Postmodernism

• 1. Introduction

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  Postmodernism has been called the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. That description comes from scholar Louis Menand, who noted that it is "definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done." From the décor of a room to the fear of nuclear armageddon, from pop art to legal theory, the term stretches across every corner of culture and thought. How did a word that first appeared in print in 1870 end up at the center of some of the most contentious intellectual battles of the 20th century? And what happens when an idea becomes so pervasive that it disappears into ordinary life? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Term Finds Its Meaning

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  Artist John Watkins Chapman first wrote about "a Postmodern style of painting" in 1870, using it to mean a departure from French Impressionism. The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation is dated to 1916, describing painter Gus Mager. In 1914, Episcopal priest J. M. Thompson used the term to argue that religion itself needed submitting to the same rigorous criticism being applied to modern theology. By 1926, Bernard Iddings Bell, then president of St. Stephen's College and also an Episcopal priest, published a book called Postmodernism and Other Essays, marking the first time anyone used the term to name an entire historical period following modernity. In 1939, historian Arnold J. Toynbee applied it in an academic context, declaring that "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914-1918." Each of these early uses addresses something different. There is little direct continuity among them. Not until the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley introduced the term in its current sense during the 1950s did a recognizable intellectual lineage begin to take shape.

• 3. The Thinkers Who Shaped It

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  Jean-François Lyotard delivered what many consider the founding philosophical statement of postmodernism in his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. His definition was famously spare: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives." By metanarratives, Lyotard meant the large organizing stories offered by Christianity, Hegel, and Marx that tell people where they stand in the world. Drawing on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion of "language games," Lyotard argued that without a shared overarching narrative, human communities are left with only local, group-specific ways of making meaning, with no higher court to settle disputes between them. Jacques Derrida approached the problem from a different direction entirely. His practice of deconstruction held that any written text contains points of internal contradiction that undermine whatever stable meaning the author intended. Derrida used the phrase "metaphysics of presence" to describe the philosophical tradition that assumed people had direct, unmediated access to reality. He argued this assumption was untenable. Michel Foucault brought a political dimension. He argued that power operates through the logic of social institutions, becoming detached from the intentions of the individuals inside them. He used what he called a "genealogical method," inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, to trace how power-relations change across history. Then there was Jean Baudrillard. Though trained as a sociologist, he moved across many disciplines. Drawing on psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's vocabulary, Baudrillard proposed that modern social production had shifted from making real objects to generating signs and symbols. He called the resulting condition "hyperreality," a state in which the domain of reality becomes so saturated with signs that reality itself becomes inaccessible, leaving only what he called simulacra: images that refer to nothing outside themselves. Baudrillard's vision has been described as "apocalyptic," and scholars still debate whether his later writing was meant as theory or something closer to science fiction.

• 4. Architecture and the Death of Modernism

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  Charles Jencks, the architectural theorist, famously announced the death of modern architecture in his 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. He named the precise moment: the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing scheme in St. Louis, Missouri, on the 15th of July 1972 at 3:32 p.m. The building's destruction by dynamite was, for Jencks, the visible end of a failed ideal. Jencks had given early lectures on the subject in the early 1970s and published his key essay, "The Rise of Post-Modern Architecture," in 1975. His concept of "double coding" captured what postmodern architecture was actually doing: combining modern techniques with something else, usually traditional building, so that structures could speak simultaneously to a general public and to specialist architects. He drew heavily on the work of American architect Robert Venturi, who had famously responded to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's modernist slogan "less is more" with the rejoinder that "less is a bore." Critics Terry Farrell and Adam Furman, writing in their book Revisiting Postmodernism, described the shift as bringing a "more joyous and sensual experience to the culture." Architecture was unusual among the arts in that postmodernism arrived there not just as an aesthetic stance but as a deliberate act of communication with the people who would actually live and work inside the buildings.

• 5. Art, Dance, Film, and Music

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  Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans series from the 1960s stands as one of the most widely cited examples of postmodernism reaching mainstream attention. By treating commercial design as fine art, Warhol dismantled the traditional boundary between the two. Sculptor Claes Oldenburg made the point even more literally. In 1961, he opened a place called The Store in a dime store area of New York's Lower East Side, where he sold brightly painted plaster replicas of hamburgers, cans of soda, dresses, and underwear. His formula was direct: "Museum in bourgeois concept equals store in mine." The Judson Dance Theater, which operated in New York's Greenwich Village during the 1960s and 1970s, brought the same spirit into movement. Taking inspiration from composer John Cage's efforts to dissolve the line between art and life, the Judson dancers stripped performance of technical virtuosity, fanciful costumes, and complex storylines, replacing them with everyday gestures: sitting, walking, kneeling. Anna Halprin's San Francisco Dancers' Workshop had pioneered related ideas starting in the 1950s; Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer are now considered, in the source's words, "giants of the field." In film, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) has been widely studied as a prime example of the postmodern. Its future setting mingles, in the source's description, "drab 1940s clothes and offices, punk rock hairstyles, pop Egyptian styles and oriental culture" with science-fiction visuals. The result merges film noir and science fiction into what critics have called tech noir. In music, the composer Jonathan Kramer wrote that avant-garde compositions "defy more than seduce the listener." In the 1960s, composers such as Henryk Górecki and Philip Glass moved away from the dissonance of atonal academic modernism toward simpler textures and more consonant harmonies. Madonna drew a different kind of scholarly attention. Avant-garde academics coined the term "Madonna studies" as a sub-discipline of cultural studies, analyzing her self-aware constructions of gender and identity. Music critic Andy Cush, writing in 2023, 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."

• 6. The Science Wars

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  Thomas Kuhn's 1962 publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions planted the seed for what became known as the Science Wars. Kuhn, a physicist and historian of science, argued that the direction of scientific inquiry is governed by a "paradigm" that defines what counts as normal science in any given period. New paradigms, he wrote, make their predecessors "mutually incommensurable." Although Kuhn's framework was not based on postmodern ideas or Continental philosophy, it subsequently became presented as the beginning of "postmodern epistemology" in the philosophy of science. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend pushed further, making stronger claims that connected Anglo-American debates about science to French poststructuralism. Israel Scheffler argued from the other direction, maintaining that scientific knowledge embodies a kind of "moral principle" that protects society from authoritarian and tribal tendencies. The crisis came to public attention with what became known as the Sokal hoax. Physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical paper to a postmodernist journal, where it was accepted and published in 1996. By the late 1990s the debate had largely subsided, in part because observers recognized it had been staged between, in the source's words, "strawman versions of postmodernism and science alike."

• 7. After Postmodernism

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  Since the late 1990s, a growing number of voices in both popular culture and academia have declared that postmodernism has gone out of fashion or is simply dead. A 2020 study tested this claim by comparing song lyrics from Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift against five characteristics consistently found in postmodern marketing literature. The study found that postmodernism "remains vibrant, re-inventive, and calls for its demise may be somewhat overblown." Swift's success, the study noted, suggested a shift toward what it called reconstructive positions regarding the self. Several competing labels have emerged for what might follow: Raoul Eshelman's performatism, Gilles Lipovetsky's hypermodernity, Nicolas Bourriaud's altermodern, and Alan Kirby's digimodernism. None of these has gained widespread acceptance. Writing in 2022, critic Steven Connor offered a different explanation for why postmodernism seems to have faded: it has not died but instead been assimilated. There is now, Connor argues, "little that can be called postmodern style" because "the clashing or commingling of styles has become entirely routine at all levels of culture." What was once energizing antagonism between high and low culture has been, in his phrase, "pestled into a tepid porridge." The general postmodern condition, he concludes, is now "universal, irreversible and metastable," embodied above all in the massive increase in digitally mediated information technologies. In the 2020s, Connor observes, the sensibility has shifted, perhaps temporarily, from irony and ambivalence toward urgency, indignation, and what he calls reductive absolutism.