What The Fuck Is "Postmodern"?

This may not be as big of a hot button term these days, but for a long time it felt like every day you were hearing something about “Postmodernism”. Anime fans were using it to describe shows that they liked, and conservatives were using it in the same tone they now use the word “woke”. Similarly to woke, it was also rare to find anyone describing themselves as postmodernist. 

Back when this term was more widely used, I would try to understand what this word meant and every source I found trying to explain it would tell you what it isn’t, but rarely what it is. I’ve read enough at this point that I feel like taking a crack at describing what this term means to me, and hopefully anyone who’s confused about the word can get a base understanding of what the fuck people are talking about. Even though it’s not a widely used word anymore, I think the reason for that is because its logic is so widely assimilated into our culture that it doesn’t feel like something distinct anymore.

In common parlance, people use the words “modern”, “contemporary”, and “current” interchangeably. In a philosophical context though, “modern” refers to a rather short period of history, roughly 1890-1945. When we name eras in philosophy, it’s to attempt to describe what the thinkers in that era had in common. Modern thinkers generally thought that humanity was going somewhere. What the destination was depended on the thinker. Marxists thought that humanity should not only strive for, but was in fact destined for communism. Eugenics was popular at the time, based on the notion that humanity should be shepherded towards a more desirable genetic composition.

Modern thought caused some of the greatest disasters in human history. The Nazis were highly modern, believing in a future of German supremacy. Overconfidence in the communist project caused terrible famines in the USSR and China, and leftists worldwide began to be disillusioned with their supposed flag-bearers. As a result, people began to question the idea of human destiny, that we are unfailingly going to make a better world than the one we live in. At the very least, we questioned the people who told us that they were taking us there. This is what people mean when they say that postmodernism is the “incredulity towards metanarratives”.

A common misconception is that people want to be postmodern. In fact, most people do not like this state of affairs. The book that popularized the term was Lyotard’s 1979 The Postmodern Condition (emphasis mine). Postmodernism is the situation we find ourselves in, whether we like it or not. Thus a postmodern figure or art piece is one who is struggling to understand or cope with the character of our time. People want to have goals, an end destination in sight. However, due to catastrophic failures of many previous goals, people are too scared to take the steps forward. Any all-encompassing societal project gets scrutinized into oblivion, never to be implemented.

This recalls Nietszche’s concept of the death of God, Nietszche being considered a huge influence on postmodern thought. God’s death isn’t a triumph but a challenge. Where does our meaning and direction come from if we don’t have a God? Where does our meaning and direction come from if our attempts at utopia are always monstrous? Who has the right to claim that they’re right? These are the questions that define the postmodern condition.

That last piece is foundational to where we are right now. The average person can see all the visions of the future presented to them and can poke holes in all of them. The result is what feels like a flat world, where all culture and ideas turn into an amorphous slop. Postmodern art was originally lauded for blending “high and low culture”. Think of Andy Warhol utilizing common commodities like soup cans in posh art galleries, and rock bands incorporating avant-garde techniques in their pop music. After 60+ years of this, “high and low culture” seem to be outdated terms. Everything is accessible to everyone. The richest people in the world play video games in their free time and listen to hip hop. Teenagers are uploading what can only be called avant garde video art (corecore, youtube poop) and music (vaporwave) to the internet in droves. Blockbuster movies are discussed as seriously in the academies as Homer. We don’t know what the most important things to focus on are, so we treat all cultural objects as equals. This can be gathered from the new framing of cultural products as “content”. Whether you’re listening to Bach, Coltrane, The Beatles, or Lil Pump, you’re just consuming content. The world under the postmodern condition feels kaleidoscopic: fractured, beautiful, and meaningless.