In the realism that rode high in the 19th century, the work of art was supposed to express unity and continuity. Realism mirrored reality, criticized it and consoled. The individuals portrayed were clearly placed in society and history. High culture was just that - higher, more valuable, than popular culture. In modernism, voices, perspectives and materials were multiple. The unity of the work was assembled from fragments and juxtapositions. Art set out to remake life. Audacious individual style threw off the dead hand of the past. Continuity was disrupted, the individual subject dislocated. High culture quoted from popular culture. Post-modernism, by contrast, is indifferent to consistency and continuity altogether. It self-consciously splices genres, attitudes, styles. It relishes the blurring or juxtaposition of forms (fiction-nonfiction), stances (straight-ironic), moods (violent-comic), cultural levels (high-low). It disdains originality and fancies copies, repetition, the recombination of hand-me-down scraps. It neither embraces nor criticizes, but beholds the world blankly, with a knowingness that dissolves feeling and commitment into irony. It pulls the rug out from under itself, displaying an acute self-consciousness about the work's constructed nature. It takes pleasure in the play of surfaces and derides the search for depth as mere nostalgia for an unmoved mover. It regards ''the individual'' as a sentimental attachment, a fiction to be enclosed within quotation marks. ''The individual'' has decomposed, as ''reality'' has dissolved; nothing lives but ''discourses,'' ''texts,'' ''language games,'' ''images,'' ''simulations'' referring to other ''discourses'' ''texts,'' etc. ''Characters'' can step out of character; they can die, as in Philip Roth's novel ''The Counterlife,'' only to live again. High culture speaks the same language as popular culture, even blurs into it.
Todd Gitlin, Hip-Deep in Post-modernism, The New York Times, November 6, 1988
