Postmodernism

Postmodernism literally means “after Modernism.” In the contemporary literature, the term often denotes the cultural phase following Modernism or a heterogeneous, unorganized intellectual movement challenging Modernism. It is a term that designates a turning point, a rupture from the past, and the phenomenon of encountering a new cultural, historical, and social realm. Throughout its history, Postmodernism has gained divergent meanings and has become a subject of long-lasting disputes in art, architecture, literature, [Page 1154]theology, geography, anthropology, philosophy, history, and all other branches of social sciences, among other disciplines.

The term can be traced back to the 1930s. In 1934, the Spanish poet and critic Federico de Onis first used the term postmodernismo to identify a tendency of regression in literature toward conservatism. In the sense of marking the beginning of a new age, however, the term was first explicitly employed by the well-known English historian, Arnold Toynbee. In the eighth volume of his A Study of History, which appeared in 1954, Toynbee referred precisely to the beginning of the “post-modern age.” He characterized this new age by the decline in the power of the bourgeoisie and dated it back to 1870s Franco-Prussian War. Up to the 1980s, the term was used by authors like Charles Olson, C. Wright Mills, Harry Levin, David Antin, Ihab Hassan, and Robert Venturi. Charles Jencks employed the term either for giving a description of some new transformations in history, social life, and several aspects of culture in general or specifically for identifying certain novelties in poetry, fiction, and architecture. Before the 1980s, however, the term had not been so popular and the subject of a widespread controversy.

It could be said that Postmodernism started to be influential in America especially in the 1960s. The publication the English translation of Jean-François Lyotard's La Condition Postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition) in 1984 marks a turning point in the controversy around Postmodernism in the English-speaking world. Postmodernism first gained a philosophical meaning in The Postmodern Condition, which combines the theory of postindustrial society developed by sociologists like Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine with recent theories on postmodern art and poststructuralism in philosophy. Further, the great influence of Lyotard's work seems to originate from its comprehensive description of the “new condition.”

In his work, Lyotard defines Postmodernism as incredulity toward meta or grand narratives. According to Lyotard, the onto-theological worldview of the Middle Ages in Europe was the main grand narrative. That is to say, all aspects of life were regulated and interpreted with respect to the belief in God. It was the “truth” and the promise of universal emancipation that legitimated all social practices, beliefs, and knowledge. The Enlightenment project brought about the dissolution of the onto-theological worldview, by which scientific, rationalist discourses gained legitimacy and replaced the old grand narrative. Reason became the ultimately superior legitimacy principle in explaining nature and in organizing all social practices. On the contrary, in the postmodern era, according to Lyotard, belief in one Truth or a single, universal grand narrative lost the grounds of its legitimacy. With developments like the computerization of society and the commodification of knowledge, the authority of any grand narrative derived from the Enlightenment project was demolished. Discourses about reality in the information society or the postindustrial society are so diverse that people have a natural tendency to be skeptical about the rational (i.e., scientific) or the universal metanarrative embracing all reality. For Lyotard, this simply marks the end of metanarratives and is the most prominent characteristic of the postmodern condition.

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