Postmodernism, with or without the hyphen, has become a buzzword in the last decade or so. What does it mean? How can I use it at trendy parties without sounding silly?
It's important to appreciate the diversity of the postmodernism. But at the risk of trivializing a complex historical phenomenon, here's a roller-coaster ride through some of its main manifestations.
If we engage in a bit of broad historical situating, we find that the postmodern shift has been located as early as the late fifties to as late as the early seventies, but for the most part changes in the 1960s lead cultural critics to see us as entering a new historical period (especially in the worlds of art, architecture, literature, and ideas). Some observers have identified this shift with the full onslaught of consumer capitalism: Frederick Jameson, for one, calls postmodernism "the culture of late capitalism."
In architecture and visual art postmodernity witnesses the return of classical elements embedded in modern techniques, materials, and styles. The clearest expression of postmodernism as a coherent phenomenon is found here. In architecture we see the reappearance of the column, of classical motifs and of decoration, ornament, and colour, as opposed to the soulless grey, silver, and black boxes of modernist architecture. The postmodernist architect celebrates pluralism, difference, and eclecticism; he recollects the past, recycling or parodying it.
In visual art, as Kim Levin points out, the past is ransacked for clues to the future. Postmodernists attempt to remedy this feeling of alienation by scavanging the past and by bringing back the human body, long absent from modern art. These artists are tolerant of ambiguity, playful and full of doubt. They revel in pastiche and the collage.
Turning to literature and literary theory, postmodernism is a cool response to the triumph of modern technology and science, especially electronic and communication technology, over older or more isolated worldviews. Postmodernist literature showcases the disjointed, the nonlinear, the out-of-wack. From Umberto Eco's exploration of the medieval spirit in his The Name of the Rose to William Gibson's skewed vision of the future of the computer revolution in his cyberpunk novels from Neuromancer on, postmodern fiction wanders through dark worlds and alternative paradigms, worlds foreign to the modern faith in science and technology, paradigms alien to the modern belief in the univalence of truth, reason and order.
Roland Barthes, along with other French literary critics, has heralded the Death of the Author. Now meaning is supposed to come from an interaction between the text and the reader: the reader of literature constructs the text from his or her own unique perspective. Under postmodernist theory, everything can be read as a text, and all readings of each text are equally meaningful, if not valid. Meaning and truth are thus plural, changing, and subjective. To give privilege to one truth over another becomes an act of psychic terrorism.
Following the death of the author is the death of the "canon", the body of writing seen as defining modern Western literature. We are now faced with a pluralism of narratives; of stories told by formerly "marginalized" groups, by women and black people, by the Third World instead of the First, by the prisoners instead of the wardens. We are urged by postmodernists to abandon the "privileging" of the stories told by dead white Europeans and their spiritual offspring abroad, to substitute a multicoloured weave for the old monochrome one.
In philosophy and politics the postmodernists see reason, progress, scientific truth, and democracy as just (to use J.F. Lyotard's expression) "meta-narratives", big stories the Western world has told itself to convince itself that it's better than the rest of the world and has a right to the resources and leadership of the world. The belief in objective Truth is a product of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, of a faith in economic and technological progress, and is expressed in the optimistic humanism that ruled the modern Western world for so long. Derrida calls this faith "logocentrism", the West's centering its philosophical and political vision on universally valid rational beliefs. The postmodernist wishes to take apart this faith, to substitute local stories for these meta-narratives, to make truth an individual rather than a social phenomena.
Philosophical and moral ideas, social values, political beliefs become constructs, ways of interpreting a reality that has no inherent meaning. The postmodernists' preference for "constructivism" in interpreting ideas, social values, and political assumptions lead to the more radical notions of hyperspace and hyperreality. Hyperspace, a science fiction term, is a space that exists only as a construct, as an idea; hyperreality is where a model of some part of the world is more real than the world itself. The postmodernist sees the reality of our selves, our values, and our science through hyper sunglasses. The result is relativism with respect to truth, values, and reality (both personal and scientific): the door is opened to diverse truths, moral codes, and views of what is real.
The philosophical method of choise for many postmodern thinkers is "deconstruction", a term made famous by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, meaning a taking apart of the belief structures of Western science, philosophy, and art. More specifically, Derrida seeks to take a text apart, to reveal its inner contradictions, its hidden assumptions, its moral and political hierarchies, its "warring forces of signification". His preferred approach to the discovering of meaning is différance, which means to defer, postphone, or put off a text's meaning, given the central postmodernist premise that we should avoid forcing a given interpretation on a text or person (which is itself based on the further beliefs that all the world's a text, and that all readings of these texts are equally valid).
Postmodernists are skeptical about politics. Michel Foucault sees Power and Knowledge as Siamese twins joined at the hip: this assumption leads postmodernists to be by and large cynical about even talking about political change, nevermind engaging in it (except perhaps at the local level). The average citizen in postmodern societies gets his or her political knowledge already cooked by the mass media (television being the central producer of postmodern political hyperreality), and drifts into a general noninvolvement in an amorphous mass politics run by anonymous elites. The consumer economy keeps the masses happy, reveling in their narcissism and hedonism. Bread and circuses replace the public political realm.
Even within media and pop culture we see echoes of the postmodern mindset. Anything fast, image-centered (as opposed to using written text), without a linear narrative, anything that shocks or alienates the traditions in its field, can be seen as having a postmodernist flavour. Also, paralleling postmodernist architecture's somewhat ironic appropriation of the classical column, we can identify a "postmodernist" pop music when we hear it borrowing from a tradition and reworking it into a new artistic form. Media now attempts to enter more directly into the process of newsmaking or artistic creation, and is increasingly dependent on the hyperreal, virtual world of computer graphics, all as part of an effort to prove that McLuhan's prophecy that the medium is the message has finally come to pass. Max Headroom was the virtual spokesman par excellence for the postmodern media.
Postmodernism addresses a growing reality in our culture, a reality that's both liberating and worrying. On the positive side, it leads us down roads previously unexplored by Western rationalist humanism. Insofar as power is based on manufactured ontologies, postmodernism opens things up politically by deconstructing these ladders of being.
But by making truth relative, social beliefs and systems constructs, and everything a text, it runs the danger of putting all social and personal values on the same plane, thus opening the door to profoundly anti-democratic forces at least within literary and artistic circles and within academe, and perhaps by extension the wider world also. And it runs the risk of generating a deep cynicism about our culture and its future: it denies us the right to believe in the superiority of our own way of life, while at the same time offering no solid grounds from which to critique that way of life. How can egalitarian, liberationist movements, like social democracy or feminism, embrace a metaphysic so profoundly relativistic? If anything goes, don't exploitation and oppression in some sense of the word "go" too? Also, slipping for a while into a neo-Marxist point of view, can't postmodernism be seen as yet another attempt by Western consumer society to eclectically absorb both its own scattered cultural hinterlands (e.g. fringe communities like the Gaels of Eire and Alba) and those of the Third World into the great central cultural-economic maelstrom which is global capitalism? Thought and culture should not be seen as floating, Laputa-like, high above the social and economic realities that nurture and shape them. The cultural and social critic has to take these and other questions seriously before unreservedly championing the postmodern condition.