Concept and background
Postmodernism means "after modernism" or a move beyond it. Since the Enlightenment, modern society had believed that human reason could discover universal truths and that science and technology would bring progress. Two world wars, the Holocaust, totalitarianism and environmental destruction shook that faith, and from the 1960s and 1970s, led largely by French thinkers, a current emerged that radically questioned modernity's premises. The term covers a broad tendency spanning philosophy, literature, art, architecture and social theory.
Key thinkers and concepts
- Lyotard: incredulity toward metanarratives: in The Postmodern Condition (1979) he defined the postmodern as "incredulity toward metanarratives." The age when a single grand story, such as human emancipation or the dialectical development of spirit, legitimated knowledge is over; small narratives and "language games" with different rules now coexist.
- Derrida: deconstruction: Western philosophy has privileged one side of binaries such as speech/writing, reason/emotion and male/female. Deconstruction exposes contradictions within texts to unsettle those hierarchies; his notion of différance holds that meaning is never fixed but endlessly deferred.
- Foucault: power and knowledge: truth and knowledge are not neutral but entangled with power. His histories of discourses on madness, prisons and sexuality showed how "normality" is produced.
- Baudrillard: simulation: in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) he argued that in media and consumer society, copies without originals (simulacra) create a "hyperreality" more real than the real.
These ideas drew on Nietzsche's and Heidegger's critiques of modern metaphysics and are often contrasted with Kant's moral philosophy, grounded in universal reason.
Art, architecture and culture
- Hybridity and parody: mixing and quoting styles from different eras (pastiche) and blurring high and popular culture, as in pop art and metafiction.
- Architecture: against functionalist modernism's "less is more," it brought back ornament, symbolism and historical styles.
- Plurality: it connects with feminism, postcolonialism and multiculturalism, which value marginalized voices and difference, and is used to explain the diversification of family forms.
Avant-gardes such as surrealism, which challenged reason-centered art with the unconscious and chance, are sometimes cited as forerunners.
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Criticism
- Habermas (1981) replied that modernity is an "unfinished project" and that a critique of reason taken too far loses its own grounds and can slide into conservatism.
- Jameson (1991) and Harvey (1989) interpreted postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism," a product of economic change and time–space compression.
- Relativism: reducing every truth claim to power or narrative, critics say, removes any standard for telling fact from falsehood. Defenders answer that the point is not to deny truth but to reflect on the conditions and limits of knowledge.
See also: Foucault on Power and Discourse, Multiculturalism
References
- Lyotard, J.-F. (1979). La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
- Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Habermas, J. (1981). Modernity versus postmodernity. New German Critique, 22, 3–14.
- Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée.
- Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.