Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

Chapter 1. What Is Postmodernism?

Postmodernism can be described as a relatively new intellectual movement that has sprung from the idea that modernism is finished and has not survived the onslaught of critique. This movement has branched into many schools of thought: deconstruction, post-structuralism, some forms of feminism, and critical theory, to name a few.

Each has attempted to fill the void in a variety of intellectual spaces, especially in academia and particularly in the humanities and social sciences, but also in popular culture. Its proponents self-identify as “critics” of one field or another.

Normally, criticism is thought more useful if the criticizer has a superior idea to replace what they have attempted to prove inferior, but this is not the manner in which postmodernism functions. Offering criticism alone without proposing solutions might be likened to the practice of the Sophists from Ancient Greece, who revelled in the skills of rhetoric and sought to find strong arguments against any stance whatsoever for the purposes of politics and persuasion. In more recent times, these rhetorical tactics have been adopted by many postmodernists in various intellectual circles. A few of its representatives are given in Table 2 below: