"Alexandre Kojeve, a French philosopher who published the reading of Hegelian historical philosophy, is often referred to because he interpreted the Japanese Edo era as a precursor of the postmodern society after the "End of History". Roland Barthes, another French critic, also depicted Japanese tradition as a realization of postmodernism.
The word "postmodern" or " postmodernity" has been widely used to analyze the cultural phenomena after 1970s. Two typical points are often discussed in its context. One is the argument by a French philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard. He argued that in the postmodern era "the grand Narrative" which had unified the entire system of knowledge disappears, and that the unity of society is broken up into a lot of various "small narratives" or cultural communities. Jean Baudrillard, a French sociologist, makes the other point. He argued that the modern distinction between the original and the copy, the real and the image, is already lost, and that everything becomes simulacrum in the postmodern era. The former emphasizes its political or social change while the latter is rather aesthetical or cultural discussion, but these two arguments are eventually supported by the same intuition. In the postmodern era, after the 1960s or 1970s, our society is little by little losing the value of "Depth", the value of something behind the visible or perceptible things we are confronted with in our dairy lives. It may be God, Truth, Justice, Nation, Ideology or Subject depending on the cultural context and all such "grand" things are now losing its credibility --- so say postmodernists. Therefore, we can say that the concept of superflat is exactly and typically postmodernist."
The essay is in two parts and contains some very important information and explanations, especially for my focus area which is quickly becoming the Otaku culture of Japan.
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