What is Postmodernism?
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“lenses” to gain accounts of things. All objects and persons are unique formulations to an observer. These perspectives come from individual experiences and cannot be pooled with the experience of others to distill universal concepts. Here is where phrases like “my reality” or “my lived experience” become paramount to postmodernists over socalled “facts”—two accounts of the same event are not considered to be in conflict, according to postmodern epistemology. On the subject of human nature, postmodernists tend to be collectivistic and treat individuals as inseparably part of groups which are based on race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and class. Individuals are a patchwork of group qualities and cannot but perceive reality and interact with others except by way of the attributes of their groups. A scientist can never be considered an objective researcher seeking the truth. The scientist will inescapably be considered a white, male, gay, scientist (for example) and will perceive the world uniquely from these inescapable group affiliations. If the field of science as a whole is filled with white men, postmodernists predict slant or bias which will lead inevitably to conflict with the “othered” or “silenced” groups that the occupations of science have failed to include (female or indigenous “ways of knowing,” for example). As a result, the postmodern ethics and politics tend to focus on a resolution of these tensions by revealing the injustices inherent or systematic in “objective” knowledge systems.
What Came Before Modernism? Having introduced some of the bases of postmodernism, we might look further into the target of
