The Condition of Postmodernity:  An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
- David Harvey

To understand postmodernism, we need to examine modernism (the ideas that postmodernism rejects):

Modernism:  (typified by thinkers of the 18th century Enlightenment era)

• positivistic (type of research)

• technocentric (technology solves our problems)

• rationalistic (logical thought)

• linear progress (science moves us forward)

• absolute, universal truths

• standardization of knowledge and production

Postmodernism:

• privileges heterogeneity and difference as liberative forces

• aim to redefine culture (cultural / feminist studies)

• fragmentation (specialization of science, no end goal)

• indeterminacy

• distrust of 'metatheories' (or 'metanarratives') that explain everything

Meta-theories / Metanarratives:  postmodernism rejects these 'universal' human theories (for example:  Michel Foucault - 'Petit History')

The shift from modernism to postmodernism:  a paradigm shift (a somewhat postmodernist idea by Thomas Kuhn)