Postmodernism is a contemporary movement and according to Malpas (2005) one which “has tended to focus on questions of style and artistic representation” and therefore it can be “described as a Style or a genre” (p. 9). He adds that the term “postmodernity has been employed to designate a specific cultural context or historical epoch” and therefore “it is said to refer to an epoch or period. He does add that a definite distinction between the two as outlined above, “is, of course, impossible” (p. 9).
I have included Rosenberg’s picture Retroactive I (1964) because of his “use of images of current events gathered from magazines and newspapers for this screen print on canvas”.
I feel this particularly demonstrates its association according to Malpas (2005) with the American literary critics Ihab Hassan’s terms for postmodern art as “text/intertext” and “combination” (p. 7 and 8). I also feel this artwork reflects the concerns of the philosophers, whom I discuss, Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) and Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) on a media-saturated culture struggling to come to grips with the television era.
In his book The Postmodern (2005) Malpas also explores some of the theorists, their theories and the impact they have on contemporary society. One of these is the French postmodern theorist Jean Francois Lyotard. His book, The Postmodern Condition:A Report on Knowledge (1979) has become for many critics a very “influential account of postmodernity” and “it investigates the condition of knowledge… including discussions of what counts as knowledge for us today, how it is generated, communicated and put to use by individuals, businesses and whole societies” (p. 36). The reasoning behind Lyotard’s argument according to Malpas “is that the status of knowledge has altered from the postindustrial age as cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age” (p 36). Lyotard lays great importance on who owns, controls and has access to the ideas and adds that “we have become consumers of a knowledge that has been transformed into a commodity” (p.36). He relates this in terms of two narratives, “grand and little and the ways in which the world is understood through the stories we tell about it” (p. 36). It is possible to relate this theory in my reading of P. K. Dick’s text Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) because some of its key themes are representative of the characteristic features of postmodernity.
According to Snipp-Walmsley (2006) there was resistance to the notion of postmodernism and Umberto Eco argues that it cannot be defined in the order of time, but should to a certain extent be viewed as a means of illustration present in every era (p. 405). He also lists amongst others Christopher Norris who according to Malpas (2005) wrote in What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical theory and the Ends of Philosophy (1990) postmodernism has been defined as “a rather unfortunate mistake” (p. 138).
