User:Mike Milligan/Sandbox

In 1979 Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote in The Postmodern Condition. ‘Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives’ Lyotard saw metanarratives (or grand narratives or big stories) as typically characterised by some form of  "'transcendent and universal truth'." Religions (especially Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are good examples of grand narratives. Their followers believe that they explain everything from the human condition to the nature of the universe. For instance, the big story of the Christian religion is the story of God’s will being worked out on earth. More modern (Enlightenment) narratives include Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, liberalism and capitalism, science and rationality. Marxism tells the story of class conflict in capitalism inevitably giving rise to revolution and socialism. So, perhaps over-‘simplifying to the extreme’, for Lyotard, postmodernism, is skepticism, or doubt, towards big stories including the big stories of modernity: science and rationality.

Lyotard uses ‘postmodern’ as a critical concept to analyze our times, our thinking and knowledge itself. However, at the other extreme, some see it as a buzzword. Dick Hebdige, in his ‘Hiding in the Light’, illustrates the range of the use of the term.

When it becomes possible for people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’ a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘predicament of reflexitivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of ‘placelessness’ (critical regionalism) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates: when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.

Postmodern architecture (where many see the origins of postmodernism), postmodern art, postmodern film, postmodern literature, postmodern music, postmodern theater and postmodernity. illustrate many of the Hebdige’s uses of ‘postmodern’ and also demonstrate the range of time periods to which the term has been applied. It is variously seen as emerging from, reacting to or superseding, modernism and some writers abbreviate to Pomo )

‘Suspicion of metanarratives’ means that postmodernists - artistic, cultural or philosophical - avoid references to a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle. So postmodernism is often characterised by extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or intertextuality.

Postmodernity refers to non-art aspects of history that were influenced by the new movement, including the evolutions in society, economy and culture since the 1960s. .  When the idea of a reaction to—or even a rejection of—the movement of modernism (a late 19th, early 20th centuries art movement) was borrowed by other fields, it became synonymous in some contexts with postmodernity. The term is closely linked with poststructuralism (cf. Jacques Derrida) and with rejection of modernism, in terms of a rejection of its bourgeois, elitist culture.

The term was used as early as 1914 in an article in The Hibbert Journal (a quarterly philosophical review) written by J.M.Thompson. In this context it was used to describe fundamental changes in attitudes and beliefs within Christian society of the time ('Post-Modernism, J.M.Thompson, The Hibbert Journal Vol XII No.4 July 1914 p.733). It was then recoined in 1949 to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, leading to the postmodern architecture movement. Later, the term was applied to several movements, including in art, music, and literature, that reacted against modern movements, and are typically marked by revival of traditional elements and techniques.

In its broadest context, postmodernism can be seen as a world view.Walter Truett Anderson identifies postmodernism as one of four world views. Truett contrast the postmodern-ironist world view which sees truth as socially constructed with (a) the scientific-rational in which truth is 'found' through methodical, disciplined inquiry, (b) the social-traditional in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilisation and (c) the neo-romantic in which truth is found either through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.