Timely Contemporaneity: the current state of postmodernism and the unfinished state of modernism

Postmodernism as a phenomenon of culture is the main social theory of contemporaneity. If we accept the theory of Deleuze, one of the key figures of postmodernism, there are two principles in the world: the schizoid beginning of creative becoming and the paranoid beginning of suffocating order. What does this mean for each of us? How does culture affect us, and do we influence it? Where is the line between "art and non-art"?

Throughout this course of lectures the main concepts of postmodern philosophy will be examined in detail. We will attempt to understand often mutually exclusive concepts as well as to follow the way that the postmodern phenomenon affects our everyday life. We will analyze the principles by which all contemporary art is created: theatre, music, painting, and literature.

Lecture Six. “Timely Contemporaneity: the current state of postmodernism and the unfinished state of modernism.”

- Postmodernism as a reaction to the modernization processes: the anthropic life position, existential abandonment, deconstruction, irony, intertextuality, rhizomes...
- The incompleteness of modernism: the “project” approach, social action, formal and substantial rationality, risks, the explicit and latent functions of social institutions, the trajectory of the acting agent in the social structure...
- Timely modernism: subcultural diversity, heterogeneous socio-cultural environments and the formation of the micro environment, the living world and communicative action, reflection and self-identification processes...

Lecturer: Yulia Barysheva, candidate of cultural studies, associate professor.