Postmodernism

Postmodernism rests on a critique of modernist representation, specifically the idea that concepts mirror reality, arguing that representations provide at best partial perspectives on their objects (perspectivism) and that cognition proceeds through representation that is mediated by language and historicity (relativism). Grand and totalizing theory is rejected in favor of local narratives and micropolitics. The privilege of unity and universality in theory and research is rejected in favor of difference and particularity. At the social level, ideas of convergence, coherence, and evolution and notions of causality are replaced by concepts of multiplicity, plurality, fragmentation, and indeterminacy. At the individual level, the modern concept of the cohesive, bounded, and unified subject operating rationally is rejected in favor of a decentered, fragmented, liminally open, socially enformed, linguistically constructed, contested, and multiple subject. At the organizational level, process is reasserted over structure, heterarchy and networking over hierarchy, play and novelty over discipline and predictability, speed and responsiveness over system integrity, the ability to learn over the content of learning, and radical change over incremental progress. Foundational knowledge and its pursuit, all forms of structuralism, superstructuralism, essentialism, and obsessive rationalism, a level outside or deeper than representation that would guarantee with certainty apodictic truth and resolve consensus, are replaced by narrative knowledge, in which knowledge is uncertainly formed and tentatively guaranteed between representations on the same surface level in a play of dissensus that includes desire, the nonrational, and the irrational.

That said, postmodernism is not antimodern so much as para-modern. It takes shape alongside the modern as an alternate, a simulation, even a perversion, a faulty version, an improper version (that celebrates its impropriety). Discussion of phenomena as “modern” can be traced to the 3rd century CE, and because the term derives from the Latin modo (“just now”) it implies that we are always becoming postmodern. Turned toward theory, postmodernism is paratheory—it questions the status and limitations of theory (including critique); it questions the rules by which theory is constructed and operates and the consequences of transgressing those rules; it blurs the relation between theory and practice; it considers theory, including itself, as a form of representation, and critique as a critical genre; it proceeds not through logic but paralogy and not through homology (the emphasis on similarities in pursuit of unity) but heterology (an emphasis on difference and fragmentation). It lays emphasis on discontinuity, fluidity, and becoming rather than continuity, stability, and being. It concentrates attention of technologies of representation, verbal, visual, informational, mechanical, and electronic. In doing this in art, architecture, literature, and some philosophical outputs it tends to adopt styles that embody these approaches—pastiche, improvisation, irony, and postirony collage and hybridity among them. As theory, philosophy, art, literature, or in whatever other form it appears, it constitutes a blurred genre.

However, any attempt at defining postmodernism must be undertaken with irony, or even postirony. So, bracketing the previous paragraphs, we must proceed with more than a little caution and a healthy sense of hubris to guide us.