Melissammoore’s Weblog

After reading Hutcheon’s piece, The Politics of Postmodernism, I felt that I had a more concise understanding of Postmodernism, and what it is meant to do within various areas. Initially, Hutcheon explains the correlation of postmodernism with representation. Hutcheon explains, “Nevertheless, in literary and art critical circles there is still a tendency to see postmodern theory and practice either as simply replacing representation with the idea of textuality or as denying our intricate involvement with representation, even though much postmodern thought has disputed this tendency” (29-30). Hutcheon explains that postmodernism goes beyond replacing traditonal modes of representation and challenges what we see as truth by ‘representing duplicates’ (30). Hutcheon refrences Althusser’s  view of ideology as a production of representations. There is no real because everything is a reproduction of a reproduction. “There is nothing natural about the ‘real’ and there never was- even before the existence of mass media” (31).  What I liked most about Hutcheon’s explanation of postmodernism is that it made me feel less disconcerting about the intentions of postmodernism. For a while I was thinking of postmodernism as a pesemistic view, where there is no order and no end. From the Hutcheon reading I saw postmodernism in a different light, as stated; “The postmodern, as I have been defining it, is not a degeneration into ‘hyperreality’ but a questioning of what reality can mean and how we can come to know it. It is not that representation now dominates or effaces the referent, but rather that it now self-consciously acknowledges its existence as representation-that is, as interpreting (indeed as creating) its referent, not as offering direct and immediate access to it” (32). According to Hutcheon, we can use postmodernism as a tool to see what we see as truth and reality, and why we see it this way. To question our beliefs and acknowledge what can be changed. As in Sherman’s film stills, she uses images of women in stereotypical roles associated with the female gender to question how women have assumed these roles throughout the years, and hopefully spark change. I thought that this reading was best for me to understand postmodernism, and what it can do for various mediums ranging from arts to politics.