Modern • Postmodern

My dear friend Debra Pughe passed this along to me.

Modern

The movements (of Modernism) are the products, at the first historical level, of changes in public media. These media…arose in the new metropolitan cities, the centers of the also new imperialism, which offered themselves as transnational capitals of an art without frontiers. Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, New York took on a new silhouette as the eponymous City of Strangers, the most appropriate locale for art made by the restlessly mobile emigré or exile, the internationally anti-bourgeois artist. From Apollinaire and Joyce to Beckett and Ionesco, writers were continuously moving to Paris, Vienna and Berlin, meeting there exiles from the [Russian] Revolution coming the other way, bringing with them the manifestos of post-revolutionary formation…Such endless border-crossing at a time when frontiers were starting to become much more strictly policed and when, with the First World War, the passport was instituted, worked to naturalize the thesis of the non-natural status of language.

The experience of visual and linguistic strangeness, the broken narrative of the journey and its inevitable presentation was bafflingly unfamiliar, and raised to the level of universal myth this intense, singular narrative of unsettlement, homelessness, solitude and impoverished independence: the lonely writer gazing down on the unknowable city from his shabby apartment.

Raymond Williams, England

Postmodern

…at some point following World War II a new kind of society began to emerge (variously described as postindustrial society, multinational capitalism, consumer society, media society and so forth). New types of consumption; planned obsolescence, an ever more rapid rhythm of fashion and styling changes; the penetration of advertising, television and the media generally to a hitherto unparalleled degree throughout society; the replacement of the old tension between city and country, center and province, by the suburb and by universal standardization; the growth of the great networks of superhighways and the arrival of automobile culture—these are some of the features which would seem to make a radical break with that older prewar society in which high modernism was still an underground force.

I believe that the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism and… the two features of postmodernism—the transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents—are both very consonant with this process.

Fredric Jameson, United States