Some are wary of concepts preceded by prefixes like “post” and “neo,” as their negative definition could imply difficulties in positively defining them. This is particularly true of “postmodernism,” which is not only impossible to strictly define, but also rejects the principle of definition altogether.
This movement developed in the second half of the twentieth century, through philosophy, arts, architecture, literature etc. And its advocates saw it as an alternative to modernity, as well as an intellectual war on the “grand narratives” of modernity like objectivity, rationality, enlightenment, science, socialism, and progress… For the ideologies and doctrines that led to calamities like Nazism, Stalinism, and Hiroshima, which were seen as outcomes of science, are no longer acceptable.
According to the postmodernists, the birth of their movement was accompanied by the ascendancy of the media, television, and advertising, and then that of music videos, YouTube, and social media, which gave rise to a “hyper-reality” that makes reality indistinguishable from simulation. We come to perceive the world through these cultural elements instead of traditional cultural ones like art, poetry, and architecture…
Jean Baudrillard mentions three stages of cultural evolution:
-Pre-modernity, with its arts, theater and music, was a time of elitist high culture which was shaped by religion in its perspective and message.
-Modernity emerged with the Industrial Revolution, its elements were photography, cinema, and printed material, which developed alongside consumerism, communism, and science. It was distinguished by the speed at which they could be produced and its capacity for replicating reality.
-Postmodernity, which was born in the middle of the twentieth century, has left us surrounded, or rather “bombarded,” with culture that has become our daily lives. Videos and advertisements are as pervasive and influential as trees and cars had once been, and television programs and their equivalents have become our foremost sources of knowledge. Since our reality is built on cultural representations, our new commodities refer to those representations, as we create copies of copies instead of depending on an original reference that represents reality like we used to.
Thus, they are simulacrums (false simulations), whereby representations of representations replace the representation of reality. For example, the image of a princess is no longer inspired by images of medieval princesses but by Disney, keeping in mind that the latter is nothing but a copy of a copy...
With this immense presence of media and its siblings, and as a result of its conflicting messages, “meaning imploded.” We can no longer distinguish right from wrong, and there is no longer a grand narrative that defines meaning for us. Life itself is no longer tied to a purpose or goal. We simply exist, and there is nothing we say or do that is more real or correct than the things someone else says or does. Since our experiences, be they righteous or wicked, are equally valuable, the differences between high culture and low culture disappears, as all art has become interpretations and no individual’s interpretation is preferable to another’s.
While modernists believed that, given the close and objective relationship between signifiers and perception, language was transparent, language is, in fact, self-referential. The ideas we project onto words are shaped by particular cultures. And all these cultures have done is interpret the meanings of words in different ways over time. As language continues to be the primary means of representing reality, considering objective reality genuinely objective becomes untenable. It is only the desire of power and rulers that presents it as such.
In turn, Jean-Francois Lyotard 's small book “The Postmodern Condition” is epistemological polemic against narratives or “metanarratives,” which he “interrogated.” A proponent of the “desire for justice,” he does not define it, as everyone understands justice in his own way. He also believes in the “desire for the unknown,” which ties him back to the romantic tradition of rejecting almost everything.
Lyotard builds on Wittgenstein’s theory of the “language game,” in which the domain of the use of language does not have a single key. Thus, we do not have a universal and final standard by which to judge human communication, but rather an intertwined set of games that interact pragmatically but are not identical, thereby giving rise to “small narratives” to confront “grand narratives.”
Among the most prominent of Lyotard’s many victims was Jurgen Habermas, who was one of few intellectuals with a powerful sense of public responsibility. While Habermas developed the idea that moral judgments could be legitimized through a rational consensus around ethics reached through deliberation, Lyotard criticized consensus as unjust. He argued that the more we disagree, the freer we are, whereas consensus leads us to “metanarratives,” behind which lies totalitarianism. Thus, per Lyotard, what we must do is increase the number of “discourses,” “narratives,” and “linguistic games,” and put an end to the modernist “terrorism” aimed at silencing them and preventing their proliferation. This is the only way to create space for the freedom that legitimizes narratives of difference and divergent ways of seeing the world. Instead of relying on a universal knowledge paradigm that facilitates communication, there should be an unbridled excess of knowledge models that disrupts communication, including that of intellectuals themselves.
The American architect Charles Jencks took on the theorization of postmodern architecture. He argued that modernist architecture died in Missouri in 1972, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects designed by Yamasaki were demolished with dynamite. This architecture, which first emerged after World War I and peaked in the mid-century, was based on the use of glass, steel, and concrete, but also a philosophy of aesthetics and ethics that emphasized that form follows function and rejected ornamentation and decoration in favor of minimalism. And from architecture, functionalism seeped into other domains like fashion and the visual arts...
Postmodern buildings may indeed be appealing and lively because of their ornamentation, use of strong colors, optical illusions, and a sense of playfulness and irony, but postmodernists’ critique of modernist architecture makes them seem like wealthy featherheads who have no regard for public concerns. They did not share the concerns of modernists with reducing consumption and the economic and rational use of Earth’s limited resources, and derided their emphasis on clean environments and building housing for the poor, as they considered all of those concerns boring and depressing pursuits that dehumanize us.
Postmodernity raises many questions: If the postmodern truth is the absence of all truth, then what makes this truth itself true? And if science is not objective, how can we claim that 1 plus 1 equals 2? And is modernity nothing more than Nazism, Stalinism, and Hiroshima?
The fact is that we are facing another reactionary tendency within modernity, a Romantic consciousness that rejects everything outside of itself and insulates its narcissistic self with a lot of noise.
We could perhaps say that postmodernity is among the phenomena that preceded the populist disasters whose barbarism is erupting today.
