The Postmodern Change
Author: Orna Gadish, M.Sc
Contact: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Historical Background and Major Theorists

Postmodernism refers to a multifarious, assorted, variegated set of concepts aggregated into a disputable, controversial, and even self-abnegating theory nonconforming to modern historical, philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, and literary rules. Yet, postmodernism emanates from the same rules that drive modernism. Postmodernism is inextricable and resists definition, as definition violates its basic assumption that no decisive terms, boundaries, or absolute verities exist in the world (Aylesworth). For this reason postmodernism considers itself a "post". Postmodernism encompasses a wide variety of disciplines from philosophy, art, literature, architecture, to sociology, political science, cultural and literary criticism, communication, and technology; and is difficult to situate temporally and historically since it is imprecise when it exactly began (Hassan 119).

Various forerunners, who were not labeled postmodern at the time they offered their theories, held postmodern views or ideas that were later regarded as postmodern. The more influential among those thinkers were Emanuel Kant who assumed that human knowledge of objects in the world largely depends on human perception through schematization of objects; the Existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche emphasized the collapse between the natural and the artificial in human experience in de-realization of objects and the human-subjects that lost their sense of identity, constancy, and essence due to artificial moral rules. Nietzsche believed in the power of the art to save humanity from identity loss and destruction— and thus predicted the postmodern revolutionary aspirations and anarchic ideas. Likewise, Nietzsche's interpretation of the concept of the "subject" or the “I” as product of social construction and moral illusion was an idea that most postmodernists gladly embraced (and later translated into their idea of the multitude or the simulacra); the existentialist Martin Heidegger who viewed the destructive power of technology (in what  he called "the Enframing") in reducing the humans to nothing but "calculated entities", such as manpower reserves— is another critical thought that some of the postmodernists possessed.