What is post-modernism? - Charles Jencks

What is PostModernism? Is it a new world view,or an outgrowth of the PostIndustrial Society? Is it a shift in philosophy, the arts and architecture? In this fourth, entirely revised edition, Charles Jencks, one of the founders of the PostModern Movement, shows it is all these things plus many other forces that have exploded since the early 1960s. In a unique analysis, using diagrams designed especially for this edition, he reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation. But why has postmodern culture arrived? In an ironic parable, the Protestant Crusade. Jencks uncovers some hitherto hidden origins: the Modernists abhorrence for all things sensuous and natural, and their zeal for all things orderly and mechanistic. This pseudoreligion led in the 1920s to the famous vacuumcleaning period, the purgation of values, metaphysics and emotion. In the 1970s it led on to the Protestant Inquisition which inadvertently created the very enemy Modernists feared
PostModernism; a CounterReformation, the reassertion of worldliness, fecundity, humour and pluralism. However, more than one tradition emerged and Jencks, distinguishing two types of PostModernism (deconstructive and reconstructive) demonstrates that the former is often a disguised form of LateModernism. This takes the decreation and nihilism of its parent to extremes. The main engine that drives global culture today
postmodernisation, the electronic economy and instant communications network
is analysed in its close relation to other posts: PostFordism, PostSocialism and the postnational world of trading blocs and unstable nations. Jencks argues that this may result in catastrophe and global governance, or a web of transnational institutions and obligations. The most radical idea of this challenging book is the conclusion: the notion that the postmodern world does not mean the end of metanarratives, but something quite different. Belief systems are flourishing as never before and, Jencks argues, a new metanarrative, based on the story of the universe and its generative qualities, will soon create a new world view that will affect all areas. It is a story which grows directly out of the postmodern sciences of complexity and is thus both true and mythic. Other What is...? titles include What is Abstraction?, What is Deconstruction?