“A critic of modernity.”
“A cultural artistic era, it's kind of a label to put on works like the renaissance or the medieval period, but much much more recent.”
“A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.”
“A term tied very closely to postmodernism, deconstructionism is a challenge to the attempt to establish any ultimate or secure meaning in a text. It collapses all hierarchies preventing you from moving forward, there is no up, no down. It's a gradual move to postmodernism then eventually nihilism.”
“But in the context of a TV show, something will be kind of a non-show (think most things on adult swim). But here's the crux of the question. I've seen people post porn in regular discord channels and mostly memes in NSFW discord channels and there's a bit of a 'who's going to break first and be genuine in the use of the channel' kind of mood. And that aversion to candide expression is something that exists elsewhere, like political commentators are kind of looked down on for talking passionately about the issues they think are important, activists are very often trolled to hell, and it feels like even taking a position at all is kind of similarly laughed at and almost discouraged, as though you're kind of giving up your ability to take nothing seriously. Is this post-modernism? Or is there another term for this?”
“Everyone is a bit racist. Everything is about power. Everyone is selfish, there are no unselfish act. Are all postmodernistic, because, so what? Get to work.”
“I have recently come to understand postmodernism in a literary context as ironic works of parody and satire among other things.”
“I think it's best explained through literature: previously, you may have a story that tied up nicely, and the ending made sense. But after World War II and into the Cold War, it didn't seem like things were making sense anymore.”
“Instead of power, what about competence, beauty, skill, talent? It's self-contradicting, because it gives you no direction for action. Questions everything. Reading literature through a postmodern lens, who is the group being represented. Takes the thing and strips all meaning from it. To destroy all system of beliefs. To even ask the question of what the meaning of life is postmodern - it's postmodern to think of the future. What is postmodernism? Borderlines nihilism. You can't be for or against anything. It exhausts all theories and values. Such that you have no ground to stand on. If you take deconstructionism to it's very end, it boils down to power, pitting the oppressor against the oppressed.”
“Is when the real bleeds into the meta-real.”
“It destroys all values systems, because how can you privilege one thing above the other if there are an infinite number of interpretations?”
“It's between modernism and distopia.”
“It's not beyond modernism, it's after.”
“No truth, no meaning, no certainty. It moves the interpretation form author to the reader, anyone can have their own interpretation. It makes yourself god.”
“Some now say we are in the 'post-post-modern' period, but it's not like all of the artists/cultural contributors get into a room and decide what era the calendar page is on.”
“Specifically as it relates to comedy, postmodernism seems to be kind of non jokes, or just a subversion of meaning, so in the context of telling a joke the real joke is that it's an anti-joke.”
“The 'postmodern' era of literature is filled with unreliable narrators, fragmented stories, and a lot of irony. This is reflective of the larger cultural feelings of relativism.”
“You can use it to to end any conversation, it's an axiom stating that either party's argument is but another word, like deconstructionism.”