Postmodernism in aesthetics

Abstract

The essay features an analysis of one of the principal aspects of postmodernism: aesthetic. It defines postmodernism as a particular area in the artistic-aesthetic culture of the last third of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, whose main trait is pervasive irony towards both the classical tradition and contemporary explorations in the areas of art practices and aesthetic theory. Postmodernism’s most characteristic traits are arbitrary mixing of cultural codes and texts of all times and nations based on the principles of deconstruction and schizoanalysis, as well as parodying play with all cultural meanings. The essay demonstrates that postmodernism internally undermines traditional views of wholeness, harmony, and completeness of aesthetic systems, their norms and criteria. Postmodernism’s main principle is asystematicity and eclecticism. It distances itself from classic Western European (ancient, Winckelmannian, Hegelian-Kantian) aesthetics; however, without clashing with it, postmodernism attempts to pull it into its own orbit using a new theoretical foundation, which features a pluralistic aesthetic paradigm that leads to a loosening and internal transformation of the categorial system and conceptual apparatus of classic aesthetics. The essay analyzes all major principles of organization of artistic text in light of postmodernism as an artistic-aesthetic phenomenon: deconstruction, intertextuality, simulation, schizoanalysis, rhizomatics, irony. It shows that a postmodern modification of aesthetic experience is realized in the principal artistic media: architecture, painting, cinema, literature, theater, music, etc. It pays special attention to postmodern tendencies In Russian culture.