Postmodernism

Postmodernism
preceded by Modernism
Postmodernity Postchristianity Postmodern philosophy Postmodern architecture Postmodern art Postmodernist film Postmodern literature Postmodern music Postmodern theater Critical theory Globalization Consumerism Minimalism in art Minimalism in music

Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism.

Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated Pomo) was originally a reaction to modernism (not necessarily "post" in the purely temporal sense of "after"). Largely influenced by the disillusionment induced by the Second World War, postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality.

Postmodernity is a derivative referring to non-art aspects of history that were influenced by the new movement, namely the evolutions in society, economy and culture since the 1960s.. When the idea of a reaction to—or even a rejection of—the movement of modernism (a late 19th, early 20th centuries art movement) was borrowed by other fields, it became synonymous in some contexts with postmodernity. The term is closely linked with Post-structuralism (cf. Jacques Derrida) and with modernism, insinuating a rejection of its bourgeois, elitist culture.

A Brief History of the Term "Postmodernism"

The question of what postmodernism means is quite difficult to answer because it is rather a complex notion. So, Ihab Hassan, one of the first to discuss about postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s, writes in 2001: "I know less about postmodernism today than I did thirty years ago, when I began to write about it. . . No consensus obtains on what postmodernism really means." It might be helpful, however, to look at the historical origins of the term briefly.

English painter John Watkins Chapman was probably the first to use the term "postmodernism." He used it in the 1870s to simply mean what is today understood to be post-impressionism. In 1934, Frederico de Onis used the word postmodernismo as a reaction against modernist poetry. In 1939, Arnold Toynbee adopted the term with an entirely different meaning: the end of the "modern" Western bourgeois order of the last two or three hundred-year period. In 1945, Australian art historian Bernard Smith took up the term to suggest a movement of social realism in painting beyond abstraction.

Two Facets of Modernism

A good way of understanding postmodernism is by knowing modernism first, because postmodernism seems to have emerged or grown from modernism. If we carefully look at modernism, we realize that it has two different facets, or two different definitions: 1) twentieth-century aesthetic modernism, which emerged during the first half of the twentieth century as a reaction to nineteenth-century traditions such as the Victorian tradition; and 2) the much longer historical tradition of "modernity," which started from the humanistic rationalism of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and which was still continuously influential till the twentieth century. Theorists such as David Lyon and Mary Klages have made this distinction between the two facets of modernism, and also a resultant distinction between two senses of postmodernism as well. Without knowing this distinction, one's understanding of the meaning of postmodernism cannot be clear.

Twentieth-century aesthetic modernism

Modernism in this sense was a series of aesthetic movements of wild experimentation in visual arts, music, literature, drama, and architecture in the first half of the twentieth century. It flourished especially between 1910 to 1930, the period of "high modernism."

Modernism in this sense was rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It was a trend of thought that affirmed the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology, and practical experimentation. Embracing change and the present, it encompassed the works of thinkers who rebelled against nineteenth-century academic and historicist traditions, believing that the traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization, and daily life were becoming outdated. They directly confronted the new economic, social, and political aspects of an emerging fully industrialized world.

The older ideas that history and civilization are inherently progressive, and that progress is always good, came under increasing attack. Arguments arose that not merely were the values of the artist and those of society different, but that society was antithetical to progress, and could not move forward in its present form. Philosophers called into question the previous optimism.

Two of the most disruptive thinkers of the period were, in biology, Charles Darwin and, in political science, Karl Marx. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty of the general public, and the sense of human uniqueness of the intelligentsia. The notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Marx seemed to present a political version of the same proposition: that problems with the economic order were not transient, the result of specific wrong doers or temporary conditions, but were fundamentally contradictions within the "capitalist" system. Both thinkers would spawn defenders and schools of thought that would become decisive in establishing modernism.

Of course, there actually were a few reforming spiritual and theological movements around the same time which also reacted against the nineteenth-century traditions. They include Neo-orthodoxy by Karl Barth in Europe, and pentecostalism and fundamentalism in America. But, they seem to have been less visible and prevalent than activities of radical aesthetic modernism.

Twentieth-century aesthetic modernism took diverse forms such as surrealism, dadaism, cubism, expressionism, and pimitivism. These forms were apparently immediate reactions to the Victorian values such as bourgeois domesticity, duty, work, decorum, referentiality, utilitarianism, industry, and realism. Some of the forms of aesthetic modernism naturally resemble Romanticism, which was rejected in the Victorian period. According to Dino Felluga, the features of modernist aesthetic work include:

1. Self-reflexivity (as in Picasso's painting "Women in the Studio").
2. An exploration of psychological and subjective states (as in expressionism or stream-of-consciousness writings such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse).
3. Alternative ways of thinking about representation (as in cubism).
4. A breakdown in generic distinction (as in between poetry and prose).
5. Fragmentation in form and representation (as in T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land").
6. Extreme ambiguity and simultaneity in structure (as in William Faulkner's multiply-narrated stories such as The Sound and the Fury).
7. Some experimentation in the breakdown between high and low forms (as in dadaism or Eliot's and James Joyce's inclusion of folk and pop-cultural material).
8. The use of parody and irony (as in surrealism, dadaism, or Joyce's Ulysses).

"Modernity" since the Enlightenment

Modernism in the second definition can be traced back to the Enlightenment, which was a humanistic reaction in the eighteenth century ro the premodern, medieval type of religious dogmatism which could still be found in Lutheran and Calvinist scholasticism, Jesuit scholasticism, and the theory of the divine right of kings in the Church of England in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of course, against this premodern type of religious dogmatism, there was another, religiously more profound, reaction in the eighteenth century, expressing itself in Pietism and John Wesley's Methodism. But the humanistic tradition of the Enlightenment was more influential than that.

Since its beginning, this Enlightenment tradition has a long history of philosophical, cultural, social and political development until most of the twentieth century, much longer and older than twentieth-century aesthetic modernism, and it is quite often called "modernity." This "modernity" tradition of the Enlightenment stressed the importance of the rational human self, objective truth or law, order, progress, etc., and it was behind most of the nineteenth century traditions. So, when the limitations of the nineteenth century were felt, "modernity" served as an indirect background against which twentieth-century aesthetic modernism sprang. When the limitations of "modernity" were more directly felt later in the twentieth century, it issued in a reaction called postmodernism, which, as will be explained below, is of a second kind, i.e., "postmodernity."

Mary Klages lists basic features of "modernity" since the Enlightenment as follows:

1. There is a stable, coherent, knowable self. This self is conscious, rational, autonomous, and universal — no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self operates.
2. This self knows itself and the world through reason, or rationality, posited as the highest form of mental functioning, and the only objective form.
3. The mode of knowing produced by the objective rational self is "science," which can provide universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the knower.
4. The knowledge produced by science is "truth," and is eternal.
5. The knowledge/truth produced by science (by the rational objective knowing self) will always lead toward progress and perfection. All human institutions and practices can be analyzed by science (reason/objectivity) and improved.
6. Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is good (what is legal and what is ethical). Freedom consists of obedience to the laws that conform to the knowledge discovered by reason.
7. In a world governed by reason, the true will always be the same as the good and the right (and the beautiful); there can be no conflict between what is true and what is right (etc.).
8. Science thus stands as the paradigm for any and all socially useful forms of knowledge. Science is neutral and objective; scientists, those who produce scientific knowledge through their unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of reason, and not be motivated by other concerns (such as money or power).
9. Language, or the mode of expression used in producing and disseminating knowledge, must be rational also. To be rational, language must be transparent; it must function only to represent the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. There must be a firm and objective connection between the objects of perception and the words used to name them (between signifier and signified).

Two Senses of Postmodernism

Correstponding to the two different facets of modernism, there are two distinguishable senses of postmodernism: 1) postmodernism as a reaction to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism; and 2) postmodernism as a reaction to the "modernity" tradition of the Enlightenment. In order to be distinguished from the former, the latter is quite often called "postmodernity."

A reaction to aesthetic modernism

Postmodernism as a reaction to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism emerged soon after World War II. It still carried most of the features of twentieth-century aesthetic modernism. So, some have argued that it is essentially just an outgrowth of modernism, and not a separate movement. But, there is a fundamental difference. It is that while aesthetic modernism had presented fragmentation, for example, as something tragic to be lamented (as in Eliots' "The Waste Land"), postmodernism no longer laments it but rather celebrates it. Thus, postmodernism is inclined to stay with meaninglessness, playing with nonsense. Dino Felluga sees this difference and lists some of the things "that distinguish postmodern aesthetic work from modernist work" as follows:

1. Extreme self-reflexivity, more playful and even irrelevant (as in pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's "Masterpiece" or architect Frank Gehry's Nationale-Nederlanden Building in Prague).
2. Irony and parody (many examples in pop culture and media advertising).
3. A breakdown between high and low cultural forms in more immediately understandable ways (as in Andy Warhol's painting for Campbell's Tomato Soup cans).
4. Retro
5. A further questioning of grand narratives
6. Visuality and the simulacrum vs. temporality (as in Art Spiegelman's graphic novel "Maus: A Surviver's Tale" through the medium of comics).
7. Late capitalism whose dominance is generally feared (as in the predominance of paranoia narratives in movies such as "Blade Runner" and "the Matrix").
8. Disorientation (as in those films that seek to disorient the viewer completely through the revelation of a truth that changes everything that came before).
9. Return of orality (based on an influx of oral media sources such as TV, film, and radio).

Postmodernism in this sense was much discussed in the 1960s and 1970s by theorists such as Leslie Fielder and Ihab Hassan, although Hassan gradually extended his discussion to a general critique of Western culture, somewhat dealing with postmodernism in the other sense.

"Postmodernity": a reaction to modernity

Up until the 1970s the discussion on postmodernism was generally confined to postmodernism in its first sense. In 1980, however, Jürgen Habermas's lecture on "Modernity: An Unfinished Project" helped bring a shift in the discussion from postmodernism in its first sense (i.e., a reaction to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism) to postmodernism in the second sense (i.e., postmodernity), ironically because of its strong defense of modernity against postmodernity. Of course, the debate on modernity versus postmodernity had already started with the involvement of critics such as Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida in favor of posmodernity, as they felt that the modernity tradition of the Enlightenment was in crisis because of the emergence of problems such as alienation and exploitatin within that tradition in spite of its original promise of positive cultural and social development. But, when Habermas was trying to defend modernity as an "unfinished project" we should not abandon yet, it prompted those who were in favor of postmodernity to react. Since then, a large volume of literature has continued to snowball, focusing on postmodernity as the more important facet of postmodernism.

Habermas now became the target of criticism especially from Jean-François Lyotard, who published The Postmodern Condition in English in 1984, his best-known and most influential work. Lyotard declared the end of the Enlightenment and rejected its tradition of "grand narrative," a totalistic, universal theory which promises to explain and solve all problems by one set of ideas.

After summarizing modernity in terms of order and rationality, Mary Klages lists some of the basic characteristics of postmodernity over against it, as follows:

1. Postmodernity is, as is expressed especially by Lyotard, the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives in favor of "order" serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice even including Marxist society. It rejects grand narratives about large-scale or global universal concepts in favor of more situational and provisional "mini-narratives" about small practices and local events.
2. There are only signifiers. Signifieds do not exist.
3. This means that there are only copies, i.e., what Baudrillard calls "simulacra," and that there are no originals. For example, cds and music recordings have no original. Related to this is the concept of virtual reality, a reality created by a computer simulation game, for which there is no original.
4. Knowledge is not good for its own sake. Its functionality or utility is more important.
5. Knowledge is also distributed, stored, and arranged differently throught the emergence of computer technology, without which it ceases to be knowledge. The important thing about knowledge is not to assess it as truth (its technical quality), as goodness or justice (its ethical quality), or as beauty (its aesthetic quality), but rather to see who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided. In other words, says Lyotard, knowledge follows the paradigm of a language game, as laid out by Wittgenstein.

Derrida's project of deconstruction as an attempt to criticize what is called logocentrism in texts can be added to the list, although it will be dealt with in a separate section below.

Relationship of the two: the same postmodern pie

The two different senses of postmodernism are reactions to the two different facets of modernism, respectively. One can observe that the reaction of postmodernity to modernity seems to be more radical than that of aesthetic postmodernism to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism, for whereas postmodernity is a big leap from modernity, aesthetic postmodernism still resembles twentieth-century aesthetic modernism at least in some external ways. Aesthetic modernism was already a very progressive movement in the first half of the twentieth century; so, aesthetic postmodernism, reacting to it, does not have to be a very big leap.

However, it is safe to say that the two different senses of postmodernism cohere and are not separate, even though they are two different reactions to the twe different facets of modernism, respectively. Timewise, they both started soon after World War II. In terms of content as well, they concur in many respects. They can interact, and "the postmodern turn can result from the interaction between" the two "in the postmodern pie." One good example of this interaction is references made by Foucault and Derrida to Belgian artist René Magritte's experiments with signification, with their appreciative understanding of Magritte's suggestion that no matter how realistically the artist can depict an item, verisimilitude is still an artistic strategy, a mere representation of the thing, not the thing itself.

Deconstruction

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 the architecture 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" connotates 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. Post-structuralists 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 "play" of difference (which he dubbed differance to capture the French sense of the term meaning both "to differ" and "to defer." 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.

Social constructionism and postmodernism

Another key element of postmodernism is social constructionism. A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived social reality. It involves looking at the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition by humans. Socially constructed reality is seen as an ongoing, dynamic process; reality is reproduced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of it. The term was first used in sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's book The Social Construction of Reality.

Social constructionism shares with postmodernism a skepticism in absolute truths and an anti-essentialism which holds that reality is socially constructed. Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of socially constructed reality stresses the on-going mass-building of worldviews by individuals in dialectical interaction with society at any time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this view, the imagined worlds of human social existence and activity, gradually crystallized by habit into institutions propped up by language conventions, given ongoing legitimacy by mythology, religion and philosophy, maintained by therapies and socialization, and subjectively internalized by upbringing and education to become part of the identity of social citizens.

Origins in architecture

The movement of Postmodernism began with architecture, as a reaction 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 and dismissal of frivolous ornament. 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. 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 totalizing 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.

Later, the term was applied to several movements, including in art, music, and literature, that reacted against modern movements, and are typically marked by revival of traditional elements and techniques. 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.

When used in other contexts, it is a concept without a universally accepted, short and simple definition; in a variety of contexts it is used to describe social conditions, movements in the arts, and scholarship (including criticism) in reaction to modernism.

Notable philosophical and literary roots

(evidence of Surrealisms influence on postmodern thought can be seen in Foucault's and Derrida's references to Rene Magritte's experiments with signification). Postcolonialism after World War II contributed to the idea that one cannot have an objectively superior lifestyle or belief.

Overview

Complicating matters further, others have argued that even the postmodern era has already ended, with some commentators asserting culture has entered a post-postmodern period. In his essay "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond," Alan Kirby has argued that we now inhabit an entirely new cultural landscape, which he calls "pseudo-modernism". This idea has been extended by A. Carlill and S. Willis, with the latter describing postmodernism as "more the rough outline of a set of self-referential ideals than a genuine cultural movement."

Development of postmodernism

Philosophical Movements and contributors

Influencer	Year	Influence
Karl Barth	c.1930	fideist approach to theology brought a rise in subjectivity
Martin Heidegger	c.1930	rejected the philosophical grounding of the concepts of "subjectivity" and "objectivity"
Ludwig Wittgenstein	c.1950	anti-foundationalism, on certainty, a philosophy of language
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"
W.V.O. Quine	c. 1962	developed the theses of indeterminacy of translation and ontological relativity, and argued against the possibility of a priori knowledge
Jacques Derrida	c.1970	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	philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods; argues for dissolving traditional philosophical problems; anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism
Matthew Barnard	c.1980	argues that Postmodernism is merely a state of mind, in comparison to Modernism claiming that both forms don't actually even exist in fundamental terms.
Jean Baudrillard	c.1981	Simulacra and Simulation - reality created by media

Criticism

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.

Sokal Affair

The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

The paper, titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax, calling his paper "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics" made by humanities academics.

The resulting debate focused on the relative scholarly merits or lack thereof of sociological commentary on the physical sciences and of postmodern-influenced sociological disciplines in general, as well as on academic ethics, including both whether it was appropriate for Sokal to deliberately defraud an academic journal, as well as whether Social Text took appropriate precautions in publishing the paper.

Interestingly, Social Text never acknowledged that the article's publication had been a mistake but supported a counter-argument defending the "interpretative validity" of Sokal's article, despite the author's later rebuttal of his own article. (see the online Postmodernism Generator)

Radical critique

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."

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.

Noam Chomsky

The problematic nature of the term ‘postmodernism’

The term has been used to express many disparate ideas. Dick Hebdige, in his ‘Hiding in the Light’ illustrates this problem:

When it becomes possible for 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 reflexitivity, 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 miniaturized 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 generalized 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.

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ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

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• Lyon, David. Postmodernity. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ISBN 9780816611737
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985. Ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ISBN 9780816622115
• MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. University of Notre Dame Press, 1984 ISBN 9780268005948
• Manuel, Peter. "Music as Symbol, Music as Simulacrum: Pre-Modern, Modern, and Postmodern Aesthetics in Subcultural Musics," Popular Music 1/2, 1995, pp. 227-239. ISSN 0261-1430
• Murphy, Nancey, Anglo-American Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspectives on Science, Religion, and Ethics. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997. ISBN 9780813328690
• Natoli, Joseph. A Primer to Postmodernity. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. ISBN 9781577180609
• Norris, Christopher. What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. ISBN 9780745009742
• Pangle, Thomas L., The Ennobling of Democracy: The Challenge of the Postmodern Age, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991 ISBN 0-8018-4635-8
• Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. New York: Picador USA, 1998. ISBN 9780312195458
• Taylor, Alan. We, the media. Pedagogic Intrusions into US Film and Television News Broadcasting Rhetorics, Peter Lang, 2004. pp. 418 ISBN 9780820465302
• Vattimo, Gianni. The Transparent Society Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ISBN 9780801845284
• Veith Jr., Gene Edward. Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1994. ISBN 9780891077688
• Woods, Tim, Beginning Postmodernism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999,(Reprinted 2002)(ISBN 0-7190-5210-6 Hardback,ISBN 0-7190-5211-4 Paperback) .
• Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. ISBN 9780312054366
• Alexie, Sherman. The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000. ISBN 9780871138125

External links

All links Retrieved December 18, 2007.

• Postmodernism Guide from Toronto High School
• A simpler description of Postmodernism
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on postmodernism
• The Christian Cadre's Postmodernism Page
• Discourses of Postmodernism. Multilingual Bibliography (PDF file)
• Modernity, postmodernism and the tradition of dissent, by Lloyd Spencer (1998)
• Dueling Paradigms: Modernist V. Postmodernist Thought
• Keith DeRose (Philosophy, Yale): Characterizing a Fogbank: What Is Postmodernism, and Why Do I Take Such a Dim View of it?
• How to Deconstruct Almost Anything—My Postmodern Adventure
• Postmodernist.com
• Postmodernism and truth by philosopher Daniel Dennett
• Postmodernism is the new black: How the shape of modern retailing was both predicted and influenced by some unlikely seers (The Economist Dec 19th 2006)
• Postmodernism and art | La crisis de las vanguardias y el debate modernidad-postmodernidad by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD.

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