Postmodernism

Postmodernism can be viewed not so much as an “ism” (which suggests something complete, totalized, unified) as a social, discursive, cultural, and political turna turnout of and away from the modern, from previously customary modes of thinking and living. Some argue that this turn was precipitated, in great part, by sociopolitical movements during the 1960s in the West, particularly theorized by French philosophers, historians, and linguists, that resisted and attempted to overthrow normalizing and often oppressive social mores, structures, and practices. Such a turn became apparent in the 1970s and 1980s through a proliferation of new media, technologies, mass cultures, reconceivings of capitalism, consumer and information societies, urbanization, and cultural forms that questioned modernist Enlightenment ideals of rational, fully conscious humans and the quest for ...