Postmodernism

Postmodernism in philosophy is a loosely allied current of late twentieth-century thought, associated chiefly with French theorists including Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, united less by a shared positive doctrine than by a common skepticism toward the "grand narratives," universal reason and stable foundations that modern Western philosophy since the Enlightenment had claimed to rest on. Lyotard's 1979 The Postmodern Condition gave the current its most cited definition, characterizing postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives," the totalizing stories, whether Enlightenment progress, Marxist historical necessity or scientific objectivity, that had claimed to legitimate knowledge and social order as a whole. Postmodern thought characteristically emphasizes the instability of meaning and the constructed, power-laden character of claims to objective truth, drawing on Foucault's analyses of how knowledge and institutional power are mutually constituted and on Derrida's deconstructive reading practice, which exposes the unstable oppositions on which texts and philosophical arguments depend. Postmodernism proved highly influential and highly contested across the humanities and social sciences from the 1970s through the 1990s, provoking sustained criticism from philosophers in both analytic and Marxist traditions who charged it with self-undermining relativism, even as its methods reshaped literary theory, historiography, and cultural and gender studies.