by Kevin Cole

Created on: February 13, 2009

The paradox of defining postmodernism is that there is no paradox. Any definition will almost always be overgeneralized, just like with any complex topic. However, a few broad characteristics are certainly discernable.

Firstly, it's necessary to distinguish between "postmodernism" and "postmodernity." The latter refers to a time period, roughly from post-WWII up to the present. This refers to the hallmarks of culture, society, politics, etc that mark contemporary life.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, refers to the philosophies and theories that have attempted to wrestle with the condition of postmodernity and either defend or critique the zeitgeist of the post-WWII era.

Thus to define "postmodernism" it's possible to note several broad, sometimes overlapping, themes.

1. CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION: Postmodern philosophers began to criticize dominating views of representation in the arts, language, and metaphysics. Postmodernism is, in many sense, a "linguistic turn" - meaning that theorists have either discovered or refined how we think of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein was pivotal here, critiquing the Logical Positivists (including Bertrand Russell) of which he was formerly apart of. In 1979 Richard Rorty published "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" in which he accused philosophers of wrongly believing their truth-claims "mirrored" the way the world actually was. His anti-realism and neo-pragmatism would become enormously influential in many circles. Lastly, in the 1980's Jacques Derrida shook up the philosophical world with "deconstruction," or his attempt to show how the meaning of texts is perpetually destabilized and that signifiers & signifieds don't enjoy the easy relationship that his precursors, the Structuralists, believed they did.

2. CRITIQUE OF POWER: In the Modern period the conception of power was most succintly expressed by Francis Bacon: "Knowledge is power." Yet in postmodernism this maxim is reversed: "Power is knowledge," declared Michel Foucault. For Foucault and other postmoderns, it became necessary to unearth and expose the myriad ways in which knowledge is actually created & shaped, and the extent to which dominant power-structures (of which we all participate in) control what knowledge & truth really is. This critique was also of Karl Marx - whereas Marxism saw power as a top-down affair (bourgeoisie oppressing the proletariat), Foucault argued that everyone wielded power.

3. CRITIQUE OF FOUNDATIONALISM: The dispute between

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