What is post-modernism?
In the 1970s and 1980s post-modernism was loosely associated with avant-garde trends in architecture and art, and new technology related-developments in computers and the media. It was launched in 1975 when Charles Jencks coined the term “post-modernism” to describe a trend in architecture. Since then it has spread through the social sciences. The various strands of “post” literatures – in culture, post-modernism; in politics, post-Marxism; in political economy, post-Fordism; in philosophy and linguistics, post-structuralism – emphasise the principles of fragmentation, heterogeneity, and contingency, and are hostile to ideas of “totality”, structure, and “grand narratives”. If post-modernism is another theory, a way of interpreting the world, or a “truth claim” what is its “genealogy”? That is, where does it come from, what is its heritage, who are its forebears? And why do Marxists call it ahistorical, and an anti-working class politics? The language of post-modernism is so impenetrab
