Why the Founders of Postmodernism Refused to Be Called Postmodernists

What is postmodernism? The term itself feels slippery, almost meaningless. It’s often used as a simple label for the era after World War II, a catch-all for the time after Modernism supposedly ended. But if you search for a self-proclaimed "postmodern philosopher," you'll likely come up empty-handed. Jean Baudrillard, one of the most famous thinkers associated with the period, dismissed it as an "old trend" he wanted no part of. Michel Foucault once remarked that he'd never met a postmodernist.

So why does a philosophy with no philosophers seem to define our age? The name itself offers a clue: it is a philosophy after modernism, a deep and critical response to the tradition of thought that began in the Modern era and was cemented during the Enlightenment.

The Modern Dream of Reason and Progress

To understand the "post," we must first understand the "modern." If all modern philosophy could be boiled down to one phrase, it would be René Descartes' famous declaration: “Cogito, ergo sum”—"I think, therefore I am." Descartes sought absolute certainty and found it in the one thing he couldn't doubt: the existence of his own thought.

This faith in the power of the human mind became the bedrock of modernity. It was an age defined by powerful ideas:

• Universal Laws: The world, nature, and society were believed to operate according to universal, discoverable laws, much like in Newtonian mechanics.
• Progress: Development was seen as a straight line moving from primitive to complex, from bad to good. Our task was to uncover these laws to speed this progress along.
• Objective Truth: Truth wasn't relative; it was a fixed reality that could be accessed through rational methods.
• Universal Morality: Ethics and law couldn't be a matter of opinion. Thinkers like Immanuel Kant sought to establish universal moral laws, or "categorical imperatives," that applied to everyone, everywhere.

But this grand, orderly vision of the world began to fracture. New scientific discoveries, like Einstein's theory of relativity, replaced the certainty of universal laws with the unsettling idea that everything is relative. Philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche declared the "death of God," signaling the collapse of the ultimate source of morality and truth, demanding a complete re-evaluation of all values. Martin Heidegger, in turn, began to dismantle the core categories of modern philosophy—subject, object, matter—arguing they were inadequate.

Finally, the sheer horror of the First and Second World Wars delivered the killing blow. The dream of rational progress died in the trenches and concentration camps. People saw where the obsession with order, purity, and a single, rational path had led. A profound rethinking of not just philosophy, but of ethics, politics, and what it means to be human, was inevitable.

The Collapse of the Grand Stories

Postmodernism emerged as a powerful protest against the foundations of modern thought. It saw the modern search for a single rule for all—its universalism and its rigid rationalism—as inherently totalitarian. Any system that claims to have the one and only answer, whether from the political left or right, becomes repressive.

One of postmodernism's central ideas, articulated by Jean-François Lyotard, is the collapse of "metanarratives." Metanarratives are the grand, all-encompassing stories we tell ourselves to explain the world: Christianity, which defined the Middle Ages; the Enlightenment's story of progress; Marxism's story of class struggle.

Lyotard argued that their time had passed. Why? Because a metanarrative requires a belief in an objective, singular truth. Postmodernism rejects this. It argues that truth is always partial, dependent on historical and social context, and never final. The world can't be explained by one neat theory. Instead, it’s a collage of competing ideas and hypotheses. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend would have called this a "proliferation" of theories, where ideas multiply rather than replace one another, even when they contradict.

Deconstructing a Black-and-White World

Modernism loved its binary oppositions: subject and object, good and evil, male and female, elite and mass. In these pairings, one side was always implicitly better, truer, or more powerful. Postmodernism works to deconstruct these oppositions, showing that they are not natural but are constructs that hide relationships of power.

In a postmodern view, good and evil are not absolutes but are subjective concepts. We are forced to see them as equivalent perspectives, collapsing the power dynamic between them. There are no more simple answers.

Jean Baudrillard took this critique further, arguing that in our contemporary society, social realities have been replaced by "simulacra"—a world of signs and symbols that have no connection to an underlying reality. Labor, for instance, is no longer just about production; for many, it's about simulating activity to fulfill a social function. Ideology is replaced by a cult of consumption, where we work to pay off loans for things we don't need, trapped in a cycle of manufactured desire.

This deconstruction also gave rise to multiculturalism—the idea that different cultures can and should coexist in a single space, enriching one another, without one having to be dominant. A postmodern society is a mosaic, with no single, clear direction.

The Death of the "Subject"

After the "death of God" and the "death of the author," postmodernism announced the "death of the subject." The modern subject was the hero of his own story: a rational, independent agent with an inherent "essence" that defined him.

Postmodernism, particularly in the work of Michel Foucault, argues that we have no such predetermined essence. The human being is the product of social, political, and economic forces. We are shaped and disciplined by conventional norms that define what is "normal" and punish any deviation as sickness or imperfection. As Foucault detailed in Discipline and Punish, these norms are not natural laws but tools of control.

This line of thought gave a powerful impetus to new movements. If binary oppositions based on power are to be dismantled, then the opposition between male and female must also fall. Modernity viewed men as rational subjects and women as their emotional, less-perfect counterparts. Thinkers like Judith Butler pioneered queer theory, which argues that gender and sexuality are not biological certainties but social constructs—labels imposed on people for the purpose of control.

Postmodernism, in its relentless critique, ultimately falls into its own logical trap. If it claims there can be no definitive theory of everything, then it cannot claim that status for itself. It must acknowledge its own relativity. In doing so, postmodernism doesn't provide a new answer. Instead, it clears the ground, making way for other theories and other ways of seeing the world, whether we call it metamodernism or something else entirely.

References

• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (1984). University of Minnesota Press.
  This is the foundational text for understanding the postmodern rejection of "metanarratives." Lyotard argues that in a postmodern world, the grand, unifying stories (like Progress or Emancipation) that once legitimized knowledge and culture have lost their credibility. He describes a shift towards smaller, localized "language games" and a new emphasis on paralogy and dissent over consensus. (See especially the Introduction and sections 1-6 for the core argument on the delegitimation of grand narratives).
• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. (1994). University of Michigan Press.
  This work explores the concepts of simulacra (copies without originals) and hyperreality. Baudrillard argues that modern society has become so saturated with symbols and media that we can no longer distinguish between reality and its representation. The article's points on consumerism and the simulation of activity in labor are drawn directly from Baudrillard's thesis that signs have replaced the real. (The chapter "The Precession of Simulacra" is particularly relevant).
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (1995). Vintage Books.
  Foucault's historical analysis explains how modern institutions—prisons, schools, hospitals—create "docile bodies" through systems of surveillance and normalization. This directly supports the article's claim about the "death of the subject," showing how the individual self is not a natural entity but is constructed and controlled by societal power structures. (Part 3, "Discipline," pp. 135-228, details the mechanisms of disciplinary power that shape the modern individual).