoting from something else. They should also be encouraged to identify ways in which belief in certain kinds of reality can be less important than belief in media representations of that reality (the spectacle and rhetoric become more significant). Guy Debord’s 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle is a critique of media-saturated capitalist culture is still relevant in diagnosing aspects of the postmodern condition (there is an excellent gloss on it here: https://hyperallergic.com/313435/an-illustratedguide-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/).

Similarly, and more recently, Fredric Jameson, diagnoses the postmodern condition as characterised by:

  • An ahistorical mode (lacking a sense of the past – history becomes another set of signifiers which can be played with)
  • A lack of distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. 
  • Surfaces – increasingly there is no time for depth – politics becomes soundbites, protests become slogans, the world is a collection of images. 
  • Affectlessness – the predominant mode of irony and ‘knowingness’ leaves little room for real emotion, but short, sharp intense emotional responses are elicited through surface representations of things of which people have no first-hand experience, e.g.: Brexit, the death of Diana, refugees. 
  • Technologies of reproduction and recirculation, e.g.: all social media.

Examples of postmodern texts

As always, anchoring the arguments in specific texts or phenomena is key to demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of the concept and how it might be useful in making sense of contemporary media. The focus for examination questions will be on: 
  • the arguments for and against understanding some forms of media as postmodern 
  • the ways postmodern media texts can challenge traditional relationships between texts and audiences 
  • the relationship between postmodernism and popular culture 
  • the ways media audiences and industries operate differently in a postmodern world 
  • the relationship between postmodernism and narrative
Read about the difference between pastiche and parody here: 
Now find some examples of each in contemporary media.

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