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[Edilma Howard]

Postmodernism is a term used to refer to a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break with modernism. What they have in common is the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of representing reality. Still, there is disagreement among experts about its more precise meaning even within narrow contexts.

"Postmodernism" is "a highly contested term",[1] referring to "a particularly unstable concept",[2] that "names many different kinds of cultural objects and phenomena in many different ways".[3] It is "diffuse, fragmentary, [and] multi-dimensional".[4] Critics have described it as "an exasperating term"[5] and claim that its indefinability is "a truism".[6] Put otherwise, postmodernism is "several things at once".[5] It has no single definition, and the term does not name any single unified phenomenon, but rather many diverse phenomena: "postmodernisms rather than one postmodernism".[7][8][9]

Although postmodernisms are generally united in their effort to transcend the perceived limits of modernism, "modernism" also means different things to different critics in various arts.[10] Further, there are outliers on even this basic stance; for instance, literary critic William Spanos conceives postmodernism, not in period terms, but in terms of a certain kind of literary imagination so that pre-modern texts such as Euripides' Orestes or Cervantes' Don Quixote count as postmodern.[11]

If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic [sic], epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.[12]

The term "postmodern" was first used in 1870 by the artist John Watkins Chapman, who described "a Postmodern style of painting" as a departure from French Impressionism.[13][17] Similarly, the first citation given by the Oxford English Dictionary is dated to 1916, describing Gus Mager as "one of the few 'post' modern painters whose style is convincing".[18]

Episcopal priest and cultural commentator J. M. Thompson, in an 1914 article, uses the term to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion, writing, "the raison d'tre of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition".[19] In 1926, Bernard Iddings Bell, president of St. Stephen's College and also an Episcopal priest, published Postmodernism and Other Essays, which marks the first use of the term to describe an historical period following modernity.[20][21] The essay criticizes lingering socio-cultural norms, attitudes, and practices of the Enlightenment. It is also critical of a purported cultural shift away from traditional Christian beliefs.[22][23][24]

In 1942, the literary critic and author H. R. Hays describes postmodernism as a new literary form.[26] Also in the arts, the term was first used in 1949 to describe a dissatisfaction with the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style.[3]

Although these early uses anticipate some of the concerns of the debate in the second part of the 20th century, there is little direct continuity in the discussion.[27] Just when the new discussion begins, however, is also a matter of dispute. Various authors place its beginnings in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.[28]

In the mid-1970s, the American sociologist Daniel Bell provided a general account of the postmodern as an effectively nihilistic response to modernism's alleged assault on the Protestant work ethic and its rejection of what he upheld as traditional values.[29] The ideals of modernity, per his diagnosis, were degraded to the level of consumer choice.[30] This research project, however, was not taken up in a significant way by others until the mid-1980s when the work of Jean Baudrillard and Fredrick Jameson, building upon art and literary criticism, reintroduced the term to sociology.[31]

Discussion about the postmodern in the second part of the 20th century was most articulate in areas with a large body of critical discourse around the modernist movement. Even here, however, there continued to be disagreement about such basic issues as whether postmodernism is a break with modernism, a renewal and intensification of modernism,[3] or even, both at once, a rejection and a radicalization of its historical predecessor.[10]

According to scholar Steven Connor, discussions of the 1970s were dominated by literary criticism, to be supplanted by architectural theory in the 1980s.[32] Some of these conversations made use of French poststructuralist thought, but only after these innovations and critical discourse in the arts did postmodernism emerge as a philosophical term in its own right.

During the 1960s, this affirmative use gave way to a pejorative use by the New Left, who used it to describe a waning commitment among youth to the political ideals socialism and communism.[1] The literary critic Irving Howe, for instance, denounced postmodern literature for being content to merely reflect, rather than actively attempt to refashion, what he saw as the "increasingly shapeless" character of contemporary society.[33][1]

In the 1970s, this changed again, largely under the influence of the literary critic Ihab Hassan's large-scale survey of works that he said could no longer be called modern. Taking the Black Mountain poets an exemplary instance of the new postmodern type, Hassan celebrates its Nietzschean playfulness and cheerfully anarchic spirit, which he sets off against the high seriousness of modernism.[1][34]

(Yet, from another perspective, Friedrich Nietzsche's attack on Western philosophy and Martin Heidegger's critique of metaphysics posed deep theoretical problems not necessarily a cause for aesthetic celebration. Their further influence on the conversation about postmodernism, however, would be largely mediated by French poststructuralism.[35])

If literature was at the center of the discussion in the 1970s, architecture is at the center in the 1980s.[32] The architectural theorist Charles Jencks, in particular, connects the artistic avant-garde to social change in a way that captures attention outside of academia.[1] Jenckes, much influenced by the American architect Robert Venturi,[36] celebrates a plurality of forms and encourages participation and active engagement with the local context of the built environment.[37] He presents this as in opposition to the "authoritarian style" of International Modernism.[3]

In the 1970s, postmodern criticism increasingly came to incorporate poststructuralist theory, particularly the deconstructive approach to texts most strongly associated with Jacques Derrida.[38] Derrida attempted to demonstrate that the whole foundationalist approach to language and knowledge was untenable and misguided. He was also critical of what he claimed to expose as the artificial binary oppositions (e.g., subject/object, speech/writing) that he claims are at the heart of Western culture and philosophy.[39] It is during this period that postmodernism comes to be particularly equated with a kind of anti-representational self-reflexivity.[40]

In the 1980s, some critics begin to take an interest in the work of Michel Foucault. This introduces a political concern about social power-relations into discussions about postmodernism.[41] Much of Foucault's project is, against the Enlightenment tradition, to expose modern social institutions and forms of knowledge as historically contingent forces of domination.[39] He aims detotalize or decenter historical narratives to display modern consciousness as it is constituted by specific discourses and institutions that shape individuals into the docile subjects of social systems.[42]

This is also the beginning of the affiliation of postmodernism with feminism and multiculturalism.[43] The art critic Craig Owens, in particular, not only made the connection to feminism explicit, but went so far as to claim feminism for postmodernism wholesale,[44] a broad claim resisted by even many sympathetic feminists such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson.[45]

Although postmodern criticism and thought drew on philosophical ideas from early on, "postmodernism" was only introduced to the expressly philosophical lexicon by Jean-Franois Lyotard in his 1979[a] The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.[46][1] In this influential work, Lyotard offers the following definition: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives [such as Enlightenment progress or Marxist revolution[1]]".[47] In a society with no unifying narrative, he argues, we are left with heterogeneous, group-specific narratives (or "language games", as adopted from Ludwig Wittgenstein[1]) with no universal perspective from which to adjudicate among them.[48]

According to Lyotard, this introduces a general crisis of legitimacy, a theme he adopts from the philosopher Jrgen Habermas, whose theory of communicative rationality Lyotard rejects.[49][50] While he was particularly concerned with the way that this insight undermines claims of scientific objectivity, Lyotard's argument undermines the entire principle of transcendent legitimization.[51][52] Instead, proponents of a language game must make the case for their legitimacy with reference to such considerations as efficiency or practicality.[1] Far from celebrating the apparently relativistic consequences of this argument, however, Lyotard focused much of his subsequent work on how links among games could be established, particularly with respect to ethics and politics.[53]

Nevertheless, the appearance of linguistic relativism inspired an extensive rebuttal by the Marxist critic Fredrick Jameson.[54] Building upon the theoretical foundations laid out by the Marxist economist Ernst Mandel[1] and observations in the early work of the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard,[55] Jameson develops his own conception of the postmodern as "the cultural logic of late capitalism" in the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods.[56][1]

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