What the fuck is Postmodernism? I am having a hard time wrapping

>>8231733
A word.

A bunch of vague hand waving nonsense. Nothing more.

Postmodernism describes both an era and a broad movement that developed in the late-20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism which marked a departure from modernism. While encompassing a broad range of ideas and projects, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism or distrust toward grand narratives, ideologies, and various tenets of Enlightenment rationality, including the existence of objective reality and absolute truth, as well as notions of rationality, human nature, and progress. Instead, it asserts that knowledge and truth are the product of unique systems of social, historical, and political discourse and interpretation, and are therefore contextual and constructed. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, self-referentiality, and irony.

Lyotard defined it as a suspicion of narratives, in the sense of worldviews, epistemological or ethical foundations, or claims to scientific, logical, or objective truth, all major aspects of Enlightenment rationalism, post-Enlightenment philosophical system-building, modern totalitarian ideologies, and (to an extent) the "Cartesian" subject-object division in traditional, existential, and phenomenological philosophy, which privileges the thinking subject as irreducible or intrinsically rational in some way.

It is also significantly linked to all kinds of attempts to undermine, "destabilise", cast in a different light, upturn, etc., existing claims to truth or moral superiority, as well as the structures, methods, institutions, etc. that they are embodied in. It also involves a turn to looking at those embodiments in practice and codification AS the actual substance, immanently, of the construction of truth. This is basically one interpretation of Nietzsche's moral, epistemological, and ontological project. Values are created, lived, and changed, not eternal and unchanging.

Nietzschean/Foucauldian genealogy, e.g. shows how truth is historically contingent and intersubjectively established, not transcendent or perennial. Derridean deconstruction shows how antinomies and paradoxes inhere in, and fundamentally undermine the stability of, all attempts at truth codification in texts or discourses. Marxian thought added the idea of ideology (culture, religion, values, thought) being determined by material factors and the interests of socioeconomically empowered parties. Freud (and a general rising interest in the unconscious or pre-conscious mind, psychological tendencies or types, submerged traumas) added the idea that your actions aren't really what you think they are, but only appear to be freely and rationally chosen by your conscious mind. All of these add up to a general "school of suspicion" (of acts, utterances, thoughts, etc.) which characterises postmodernism. The thinking subject, the truth, and social institutions have all become porous, historically contingent, discursively constructed, arbitrary.

Major movements in postmodernism were structuralism (which analyses systems of interconnected meaning rather than nodules of objective meaning), poststructuralism, and a focus on the nature of language (more broadly, on the intersubjective and genealogical nature of our assumed constructivist/symbolic epistemology).

Postmodern art tries to do similar things, and often focuses on the inherent flaws of our perspectivism, the inability to assign or detect permanent meaning, etc.

Essentially Postmodernism tries to dismantle structures in our society and to point out flaws in any 'logic' we might percieve.

It mostly stems from the fact that language as a whole has can not be trusted and thus everything ever said and written is nothing more than arbitrary nonsense. What Postmoderism does is tell you WHY a statement is nonsense.

You can go into a fuckton of different directions but essentially it is being an asshole.in the most ironic and skeptical way possible.