Did you mean: postmodern (in architecture), Postmodern music, theories of photographic meaning (photography)
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post·mod·ern (pōst-mŏd'ərn)  |
Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes: “It [a roadhouse]is so architecturally interesting . . . with its postmodern wooden booths and sculptural clock” (Ruth Reichl).
postmodernism post·mod'ern·ism n.| Geography Dictionary: postmodernism |
A philosophical stance which claims that it is impossible to make grand statements—meta-narratives—about the structures of society or about historic causation, because everything we perceive, express, and interpret is influenced by our gender, class, and culture; knowledge is partial and situated, and no one interpretation is superior to another. Some have argued that postmodernism is related to post-Fordism, and the rise of consumer capitalism, economic globalization, the information economy, and new models of flexible accumulation, but these links are, of course, meta-narratives—the very interpretations which postmodernists reject.
Postmodernism has confirmed in geographers the recognition that space, place, and scale are social constructs, not external givens (See structuralism). Of particular interest is the way that time and space have been ‘compressed’ by modern transport systems, especially by jumbo jets; postmodernity differs from modernity in that it is less territorially bounded—nowhere is very far away any more. As a result, cultures are transformed. Some geographers claim that postmodernism challenges the dominance of time and history in social theories, and instead stresses the significance of geography and spatiality.
The postmodern tradition also stresses, and indeed champions, difference, and this is a strand which has been welcomed by feminist geographers, who would claim that geography has been speaking in an authoritarian, masculinist voice for too long.
| Literary Dictionary: postmodernism |
postmodernism, a disputed term that has occupied much recent debate about contemporary culture since the early 1980s. In its simplest and least satisfactory sense it refers generally to the phase of 20th‐century Western culture that succeeded the reign of high modernism, thus indicating the products of the age of mass television since the mid‐1950s. More often, though, it is applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles—most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. In this sense, promoted by Jean Baudrillard and other commentators, postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
As applied to literature and other arts, the term is notoriously ambiguous, implying either that modernism has been superseded or that it has continued into a new phase. Postmodernism may be seen as a continuation of modernism's alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world: in very crude terms, where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference, favouring self‐consciously ‘depthless’ works of fabulation, pastiche, bricolage, or aleatory disconnection. The term cannot usefully serve as an inclusive description of all literature since the 1950s or 1960s, but is applied selectively to those works that display most evidently the moods and formal disconnections described above. It seems to have little relevance to modern poetry, and limited application to drama outside the ‘absurdist’ tradition, but is used widely in reference to fiction, notably to the novels (or anti‐novels) and stories of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, and many of their followers. Some of their works, like Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Nabokov's Ada (1969), employ devices reminiscent of science fiction, playing with contradictory orders of reality or the irruption of the fabulous into the secular world.
Opinion is still divided, however, on the value of the term and of the phenomenon it purports to describe. Those who most often use it tend to welcome ‘the postmodern’ as a liberation from the hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures; while sceptics regard the term as a symptom of irresponsible academic euphoria about the glitter of consumerist capitalism and its moral vacuity. For more extended discussions, consult Jean‐François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1986); H. Bertens and D. Fokkema (eds.), Approaching Postmodernism (1986); and Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987). See also post‐structuralism.
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: postmodernism |
For more information on postmodernism, visit Britannica.com.
| Modern Design Dictionary: Postmodernism |
The term ‘Postmodernism’ has been applied to many disciplines including architecture, design, literature, communications, music, sociology, and film. In relation to architecture and design, by the late 1950s the visual language of Modernism was increasingly equated with the tastes of the educated professional classes, the corporate aesthetic of successful multinational companies, and the outlook of an architectural establishment that had taken up a vocabulary derived from radical avant-garde tendencies in the interwar years. Firmly embedded in the contemporary world of television, passenger jet air transportation, foreign travel, and nuclear energy the burgeoning Postmodern Zeitgeist (or ‘spirit of the age’) of the later 1950s and early 1960s was to many—particularly younger architects, designers, and consumers—emphatically different from that of 1920s and 1930s Modernism. The early 1960s was a period in which the ephemeral values of Pop came of age, its brightly coloured, culturally diverse, and image-rich ethos increasingly at odds with the rational, restrained aesthetic associated with the Modernists' exploration of new materials, manufacturing technologies, and abstract forms in the decades before the Second World War.
Ornament is an important feature of the Postmodernist vocabulary, a characteristic very much opposed by Modernist practitioners and theorists such as Adolf Loos, whose article on Ornament and Crime of 1908 anticipated the antipathy to the decorative arts of leading figures such as
One of the best-known maxims associated with Postmodernist architecture and design is architect, designer, and writer Robert Venturi's ‘less is a bore’, an ironic subversion of the Modernist credo ‘less is more’. Although the architectural and design historian and author of Pioneers of Modern Design Nikolaus Pevsner had disapproved of what he detected as a growing trend towards ‘Postmodern’ electicism in an essay of 1961, Venturi did much to begin to define the term more tightly in his landmark book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in 1966. In this—in opposition to the clarity of form and enduring values associated with Modernism—he identified a number of Postmodern characteristics including hybridity, ambiguity, distortedness, inconsistency, and equivocality. Such ideas were further developed in Venturi's 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas, written with fellow architects Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. They advocated the use of a visual language that could be widely understood, drawing on the visual imagery and symbolism of popular culture seen in the vibrant, often neon-lit, façades of the hotels, casinos, restaurants, and other entertainment buildings in Las Vegas. However, the popular visual language of billboards and façades explored by Venturi in Learning from Las Vegas had been a developing trend in business circles in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe for well over a decade. In business as well as architectural and design theoretical circles there had also been a growing interest in the formulation of a visual syntax that explored the aspirations and desires of consumers through a more sophisticated understanding of the driving forces of popular culture, an outlook that was fiercely attacked by the American writer Vance Packard in his best-selling book The Hidden Persuaders of 1957. Increasing investment in Motivational Research, especially in the United States, further refined understanding of the visual language of advertising and retailing. Leading figures in the field were the social anthropologist Burleigh Gardner of Social Research Inc. and Austrian-born Dr Ernst Dichter, president of the Institute for Motivational Research and author of The Strategy of Desire (1960).
Next to Venturi one of the most important figures involved in the definition of Postmodernism in architectural and design circles was the American architect, designer, theorist, historian, and prolific writer Charles Jencks, whose major books included The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977) and Postmodern Classicism (1983). Further definitions of Postmodernism have been explored in the writings of cultural theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard. The latter proposed in his book The Post-Modern Condition (1984) that Postmodernism was a rejection of the universal certainties of the Modernist world in favour of the local and provisional. Further underlining the variety and complexity of the ways in which the term has been utilized was Marxist writer Frederic Jameson's view that Postmodernism was a form of American cultural imperialism and an expression of multinational and consumer capitalism. The emergence of Postmodernism also coincided with the rise of service-based, Post-Industrial economies and the demise of the production-based economies associated with Fordism. Furthermore, computerized flexible production runs that could respond swiftly to the varied consumer demands of a pluralist society began to replace the large-scale production runs geared to satisfying homogeneous mass markets.
Dissatisfaction with the restrictions of the Modernist approach was also evident in the creative outlook of Italian designers associated with the Neo-Liberty style of the 1950s. They sought to revive the expressive, organic, forms of Art Nouveau and showed considerable respect for craft traditions—the antithesis of the standardized, machine-made forms of Modernist design. Prominent in the Neo-Liberty movement was the furniture designer Carlo Mollino. Also concerned with the possibilities of a richer visual syntax than that of Modernism in their exploration of the semantic possibilities of architecture and design were Italian writers such as the theorist and historian Gillo Dorfles and academic, novelist, historian, and cultural theorist Umberto Eco. Like the French sociologist Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957), Eco explored the field from the late 1950s onwards, his texts including A Theory of Semiotics (1976). Dorfles's writings included a 1969 edited book of essays entitled Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, its focus on popular culture being intrinsically opposed to the tenets of Modernism and associated ideas of ‘Good Design’. During the 1960s Italian avant-garde designers turned their backs on the dictates of mainstream manufacture in favour of experimentation, the publication of manifestos, involvement in research and education, and the mounting of exhibitions. Important amongst these was the 1972 Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Emilio Ambasz. Leading figures such as Ettore Sottsass Jr. and Anti-Design and Radical Design groups such as Archizoom and Superstudio drew on the iconography of Hollywood films and Pop and were also attracted to alternative lifestyle models such as those of the hippies. Colour, ornament, and decoration, together with kitsch, irony, and distortion of scale, were all key ingredients in Postmodernism. Following on from this was the work of Studio Alchimia, established by Alessandro Mendini in 1976 although its continuing commitment to design polemics rather than an exploration of the creative potential of design as a powerful agent for change in the world of production led Sottsass to form a new group, Memphis, in 1981. Associated closely with ‘New Design’, a term widely used in 1980s Italy that referred to design work that broke with international style and functionalism, Memphis in many ways epitomized the spirit of Postmodernism. However, Sottsass believed that the latter was American, academic, and restricted in its cultural references. Memphis embraced many design fields including furniture, textiles, carpets, lighting, clocks, ceramics, and interiors, drew on an eclectic range of sources including kitsch, Art Deco, and Pop and married cheap and expensive materials, popular and high culture references, thus imaginatively extending the contemporary design syntax.
Postmodernism was intrinsically bound up with notions of fashion and change associated with graphics, clothing, and retail design despite the fact that many of its original theoretical debates were bound up in the concerns of those who sought to open up fresh expressive possibilities in the more durable outputs of architecture. It flourished most vigorously during the 1980s when new markets for the conspicuous consumption of iconic products flourished and designers emerged as artistic celebrities. All of them stimulated, and catered for, the growing consumer demand for household goods endowed with cultural and aesthetic status. One particular, and often comparatively affordable, feature of Postmodern design was its increasing investment in the production of small-scale products for the table and kitchen—dinnerware, glassware, and metalware—a field where contemporary initiatives had for many years been heavily overshadowed by manufacturers' (and many consumers') preoccupation with traditional forms and patterns. Many of these products were closely associated with the preoccupation that many Postmodern designers, particularly the significant number who came from an architectural background, had with contemporary architecture on a vastly reduced scale. Such designs—including salt and pepper grinders, jugs, tea and coffee pots, sugar bowls, plates—were often referred to as items of ‘table architecture’ or ‘microarchitecture’. The first Swid Powell collection of porcelain dinnerware, silverware, and glass to embrace such trends was launched in 1984. The architecturally conceived Tea and Coffee Piazza project of 1980, coordinated for Alessi by Alessandro Mendini, did much to promote the company's tableware, also described as ‘domestic landscape’ and set the scene for related Alessi initiatives over succeeding decades.
Like Modernism, Postmodernism is an international language finding expression in much of the industrialized world including Europe, Scandinavia, the Far East—particularly Japan—and Australia. Catering for the new breed of design-conscious consumers keen to purchase affordable status symbols for the domestic environment were widely recognized companies such as Alessi, Ajeto, FSB (Franz Schneider Brakel), Källemo, Knoll, Swatch, Swid-Powell and WMF (Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik). The heightened media preoccupation with design in the years in which Postmodernism emerged led to considerably increased emphasis on the cult of the designer celebrity. In addition to the designers mentioned earlier, other well-known designers associated with Postmodernism include Andrea Branzi, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Toshiyuki Kita, Danny Lane, Javier Mariscal, Borek Sípek, Philippe Starck, Matteo Thun, and Stanley Tigerman.
| French Literature Companion: Postmodernism |
A movement in art and ideas which challenges the aspirations to unity, purpose, and order. Emerging first as a rejection of the classical aesthetic principles of modern architecture, Postmodernism is exemplified by the Pompidou Centre at Beaubourg in Paris, which displays all its components and starkly contrasts with its surroundings. Jean-François Lyotard, in La Condition postmoderne (1979), generalized the idea into a diagnosis of the contemporary fragmentation of systems of knowledge. Postmodernism rapidly became a portmanteau term applied to a wide range of cultural phenomena, especially in art and cinema, but also extending to literature and philosophy. Throughout the 1980s it became a focus for debate in English-speaking intellectual circles, where it was seen, by supporters and opponents alike, as a reflection of and on the apparent success of free-market economics and culture, and the evident disarray of Marxist political and intellectual alternatives.
Like Post-Structuralism, from which it is often difficult to distinguish it, Postmodernism is not a readily identifiable school of thought in France. It is most usually associated with Lyotard and Baudrillard, but is often felt to include the later writings of Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, and Irigaray. A widely shared view was that there was a growing disintegration of the modern grands récits, the Hegelian, Marxist, or Freudian systems, each of which had sought to provide a coherent intellectual framework with which to understand and change the world. Their failure signalled the futility of any attempt to construct a Master Narrative, and could be construed as a liberation from the strait-jacket of totality and authority. The Postmodern posture was therefore to emphasize and enjoy difference (s) without seeking to bring them into unity; to disrupt fixed patterns or hierarchies which might exist or emerge; and to frustrate imperatives or directions which anyone might seek to impose on another. For this reason it is notably resistant to simple summary or definition.
Postmodernism shares many aspects of earlier cultural avant-garde movements, particularly Surrealism, anarchism, and Situationism, from which its members have drawn many techniques. A striking feature is the prevalence of pastiche in Postmodern works, drawing on elements from a variety of sources, which are then juxtaposed, often ironically. Beneix's film Diva (1981) exemplifies the approach, using elements of character, plot, setting, and composition from several cinematic genres. As with earlier modernism, these highly allusive works offer a special pleasure to the initiated. Critics of Postmodernism, such as Fredric Jameson and Jürgen Habermas, have suggested that it exacerbates the problems of personal and social disintegration, bewilderment, impotence, and despair which it attempts to portray.
[Michael Kelly]
Bibliography
| Philosophy Dictionary: postmodernism |
In the culture generally, postmodernism is associated with a playful acceptance of surfaces and superficial style, self-conscious quotation and parody (although these are also found in modernist literature, such as that of James Joyce), and a celebration of the ironic, the transient, and the glitzy. It is usually seen as a reaction against a naïve and earnest confidence in progress, and against confidence in objective or scientific truth. In philosophy, therefore, it implies a mistrust of the grands récits of modernity: the large-scale justifications of western society and confidence in its progress visible in Kant, Hegel, or Marx, or arising from utopian visions of perfection achieved through evolution, social improvement, education, or the deployment of science. In its post-structuralist aspects it includes a denial of any fixed meaning, or any correspondence between language and the world, or any fixed reality or truth or fact to be the object of enquiry.
The tendency was anticipated, and perhaps most brilliantly expressed, by Nietzsche, whose perspectivism is seen as a philosophical technique for dissolving the presumption that there can be objective knowledge. Objectivity is revealed as a disguise for power or authority in the academy, and often as the last fortress of white male privilege. Logical or rational thought is revealed as the imposition of suspect dichotomies on the flux of events. Postmodernists differ over the consequences of such discoveries, sharing the sceptic's old problem of how to think and act in the light of the doctrine. While the dismantling of objectivity seems to some to be the way towards a liberating political radicalism, to others it allows such unliberating views as the denial that there was (objectively) such an event as the Second World War or the Holocaust, and to others such as Rorty (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 1989), it licenses the retreat to an aesthetic, ironic, detached, and playful attitude to one's own beliefs and to the march of events. This retreat has been criticized as socially irresponsible (and in its upshot, highly conservative). The postmodernist frame of mind, charted, for example, in The Postmodern Condition, 1984, by Jean-François Lyotard, may seem to depend on a cavalier dismissal of the success of science in generating human improvement, an exaggeration of the admitted fallibility of any attempt to gain knowledge in the humane disciplines, and an ignoring of the quite ordinary truth that while human history and law admit of no one final description, they certainly admit of more or less accurate ones, just as a landscape permits of no one unique map, yet there can be more or less accurate maps.
| US History Encyclopedia: Postmodernism |
In the 1970s, "postmodernism" became a descriptive reference for certain changes occurring in American social, intellectual, and cultural life. The term had an elusive quality about it, and scholarly efforts to give it greater precision abounded. Post-modernism also yielded a critical literature as intellectuals pondered its political and ideological significance. Like "modernism," "postmodernism" conveyed different notions in the different categories in which the word was used. Examining the postmodern phenomenon in those categories does, however, suggest parallel meanings that paint a larger picture of American life in the late twentieth century. Causal interconnections are by no means self-evident, but common themes and motifs do appear.
Economic Affiliation
Postmodernism concurs with the emergence of postindustrialism. In the mid-1970s, the United States became, statistically, a service economy, with more workers employed in that category than in industrial jobs. Longstanding landmarks of the industrial era—steel, auto-mobiles—declined and service businesses—hotels, travel agencies, restaurants, medical and health care organizations, sports, health clubs, real estate—provided the growth sectors of the American economy. These outlets serviced the greater leisure and discretionary time available to many Americans. Family patterns and gender roles were changing and greater personal choice produced a "lifestyle" revolution. Postindustrialism also connoted an "information age." Communications, the television medium, research and development, and the dissemination of knowledge in all forms attained higher prominence and importance. By the century's end personal computers had become common household items and computer functions proved indispensable to virtually every business function in the postindustrial economy. The information age, with its ever-accelerating pace, compelled Americans to process data and symbols in a new sensory environment.
Social critics perceived the change. The futurist Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, a best-selling book of 1970, described the new "feel" of the "super industrial economy." The rapid pace of change, the accelerated mobility of the business world, the "throwaway society" of the consumer market, Tofler asserted, all created the transient and impermanent sense of life in the new era. Human relations became more ad hoc as older social structures dissolved, Toffler believed. Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism (1979) lamented the triumph of a hedonistic culture. Reflecting on the "political crisis of capitalism," Lasch recounted the emergence of a "therapeutic sensibility" and Americans' pervasive quest for psychic well-being. According to Lasch, Americans knew only the overwhelming present of the capitalist marketplace; self-preoccupation, indiscriminate hedonism, and anarchic individualism had become the normative social impulses of American life.
Postmodern Intellect
Impermanence, Pluralism, dissolution, and the decay of authority constituted thematic emphases in the intellectual dimensions of postmodernism. The major influence, in the fields of language and literary theory, came heavily from the French. In the late 1960s, American students began to hear of thinkers like Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and others. They provided the leads in the redirection in American literary studies, "the linguistic turn" that would have influence in many academic disciplines. Influenced by the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, the French thinkers sought to deflate the pretensions of the logocentric, or word-focused, culture of Western civilization. Literary and intellectual texts, they asserted, always, when under close examination, yield both multiple and contradictory meanings. They "deconstruct" themselves. They do not produce truth systems; they confront us only with an endless chain of signifiers. Meaning always recedes, and eludes the reader. Western thinking, the poststructuralists maintained, had always been a quest for metaphysical comfort—a quest for the Absolute. But the efforts, they asserted, collapse from their very excesses. Poststructuralists such as those associated with the Yale School of academics in the 1970s deprived literary texts of subject authority ("the disappearance of the author"), coherence (texts are "de-centered"), and social reference ("there is nothing outside the text"). On the other hand, in poststructuralism, loss of authority also signified the positive alternative of reading as personal freedom ("re-creation"); Barthes wrote of the "pleasure of the text." In the Yale School, Geoffrey Hartman urged that the very indeterminacy of language empowered a creative criticism that broke the shackles of univocal meaning.
Postmodernism in its poststructuralist mode challenged the European and American left. In France, it replaced a Marxism that had dominated in the universities into the 1960s. In the United States, a sustained attack came from the literary scholar Frank Lentricchia in his 1980 book After the New Criticism. Leftist scholars, and particularly Marxists, had long insisted that literature, like all culture, reflected the hegemony of the dominant classes in capitalism; thus it always had a social connection and a historical foundation. Lentricchia saw in the American poststructuralists merely a formalist and hermetic approach to literature, depriving it of social and political context. "Pleasures of the text" conveyed to Lentricchia only the habits of aesthetic indulgence in bourgeois appropriations of culture, in short, a familiar recourse to hedonism. The linguistic turn to this extent, he believed, registered the most damning aspects of American capitalist culture, dissevering literature from the class struggle and rendering it a decorative and therapeutic device that invites us to take our pleasure as we like it.
In philosophy, Richard Rorty moved in a similar postmodernist direction. His Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) sought, like the poststructuralists, to deflate the pretensions of his discipline. Western thinking, he insisted, had gone awry in its long-standing efforts to secure a foundational epistemology, to make mind the mirror of nature. Rorty faulted the ahistorical character of this quest. Philosophy became defensive, he charged, freezing reality in privileged forms or essences. Appealing to the American pragmatist John Dewey, Rorty wished to return philosophy to the problematical aspects of ordinary life. In this era of "post-" and "neo-" labeling, Rorty called for a "post-Philosophy" that abandons pursuit of the conditioning groundwork of all thinking; instead, philosophy should be a form of hermeneutics. Post-Philosophy, for Rorty, had a relaxed and playful manner; it becomes an aspect of conversation, rooted in social and historical conditions. Here, too, a therapeutic quality stands out: philosophy helps us cope.
Postmodernism had a major social voice in the brilliant writings of the French thinker Michel Foucault. Though a voice of the political left, Foucault represents the postmodernist diminution of Marxism. To many post-structuralists like Foucault, Marxism conveyed traditional Western habits of logocentrism and notions of totality, from Hegel and onto "Western" Marxist humanism in the twentieth century. Foucault added to textual analysis the ingredient of power and saw language systems and intellectual discourse as vehicles of control. Foucault, however, read society like poststructuralists read literary texts, as decentered systems. In contrast to Marxists, he described power not as hegemony but as multiplicities, localities of activities, spaces, in which resistance and subversion are always at work. Foucault faulted Marxism as an intellectual residual of nineteenth-century ideology. Postmodernists like the French critic Jean-François Lyotard, in his influential book The Post-Modern Condition (1979), distrusted all holistic theorizing and "metanarratives." Absolutism in thought, he believed, led to totalitarianism in the political realm, the Gulag.
Postmodernist Arts
Postmodernism had specific references to the visual arts and redefined trends in painting and architecture. In the 1960s the reign of modernism in painting weakened. Nonrepresentational forms, of which the most often highlighted was abstract expressionism, gave way to stark contrasts, as in pop art. New styles proliferated: photo-realism, pattern and decorative art, high-tech art. Although some new genres—such as feminist and performance art—often suggested a subversive intent, generally commentators saw that postmodernism took painting away from the critical edge and alienated mood of modernism. They found in the newer varieties a relaxed posture. And against the arctic purity of modernism, its successor forms invited a sensual indulgence, not only in the marketplace of suburban America, but also in older art forms obscured or discredited by the modernist imperium. Museums sponsored revivals and retrospective exhibits of all kinds.
Architecture saw a similar shift. Sleek, glass rectangular skyscrapers, born of the severe rationalism of the Bauhaus school decades previously, had long dominated the main streets of America's large cities. Revolting against this restrictive formalism of modernist architecture, Robert Venturi led a postmodernist protest. His book Learning from Las Vegas (1972) celebrated the "ordinary and ugly" buildings of that American playground. Then in 1978, Philip Johnson, a noted practitioner of modernism, surprised the critics in revealing his design for the new AT&T building in New York City. Johnson affixed to the top of the slender rectangular slab a 30-foot-high pediment, broken in the center by a circular opening, an orbiculum that capped the building with a stylistic crown. It looked to some like the crest of an old grandfather clock. Almost overnight, it seemed, Johnson's "Chippendale" effect gave architects a license to appropriate freely from any and all older mannerisms. Post-modernist architecture signified a pervasive and playful eclecticism.
These directions raised more critical voices, mostly on the cultural left. The Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson provided the most trenchant attack in his Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Everywhere postmodernism signified to Jameson the loss of critical distance, the triumph of "kitsch," the collapse of all signs and symbols under the global marketplace of international capitalism. Under postmodernism, he said, historicity dissolved. The past presented itself only as commodifiable pastiche. Postmodernism, in Jameson's account, meant the flattening out of all historically conditioned realities that constitute the vehicle of social reconstruction. It leaves only the reign of simulacra, the therapeutic salve, the pseudo-reality of a dehumanized civilization.
Postmodernist culture reflected the proliferating diversity of American life in the late twentieth century. It fostered a mood of acceptance and democratic tolerance. Some resented its anti-elitism and found it meretricious and too comfortable with the commercial nexus. The postmodernist era brought a politics of diversity and group identity—in women's rights, gay liberation, black, Indian, and Chicano ethnic movements. Here, too, postmodernism broke down prevailing norms and idealizations of American life. Some saw in the effects a healthy, democratic tolerance. Others wondered whether there remained any unifying force or any center in American life.
Bibliography
Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge, 1995.
Hoeveler, J. David, Jr. The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.
Kellner, Douglas, ed. Postmodernism: Jameson Critique. Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1989.
Silverman, Hugh J., ed. Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Arts. New York: Routledge, 1990.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: postmodernism |
The term postmodernism is probably most specific and meaningful when used in relation to architecture, where it designates an international architectural movement that emerged in the 1960s, became prominent in the late 1970s and 80s, and remained a dominant force in the 1990s. The movement largely has been a reaction to the orthodoxy, austerity, and formal absolutism of the International Style. Postmodern architecture is characterized by the incorporation of historical details in a hybrid rather than a pure style, by the use of decorative elements, by a more personal and exaggerated style, and by references to popular modes of building.
Practitioners of postmodern architecture have tended to reemphasize elements of metaphor, symbol, and content in their credos and their work. They share an interest in mass, surface colors, and textures and frequently use unorthodox building materials. However, because postmodern architects have in common only a relatively vague ideology, the style is extremely varied. Greatly affected by the writings of Robert Venturi, postmodernism is evident in Venturi's buildings and, among others, in the work of Denise Scott Brown, Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, Arata Isozaki, and the later work of Philip Johnson.
See also contemporary art.
Bibliography
See P. Goldberger, On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Postmodern Age (1983); A. Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986); C. Jencks, What is Post-Modernism? (1986); S. Gaggi, Modern/Postmodern (1989); D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (1989); J. Tagg, ed., The Cultural Politics of Postmodernism (1989); D. Kolb, Postmodern Sophistications (1990); H. Risatti, ed., Postmodern Perspectives (1990); F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991); Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates on Houses and Housing (1992); T. Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (1993); P. Jodidio, Contemporary American Architects (1993); D. Meyhofer, Contemporary European Architects (1993); N. Wheale, ed., The Postmodern Arts (1995); S. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (1996).
| Fine Arts Dictionary: postmodernism |
A movement, particularly in architecture, that reacted against the pared-down modern school by reintroducing classical and traditional elements of style. An example of this style is Philip Johnson's AT&T Building in New York City.
| Obscure Words: postmodernism |
| Wikipedia: Postmodernism |
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It has been suggested that this article be split into multiple articles accessible from a disambiguation page. (Discuss) |
Postmodernism (or, familiarly, pomo) literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives. It is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema, and design, and in the interpretation of history, law, culture and religion in the late 20th century.
Postmodernism is an aesthetic, literary, political or social philosophy, which was the basis of the attempt to describe a condition, or a state of being, or something concerned with changes to institutions and conditions (as in Giddens, 1990) as postmodernity. In other words, postmodernism is the "cultural and intellectual phenomenon", especially since the 1920s' new movements in the arts, while postmodernity focuses on social and political outworkings and innovations globally, especially since the 1960s in the West.
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary refers to postmodernism as "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions."[1]
The term postmodern is described by Merriam-Webster as meaning either "of, relating to, or being an era after a modern one" or "of, relating to, or being any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature)", or finally "of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language".[2]
The American Heritage Dictionary describes the meaning of the same term as "Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes: “It [a roadhouse] is so architecturally interesting … with its postmodern wooden booths and sculptural clock”.[3]
Postmodernism was originally a reaction to modernism. Largely influenced by the Western European "disillusionment" induced by World War II, postmodernism refers to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality,[4] in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself. It has given rise to charges of fraudulence.[5]
Postmodernity is a derivative referring to non-art aspects of history that were influenced by the new movement, namely developments in society, economy and culture since the 1960s.[6] When the idea of a reaction or rejection of modernism was borrowed by other fields, it became synonymous in some contexts with postmodernity. The term is closely linked with poststructuralism (cf. Michel Foucault) and with modernism, in terms of a rejection of its bourgeois, elitist culture.[7]
The term was first used around the 1870s in various areas. For example, John Watkins Chapman avowed "a postmodern style of painting" to get beyond French Impressionism[8] Then, J.M.Thompson, in his 1914 article in The Hibbert Journal (a quarterly philosophical review), used it to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion: "The raison d'etre of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of Modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition" ('Post-Modernism, J.M.Thompson, The Hibbert Journal Vol XII No.4 July 1914 p.733).
In 1917 Rudolf Pannwitz used the term to describe a philosophically oriented culture. Pannwitz's idea of post-modernism came from Nietzsche's analysis of modernity and its ends of decadence and nihilism. Overcoming the modern human would be the post-human. But, contrary to Nietzsche, Pannwitz also includes nationalist and mythical elements. [9]
It was used later in 1926 by B.I.Bell in his "Postmodernism & other Ess." In 1925 and 1921 it had been used to describe new forms of art and music. In 1942 H. R. Hays used it for a new literary form but as a general theory of an historical movement it was first used in 1939 by the historian Arnold J. Toynbee: "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914-1918." [10]
In 1949 it was used to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, leading to the postmodern architecture movement.[11] Postmodernism in architecture is marked by the re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, and non-orthogonal angles. It may be a response to the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style.
The term was applied to a whole host of movements, many in art, music, and literature, that reacted against modernism, and are typically marked by revival of traditional elements and techniques.[12] Walter Truett Anderson identifies postmodernism as one of four world views. These four worldviews are the postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed, the scientific-rational in which truth is found through methodical, disciplined inquiry, the social-traditional in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilisation and the neo-romantic in which truth is found either through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.[13]
Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society expanded the importance of critical theory and has been the point of departure for works of literature, architecture, and design, as well as being visible in marketing/business and the interpretation of history, law and culture, starting in the late 20th century. These developments — re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from industrial to service economy) that took place since 1950's and 1960's, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968 — are described with the term postmodernity,[14] as opposed to postmodernism, a term referring to an opinion or movement. Whereas something being "postmodernist" would make it part of the movement, its being "postmodern" would place it in the period of time since the 1950s, making it a part of contemporary history.
Notwithstanding the foregoing distinctions, both terms can be synonymous and interchangeable in common parlance, given the fluidity and ongoing evolution of their definitions.
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Whether ‘postmodernism’ is seen as a critical concept or merely a buzzword, one cannot deny its range. Dick Hebdige, in his ‘Hiding in the Light’ illustrates this:
When it becomes possible for a people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of placelessness (‘critical regionalism’) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates - when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.[15]
The movement of Postmodernism began with architecture, as a reactionary movement against the perceived blandness and hostility present in the Modern movement. Modern Architecture as established and developed by masters such as Walter Gropius and Philip Johnson was focused on the pursuit of an ideal perfection, harmony of form and function[16] and dismissal of frivolous ornament.[17] Critics of modernism argued that the attributes of perfection and minimalism themselves were subjective, and pointed out anachronisms in modern thought and questioned the benefits of its philosophy.[18] Definitive postmodern architecture such as the work of Michael Graves rejects the notion of a 'pure' form or 'perfect' architectonic detail, instead conspicuously drawing from all methods, materials, forms and colors available to architects. Postmodern architecture began the reaction against the almost totalitarian qualities of Modernist thought, favoring personal preferences and variety over objective, ultimate truths or principles. It is this atmosphere of criticism, skepticism and subjectivity that defines the postmodern philosophy.
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Certain interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche are important precursors to postmodernism. With their emphasis on skepticism, especially concerning objective reality, social morals, and societal norms[19], all three philosophers, for the postmodernists, represent a reaction to modernism ending in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Other notable influences on postmodernism include Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy, Alfred Jarry's 'Pataphysics, and the work of Lewis Carroll.[citation needed]
Art and literature of the early part of the 20th century play a significant part in shaping the character of postmodern culture. Dadaism attacked notions of high art in an attempt to break down the distinctions between high and low culture; Surrealism further developed concepts of Dadaism to celebrate the flow of the subconscious with influential techniques such as automatism and nonsensical juxtapositions (evidence of Surrealism's influence on postmodern thought can be seen in Foucault's and Derrida's references to Rene Magritte's experiments with signification).
Some other significant contributions to postmodern culture from literary figures include the following: Jorge Luis Borges experimented in metafiction and magical realism; William S. Burroughs wrote the prototypical postmodern novel Naked Lunch and developed the cut up method (similar to Tristan Tzara's "How to Make a Dadaist Poem") to create other novels such as Nova Express; Samuel Beckett attempted to escape the shadow of James Joyce by focusing on the failure of language and humanity's inability to overcome its condition, themes later to be explored in such works as Waiting for Godot. Karl Barth's fideist approach to theology and lifestyle, brought an irreverence for reason, and the rise of subjectivity.
Postcolonialism after World War II contributed to the idea that one cannot have an objectively superior lifestyle or belief. This idea was taken further by the anti-foundationalist philosophers: Heidegger, then Derrida, who examined the fundamentals of knowledge; they argued that rationality was neither as sure nor as clear as modernists or rationalists assert. It is with the end of the Second World War that recognizably postmodernist attitudes begin to emerge.
It is possible to identify the burgeoning anti-establishment movements of the 1960s as the constituting event of postmodernism. The theory gained some of its strongest ground early on in French academia. In 1971, the Arab-American theorist Ihab Hassan was one of the first to use the term in its present form (though it had been used by many others before him, Charles Olson for example, to refer to other literary trends) in his book: The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature; in it, Hassan traces the development of what he called "literature of silence" through Marquis de Sade, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Beckett, and many others, including developments such as the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau roman. In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard wrote a short but influential work The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Richard Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes are also influential in 1970s postmodern theory.
The postmodern impulse in classical music arose in the 1970s with the advent of musical minimalism. Composers such as Terry Riley, John Adams, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, and Lou Harrison reacted to the perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism by producing music with simple textures and relatively consonant harmonies. Some composers have been openly influenced by popular music and world ethnic musical traditions. Though representing a general return to certain notions of music-making that are often considered to be classical or romantic, not all postmodern composers have eschewed the experimentalist or academic tenets of modernism. The works of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, for example, exhibit experimentalist preoccupation that is decidedly anti-romantic. Eclecticism and freedom of expression, in reaction to the rigidity and aesthetic limitations of modernism, are the hallmarks of the postmodern influence in musical composition.
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Influencer Year Influence Karl Barth c.1925 fideist approach to theology brought a rise in subjectivity Martin Heidegger c.1927 rejected the philosophical grounding of the concepts of "subjectivity" and "objectivity" Thomas Samuel Kuhn c.1962 posited the rapid change of the basis of scientific knowledge to a provisional consensus of scientists, popularized the term "paradigm shift" Jacques Derrida c.1967 re-examined the fundamentals of writing and its consequences on philosophy in general; sought to undermine the language of western metaphysics (deconstruction) Michel Foucault c.1975 examined discursive power in Discipline and Punish, with Bentham's panopticon as his model, and also known for saying "language is oppression" (Meaning that language was developed to allow only those who spoke the language not to be oppressed. All other people that don't speak the language would then be oppressed.) Jean-François Lyotard c.1979 opposed universality, meta-narratives, and generality Richard Rorty c.1979 argues philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods; advocates dissolving traditional philosophical problems; anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism Jean Baudrillard c.1981 Simulacra and Simulation - reality disappears underneath the interchangeability of signs
Deconstruction is a term which is used to denote the application of postmodern ideas of criticism, or theory, to a "text" or "artifact", based on architectural deconstructivism. A deconstruction is meant to undermine the frame of reference and assumptions that underpin the text or the artifact.
The term "deconstruction" comes from Martin Heidegger, who calls for the destruction or deconstruction (the German "Destruktion" connotes both English words) of the history of ontology. The point, for Heidegger, was to describe Being prior to its being covered over by Plato and subsequent philosophy. Thus, Heidegger himself engaged in "deconstruction" through a critique of post-Socratic thought (which had forgotten the question of Being) and the study of the pre-Socratics (where Being was still an open question).
In later usage, a "deconstruction" is an important textual "occurrence" described and analyzed by many postmodern authors and philosophers. They argue that aspects in the text itself would undermine its own authority or assumptions and that internal contradictions would erase boundaries or categories which the work relied on or asserted. Poststructuralists beginning with Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, argued that the existence of deconstructions implied that there was no intrinsic essence to a text, merely the contrast of difference. This is analogous to the idea that the difference in perception between black and white is the context. A deconstruction is created when the "deeper" substance of text opposes the text's more "superficial" form. This idea is not isolated to poststructuralists but is related to the idea of hermeneutics in literature; intellectuals as early as Plato asserted it and so did modern thinkers such as Leo Strauss. Derrida's argument is that deconstruction proves that texts have multiple meanings and the "violence" between the different meanings of text may be elucidated by close textual analysis.
Popularly, close textual analyses describing deconstruction within a text are often themselves called deconstructions. Derrida argued, however, that deconstruction is not a method or a tool but an occurrence within the text itself. Writings about deconstruction are therefore referred to in academic circles as deconstructive readings.
Deconstruction is far more important to postmodernism than its seemingly narrow focus on text might imply. According to Derrida, one consequence of deconstruction is that the text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words but the entire spectrum of symbols and phenomena within Western thought. To Derrida, a result of deconstruction is that no Western philosopher has been able to escape successfully from this large web of text and reach that which is "signified", which they imagined to exist "just beyond" the text.
The more common use of the term is the more general process of pointing to contradictions between the intent and surface of a work and the assumptions about it. A work then "deconstructs" assumptions when it places them in context. For example, someone who can pass as the opposite sex may be said to "deconstruct" gender identity, because there is a conflict between the superficial appearance and the "reality" of the person's gender.
Often opposed to deconstruction are social constructionists, labeled as such within the analytic tradition, but not usually in the case of the continental tradition. The term was first used in sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's book The Social Construction of Reality.
Usually in the continental tradition, the terms structuralism or poststructuralism are used. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is seen as the biggest contributor to structuralism, which is epitomized in the philosophy of Claude Levi-Strauss. Michel Foucault was also a structuralist but then turned to what would be termed poststructuralism, although he himself declined to call his work either poststructuralist or postmodern. Structuralism historically gave way to poststructuralism; often the role of postmodernism within the analytic tradition is played down, although works by major figures of the analytic tradition in the 20th century, including those of Thomas Kuhn and Willard Van Orman Quine, show a similarity with works in the continental tradition for their lack of belief in absolute truth as well as in the pliability of language.
In the continental tradition, most works argue that power dissimulates and that society constructs reality, while its individuals remain powerless or almost powerless. Often, both continental and analytic sources argue for a renewed subjectivity, borrowing heavily from Immanuel Kant, while they largely reject his a priori/a posteriori distinction. They both minimize discussions of practical ethics, instead borrowing heavily from post-Holocaust accounts of the need for an ethics of responsibility, which is very rarely practically defined.
One of the large differences between analytic postmodern sources and continental postmodern sources is that the analytic tradition by and large guards at least some of the tenets of liberalism, while many continental sources flirt with, or completely immerse themselves in, Marxism.
Recently, it is noticeable that some of the ideas found in poststructuralism and postmodernism, as the lack of belief in absolute truth or the idea of a reality constructed, is promoted in a new paradigm within constructivist epistemology.
Formal, academic critiques of postmodernism can be found in Beyond the Hoax and Fashionable Nonsense.
The term postmodernism, when used pejoratively, describes tendencies perceived as relativist, counter-enlightenment or antimodern, particularly in relation to critiques of rationalism, universalism or science. It is also sometimes used to describe tendencies in a society that are held to be antithetical to traditional systems of morality. Elements of the Christian Right, in particular, have interpreted postmodern society to be synonymous with moral relativism and contributing to deviant behavior.[20][21] See, Postmodernity, subsection "Anti-postmodernity critiques."
The criticisms of postmodernism are often complicated by the still-fluid nature of the term [22], and in many cases the criticisms are clearly directed at poststructuralism and the philosophical and academic movements that it has spawned rather than the broader term postmodernism[citation needed].
The criticism of elements of postmodernism as sophism or obscurantism was played out in the Sokal Affair, where Alan Sokal, a physicist, delivered for publication an article about interpreting physics and mathematics in terms of postmodern theory, which he had deliberately written to mock postmodernist views on objectivity, determinism and the social construction of scientific truth. It was published by Social Text, a cultural studies journal active in the field of postmodernism. Sokal arranged for the simultaneous publication of another article describing the former as a successful experiment to see whether a postmodernist journal would publish it, triggering an academic scandal. Sokal later published a book with Jean Bricmont called Intellectual Impostures, which expands upon his criticism of postmodernism.
The linguist Noam Chomsky has suggested that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals won't respond as "people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc? These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames."[23]
| “ | There are lots of things I don't understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out. | ” |
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—Noam Chomsky |
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Michel Foucault rejected the label of postmodernism explicitly in interviews but is seen by many to advocate a form of critique that is "postmodern" in that it breaks with the utopian and transcendental nature of "modern" critique by calling universal norms of the Enlightenment into question. Giddens (1990) rejects this characterisation of modern critique by pointing out that a critique of Enlightenment universals were central to philosophers of the modern period, most notably Nietzsche. What counts as "postmodern" is a stake in political struggles where the method of critique is at issue. The recurring themes of these debates are between essentialism and anti-foundationalism, universalism and relativism, where enlightenment thinking is seen to represent the former and postmodernism the latter. This is why theorists as diverse as Nietzsche, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and Butler have been labeled "postmodern", not because they formed a historical intellectual grouping but because they are seen by their critics to reject the possibility of universal, normative and ethical judgments. With some exceptions (e.g. Jameson and Lyotard), many thinkers who are considered 'postmodern' or 'poststructuralist' see these characterizations merely as labels of convenience and reject them altogether.
Alex Callinicos, a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party (Britain) - a Marxist organisation of the International Socialist Tendency - argued against what he calls "the idealist irrationalism of poststructuralism", the "existence of any radical break" from modernism to postmodernism, and the socio-economic developments of the late 80s and early 90s (the height of postmodernism's popularity) actually representing "any fundamental shift from classical patterns of capital accumulation (surplus value)." Callinicos attacks notable postmodern thinkers such as Baudrillard and Lyotard, arguing postmodernism "reflects the disappointed revolutionary generation of '68, (particularly those of May 68) and the incorporation of many of its members into the professional and managerial 'new middle class'. It is best read as a symptom of political frustration and social mobility rather than as a significant intellectual or cultural phenomenon in its own right." [24]
Fredric Jameson, American literary critic and Marxist political theorist, attacks postmodernism (or poststructuralism), what he claims is "the cultural logic of late capitalism," for its refusal to critically engage with the metanarratives of capitalization and globalization. The refusal renders postmodernist philosophy complicit with the prevailing relations of domination and exploitation. [25]
In 1994, the then-President of the Czech Republic and renowned playwright Václav Havel gave a hopeful description of the postmodern world as one based on science, and yet paradoxically “where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.”[26]
Josh McDowell & Bob Hostetler offer the following definition of postmodernism: “A worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.” Truth is “created by the specific culture and exists only in that culture. Therefore, any system or statement that tries to communicate truth is a power play, an effort to dominate other cultures.”[27]
The Italian medievalist and semiotician Umberto Eco characterised "the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland."[28]
Rousseau (Cornell UP, 2006), 309-327.
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| Translations: Post-modern |
Dansk (Danish)
adj. - postmoderne
Français (French)
adj. - post-moderne
Deutsch (German)
adj. - postmodern
Ελληνική (Greek)
adj. - μεταμοντέρνος
Italiano (Italian)
postmoderno
Português (Portuguese)
adj. - pós-moderno
Русский (Russian)
постмодернистский
Español (Spanish)
adj. - posmoderno
Svenska (Swedish)
adj. - konstnärlig stilriktning
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
后现代主义的, 后现代派的
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
adj. - 後現代主義的, 後現代派的
日本語 (Japanese)
adj. - ポストモダニズムの
עברית (Hebrew)
adj. - חדיש במיוחד, פוסט-מודרני
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