Can someone explain postmodernism in terms a sixth grader can understand?

Question

I think I'm pretty smart, but I just don't get it.

Answer 1

Hopefully you're a smart 6th grader. As much as I agree with the feeling of the above I think it is actually useful to understand this. It does help us see some things about our world and our lives that we could miss otherwise. It is more that the ideas are used for pretentious, crappy purposes, by people who don't have other skills.

We used to think that science was going to reveal everything. It was objective, and it was piling up discoveries one after the other. A scientist named Newton had made discoveries that explained a huge amount about our world. We were on the way to knowing everything and conquering the last bits of nature. It was going to be continual progress from here, or at least it seemed that way. The period when all this was happening was called Modernism.

Fast forward to today. Einstein has shattered our certain concepts of space and time one as one of the worlds best scientists Newton had described them. Quantum Mechanics (the study of the stuff that makes up atoms) showed that at that level we could only know things (on that level) with probability, not for sure. It also showed that just observing something makes it change, so that and a few other ideas made some conclude that we cannot be completely objective, not as we had thought. Finally a guy named Thomas Kuhn showed that science actually progresses as a social process with revolutions that overturn what was known before (like Einstein did). So science it turns out doesn't incrementally pile up successes, and it looks like interactions between people and power have something to do with what science allows to be called true. It looks a bit in places like a good ole boys club. All this and it's implications are called Post Modernism. The implications were used to question the order of the day in literature, art, our personal lives and much more due to the information explosion.

One of the big benefits is that it gets us to question people who have power and who say they have the answers to what is True. The downside is that it can be used to try to show off for people who use this to make a lot of stuff up and make it so complicated that it actually looks like they've come up with something great, when actually all it is is complicated to the point that no one else cares to read it.

Recess is almost over. I'll see you in class.

Answer 2

No -- I doubt that anyone can explain it in terms that a postgraduate can understand.

It isn't so much that it is hard to understand -- as it is that everyone uses the word differently. For example, in Art, it might refer to anything that is not representational -- including Dada, Cubism or that crap that Rothko did.

In literature, it means something very different. It is often associated with the deconstructive movement -- which always seemed to me to encompass a refusal to consider any outside influences on a work. Thus, 1984 or BRAVE NEW WORLD should not be viewed in terms of the totalitarian movements of the 20th century. This always seemed incredibly stupid to me.

If I were forced to describe postmodernism to a a sixth-grader, I suppose I sould come up with "Self-involved pretentious crap." If I were to describe it to an adult -- I would say the same thing -- using a different word than "crap."