Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a late-20th-century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was a departure from modernism. Postmodernism articulates that the world is in a state of perpetual incompleteness and permanent unresolve. Postmodernism promotes the notion of radical pluralism; that there are many ways of knowing, and many truths to a fact. From a postmodern perspective knowledge is articulated from perspectives, with all its uncertainties, complexity and paradox. Thus knowledge is relational and all realities are woven on local linguistic looms. Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. It is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thought.

The term postmodernism has been applied to a host of movements, mainly in art, music, and literature, that reacted against tendencies in modernism, and are typically marked by revival of historical elements and techniques.

Postmodernism (disambiguation)

Postmodernism is a philosophical concept.

Postmodernism may also refer to:

See also

Postmodernism in political science

Postmodernism in political science refers to the use of postmodern ideas in political science. Postmodernists believe that many situations which are considered political in nature can not be adequately discussed in traditional realist and liberal approaches to political science. Postmodernists cite examples such as the situation of a Benedictine University “draft-age youth whose identity is claimed in national narratives of ‘national security’ and the universalizing narratives of the ‘rights of man,’” of “the woman whose very womb is claimed by the irresolvable contesting narratives of ‘church,’ ‘paternity,’ ‘economy,’ and ‘liberal polity.’ In these cases, postmodernists argue that there are no fixed categories, stable sets of values, or common sense meanings to be understood in their scholarly exploration.

In these margins, postmodernists believe that people resist realist concepts of power which is repressive, in order to maintain a claim on their own identity. What makes this resistance significant is that among the aspects of power resisted is that which forces individuals to take a single identity or to be subject to a particular interpretation. Meaning and interpretation in these types of situations is always uncertain; arbitrary in fact. The power in effect here is not that of oppression, but that of the cultural and social implications around them, which creates the framework within which they see themselves, which creates the boundaries of their possible courses of action.