Postmodernism

Postmodernism has been defined in diverse and sometimes confusing ways since it first became common in the lexicon of human geographers during the midto late 1980s. This confusion arose because postmodernism has two closely related definitions: one as object and the other as attitude. First, postmodernism can be understood as an object or a thing, and in particular this object can be seen as an era. This era is defined by things such as literature, art, and architecture and by processes such as differing forms of capitalist production that result in the context of postmodern thought. Second, postmodernism can be understood as an attitude or a way of understanding the world. In particular, the things and processes that characterize the era of postmodernism both reinforce and remake postmodernism as an attitude. This attitude can perhaps be understood more specifically as an intellectual movement that provides a coherent set of ideas for understanding the world in a particularly postmodern way. In an attempt to capture some of the complexity of the interrelationships between postmodernism as object and postmodernism as attitude, geographers such as Michael Dear have suggested that we further distinguish among postmodernism as epoch, postmodernism as style, and postmodernism as method. Style and epoch help us to understand the notion of postmodernism as an object, whereas method helps us to understand postmodernism as an attitude.

Postmodern style can be understood as a thing to be analyzed, and such analyses suggest that there has been a change in both the style and epoch of contemporary Western societies. Whereas such societies once reflected the somber and univocal face of modernity—especially in the faceless architecture of the international modern style—they now exhibit the more diverse and polyvocal face of postmodern style. In architecture, this has seen the development of more playful buildings such as the sinuous glass, limestone, and titanium walls of the Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. Such buildings often are designed specifically as statements of opposition to the utilitarian, monolithic, and (often) ubiquitous skyscrapers of the international modern style. In this sense, postmodern style can be seen as a recognizable literary, artistic, and cultural trend reacting against modernism.

Some researchers consider postmodern style to be part of a larger set of processes that characterize a postmodern epoch. The key set of relationships on which these researchers focus involves social and economic relationships that apparently have undergone a major shift. Capitalist production and accumulation, for example, once were characterized by mass production and scientific management (as exemplified by the Fordist mass production of the automobile), but they are now said to have shifted to a mode of “justin-time” or flexible production systems.

As a method or an intellectual attitude, postmodernism is characterized by a reaction against the so-called certainty of narratives of progress and Enlightenment that characterize the modernist foundations of Western intellectual activity. In a postmodern method, former boundaries between phenomena such as the economic and the social, art and science, and myth and reality—distinctions so important to modernism—collapse into one another. Postmodern thinkers tend to be wary of what are termed metanarratives (or overarching theories), such as secular humanism, historical materialism, and scientific rationalism, which attempt to provide unified and singular explanations for social relations. In fact, one of the key postmodern thinkers, Jean-François Lyotard, defined postmodernism simply as incredulity toward metanarratives.

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