Post-Modernism

Term used to characterize developments in architecture and the arts in the 1960s and after, when there was a clear challenge to the dominance of modernism; the term was applied predominantly from the 1970s to architecture and somewhat later to the decorative and visual arts. It was first used as early as 1934 by Spanish writer Federico de Onis, although it was not then used again until Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History in 1938 (published after World War II); Toynbee and others saw the 'post-modern' phenomenon in largely negative terms, as an irrational reaction to modernist rationalism. The term was used sporadically thereafter in the fields of literary criticism and music. In the 1970s, however, it came into wide use in connection with architecture to denote buildings that integrate modernism with a selective eclecticism, often of classical or Neo-classical origin. In painting the term took hold later, peaking in the mid-1980s in the USA to describe work that offered a more biting critique of current cultural values than that offered in architecture. If the attachment of the label itself is ignored, however, the developments may be perceived as continuous with the anti-modernism of the 1960s, which readily related to the growing pluralism in art and architecture that came to be associated with Post-modernism from the early 1980s.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

A school of thought which rejects what is called modernism. Post-modernism is a broad term originating in literary studies, used by and of those thinkers who seek to respond in various ways to ‘modernism’. For post-modernists, modernity begins sometime in the seventeenth century and ends sometime between 1945 and the present. It is characterized by the ascendancy of science and reason as means for both understanding and explaining the world. The success of the rational application of science to nature and the progress that ensued in this field, led to a belief that rational and scientific approaches to economics, politics, society, and morality would ensure progress in these fields too. Science and reason would be capable of providing firm, objective, and universal foundations with which to underpin social and moral reforms. It is in this sense that thinkers as diverse as Hobbes, Bentham, and Marx may be described as ‘modern’.

Writers who see themselves, or are seen by others, as post-modernist respond initially to what they perceive to be the twin failures of science and reason to deliver progress. (Adorno, for example, remarked that no one can seriously believe in the idea of progress after the Holocaust.) The ‘failure’ of science and reason and the objective and universal claims made in their name undermines the possibility of ever producing ‘totalizing’ theories again—theories (‘Grand Narratives’) that seek to explain and predict individual behaviour and/or social formations on the basis of a set of incontrovertible, rationally derived propositions. Examples of such theories would be Marxism, utilitarianism, and Freudianism.

On this basis, some post-modernists argue that knowledge claims can only ever be partial and local. Foucault, for example, suggests that power is not a unified and uniform phenomenon centred on, say, the ‘state’ (as Marxists might take it to be). Resistance to power, therefore, must itself be ‘decentred’ or localized. Post-modernism in these terms is open to the charges both of relativism and conservatism. Relativism, because, if all that we have access to are local knowledges, practices, and so on, we can have no justifiable reason to judge other localities and their practices. Conservatism, because if we cannot judge even our own localities (institutions, practices, societies, etc.) in the light of standards or principles external to them, it is unclear what justification we could ever have for changing them. On the other hand, if one associates modernity with the rise and globalization of capitalism, and accepts that this phenomenon is itself a form of cultural and economic imperialism, then post-modernism can be represented as having radical potential in the attempt to formulate a defence of difference.

— Alan Apperley