Postmodernism is a vast and nebulous term that is essentially meaningless unless you narrow down your focus significantly. One hand it's just anything that happened after modernism which ended sometime after WWII. Or not.
On the other hand, Postmodernism is also the various developments within culture during this arbitrary time frame which maybe hasn't even yet ended, depending on who you talk to. And in this sense, you can take a look at the developments within a given field, like say, architecture and see if there are certain trends that make it characteristically postmodern.
What people usually talk about when they talk about postmoder ism as opposed to postmodern whatever is philosophical/theoretical postmodernism. Any attempt to define what this actually is a vast oversimplification of a very complex body of work written over many decades, to the point where it may not even be very helpful to try, but here goes nothing.
-Modernism generally speaking was interested in epistemology, a.k.a. how do we know what we know. Postmodernism is more concerned with ontology a.k.a. what is the nature of being. Less, "What can we know about a thing," more "What does it even mean to talk about a 'thing.'"
-The collapse of the distinction between high and low art. Think Andy Warhol with his kitschy silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell soup cans hanging in the MOMA.
-An abiding interest in how power informs all discourse. A classic example is Foucault's History of Sexuality. The title is deliberately provocative, after all, how can you have a history of sexuality. Isn't that like having a history of eyeballs? Well, not so much. According to Foucault, the very idea of a sexuality had to be invented and brought into being through discourse before it became what we now think of as an essential quality of our very beings, and this discourse was shaped by those who had the power to speak and be taken seriously (think a lot of stern Victorian doctors).
-Bringing to the surface voices that have been historically suppressed, the queer, the female, the colonized. Works that were overlooked in their time get raised up. Other works get reexamined from fresh (non straight white male) perspectives. Lots of fights about what goes in the canon. Hemmingway takes a real beating (somewhat unfairly. Hemmingway is actually pretty queer IMO).
-The rejection of objective captial-T Truth in favor of contingent truths (this is true if we assume this and this). For a lot of postmodernism, there is no foundation upon which objective truth in the classical sense can rest. God is dead. Descartes' "I think therefore I am" only proves that thinking is happening, while the what exactly the "I" is most unclear. There is no bottom, only the shifting sands of power and discourse. The best your going to get for objectivity is the text, but that has to be interpreted.
This again, is an enormous oversimplification. But those are some very broad strokes.
EDIT: Just looked a the comment you linked. Fuck you were talking about literary postmodernism. That's a whole other post, and it's 1 AM, sorry.
Postmodernism is a vast and nebulous term that is essentially meaningless unless you narrow down your focus significantly. One hand it's just anything that happened after modernism which ended sometime after WWII. Or not.
On the other hand, Postmodernism is also the various developments within culture during this arbitrary time frame which maybe hasn't even yet ended, depending on who you talk to. And in this sense, you can take a look at the developments within a given field, like say, architecture and see if there are certain trends that make it characteristically postmodern.
What people usually talk about when they talk about postmoder ism as opposed to postmodern whatever is philosophical/theoretical postmodernism. Any attempt to define what this actually is a vast oversimplification of a very complex body of work written over many decades, to the point where it may not even be very helpful to try, but here goes nothing.
-Modernism generally speaking was interested in epistemology, a.k.a. how do we know what we know. Postmodernism is more concerned with ontology a.k.a. what is the nature of being. Less, "What can we know about a thing," more "What does it even mean to talk about a 'thing.'"
-The collapse of the distinction between high and low art. Think Andy Warhol with his kitschy silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell soup cans hanging in the MOMA.
-An abiding interest in how power informs all discourse. A classic example is Foucault's History of Sexuality. The title is deliberately provocative, after all, how can you have a history of sexuality. Isn't that like having a history of eyeballs? Well, not so much. According to Foucault, the very idea of a sexuality had to be invented and brought into being through discourse before it became what we now think of as an essential quality of our very beings, and this discourse was shaped by those who had the power to speak and be taken seriously (think a lot of stern Victorian doctors).
-Bringing to the surface voices that have been historically suppressed, the queer, the female, the colonized. Works that were overlooked in their time get raised up. Other works get reexamined from fresh (non straight white male) perspectives. Lots of fights about what goes in the canon. Hemmingway takes a real beating (somewhat unfairly. Hemmingway is actually pretty queer IMO).
-The rejection of objective captial-T Truth in favor of contingent truths (this is true if we assume this and this). For a lot of postmodernism, there is no foundation upon which objective truth in the classical sense can rest. God is dead. Descartes' "I think therefore I am" only proves that thinking is happening, while the what exactly the "I" is most unclear. There is no bottom, only the shifting sands of power and discourse. The best your going to get for objectivity is the text, but that has to be interpreted.
This again, is an enormous oversimplification. But those are some very broad strokes.
EDIT: Just looked a the comment you linked. Fuck you were talking about literary postmodernism. That's a whole other post, and it's 1 AM, sorry.
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