Postmodernism, also spelled post-modernism, is an approach in sociology that stresses the uncertain nature of societies in which all certainties have been challenged and undermined. The condition of a lived experience occurs in a global society without absolute rules or explanations.
Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements. It emerged in the mid-20th century as a skeptical response to modernism, emphasizing the instability of meaning, rejection of universal truths, and critique of grand narratives.
Postmodernism, in contemporary Western philosophy, a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.
Insofar as postmodernism introduces aesthetic playfulness and subversion into science and politics, he resists it in the name of a modernity moving toward completion rather than self-transformation.
With Postmodernism, we leave the certainty of a single, integrated, and sense-making narrative, and we enter into a period cut adrift from certainty, plunged into “multiple, incompatible, heterogeneous, fragmented, contradictory and ambivalent” meanings.
Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated as Po-Mo) is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are considered to have emerged from, or superseded, modernism, in reaction to it, soon after the end of World War II, which caused people much disillusionment.
Postmodernism can be seen as a reaction against the ideas and values of modernism, as well as a description of the period that followed modernism's dominance in cultural theory and practice in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century.