Postmodernism

A philosophical and cultural orientation skeptical of grand narratives, fixed truths, and stable meaning — associated with thinkers like Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida, and with works like Simulacra and Simulation, Capitalist Realism, and White Noise.

In the corpus, postmodernism appears primarily as a point of contrast for the emerging “metatribe” (Tyler Alterman, 2020). The metatribe is “neither nihilist nor locked onto an ethical system” — which places it in tension with postmodern nihilism (the refusal of meaning) while also rejecting dogmatic modernist meta-narratives. Tyler Alterman notes that some try to apply the label “Metamodernism” to the metatribe, but metamodernists are a sociologically distinct group that is “only one part of the metatribe.”

Baudrillard’s simulacra concept — that maps now precede territory, and that simulation has replaced the real — runs through multiple books in the corpus as the philosophical backdrop for concerns about virtual worlds, media reality, and techno-utopianism. Capitalist Realism (Mark Fisher) and White Noise (Don DeLillo) both engage this tradition.

Where this appears

• 1- 2020 Will See the… (tweet)