Postmodernism

➢ Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid-to-late 20th century

across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure
from modernism. The term has been more generally applied to describe a historical era said
to follow after modernity and the tendencies of this era.
➢ Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an art movement that arose from broad
transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
➢ The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and
social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features
such as urbanization, new technologies, and war.
➢ Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated
or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone
of the movement's approach.
➢ Modernist innovations included abstract art, the stream-of-consciousness novel, montage
cinema, atonal and twelve-tone music, and divisionist painting.
➢ Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and made use of the works of the
past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision
and parody.
➢ Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists
also rejected religious belief.
➢ A notable characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness concerning artistic and social
traditions, which often led to experimentation with form, along with the use of techniques
that drew attention to the processes and materials used in creating works of art.
➢ While some scholars see modernism continuing into the 21st century, others see it evolving
into late modernism or high modernism. Postmodernism is a departure from modernism
and rejects its basic assumptions.
➢ Some commentators define modernism as a mode of thinking—one or more
philosophically defined characteristics, like self-consciousness or self-reference, that run
across all the novelties in the arts and the disciplines.
➢ More common, especially in the West, are those who see it as a socially progressive trend
of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their
 environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or
technology.
➢ From this perspective, modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of
existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding
back' progress, and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end.
➢ According to Roger Griffin, modernism can be defined as a broad cultural, social, or
political initiative, sustained by the ethos of "the temporality of the new".
➢ Modernism sought to restore, Griffin writes, a "sense of sublime order and purpose to the
contemporary world, thereby counteracting the (perceived) erosion of an overarching
‘nomos’, or ‘sacred canopy’, under the fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity."
➢ Therefore, phenomena apparently unrelated to each other such as
"Expressionism, Futurism, vitalism, Theosophy, psychoanalysis, nudism, eugenics,
utopian town planning and architecture, modern dance, Bolshevism, organic nationalism –
and even the cult of self-sacrifice that sustained the hecatomb of the First World War –
disclose a common cause and psychological matrix in the fight against (perceived)
decadence."
➢ All of them embody bids to access a "supra-personal experience of reality", in which
individuals believed they could transcend their own mortality, and eventually that they had
ceased to be victims of history to become instead its creators.

➢ Postmodern thinkers frequently describe knowledge claims and value

systems as contingent or socially-conditioned, framing them as products of political,
historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies.
➢ These thinkers often view personal and spiritual needs as being best fulfilled by improving
social conditions and adopting more fluid discourses, in contrast to modernism, which
places a higher degree of emphasis on maximizing progress and which generally regards
the promotion of objective truths as an ideal form of discourse.
➢ Some philosophers assert that those who employ postmodernist discourse are prey to a
performative contradiction and a paradox of self-reference, as their critique would be
impossible without the concepts and methods that modern reason provides.
➢ Postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward
what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, often
criticizing Enlightenment rationality and focusing on the role of ideology in maintaining
political or economic power.
➢ Common targets of postmodern criticism include universalist ideas of objective
reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, and social progress.
Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-
consciousness, self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and
irreverence.
➢ Postmodern critical approaches gained popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, and have been
adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines, including cultural
studies, philosophy of science, economics, linguistics, architecture, feminist theory,
and literary criticism, as well as art movements in fields such as literature, contemporary
art, and music.
➢ Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction, post-
structuralism, and institutional critique, as well as philosophers such as Jacques
Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Fredric Jameson.
➢ Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse and include arguments that
postmodernism promotes obscurantism, is meaningless, and that it adds nothing to
analytical or empirical knowledge.
➢ Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse defined by an attitude
of skepticism toward what it describes as the grand
narratives and ideologies of modernism, as well as opposition to epistemic certainty and
the stability of meaning.
➢ It questions or criticizes viewpoints associated with Enlightenment rationality dating back
to the 17th century, and is characterized by irony, eclecticism, and its rejection of the
"universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.
➢ Postmodernism is associated with relativism and a focus on ideology in the maintenance
of economic and political power.
➢ Postmodernists are generally "skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all
groups, cultures, traditions, or races," and describe truth as relative.
➢ It can be described as a reaction against attempts to explain reality in an objective manner
by claiming that reality is a mental construct.
➢ Access to an unmediated reality or to objectively rational knowledge is rejected on the
grounds that all interpretations are contingent on the perspective from which they are
made;as such, claims to objective fact are dismissed as naive realism.
➢ Postmodern thinkers frequently describe knowledge claims and value
systems as contingent or socially-conditioned, describing them as products of political,
historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies.
➢ Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-
referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence.
Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such
as deconstruction and post-structuralism.
➢ Postmodernism relies on critical theory, which considers the effects of ideology, society,
and history on culture.
➢ Postmodernism and critical theory commonly criticize universalist ideas of objective
reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress.
➢ Initially, postmodernism was a mode of discourse on literature and literary criticism,
commenting on the nature of literary text, meaning, author and reader, writing, and reading.
➢ Postmodernism developed in the mid- to late-twentieth century across philosophy, the arts,
architecture, and criticism as a departure or rejection of modernism.
➢ Postmodernist approaches have been adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical
disciplines, including political science, organization theory, cultural studies, philosophy of
science, economics, linguistics, architecture, feminist theory, and literary criticism, as well
as art movements in fields such as literature and music.
➢ As a critical practice, postmodernism employs concepts such
as hyperreality, simulacrum, trace, and difference, and rejects abstract principles in favor
of direct experience.
➢ Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, and include arguments that
postmodernism promotes obscurantism, is meaningless, and adds nothing to analytical or
empirical knowledge.
 ➢ Some philosophers, beginning with the pragmatist philosopher Jürgen Habermas, say that
postmodernism contradicts itself through self-reference, as their critique would be
impossible without the concepts and methods that modern reason provides.
➢ Various authors have criticized postmodernism, or trends under the general postmodern
umbrella, as abandoning Enlightenment rationalism or scientific rigor.

Postmodern Critique
➢ As any theory, the theory of Postmodernism has pros and cons just like any other cultural
phenomena and theories, and the rest of the curriculum of literary criticism.
➢ The pros Postmodernism, it’s liberation movement aimed at freeing man from the world of
illusions and myths, and freeing it from the domination of mythology.
➢ Philosophies of Postmodernism are also working to undermine the central arguments of
Western thought, and revisit the constants, and so by undermining, questioning, dispersion,
audit and demolition.
➢ And the goal is to build new values. On the other hand, it fights the culture of elite status,
cases: Margin and popular culture, and then criticised Orientalist discourses which had had
a colonial character by disassembly, criticism and analysis.
➢ As Postmodernism believed in pluralism, diversity, multiple identities theory, and re-
consideration of the context of the referral, the author and the recipient.
➢ And well cared intertextuality, differences chromatography, Gender and ethnicity. And it
succumbed to the language of fragmentation, disintegration and disorder.
➢ Also, it denounced to the concepts of repressive and authority of the power.
➢ However, the most significant cons of the Postmodern is reliance on the idea of disruption
and destruction and chaos, it does not offer a realistic alternative to human cultural and
practical, it’s hard to apply the perceptions of Postmodernism because of its whimsicality
and extremism.
➢ So, the Postmodernism consumed its strategy to effect highlighting the unjust prejudices
without having a moral or political or social position.
➢ It is noted that postmodern theory undermines itself; because of the character of the
anarchist, nihilist and absurd.
➢ Postmodernism has attracted positive and negative criticism both. It could be seen as a
positive force editor are destabilising preconceived ideas about language and its
 relationship to the world, and undermine all the self-languages that refer to history and
society.
➢ Also considers that the era of Postmodernism leads own assumptions and overrides all the
correlated interpretations.
➢ For many are ineffective and is not committed politically. (Carter, 2012)
➢ Thus, we end that the philosophy of Postmodernism has positive and negative values, but
what interested to the human being in the practical reality are the establishment and rooting,
not dismantling and disruption, while striving to build meaningful, rather than indulging in
virtual worlds absurd, nihilistic and anarchic.
➢ Postmodernism philosophy does not work on an a rmation of any absolute right or
objective, especially in matters of religion and spiritualities. When the confrontation with
right regard to the truth of Allah and religious practice.
➢ The point of view of the philosophy of Postmodernism is the following statement: "This
may be true for you, but not for me."
➢ While such a response might be appropriate when discussing the types favourite food or
favourite forms of art, but that such a serious thinking when applied to the truth because it
confuses matters of opinion and matters right.
➢ I may be considered the risks of Postmodernism philosophy as decline begins to reject the
absolute right and then leads to the loss of the distinction between matters of religion and
belief and up to the philosophy of the diversity of religions, which says that there is no true
religion or belief.
➢ Thus, there is no one may claim that his religion is right rather than other religions. The
second interceptor is that Postmodernism are considered God is no longer the source of
truth, but in humans, as Ren Descartes says so: "I think therefore I am."(Descartes, 1994).

Differences between modernism and postmodernism

➢ By the early 1980s the Postmodern movement in art and architecture began to establish its
position through various conceptual and intermedia formats.
➢ Postmodernism in music and literature began to take hold earlier. In music, postmodernism
is described in one reference work as a "term introduced in the 1970s”, while in British
 literature, The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees modernism "ceding its
predominance to postmodernism" as early as 1939.
➢ However, dates are highly debatable, especially as according to Andreas Huyssen: "one
critic's postmodernism is another critic's modernism."
➢ This includes those who are critical of the division between the two and see them as two
aspects of the same movement, and believe that late Modernism continues.
➢ Modernism is an encompassing label for a wide variety of cultural
movements. Postmodernism is essentially a centralized movement that named itself, based
on sociopolitical theory, although the term is now used in a wider sense to refer to activities
from the 20th century onwards which exhibit awareness of and reinterpret the modern.
➢ Postmodern theory asserts that the attempt to canonise Modernism "after the fact" is
doomed to undisambiguable contradictions.
➢ In a narrower sense, what was Modernist was not necessarily also postmodern. Those
elements of Modernism which accentuated the benefits of rationality and socio-
technological progress were only Modernist.
➢ Modernism's stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism,
and primitivism disregards conventional expectations.
➢ In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and
unpredictable effects, as in the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs
in Surrealism or the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in Modernist music.
➢ In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in
novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.