Postmodernism: the story on HearLore

Postmodernism

On the 15th of July 1972, at 3:32 p.m., the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri, marked the symbolic death of modern architecture. Architectural critic Charles Jencks declared this moment the end of an era, where the rigid, authoritarian style of the International Style had failed the people it was meant to serve. This event ignited a firestorm of debate that would eventually birth the term postmodernism into the architectural lexicon. Jencks, who had been lecturing on the subject since the early 1970s, used this demolition to argue that architecture needed to speak to the public, not just to a select group of architects. He proposed a concept called double coding, which combined modern techniques with traditional building elements to create a dialogue between the elite and the everyday. This was a direct rejection of the modernist slogan less is more, which was replaced by the postmodernist rejoinder less is a bore. The movement sought to bring joy and sensuality back into the built environment, challenging the sterile uniformity that had come to define the mid-20th century city. The first built example of this new style appeared in 1982 with the Portland Building by Michael Graves, a structure that embraced historical references and playful ornamentation to stand in stark contrast to the glass boxes of its predecessors. The SIS Building, designed by Terry Farrell in 1994, later became a postmodern fortress for the British intelligence service, blending Mayan and Aztec temple influences with industrial modernist design to create a hulking, imposing presence that defied the transparency modernists had demanded.

The Crisis of Representation

In 1979, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, a work that would fundamentally alter the landscape of Western thought. Lyotard defined postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives, the grand stories that societies use to explain their existence, such as Christianity, Marxism, or the Enlightenment's promise of progress. He argued that in a postmodern society, no single narrative could claim universal truth, leaving us with a collection of heterogeneous language games that could not be adjudicated by a single standard. This skepticism was not merely an academic exercise but a response to the collapse of faith in the ability to represent reality accurately. The crisis of representation meant that the tools we used to understand the world were themselves unstable, shaped by cultural and personal backgrounds rather than objective facts. This idea was further developed by Jacques Derrida, who introduced deconstruction to show that any text harbors inherent points of undecidability that undermine stable meaning. Derrida demonstrated that the practice of writing inevitably reveals suppressed elements, challenging the hierarchies and dualisms that sustain traditional metaphysics. Michel Foucault added a political dimension to this crisis, arguing that power operates through social institutions that are unmoored from the intentions of any actual individuals. He analyzed how historical formations of discourse shape contemporary political thinking, suggesting that individuals are both products and participants in these dynamics. The work of Jean Baudrillard took this further, proposing that social production had shifted from creating real objects to producing signs and symbols, creating a state of hyperreality where the domain of reality becomes inaccessible. This vision of postmodernity was described as apocalyptic, where signs and images become entirely self-referential, simulating themselves without any relation to an external reality.

Common questions

When did the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex occur and why is it significant to postmodernism?

The demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex occurred on the 15th of July 1972 at 3:32 p.m. in St. Louis, Missouri. Architectural critic Charles Jencks declared this event the symbolic death of modern architecture and the birth of postmodernism in the architectural lexicon.

What is the definition of postmodernism according to Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition?

Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives in his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. He argued that no single narrative can claim universal truth in a postmodern society, leaving us with a collection of heterogeneous language games.

Which artists and works exemplify postmodernism in the visual arts and music during the 1960s and 1970s?

Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans series from the 1960s brought postmodern sensibility to mainstream attention by challenging distinctions between fine art and commercial design. Artists like Madonna, David Bowie, and Talking Heads became icons of postmodernism in music by using irony, humor, and self-parody to challenge dominant musical structures.

How did the Science Wars influence the perception of postmodernism in the late 20th century?

The Science Wars began with the 1962 publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn and escalated when physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical paper to a postmodernist journal in 1996. This hoax highlighted tensions between the scientific community and postmodern theorists regarding whether scientific knowledge is socially constructed.

What role does postmodernism play in feminism and psychology according to the text?

Postmodern feminism mixes postmodern theory and French feminism to reject a universal female subject and destabilize patriarchal norms entrenched in society. Postmodern psychologists argue that the American conception of an isolated, unified self does not exist and that humans are composed of many different selves constructed for different situations.

Did postmodernism die out by the late 1990s or is it still relevant today?

A 2020 study found that postmodernism remains vibrant and re-inventive despite claims that it had gone out of fashion by the late 1990s. Steven Connor wrote in 2022 that postmodernism has undergone a disappearance into culture by way of assimilation, making the general postmodern condition universal and irreversible.

The Art of Pastiche and Irony

The visual arts of the 1960s and 1970s became the testing ground for postmodern ideas, blurring the lines between high culture and popular media. Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans series, created in the 1960s, brought the postmodernist sensibility to mainstream attention by challenging traditional distinctions between fine art and commercial design. Warhol's work exemplified the postmodern tendency to mix styles and genres, creating a new aesthetic that embraced the everyday and the commercial. In the realm of music, artists like Madonna, David Bowie, and Talking Heads became icons of postmodernism, using irony, humor, and self-parody to challenge the authority of dominant musical structures. Madonna, in particular, was seen as a personification of the postmodern, with her self-aware constructs of gender and identity, and her classic film references in music videos like Material Girl and Express Yourself. Her work embodied fragmentation, pastiche, retrospection, and anti-foundationalism, subverting the male gaze and enacting postmodernist models of subjectivity. The Judson Dance Theater in New York's Greenwich Village during the 1960s and 1970s similarly broke down the distinction between art and life, stripping dance of its theatrical conventions to draw on everyday movements. This approach focused more on the intellectual process of creating dance than the end result, challenging the virtuoso technique and fanciful costumes of traditional dance. In literature, writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon responded to the stylistic innovations of Finnegans Wake and the late work of Samuel Beckett, playing with language, twisted plots, and multiple narrators to unsettle the conventional idea of the novel. The postmodern novel often calls attention to its own complicated connection to reality, using compositional and semantic practices such as inclusivity and logical impossibility to create a sense of depthlessness and waning of affect.

The Science Wars and the Sokal Hoax

The intellectual landscape of the late 20th century was shaken by the Science Wars, a series of debates that began with the 1962 publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn presented the direction of scientific inquiry as governed by a paradigm defining what counts as normal science, setting the agenda for much of The Postmodern Condition and subsequently being presented as the beginning of postmodern epistemology in the philosophy of science. The debate escalated when the French political philosophers Luc Ferry and Alain Bricaud began a series of responses to the interpretation of postmodernism, inspiring the physicist Alan Sokal to submit a deliberately nonsensical paper to a postmodernist journal. In 1996, the paper was accepted and published, proving nothing about postmodernism or science but adding to the public perception of a high-stakes intellectual war. The Sokal hoax highlighted the tensions between the scientific community and postmodern theorists, who argued that scientific knowledge is socially constructed and that the assumptions introduced by new paradigms make them mutually incommensurable with previous ones. The philosopher Israel Scheffler argued that the ever-expanding body of scientific knowledge embodies a moral principle protecting society from its authoritarian and tribal tendencies, while postmodernists like Paul Feyerabend made stronger claims that connected the largely Anglo-American debate about science to the development of poststructuralism in France. The debate expanded into a broader discussion about Western culture, with Habermas arguing that postmodern thinkers were caught in a performative contradiction, relying on concepts and methods that are themselves products of modern reason. Despite the intensity of the conflict, the debate largely subsided by the late 1990s, in part due to the recognition that it had been staged between strawman versions of postmodernism and science alike.

The Politics of Identity and Power

Postmodernism became a powerful tool for critiquing the structures of power and identity that had long dominated Western society. In the 1980s, the work of Michel Foucault introduced a political concern about social power relations into discussions about postmodernism, leading to the affiliation of postmodernism with feminism and multiculturalism. The art critic Craig Owens made the connection to feminism explicit, claiming feminism for postmodernism wholesale, a broad claim resisted by even many sympathetic feminists such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson. Postmodern feminism mixes postmodern theory and French feminism to reject a universal female subject, destabilizing the patriarchal norms entrenched in society that have led to gender inequality. The movement seeks to analyze notions that have led to gender inequality, promoting equality through critiquing logocentrism, supporting multiple discourses, and deconstructing texts. In the field of psychology, postmodern psychologists concluded that the American conception of an isolated, unified self does not exist, arguing that people are composed of many different selves, constructed for different situations. This challenges the modernist view of psychology as the science of the individual, favoring instead the idea that humans are a cultural and communal product, dominated by language rather than by an inner self. The postmodern theological movement emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, interpreting Christian theology in light of postmodern theory to question fixed interpretations and explore the role of lived experience. Theologian Kevin J. Vanhoozer combined and expanded on other scholarly classifications to present seven types of postmodern theology, each believing itself to be responding to, rejecting, or passing through modernity. The movement's influence extended to law, where postmodern legal scholars developed new approaches to address both formal and ethical issues in jurisprudence, emphasizing the inequalities introduced to the legal system by matters such as race, gender, and economic status.