Study Task 2: Reading and Understanding a Text: To What extent could contemporary animation be described as Postmodern?

The question I have chosen for this CoP task is...

To what extent could contemporary animation be described as Postmodern?

To better understand the topic I have been reading journals on the subject of modernity and postmodernity. For this task I have condensed part of a journal by Terry Barrett on this very topic titled 'Modernism and Postmodernism: An overview with art examples.'

Modernity and Postmodernity in art are best understood in relation to modernity and postmodernity in general cultural history. The age of modernity began with the Enlightenment and it was Isaac Newton that championed the belief that through science the world could be saved.  Rene Descartes and later, Immanuel Kant shaped the age intellectually, believing that through reason they could establish a foundation for universal truth. The major movements and events of modernity are democracy, capitalism, industrialization, science, belief in freedom of the individual and urbanization.

For postmodernism however, there is no unifying theory, as there are many contenders putting forth contentious ideas. Proponents of postmodernity symbolically date back to 1968, with the riots in Paris in which students demanded radical changes to what they perceived as an elitist European University system. Postmodernism is better described as anti-modernism, as it does not merely follow modernism but also challenges modernist assumptions and conventions. Postmodernists see modernity as the oppression of ‘peasants’ under ‘monarchies’, or in a more modern context, the oppression of workers under capitalist systems or the oppression of women in the social consciousness.  The postmodern argument is, in summary, the belief that modernity leads to social practices and institutions that legitimise domination and control by an elite few over the many.

I have also picked out five key quotes from the journal piece that I believe explain the subject. 

'Isaac Newton championed the belief that through science the world could be saved.'

'Political leaders of modernity also championed reason as a source of progress in social change, believing that with reason they could produce a just and egalitarian social order. Such beliefs fed the American and French democratic revolutions, the first and second world wars, and the thinking of many today'.

'Whereas modernity is influenced by the rationalism of Newton, Descartes, Kant and others, postmodernity is influenced by philosophers such as Fredrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidrigger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey and more recently Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, who are skeptical about the modernist belief that theory can mirror reality.'

'Karl Marx and Sigmund freud also undermined the modernist belief that reason is a source of truth  by identifying economic forces above the surface of society and the psychological forces below it that are not bound by reason, yet are powerful shapers of society and individuals.'

'Postmodernists stress that facts are simply interpretations, that truth is not absolute but merely the construct of individual groups, and that all knowledge is mediated by culture and language.'