Postmodernism

Postmodernism, as the term implies, refers to a decisive break that began during the 20th century away from the historical, philosophical, political, cultural, and aesthetic characteristics associated with modernism. In broad outline, modernism as an era spans the 400 years between humanism and the revival of classicism during the Renaissance in the early 1500s and the highly complex industrial societies of the mid-1900s. Modernism is rooted in the Enlightenment philosophies that spawned capitalism, nationalism, and modern science in western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, after the Renaissance. The rise of modernism is based on rationality as the key to human development, the accessibility of a universal and objective truth, a direct relationship between humans and nature, and a grand historical narrative of the progressive betterment of the quality of life [Page 283]through science and technology. Modernism also is associated with the rise of industrialization in the 19th century and the growth of the bureaucratic, hierarchical nation-state in the 20th century.

The idea of modernism has a different context in cultural and aesthetic realms, referring to art, literature, and architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which in some ways moved beyond representational, realistic styles and embraced an aesthetic of individualism, novelty, and universality. The term postmodernism was first used in 1917 by a German philosopher to describe the nihilism of 20th-century Western culture. It appeared prominently in literary criticism of the 1950s and 1960s in reaction to aesthetic modernism, and in architecture in the 1970s. In the 1980s, it came to refer in philosophy to French post-structuralism and in general to a reaction against modern rationalism in philosophy since René Descartes in the 1600s.

As a reaction against the general characteristics of modernism, whether in philosophy, politics, or culture, the term postmodernism is highly contested, leading to multiple interpretations of its nature and meaning, with scholarly debates about whether postmodernism actually exists or whether the tendencies it represents are simply another manifestation of modernism. Still, these contrary tendencies, or rejections of modernism, are identifiable and represent a definite shift in worldview and experience. Ruptures with each of the characteristics listed above point toward the sense that a decisive global change has occurred that is qualitatively different from modernism.

Both positive and negative readings of postmodernism show the centrality of new technologies to its definition. With a focus on negative qualities, postmodernism denies objective knowledge of the world as studied by science, the primary meaning of words and texts, and the unity of the individual self; in short, it rejects the basic intellectual assumptions and ideas of modern Western civilization. Various readings of postmodernism share some common themes. One is the recognition of pluralism and indeterminacy and an accompanying rejection of simplicity, completeness, and certainty. A second theme is the acceptance of playfulness in the cultural fields that previously were seriously searching for a realist truth. A third theme is a new focus on representation, images, information, and cultural signs as dominant in social life. The global changes signaling the rise of a postmodern world include the end of European colonization; the rise of mass culture; the modernization of the Third World; the shrinking of the globe by telecommunications, weapons, and marketing; and a shift from material-based production to information-based production.

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