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Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, Culture, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of depicting the world. Still, there is disagreement among experts about its more precise meaning even within narrow contexts.
The term began to acquire its current range of meanings in literary criticism and architectural theory during the 1950s–1960s. In opposition to modernism's alleged self-seriousness, postmodernism is characterized by its playful use of Eclecticism styles and performative irony, among other features. Critics claim it supplants Morality, Politics, and Aesthetics ideals with mere style and spectacle.
In the 1990s, "postmodernism" came to denote a general – and, in general, celebratory – response to cultural pluralism. Proponents align themselves with feminism, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism. Building upon poststructural theory, postmodern thought defined itself by the rejection of any single, foundational historical narrative. This called into question the legitimacy of the Enlightenment account of progress and rationality. Critics allege that its premises lead to a nihilistic form of relativism. In this sense, it has become a term of abuse in popular culture.
Although postmodernists are generally united in their effort to transcend the perceived limits of modernism, "modernism" also means different things to different critics in various arts. Further, there are outliers on even this basic stance; for instance, literary critic William Spanos conceives postmodernism not in period terms but in terms of a certain kind of literary imagination so that pre-modern texts such as Euripides' Orestes or Cervantes' Don Quixote count as postmodern.
According to scholar Louis Menand, "Postmodernism is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. It's definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done." From an opposing perspective, media theorist Dick Hebdige criticized the vagueness of the term, enumerating a long list of otherwise unrelated concepts that people have designated as postmodernism, from "the décor of a room" or "a 'scratch' video", to fear of nuclear armageddon and the "implosion of meaning", and stated that anything that could signify all of those things was "a buzzword".
All this notwithstanding, scholar Hans Bertens offers the following:
If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic sic, epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.
In practical terms, postmodernisms share an attitude of skepticism towards grand explanations and established ways of doing things. In art, literature, and architecture, this attitude blurs boundaries between styles and genres, and encourages freely mixing elements, challenging traditional distinctions like High culture versus Popular culture. In science, it emphasizes multiple ways of seeing things, and how our cultural and personal backgrounds shape how we see the world, making it impossible to be completely objective. In philosophy, education, history, politics, and many other fields, it encourages critical re-examination of established institutions and social norms, embracing diversity, and breaking down disciplinary boundaries. Though these ideas weren't strictly new, postmodernism amplified them, using an often playful, at times deeply critical, attitude of pervasive skepticism to turn them into defining features.
The term "postmodernism" first appeared in print in 1870, but it only began to enter circulation with its current range of meanings in the 1950s—60s.
Episcopal priest and cultural commentator J. M. Thompson, in a 1914 article, uses the term to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion, writing, "the raison d'être of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition". In 1926, Bernard Iddings Bell, president of Bard College and also an Episcopal priest, published Postmodernism and Other Essays, which marks the first use of the term to describe an historical period following modernity. The essay criticizes lingering socio-cultural norms, attitudes, and practices of the Enlightenment. It is also critical of a purported cultural shift away from traditional Christian beliefs.
The term "postmodernity" was first used in an academic historical context as a general concept for a movement by Arnold J. Toynbee in a 1939 essay, which states that "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914–1918".
In 1942, the literary critic and author H. R. Hays describes postmodernism as a new literary form. Also in the arts, the term was first used in 1949 to describe a dissatisfaction with the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style.
Although these early uses anticipate some of the concerns of the debate in the second part of the 20th century, there is little direct continuity in the discussion. Just when the new discussion begins, however, is also a matter of dispute. Various authors place its beginnings in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Discussion about the postmodern in the second part of the 20th century was most articulate in areas with a large body of critical discourse around the modernism. Even here, however, there continued to be disagreement about such basic issues as whether postmodernism is a break with modernism, a renewal and intensification of modernism, or even, both at once, a rejection and a radicalization of its historical predecessor.
While discussions in the 1970s were dominated by literary criticism, these were supplanted by architectural theory in the 1980s. Some of these conversations made use of French poststructuralist thought, but only after these innovations and critical discourse in the arts did postmodernism emerge as a philosophical term in its own right.
During the 1960s, this affirmative use gave way to a pejorative use by the New Left, who used it to describe a waning commitment among youth to the political ideals socialism and communism. The literary critic Irving Howe, for instance, denounced postmodern literature for being content to merely reflect, rather than actively attempt to refashion, what he saw as the "increasingly shapeless" character of contemporary society.
In the 1970s, this changed again, largely under the influence of the literary critic Ihab Hassan's large-scale survey of works that he said could no longer be called modern. Taking the Black Mountain poets an exemplary instance of the new postmodern type, Hassan celebrates its Nietzschean playfulness and cheerfully anarchic spirit, which he sets off against the high seriousness of modernism.
(Yet, from another perspective, Friedrich Nietzsche's attack on Western philosophy and Martin Heidegger's critique of metaphysics posed deep theoretical problems not necessarily a cause for aesthetic celebration. Their further influence on the conversation about postmodernism, however, would be largely mediated by French poststructuralism.)
If literature were at the center of the discussion in the 1970s, architecture was at the center in the 1980s. The architectural theorist Charles Jencks, in particular, connected the artistic avant-garde to social change in a way that captured attention outside of academia. Jencks, much influenced by the American architect Robert Venturi, celebrated a plurality of forms and encourages participation and active engagement with the local context of the built environment. He presented this as in opposition to the "authoritarian style" of International Modernism.
In the 1980s, some critics began to take an interest in the work of Michel Foucault. This introduced a political concern about social power-relations into discussions about postmodernism. This was also the beginning of the affiliation of postmodernism with feminism and multiculturalism. The art critic Craig Owens, in particular, not only made the connection to feminism explicit, but went so far as to claim feminism for postmodernism wholesale, a broad claim resisted by even many sympathetic feminists such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson.
By the 1990s, postmodernism had become increasingly identified with critical and philosophical discourse directly about postmodernity or the postmodern idiom itself. No longer centered on any particular art or even the arts in general, it instead turned to address the more general problems posed to society in general by a new proliferation of cultures and forms. It is during this period that it also came to be associated with postcolonialism and identity politics.
Around this time, postmodernism also began to be conceived in popular culture as a general "philosophical disposition" associated with a loose sort of relativism. In this sense, the term also started to appear as a "casual term of abuse" in non-academic contexts. Others identified it as an aesthetic "lifestyle" of eclecticism and playful self-irony.
In Kuhn's 1962 framework, the assumptions introduced by new paradigms make them "mutually incommensurable" with previous ones, although they may provide improved explanations of the material world. A more radical version of incommensurablity, introduced by the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, made stronger claims that connected the largely Anglo-American debate about science to the development of poststructuralism in France.
To some, the stakes were more than epistemological. The philosopher Israel Scheffler, for instance, argued that the ever-expanding body of scientific knowledge embodies a sort of "moral principle" protecting society from its authoritarian and tribal tendencies. In this way, with the addition of the poststructuralist influence, the debate about science expanded into a debate about Western culture in general.
The French political philosophers and Luc Ferry began a series of responses to this interpretation of postmodernism, and these inspired the physicist Alan Sokal to submit a deliberately nonsensical paper to a postmodernist journal, where it was accepted and published in 1996. Although the so-called Sokal hoax proved nothing about postmodernism or science, it added to the public perception of a high-stakes intellectual "war" that had already been introduced to the general public by popular books published in the late '80s and '90s. By the late '90s, however, the debate had largely subsided, in part due to the recognition that it had been staged between strawman versions of postmodernism and science alike.
Criticism of postmodernist movements in the arts include objections to departure from beauty, the reliance on language for the art to have meaning, a lack of coherence or comprehensibility, deviation from clear structure, and consistent use of dark and negative themes.
Jencks makes the point that postmodernism (like modernism) varies for each field of art, and that for architecture it is not just a reaction to modernism but what he terms double coding: "Double Coding: the combination of Modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects."
In their book, "Revisiting Postmodernism", Terry Farrell and Adam Furman argue that postmodernism brought a more joyous and sensual experience to the culture, particularly in architecture. For instance, in response to the modernist slogan of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe that "less is more", the postmodernist Robert Venturi rejoined that "less is a bore".
The Judson collective included trained dancers, visual artists, filmmakers, writers, and composers, exchanging approaches, and critiquing traditional dance, with a focus "more on the intellectual process of creating dance than the end result". The end of the 1970s saw a distancing from this analytical postmodern dance, and a return to the expression of meaning. (2025). 9780819561602, Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 9780819561602 In the 1980s and 1990s, dance began to incorporate other typically postmodern features such as the mixing of genres, challenging high–low cultural distinctions, and incorporating a political dimension.
Certain key characteristics are used to separate the postmodern from modernist cinema and traditional narrative film. One is an extensive use of homage or pastiche, imitating the style or character of other artistic works. A second is meta-reference or self-reference, highlighting the relation of the image to other images in media and not to any kind of external reality. Viewers are reminded that the film itself is only a film, perhaps through the use of intertextuality, in which the film's characters reference other works of fiction. A third characteristic is stories that unfold out of chronological order, deconstructing or fragmenting time to emphasize the constructed nature of film. Another common element is a bridging of the gap between highbrow and Low culture,. Contradictions of all sorts are crucial to postmodernism.
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) has been widely studied as a prime example of postmodernism. The setting is a future dystopia where "replicants", enhanced android workers nearly indistinguishable from humans, are hunted down when they escape from their jobs. The film blurs boundaries between genres and cultures, and fuses disparate styles and periods: futuristic visuals "mingle with drab 1940s clothes and offices, punk rock hairstyles, pop Egyptian styles and oriental culture." The blending of film noir and science-fiction into tech noir illustrates the deconstruction of both cinema and genre. The film can also be seen as an example of major studios using the "mystique and cachet of the term 'postmodern' as a sales pitch", resulting in Hollywood movies that "demonstrate all the postmodern characteristics". From another perspective, "critical responses to Blade Runner fall on either side of a modern/postmodern line" – critical analysis from "modernist" and "postmodernist" approaches produce entirely different interpretations.
In Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale details the shift from modernism to postmodernism, arguing that postmodernist works developed out of modernism, moving from concern with questions about the nature and limits of knowledge about one's "world" ("Epistemology dominant") to concern with questions of modes of being and existence in relation to "different kinds of worlds" ("Ontology dominant"). McHale's "What Was Postmodernism?" (2007) follows Raymond Federman's lead in now using the past tense when discussing postmodernism. Others argue that postmodernism in literature utilizes compositional and semantic practices such as inclusivity, intentional indiscrimination, nonselection, and "logical impossibility."
Across musical traditions, postmodernism can be identified through several core characteristics: genre mixing; irony, humor, and self-parody; "surface" exploration with less concern for formal structure than in modernist approaches; and a return to tonality. This represents a loss of authority of the Eurocentric perspective on music and the rise of world music as influenced by postmodern values. Composers took different routes: some returned to traditional modes over experimentation, others challenged the authority of dominant musical structures, others intermingled disparate sources.
The composer Jonathan Kramer has written that avant-garde musical compositions (which some would consider modernist rather than postmodernist) "defy more than seduce the listener, and they extend by potentially unsettling means the very idea of what music is." In the 1960s, composers such as Henryk Górecki and Philip Glass reacted to the perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism by producing music with simple textures and relatively consonant harmonies, whilst others, most notably John Cage challenged the modernist account of structure by including the contingent in the structure of his compositions themselves.
In 2023, music critic Andy Cush described Talking Heads as "New York art-punks" whose "blend of nervy postmodernism and undeniable groove made them one of the defining rock bands of the late 1970s and '80s." Media studies Dick Hebdige, examining the "Road to Nowhere" music video in 1989, said the group "draw eclectically on a wide range of visual and aural sources to create a distinctive pastiche or hybrid 'house style' which they have used since their formation in the mid-1970s deliberately to stretch received (industrial) definitions of what rock/pop/video/Art/ performance/audience are", calling them "a properly postmodernist band." According to lead vocalist/guitarist/songwriter David Byrne, commenting in 2011, "Anything could be mixed and matched – or mashed up, as is said today – and anything was fair game for inspiration.”
Avant-garde academics labelled American singer Madonna a "personification of the postmodern" and created a sub-discipline of cultural studies known as Madonna studies. Her self-aware constructs of gender and identity, and classic film references in music videos for "Material Girl" (1984) and "Express Yourself" (1989), made her a favorite of cultural theorists, who saw her as "enacting postmodernist models of subjectivity." Madonna was seen to embody fragmentation, pastiche, retrospection, anti-foundationalism, and de-differentiation; her "subversion of the subversion of the subversion of the male gaze" in the "Material Girl" video was analyzed.
Poststructuralists, like structuralism, start from the assumption that people's identities, values, and economic conditions determine each other as parts of a common whole, rather than having intrinsic properties that can be understood in isolation. While structuralism explores how meaning is produced by a set of essential relationships in an overarching quasi-linguistic system, poststructuralism accepts this premise, but rejects the assumption that such systems can ever be fixed or centered. Instead, poststructuralists stress the various ways that cultural structures are produced in history. They also emphasize how meaning is generated, rather than discovered, and they replace the traditional concept of "representation" (according to which meaning is determined by the objected signified) to focus instead upon the elastic potentialities of language to generate new meanings.
Politically, all of them began with Marxist sympathies, became disillusioned, and eventually opposed the French Communist Party and its application of theory. The chaos following the briefly successful communist revolution of May '68 in France was a particular point of rupture.
From this perspective, Derrida argues that the practice of metaphysics in the Western tradition depends upon hierarchies and orders of subordination within various dualisms that it does not acknowledge. It prioritizes presence and purity over the contingent and complicated, dismissing them as aberrations irrelevant to philosophical analysis. In essence, according to Derrida, metaphysical thought prioritizes one side of an opposition while ignoring or marginalizing the alternative. He uses the term metaphysics of presence to describe the foundationalist approach to knowledge, taking himself to have demonstrated that we do not have unmediated access to reality. This project of deconstructing and challenging the assumptions of modern philosophy was influential for many postmodern thinkers.
Both Foucault's political orientation and the consistency of his positions continue to be debated among critics and defenders alike. Nevertheless, Foucault's political works share two common elements: a historical perspective and a discursive methodology. He analyzed social phenomena in historical contexts and focused on how they have evolved over time. Additionally, he employed the study of written texts, usually academic texts, as the material for his inquiries. In this way, Foucault sought to understand how the historical formation of discourses has shaped contemporary political thinking and institutions.
Postmodernity, Baudrillard said, is the condition in which the domain of reality has become so heavily mediated by signs as to become inaccessible in itself, leaving us entirely in the domain of the simulacra, images that bear no relation to anything outside of themselves. This hyperreality is presented as the terminal stage of simulation, where signs and images become entirely self-referential.
Baudrillard's vision of postmodernity has been described as "apocalyptic", and scholars disagree about whether his later works are intended as science fiction or truthful theoretical claims. Another interpretation is that Baudrillard deliberately adopts the role of agent provocateur.
By "metanarratives", Lyotard meant such overarching narrative frameworks as those provided by Christianity, G. W. F. Hegel, and Karl Marx that unite and determine our basic sense of our place and significance in the world. It was his early disillusionment with his early Marxism that would later be generalized into the universal claim about metanarratives. In a society with no unifying narrative, he argued, we are left with heterogeneous, group-specific narratives (or "language games", as adopted from Ludwig Wittgenstein) with no universal perspective from which to adjudicate among them.
According to Lyotard, this introduced a general crisis of legitimacy, a theme he adopts from the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose theory of communicative rationality Lyotard rejected. While he was particularly concerned in that report with the way that this insight undermined claims of scientific objectivity, Lyotard's argument undermines the entire principle of transcendent legitimization. Instead, proponents of a language game must make the case for their legitimacy with reference to such considerations as efficiency or practicality. Far from celebrating the apparently relativistic consequences of this argument, however, Lyotard focused much of his subsequent work on how links among games could be established, particularly with respect to ethics and politics.
Habermas criticized these thinkers for their rejection of the subject and their embrace of experimental, avant-garde strategies. He asserted that their critiques of modernism ultimately lead to a longing for the very subject they seek to dismantle. Habermas also took issue with postmodernists' leveling of the distinction between philosophy and literature. He argued that such rhetorical strategies undermine the importance of argument and communicative reason.
Habermas's critique of postmodernism set the stage for much of the subsequent debate by clarifying some of its key underlying issues. According to scholar Gary Aylesworth – against those who would dismiss postmodernist discourse as simple nonsense – the fact that Habermas was "able to read postmodernist texts closely and discursively testifies to their intelligibility". His engagement with their ideas has led some postmodern philosophers, following Lyotard, to similarly engage with Habermas's criticisms.
Jameson categorizes a variety of features of the postmodern. One is the elision of the distinction between high culture and mass culture. Also, because of our loss of a unified "bourgeois ego", subjectivity is less focused, and we experience what he terms a "waning of the affect", an emotional disengagement from the social world. This loss of significance leads to what he calls "depthlessness", a difficulty in getting beneath the surfaces of cultural objects to find any deeper significance than is offered directly to the subject. Reduced to a set of styles, history looses its political force. This phenomenon finds expression, for instance, in the shift from "parody", in which styles are mixed in the interest of making a point, to "pastiche", in which styles are mixed together without attention to their original contexts.
Rorty challenged the notion of a mind-independent, language-independent reality. He argued that language is a tool used to adapt to the environment and achieve desired ends. This naturalistic approach led him to abandon the traditional quest for a privileged mental power that allows direct access to things-in-themselves.
Instead, Rorty advocated for a focus on imaginative alternatives to present beliefs rather than the pursuit of independently grounded truths. He believed that creative, secular humanism, free from authoritarian assertions about truth and goodness, is the key to a better future. Rorty saw his neopragmatism as a continuation of the Enlightenment project, aiming to demystify human life and replace traditional power relations with those based on tolerance and freedom.
Anthropologists working in a postmodern vein seek to dissect, interpret, and write cultural critiques, analyzing of cultural texts and practices, rather than relying on empirical observation. The issue of subjectivity is a concern: as Ethnography are influenced by the perspective of the author, the question arises in the study of individual cultures as to whether the author's opinions should be considered scientific. Clifford Geertz, considered a founding member of postmodernist anthropology,Erickson, P. (2017). A History of Anthropological Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (pp.130) holds that, "anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third order ones to boot. (By definition, only a 'native' makes first order ones: it's his culture.)"Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretations of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, Inc. (pp.15) In the 21st century, some anthropologists use a form of standpoint theory, which prioritizes the perspectives of the subject over the perspective of the observer in cultural interpretation.
Postmodern feminism seeks to analyze notions that have led to gender inequality, and attempts to promote equality through critiquing logocentrism, supporting multiple discourses, deconstructing texts, and seeking to promote subjectivity. This approach is not readily accepted by all feminists—some believe postmodern thought undermines the attacks that feminist theory attempts to create, while other feminists are in favor of the union.
In 2001, Kenneth Gergen, a pioneer in postmodern psychological theory, identified "emphasis on the individual mind, an objectively knowable world, and language as carrier of truth" as the cornerstones of traditional modernist psychology. He noted criticism of these assumptions coming from "every quarter of the humanities and the sciences", and the emergence of a psychology in which "colonialist universalism is replaced by a global conversation among equals". He also considered the "strong critical reservation", including the realist argument that a socially constructed world cannot negate a clearly observable objective reality; the claim of incoherence, wherein postmodernism denies truth and objectivity while simultaneously making truth claims; and its moral relativism, which fails to take a principled ethical stand. Ultimately, he concluded that psychology's future is "hanging in the balance".
In 2021, psychologist Jan Smedslund discussed how psychology tried for decades to emulate the Natural science and address unpredictable individual behavior. He described how the dominant methodology came to rely exclusively on statistical analysis of group-level data and average findings, whereby it "lost contact with the psychological processes going on in individual persons." He advocated for abandoning the natural science approach that had "led into a clearly discernible blind alley."
In 2024, American psychology professor Edwin Gantt wrote that psychology remains in a state of continual struggle "to decide whether its true intellectual home is to be found among the humanities, especially philosophy and literature, or among the STEM disciplines." He finds psychology "a key site where the intellectual tug-of-war between modernism and postmodernism plays itself out in academia."
Postmodern urban planning involves theories that embrace and aim to create diversity, elevating uncertainty, flexibility, and change, and rejecting utopianism while embracing a utopian way of thinking and acting. The postmodernity of "resistance" seeks to deconstruct modernism, a critique of the origins without necessarily returning to them. ; ; ;
Theologian Kevin J. Vanhoozer combines and expands on other scholarly classifications to present seven types of postmodern theology: postliberal, postmetaphysical, deconstructive, reconstructive, feminist, Anglo-American postmodernity, and radical orthodoxy. He notes that the typology should be considered "provisional and fallible yet not entirely arbitrary", having met two main criteria: each is an approach taken by more than one theologian, and each "believes itself to be responding to, rejecting, or passing through modernity, not inhabiting it."
The postmodern fashion sensibility appeared also through the subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s. , Punk subculture and other countercultural groups constructed their own nonconformist identities through choices in music, drugs, slang, and appearance. As these styles gained mainstream popularity, critics claim they lost their deeper meaning: "the adoption of surface attributes offers the frisson of rebellion without a commitment to a subcultural lifestyle."
A 2020 study investigated the reported transition from postmodernism to post-postmodernism, those "changing social conditions that lead the consumer to consume in a particular manner". Song lyrics were selected from Madonna (postmodern), Taylor Swift (post-postmodern), and Lady Gaga as a transitional example. Five postmodern characteristics consistently found in marketing literature were compared to their post-postmodern counterparts: anti-foundationalism to rewriting; dedifferentiation to redifferentiation; fragmentation to reengagement; reversal of production and consumption to rebalancing of production and consumption; and hyperreality to alternative reality. Postmodernism, it finds, "remains vibrant, re-inventive, and calls for its demise may be somewhat overblown." Swift's success "suggests a significant shift from deconstructive to reconstructive positions regarding the self and its surroundings", noting that her "post-postmodern engagement, enthusiasm and sincerity" appeared to be "somewhat superficial, sociopathic, and couched in fabulation."
The connection between postmodernism, posthumanism, and transhumanism has led to a challenge to postmodernism, for which the terms Post-postmodernism and postpoststructuralism were first coined in 2003. A small group of critics has put forth a range of theories that aim to describe culture or society in the alleged aftermath of postmodernism, most notably Raoul Eshelman (performatism), Gilles Lipovetsky (hypermodernity), Nicolas Bourriaud (altermodern), and Alan Kirby (digimodernism, formerly called pseudo-modernism). None of these new theories or labels have so far gained very widespread acceptance.
Writing in 2022, Steven Connor argues that, despite continuing reports of its death or imminent demise, postmodernism has instead undergone a kind of disappearance into our culture by way of assimilation. He notes there is little that can now be called postmodern style because "the clashing or commingling of styles has become entirely routine at all levels of culture." The energizing antagonism between high and low culture has been "pestled into a tepid porridge." And the general postmodern condition is now "universal, irreversible and metastable, embodied above all in the massive increase in digitally mediated information technologies." According to Connor, postmodernism in the 2020s is a sensibility that has been integrated into everyday life, having been subject to a considerable degree of shifting, perhaps temporarily, from irony, pluralism and ambivalence to urgency, indignation, and reductive absolutism.
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