Forum Activity: Key Ideas from Postmodernity and Pop Culture

For general readers, this article centres around pastiche, which is work (artistic, architecture, whatever) that imitates previous works (click here for more). Typically I write to this blog for university, and then copy my writings to my secure university discussion board. This time around, I've reversed the process. Let's see if it works...

Warning: this post contains links to third party blogs, the contents of which I cannot guarantee are suitable for all audiences.

I have an admission to make - I was a geek long before it was cool to be a geek. Here's my badge. It's okay though, really, my wife loves me and supports me, and I have found meaningful employment, so it's not so bad. I have friends, because I can make their home wireless networks not only work, I can also deny their neighbours free Internet access.

An indicator of my degree of geekiness, on a scale of one to ten, with one being "high school sports captain" and ten being Sheldon Cooper, is about "Dick Smith in his dorky stage" (with absolute respect and kudos to our champion of geekery, Lord Richard).


As a product of the flowers and beads generation, I have a fascination with posters, and their cultural significance. This may be because I grew up with a very striking matador poster on my wall, similar to this one (click it for the source).

These were popular and fashionable when I was a kid, as were velociraptors and other Cretaceous lifeforms.

As the poorest kid in town (we lived in a hole in the road), and having no concept that such a poster would become so politically incorrect, I grew to love this poster because it was a window into an alien world, and it was vivid, and bright and charming, although possibly not to el torro.

I grew up to become a scientist, all very respectable and socially acceptable, and I have learned to hide my stronger geek tendencies from the public eye. I do have a bipedal robot hiding in my study, and my wife and I keep both wet and dry Roombas (to the cat's terror, and my delight), but in the main I can fake a reasonable 'normal world' conversation over dinner.

But I have never lost my fascination for posters and what they represent. We collect fine art - because that's smart and acceptable and normal - but what I'd really like is a four-foot framed print of the characters from the DC universe. You know the one I mean! I've resisted the urge to collect posters, but now that I'm middle-aged I'm permitted to do a lot of stuff just because I want to.

As I look back I see a progression of posters even during my life time, and it goes a little like this: posters that are now considered genuinely retro > 'reinvented' retro posters > current geek culture posters > pastiche posters. Allow me to illustrate.

Genuinely retro posters

This will 'frame' my generation a little better than my hilarious reference to dinosaurs. I grew up with the following as the dominant social force - my church pastors warned that this was the beginning of the end, sociologists pondered what it all meant, and me... well, I spent many, many hours in movie cinemas (watching the fillum, as the old folks would say) because my folks owned a greengrocer and needed somewhere to put me while they were purchasing at the market. I digress, here we go:



Once again, click the thumbnails for the source(s).

Familiar to anyone? These posters are now being reprinted in the millions (well, in the 'tens', at least) as genuine retro posters. I feel old, but then I remember my mother rode a horse to school, and feel better. And school only went to Year 9 then, so progress, right? Now, I are a scientist!

'Reinvented' retro posters

I'm fascinated by the use of 'reinvented' retro posters, which I guess are really a form of pastiche however for the sake of padding my post out a little and showing a linear progression of more than two points, I categorise on their own. As a founding member of the The Big Bang Theory cult, I can tell you far too much about the details in the sets of this fine CBS docu-drama, and I can attest to Penny's status as an empowered postmodern feminine goddess (ahem).

On the walls of Leonard and Sheldon's apartment are two posters that are now known to true geeks as iconic representations (is that a tautology?) of the highest level of geekery, observe:



(Yes, yes, click the image for the source - you're quite passionate about this, you know?)

The first is - obviously - Captain Future, "Wizard of Science", a reinvention of a TV series from the 1940s and '50s, and the second is a reinvented product ad from the 1930s for Petre Devos Beer (incidentally, that poster has spawned it's own font, of the same name, look it up!).

So, while it's strictly pastiche, it's retro reinvention... I'm sticking to that. Here's another example of the old made new, and returning to Empire vs Republic for a moment:



(Source, click, yeah yeah)

This is "Beat the Empire with a Red Squadron (Vintage Edition)" by Eozen, a talented postmodern artist. This is definitely pastiche, and certainly a mashup of genres, but it's a great example of 'reinvented' retro.

Geek culture posters

And now closer to home. Current geek culture, aimed squarely at geeks. If I need to explain the following posters, I'm afraid you're simply not the target audience. But take it from me, the target audience now has spending power and a greater willingness to express our individuality:



Pastiche posters

A genre of posters I'm totally captivated (like, totally) with is mashups, or pastiche, but in the geek world the mashups are often from two very tightly defined niches, such that if you're not fully aware of both worlds, the reference is lost, and somehow, that's just okay too. Take, for example, People's Exhibit A:



This is a mashup between Calvin and Hobbes, and Firefly - and it's immediately obvious that unless you are familiar with both 'world's, the humour is lost. Kind of an 'in joke' among geeks, only this time the last-laughers who didn't get it are non-geeks! Cool, huh?

And lastly, something a little harder to classify, but certainly pastiche at multiple levels. I give you Nuka-Cola:



This little beauty is pastiche² (yes, that's right, pastiche squared, wild ones!), as it is pastiche not only on its obvious play on a certain world-favourite beverage, but because Nuka-Cola exists in an online world that is itself pastiche of genres that represents a post-apocalyptic world that centres around the refreshing ale that will have you glowing in the dark in no time.

Thanks for journeying with me to this point, I know those of us from the grandfather era tend to ramble a little. Now, let's see how much Moodle* can mess with my, like, links, and stuff, innit.


* Moodle is the university Learning Management System, it's notorious for messing up formatting of long posts and not allowing enough time for edits

EDU5704 Reading 1.1

EDU5704 Popular Culture as Curriculum and Pedagogy

Reading 1.1 Drolet, M. (2004). The postmodernist reader: foundational texts, Routledge, London: UK

Part One - Pages 1 to 7

Within the Australian identity is a widely recognised idiomatic paradox. One who self-identifies as being “Australian”, whether by birth, social adoption (with a nod to our ‘Southern’ Australian cousins, eh bro) or other association, may openly and loving refer to a fellow Australian as being “a total bastard”, with the collective understanding that this is an endearment, a statement of acceptance, a cloaked compliment. However, for an Australian to refer to another – commonly someone not accepted as typically “Australian” – as being “a bit of a bastard” is culturally a supreme criticism.

Where then does this seemingly marginal difference between being “a bit of” as opposed to “a total” bastard originate and take meaning? Only an Aussie could tell you – and I defy any non-Australian observer to adequately explain this phenomenon.

It appears that so, too, are many of the distinctions claimed by post-modernists. Apparently, you need to be one to “get it”, to understand the nuances and subtleties of the condition, and unless you are one, you will be gently patronised for your inability to “get it”.

However, at least for this sceptical scientist, Michael Drolet manages to illuminate this shadowy and mystical world with his Postmodernism Reader (2004). He claims a dispassionate stance, and in the main he maintains this. His stated intent is to:

1. give meaning to postmodern, –ity, and –ism, by exploring their origins in the arts and architecture, humanities and theology (p. 1); and to 
2. identify postmodern, –ity, and –ism more broadly though their existence within the conflict between romanticism and classicism (p. 2).

Drolet identifies that when used prescriptively in the late 1950s postmodernism “sought to challenge received wisdom and established norms” (p. 2) and that it had become popularly adopted as – by my reinterpretation – a catchcry or buzzword in the 1960s and ‘70s of the ‘artistic set’ who were keenly latching onto their own new Enlightenment. He attempts to mitigate the “deep suspicion [and] outright hostility” (p. 1) towards postmodernism as “fuzzy thinking or a fashionable but muddled recourse to the use of [the term] to describe just about any phenomenon, which is odd and new” (p. 1) by explaining away the confusion caused by early dual applications of the term as both a movement and a “new sensibility” (p. 3).

My reading to date, and subsequent naïve understanding, suggests that postmodernism, then, it a doctrine of anti-establishmentarianism, with ‘the modern’ being ‘the establishment’.

I am drawn to Drolet’s citation of Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) in which Bell defines postmodernism as “a ‘new sensibility’ which ‘breaks down all genres and denies that there is any distinction between art and life’” (p. 3) and Levi-Strauss’s much earlier (b. 1908) reference to the human subject as having become “the spoiled brat of philosophy” (p. 3). Although aware that such ageist comments are non de rigueur, my attraction to these references lies in my observations, through the lens of a middle-aged Caucasian observer, of Generations X through Z and their insistence that there is no distinction between their individual point of view, and reality.

I suspect that this may be another small glimmer of light in my learnings.

Drolet explores (pp. 3,4) the distance between the precepts of the failure of the Grand Narratives of Western thought to emancipate the downtrodden, and that Western thought enabled the transformative change in individuals and societies that initiated that very emancipation. In the second reading McRobbie expands on this tension using feminism as a platform, questioning whether modernist feminism caused greater equality for women in a postmodernist society, or if in fact modernist feminism is challenged by ‘feminine’ postmodern women.

While exploring the historical political origins of postmodernism from the 1920s, Drolet highlights Bell’s arrival at a conclusion of a “modern faith in the power of reason to free the human spirit from bondage arising out of ignorance and prejudice” (p. 4) as an antidote to capitalism of the modern era. It’s a cynical view, but I have a greater belief that the power of individual and corporate greed will win – easily – over any such noble design; every time.

As the light of learning flickers more insistently, and I accept that the emergence of “me” – of self above all else, of my view as my incontestable reality – is a defining feature of postmodernism, I question where Western though is heading next; not in an alarmist, moral panicking way, but rather ruminating on the “new series of circumstances and social conventions [that require] a total rethinking of political practices and [the] nature of politics itself [as a] part of a new form of individual and human liberation” (p. 4).

I’m not confident in the postmodernist assumption that humanity’s natural and ultimate evolution is towards the ‘collective empowerment of the individual’. I endorse the emancipation struggles of the earlier modern era and acknowledge that true emancipation wars are being literally and figuratively fought globally – but I cannot but reflect on how akin postmodernism is to metaphorical wankery in the privileged Western world.

In the same sense that the human body needs a healthy level of stress to maintain optimum performance, is there a point at which individual and human liberation reaches equilibrium, and how far past that point do we start cranking the clarions of social decay? Drolet cites Toynbee’s negative view of postmodernism in A Study of History as “the prelude to the decline of civilisation itself” (p. 6). As feminism is questioning its place in a postmodern world after raising the placards in the modern world, is the empowerment and emancipation of “me” heading towards obscurity in a more empowered and emancipated world? (Ooh, lint ball.)

If, as Drolet states, Toynbee contended that “… an unprecedently prosperous and comfortable Western middle class [were] imagining that, for their benefit, a sane, satisfactory Modern Life had miraculously come to stay as a timeless present” (p. 7) what then is the expectation of the children of The Internet, given the prosperity and comfort of their lives in comparison to those observed by Toynbee of their grandparents.

As the light of learning flickers and wanes, I need to move to exploring pop culture against this angsty and political backdrop.

EDU5704 Reading 1.2

EDU5704 Popular Culture as Curriculum and Pedagogy

Reading 1.2: McRobbie, A. (1994). Postmodernism and popular culture. Routledge, London: UK

The course material (p. 23) highlights McRobbie defining agency, and that through agency people in this postmodern age are active decision makers when it comes to media consumption:

Social agency is deployed in the activation of all meanings. Audiences or viewers, lookers or users are not simple-minded multitudes. As the media extends its sphere of influence, so also does it come under the critical surveillance and usage of its subjects. 

(Incidentally as a parent I don’t lament the introduction of Bratz dolls – as do the course notes – but rather celebrate them as a preferable alternative to Barbie dolls.)

As a novice sociology journeyman, I initially struggled to find the relevance or personal reality of McRobbie’s linking of postmodernism to feminism, to produce what she refers to as feminist postmodernism. Perhaps it is my ‘youngling’ status in the –ologies and the naivety that arises from it, or a certain alleged chromosomal deficit, or even simply that the reading is now dated in terms of the evolution of postmodernism as a movement – if, in fact, it exists as such. I appreciated, at least, that McRobbie defined her ‘angle’ (‘bias’ being too strong a word for this professionally stated perspective) up-front and then spoke to it, rather than disguising it as a different beast. She queries the impacts on feminism when confronted with “difference and fragmentation, [when it] finds itself under attack from women who want to state their difference” (p. 6) and whether post-feminism has a place in sociology. To my inexperienced and uninvolved eye, the framing of these questions and the response to them – which easily exchanges feminism with the state of being a modern woman – suggests an alternate agenda. The confusion for me as a male observer is that the majority of women I interact with in professional and social settings seem to have a diminishing investment or engagement with feminism in its classical definition, and the majority argue confidently that they feel empowered and enabled in today’s society, possibly to a ‘higher level’ than the men around them as a result of genuine change, or less commonly through – a phrase I particularly despise – ‘positive discrimination’. Perhaps this is merely a reflection of my particular circumstance, or that I am unqualified to make such an observation.

To risk contention and oversimplification, McRobbie’s article seems to question whether modernism is more empowering – and therefore of greater value – to a hardcore feminist agenda than is postmodernism, as in a postmodernist society ‘modern women’ are empowered to the degree that – at least to them – modernist feminism has ‘done the job’ and is now of less societal value. She describes “the experience of young women for whom feminism, as we know, is not necessarily the political space they choose, even if they feel and express a desire to achieve equality” (p. 9); however, with at least a casual reading, she seems threatened by the ‘young women’ who feel they have achieved equality.

McRobbie states the need for “what emerges from between feminism and femininity, and we have to attend to the inventiveness of women as they create new social categories, some of which cause grave concern on the part of the social order” (emphasis added, p. 8). I, for one, greatly celebrate that which emerges between feminism and femininity, in the same manner in which I aspire to be a strong, masculine man with great respect for all people without regard to their ‘emancipation status’. I’m also deeply curious about apparent feminist concern surrounding the impact of femininity on social order.

As part of my academic discovery I continue to explore the following questions on equality and modernity, given McRobbie’s argument that “modernity … provided the spaces for a discourse of freedom, emancipation and equality to emerge” (p. 6).

Question 1: In the discourse of freedom, emancipation and equality, does indifference necessarily infer an acceptance of slavery and bondage? What about indifference by a member of a minority group?

Question 2: As a middle-aged white Caucasian male, can I understand what it means to be of a minority group that is or has historically been enslaved, marginalised, or otherwise disenfranchised?

Within her introduction I struggled to identify whether feminism is the point, or whether a discourse on feminism was simply an example as the vehicle for a broader exploration of postmodernism – and while I am still uncertain on this distinction, the distinction itself quickly became less relevant as I worked through the reading.

McRobbie describes postmodernism as art and culture that is “stripped of its old hidden elitist difficulty” (p. 2) and a culture that “refuse[s] to take itself seriously” (p. 3) but which is not “a forgetfulness or abandonment of politics, [but rather can] force us to reconsider the foundations of our modern thought” (p. 3). I find great tension in this study of postmodernism in its own inability to define itself, offering instead an almost Zen-like mystical response of “it’s what you choose it to be, as long as your definition is in reaction to modernism”, or more commonly, a carefully unspoken yet clearly implied response that to seek a clear definition is to have somehow childishly missed the point, to have become by default that dreaded thing that is a semiologist. As a scientist I am sceptical of a field that is itself elitist, and faux-mystical in its elitism, but perhaps I shall still “find the light”.

I am curious about McRobbie’s focus on Sontag’s work on gay men and their creation of culture, and that culture subsequently becoming ‘main-stream’ (for all the offence that such a distinction between ‘gay’ and ‘main-stream’ would cause my homosexual friends). A later exploration in the reading focuses on pastiche as an art form, and I believe that ‘camp’ culture (as used by McRobbie, p. 4, and Sontag, 1967) is far more pastiche than it is original. I am inevitably driven to wonder if the author is exhibiting the same need for legitimacy and validation for gay culture as postmodernism seems to crave for its own existence. McRobbie’s statement that “to lament the decline of full wholesome subjectivity is literally to cast aspersions on unwholesome, un(in)formed, partial and hybridic identities” (p. 4) clashes almost violently against my perspective and experience as an evolved and accepting individual, despite my white, middle-aged heterosexuality – although I acknowledge this may be in part because the article is from another (perhaps ‘bygone’) decade and that the particular Australian sociological landscape I inhabit may not be indicatively ‘main-stream’.

In McRobbie’s examination of Baudrillard’s work on “the disavowal of fictions, narratives and stories, with the growth of the age of science, reason and the enlightenment, [disguising] the fact that these were constructed within great overarching narratives and stories”, and “bigger [stories] of conquest, decimation and militarization” (p. 5), I believe I start to find my first glimpses of light, my first dawnings of understanding. I start to realise that perhaps the significant shift from modernism to postmodernism – as expressed through popular culture – is the shift to the micro-story; the story of “me”, of the voice of the individual.

I shall explore this glimmer of light further.