In your opinion how
did Postmodernism get connected with Popular Culture?
Most contributions to the debate
on postmodernism agree that whatever else it is or might be, postmodernism has something to do with the development of popular culture in the
late twentieth century in the advanced capitalist democracies of the West. That
is, whether postmodernism is seen as a new historical moment, a new sensibility or a new
cultural style, popular culture is cited as a terrain on which these changes
can be most readily found.
POPULAR
CULTURE AND THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNISM
It is in the late 1950s and early
1960s that we see the beginnings of what is now understood as postmodernism. In the work of the American cultural critic, Susan Sontag (Against
Interpretation (1966», we encounter the celebration of what she calls a ‘new
sensibility’. As she explains: ‘One important consequence of the new
sensibility [is] that the distinction between high” and “low” culture seems
less and less meaningful.’
The postmodern ‘new sensibility’ rejected the cultural elitism of modernism. Although it often ‘quoted’ popular culture, modernism was marked by a deep suspicion of all things popular. Its entry
into the museum and the academy as official culture was undoubtedly made easier
(despite its declared antagonism to ‘bourgeois philistinism’) by its appeal to,
and homologous relationship with, the elitism of class society. The response of
the postmodern ‘new sensibility’ to modernism’s canonization was a
re-evaluation of popular culture. The postmodernism of the 1960s was therefore in part a populist attack on the
elitism of modernism. It signalled a refusal of what Andreas Huyssen in After the
Great Divide (1986) calls ‘the great divide … [a] discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture’. Moreover, according to Huyssen, ‘To a large extent, it is by the distance we have travelled from this “great divide” between mass culture and modernism that we can measure our own cultural postmodernity.’ The American and British pop art movement of the 1950s and the 1960s, with its rejection of the distinction between popular and high culture, is postmodernism’s first cultural flowering. As pop art’s first theorist Lawrence Alloway explains:
Great Divide (1986) calls ‘the great divide … [a] discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture’. Moreover, according to Huyssen, ‘To a large extent, it is by the distance we have travelled from this “great divide” between mass culture and modernism that we can measure our own cultural postmodernity.’ The American and British pop art movement of the 1950s and the 1960s, with its rejection of the distinction between popular and high culture, is postmodernism’s first cultural flowering. As pop art’s first theorist Lawrence Alloway explains:
The area of contact was mass produced
urban culture: movies, advertising, science fiction, pop music. We felt none of
the dislike of commercial culture standard among most intellectuals, but
accepted it as a fact, discussed it in detail, and consumed it
enthusiastically. One result of our discussions was to take Pop culture out of
the realm of ‘escapism’, ‘sheer entertainment’, ‘relaxation’, and to treat it
with the seriousness of art (quoted in John Storey, An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (1997».
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