Postmodernism was a reaction against modernism. Modernism was generally based on idealism and a utopian vision of human life and society and a belief in progress. It assumed that certain ultimate universal principles or truths such as those formulated by religion or science could be used to understand or explain reality. Modernist artists experimented with form, technique and processes rather than focusing on subjects, believing they could find a way of purely reflecting the modern world.
While modernism was based on idealism and reason, postmodernism was born of scepticism and a suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal certainties or truths. Postmodern art drew on philosophy of the mid to late twentieth century, and advocated that individual experience and interpretation of our experience was more concrete than abstract principles. While the modernists championed clarity and simplicity; postmodernism embraced complex and often contradictory layers of meaning.
THE MANY FACES OF POSTMODERNISM
Anti-authoritarian by nature, postmodernism refused to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be. It collapsed the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture, between art and everyday life. Because postmodernism broke the established rules about style, it introduced a new era of freedom and a sense that ‘anything goes’. Often funny, tongue-in-cheek or ludicrous; it can be confrontational and controversial, challenging the boundaries of taste; but most crucially, it reflects a self-awareness of style itself. Often mixing different artistic and popular styles and media, postmodernist art can also consciously and self-consciously borrow from or ironically comment on a range of styles from the past.
“Modern” and “post-modern” were terms that were developed in the 20th century. “Modern” is the term that describes the period from the 1890s to 1945, and “post-modern” refers to the period after the Second World War, mainly after 1968.
Modern is related to logical and rational thinking whereas post-modern has denied this logical thinking. While the modern approach was theoretical, objective and analytical, the post-modern approach was subjective.
The modernist was in search of an abstract truth of life whereas the post-modernist did not believe in abstract truth or in universal truth. In modernism, there was an attempt to develop a coherent worldview. But in post-modernism, there is an attempt to remove the differences between the high and the low.
A modern thinker believes in learning from the experiences of the past and also has much trust in the text that tells about the past. On the contrary, a post-modern thinker does not have such beliefs. The post-modernist thinks that the text that tells about the past is of no use in the present times.
When a modern thinker analyses a subject by going deep into it, the post-modern thinker does not believe in in-depth analysis. A post-modern thinker bases his views on hyper-reality whereas the modern thinker only considered original works as genuine. A post-modern thinker considers morality as relative.
When considering the arts, modern and post-modern art have many differences. While modern art is based on elegance and simplicity, post-modern art is considered elaborate and decorative.
When modern philosophy is based on effect and cause, post-modern philosophy is based on chance only. When modern thinkers consider truth as objective, the post-modern thinkers consider truth as relative and socially based. It can also be seen that post-modernists involve politics in everything whereas modernists are not that political.
Robert Kerr writes in 2015’s How Postmodernism Explains Football and Football Explains Postmodernism: The Billy Clyde Conundrum:
* In his insightful Reading Football, Oriard made the argument that football’s narrative structure proved to be so rich it made it easy for even run-of-the-mill sportswriters to give readers of newspapers and
magazines a sense of thrills, suspense, and athletic prowess. The audience responded enthusiastically, finding in football “an irresistible duality” that was “at once mythic and visceral, liberating and lethal . . . rolled
into one compact drama,” as Almond put it. And once all that became evident to individuals and groups alert to social trends that presented opportunity for commercial exploitation, the boom was really on. “Football succeeded as a spectacle because the games’ own structure made narrative drama possible,” Oriard pointed out, “but also because these narrative possibilities were exploited by football’s promoters.”* Time and again, colleges and universities have ultimately embraced the compromise that football represented between their traditional missions and values and the many undermining forces the game brought to campus. Clearly those forces—including the violence and other antisocial behaviors, the mockery of academic standards, the corruption of money, etc.—have been there from the start. But so has the game’s irresistible appeal to audiences that enables colleges to attract students, alumni support, political influence, financial support, etc. The history of higher education is replete with examples of university leaders tapping into the force field of football in order to build their institutions.
* For well beyond his team’s games, influential narratives produced and shaped by [Oklahoma coach Bud] Wilkinson reached larger audiences with the potential to create “systems of meaning and standards of reality shared by writer and audience,” as media historian James Carey has characterized such message making. Wilkinson contributed narratively to his times in ways both tangible and intangible. One of the former that stands as a formal effort to utilize mass media is his Football Letter. Wilkinson’s renown came as one the game’s winningest coaches ever—his teams from the Fifties still hold the record for most consecutive victories by a major college football team—but his institutional newsletter offers narrative-making insights beyond football.
* Over the seventeen years Wilkinson was head coach at Oklahoma, his newsletters consistently articulated an idealistic vision of college football as a metaphorical realm where wholesome warriors strive for collective
progress. Especially in his early years that emphasis on self-sacrifice in the name of team progress dovetailed with the formative wartime experience of both Wilkinson and his newsletter audience, most of whom had just returned from World War II service at the time Wilkinson began his coaching career at Oklahoma. And his early athletes at Oklahoma, most of them World War II veterans, validated his metaphorical vision. However, in the second half of Wilkinson’s career, that vision began to be challenged by a younger generation of athletes raised on affluence, television, and individualism instead of wartime sacrifice and collective effort.* Byron Searcy told Gary King for a 1988 account of the era. “I saw in ‘57 an entirely different bunch of guys and it began a whole different era for Bud in dealing with the boys. There were guys on that team who questioned; they didn’t see the importance of discipline.”
* In stark contrast, one of Wilkinson’s last All-Americans was Joe Don Looney, an unruly hedonist who spent his days on the Oklahoma team capriciously defying the head coach. When Looney was dismissed from the team in 1963, the Oklahoman made it the lead story on its front page.
Though Looney played only a little more than one season at Oklahoma, and only sporadically in professional football later, his anti-hero antics contributed to a popular following that continued even after his death in
1988 in a motorcycle accident.* In that same early-Seventies era, writer Roy Blount spent six months with professional football players for a nonfiction book and found a world not significantly dissimilar to that of Billy Clyde’s. Blount found pro players to be “adults who fly through the air in plastic hats and smash each other for a living.” He ended up titling his book Three Bricks Shy of a Load, inspired by a conversation in which a defensive lineman told him, “You picked the right team. Oh, a great bunch of guys! And a bunch of crazy fuckers! I’m crazy too! We’re all about three bricks shy of a load!” Blount concluded that last sentence “summed up my six months with the Pittsburgh National Football League team better than anything else.” Those “crazy” Steelers went on to win three Super Bowls that decade.
Football historian and former NFL player Michael Oriard declared Semi-Tough transformational in that it contributed to changes in the way people think about the game and its participants. “Football was not always the most sexually charged of American sports; this part of its myth is a recent trend since the rise of professional football to prominence in the late fifties,” he has written. For most of football’s history before Semi-Tough, he said, the dominant image of a football player was Frank Merriwell, who wooed his long-time sweetheart with “two kisses over a period of several years” before finally marrying her and starting a family. Most influential in refocusing popular imagery of football players on “the sexual ‘stud,’ ” in Oriard’s assessment, have been media representations that highlight “the excessively sexed male such as Billy Clyde Puckett of Dan Jenkin’s Semi-Tough.” He called it “the most complete portrait of the stud football player in American fiction. . . . In fact, sex is the foundation of Billy Clyde’s ideal world—everyone enjoys it and nobody is hurt.”
* The bestselling novel found a huge audience for its fictional world in which every sort of vice, indulgence,
depravity, and mayhem played out with a cartoonish harmlessness, because somehow it all contributed toward successful football. However audacious an assertion it may have been, as we shall see, it has been rather widely embraced ever since.* The best articulations of postmodernist theory show us that so much of what we pretend is consistently and clearly explainable actually is not. The worst suggests that nothing is explainable.
* Postmodernist thought represents a source of wisdom that knows our modernist impulses always crave simple, sure answers. But it keeps finding ways to tell us, sometimes gently, sometimes annoyingly, sometimes rather arrogantly that no matter how much we do want such answers—or reliable metanarratives, etc—we can’t have them, because they so often don’t exist.
* For truly one can consider any game of football, from kickoff to final play, and extending even before and after those moments, to be nothing without the narratives that sponsors, participants, media, fans, and others impose upon it.
For example, the fans must embrace the notion that there is great significance for them in deeply bonding with one group of individual players wearing a particular uniform (rather than those wearing another), when in fact any player in theory could potentially be wearing one uniform or another. How, for example, would fans respond if the two teams in any given game decided at halftime to swap uniforms? Would fans still maintain the same bond with different players wearing “their” team’s uniforms? Or would the supposedly deep union between the fans and “their” players wearing one uniform endure when the players switched to the other team’s uniforms?
In essence, what actually happens in all games of football at even the highest levels of play is no more than what happens when a bunch of kids take a football out in the yard, choose up sides, and see which can do the things that will count as scores more often than the other team can. To that end, the participants will shove and chase each other about for some period of time. And beyond that, all meaning imposed upon those activities is narrative—an effort to develop stories with explanatory power. It offers textbook examples of processes that sociological scholars and others would call meaning-making, the social construction of reality, or narrative creation.
* Before, during and after the games, such narratives seek to impose meaning upon what will happen, what is happening, what has happened.
The appetite for such narratives among audiences seems to have no limit. And only football truly feeds the hunger. As journalist Warren St. Moon has written, “without football to generate controversies and scandals”
once the season ends, even the most successful sports talk-show hosts like Paul Finebaum in Alabama have to “improvise—sometimes desperately—to keep listeners tuning in for four hours a day.”* Oriard has noted, “it is most important to recognize that no single interpretation of football’s place
in American life has ever achieved consensus. The value of the games was debated from the outset and never resolved.” Recalling the clash of two dominant figures at the University of Chicago around the turn of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “In what [Coach Amos Alonzo] Stagg called sportsmanship, [Thorstein] Veblen found exploitation and the desire to inflict damage on others,” Oriard mused, “Who spoke for America, Stagg or Veblen? Both did from different vantage points.”So postmodernist theory tells us, perhaps, what we should have recognized all along—that football is not likely ever to give us definitive answers, but always it will give us the endless narratives that we may need even more. And just maybe, that is why the game exists and endures and flourishes and means so much to so many Americans anyway.
