Postmodernism

The cultural and intellectual trend known as postmodernism developed out of a climate of dissent from modernism, the broad cultural movement in art and literature that had emerged from the Age of Enlightenment. Often identified or associated with other terms such as poststructuralism, decon-structivism, social constructionism, and postcolo-nialism, postmodernism developed in reaction to modernism and is sometimes seen as a rejection of the notion that there is such a thing as truth “out there” in favor of the view that truth is created rather than discovered.

According to some theorists, the very act of trying to define postmodernism constitutes an act of modernism imposed on postmodernity. The spirit of postmodernism is inhospitable to such endeavors as the establishment of authoritative definitions or, for that matter, the compiling of encyclopedias. The project of collecting, codifying, and publishing exhaustive bodies of knowledge characterized the Enlightenment or modernist position. The epistemological position of modernism is consistent with the idea that truth is objective and can be defined according to principles of technical and scientific rationality. This idea is rejected by postmodernism; thus, attempts to define or state the essence of postmodernism go against the grain of postmodernist thought. Rather, postmodernism attempts to describe “what is” with an emphasis on subjectivity. Modernism, by contrast, prefers to emphasize that which is held to be the case by applying objective standards and procedures. An element of a postmodern position is the activity of dissent from “what is.”

The origins of postmodernism have been vigorously debated by prominent postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, and their respective followers. Some claim that postmodernism began with the Industrial Revolution, or after World War I or World War II, or even more recently, in the 1960s. Other theorists claim that it began in the arenas of art, music, and literature, while others claim that postmodernism began as part of philosophical or sociological discourse, or in the field of architecture.

No matter what label or historical moment or discipline is claimed as the root of postmodernism, any attempt to represent its nature must contend with the many differences among theorists over what its constitutive elements are. The resulting lack of clarity seems to characterize not only the world of the early 21st century, but also recent and contemporary acts of reform and dissent within both society generally and the discourse of education in particular.

In dissenting from modernity's attempts to create metanarratives as sources of truth, usually from a European and American perspective, postmodernism rejects such metanarratives. Postmodernism moves away from the modernist concepts of a democratic society and individuals' social responsibilities and toward understanding these phenomena from the perspective of those voices and histories that previously had been excluded from Eurocentric metanarratives. Starting from the premise that there can be no validity to any claim for a particular location to be privileged as the center of truth and meaning, or the center of the world, postmodernism departs from common notions of East and West (East and west of what central point?). Thus the memories of those who were historically colonized and oppressed now play a major role in understanding reality, be it from a historical, cultural, sociological, or religious perspective.

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