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There are essentially MANY postmodernities, but I suppose in a nutshell the one that I'm familiar with goes a bit like this:
Modernity can be defined as the rationalist mindset that emerged during the enlightenment and can be seen to be an analysis of the world within language as the world which IS. It's kind of the clockwork universe idea post-Newton - that everything fits together and is comprehensible and predictable from the perspective of a human being.
Post-structuralist writing tended to emphasize that language isn't transparent to reality, but is a constructor of reality, in that our need to differentiate between objects, assign names to them, create heirarchies etc was what generated 'our' world, but that such a world was no more or less than a human-created structure that referred essentially only back on itself. People like Derrida demonstrated that language works on axes of association and the deferral of meaning - so that tree gets its meaning from associations with green, leaf, trunk etc - but that green, leaf and trunk etc. only get THEIR meanings through subsequent associations with other things. There is no fixed point in which we can define something outside language in a stable way.
Postmodernity takes up many of the challenges of post-structuralist thought - basically intimating the the modernist structure we inhabit is essential to being 'human' and that we couldn't think or operate outside this structure, but that you can push this structure until it collapses around the edges - and that the collapse was more interesting and rewarding than the structure. Postmodernity is often about pushing concepts to the point at which they become their opposite and then explode - to use a bad metaphor, releasing a lot of creative energy in the process.
It's against the view of the world as determinist, closed, fully comprehensible, knowable, logical and robotic - a tension that seems to me to be recapitulated in fiction in the battle between the Outer Church and the Invisibles (in which the modernist world is completely self-deconstructing all the time, because it lives in a postmodern world, and in which the postmodern agents are necessarily restricted within a modernist mindset for the vast amount of time). |
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(Sorry, this thread just interested - then infuriated me - with it's Invisibles wossnames dangling all around me)[/rot] 