Random cannibalisation (cherry picking)
A desperate attempt to make sense of an age that is chaotic and confusing
No grand narratives
The end of history? (not the end of things happening, but the end of new inventions changing the world, a system of resignation, a culture of repetition)
An age of information, possibly overstimulation?
Imitating and reusing dead styles, but without the importance, the emotion, the creativity
Depthlessness?
Born out of a pessimism of the world
A dystopia
Neo - beware concepts that begin with Neo; it probably means that it is not a new version of that concept, it is the old concept recycled
A culture that is more concerned with reproduction rather than production
Technology replacing human productivity and human skill
The weakening of historicity - because we have now have a cultural history of sampling, our understanding of history is completely change - we take styles and images without understanding their original uses and contexts - creates a divorce between us and history
Jameson's definition of pastiche:
The increasing unavailability of personal style, pg. 16
The producers of culture have no where to turn to but the past: the imitation of dead styles, pg.17
Pastiche is the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style...but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry...devoid of laughter and without any conviction pg. 17
Modernist styles become postmodernist codes, pg. 17
Deja Vu, pg. 24
Hutcheon's definition of postmodernism and parody:
postmodernist art offers a new model for mapping the borderline between art and the world, a model that works from a position within both and yet within neither, pg. 180
postmodernism is a fundamentally contradictory enterprise: its art forms (and its theory) use and abuse, install and then subvert convention in parodic ways, self-consciously pointing both to their own inherent paradoxes and provisionality and, of course, to their critical or ironic re-reading of the art of the past, pg. 180
'Parodic references to history textually reinstate a dialogue with the past', pg. 180 - sampling anything opens up a critical and social dialogue with the past, making people aware of what came before
What both its supporters and its detractors seem to want to call "postmodernism" in art today -be it in video, dance, literature, painting, music, architecture, or any other form -seems to be art marked primarily by an internalised investigation of the nature, the limits, and the possibilities of the language or discourse of art.
[works] are resolutely historical and inescapably political precisely because they are parodic
[the very label of] postmodernism signals its contradictory dependence upon and independence from the modernism that both historically preceded it and literally made it possible. (It's not necessarily just blind imitation, it's an art form in it's own right that wouldn't exist without the movement of modernism before it).
"Postmodernist ironic recall of history is neither nostalgia nor aesthetic "cannibalization."
'The politics of pluralism' is getting us away from a white anglo-dominated culture.
She also writes about how people who don't accept pluralism are elitist snobs.
One of the main features that distinguishes postmodernism from modernism is the fact that it "takes the form of self-conscious, self-contradictory, self-undermining statement"
The use of parody: citing a convention only to make fun of it
Unlike Jameson, who considers such postmodern parody as a symptom of the age, one way in which we have lost our connection to the past and to effective political critique, Hutcheon argues that "through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference"
Parody de-doxifies: it unsettles all doxa, all accepted beliefs and ideologies
she values postmodernism's willingness to question all ideological positions, all claims to ultimate truth.