Postmodern Culture

Abstract

Postmodern culture is global, although it takes shape initially in western culture in the late twentieth century. It is a far‐reaching phenomenon describing a range of activities, events, and perspectives relating to the arts, architecture, the humanities, politics, and the social sciences across world cultures. Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century and continuing to today, postmodern culture represents plasticity, diversity, eclecticism, antifoundationalist philosophy, and, for many, relativism. In contrast to modern culture, with its emphasis on social progress, coherence, and universality, postmodern culture represents instances of dramatic historical and ideological change in which modernist narratives of progress and social holism are viewed as incomplete, noncausal, elastic, and contradictory. In conjunction with the end of modernist progress narratives, an insistence on totality and coherence gives way to fragmentation and diversity and the dominance of universality in cultural schemes is subverted by difference within a postmodern condition. Additionally, postmodern culture stands for more than the current or present state of society. Postmodern culture is characterized by the valuing of activities, events, and perspectives that emphasize the particular over the global or the fragment over the whole. This reversal of a modernist ideology necessitates a Nietzschean revaluation of variation, difference, and flexibility in the cultural sphere. Primarily through the writings of Jean‐François Lyotard, whose seminal book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984) remains the definitive exposition of the term and its significance to society, postmodern culture has come to be identified with a radical critique of the relationship between the particular and the universal in art, culture, and politics.