Chapter Four.The postmodernist approach considers objectivity to be a veil that hides its real nature of power ; by stripping objectivity of its disguise , some postmodernists seek liberation , while others " retreat to an aesthetic , ironic , detached , and playful attitude to one's own beliefs and to the march of events " ( Blackburn , 1994 : 295 ) . If postmodernism is the dominant spirit of the time and has influenced many fields of study , this question may spring to mind : Has postmodernism affected the field of English language teaching both in theory and practice too ? To answer this question first , we delve briefly into the concept of modernism , the movement from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge , then we will shed more light on postmodernism and finally we shall see whether there are any implications of this philosophy in the field both in theory and practice . Postmodernism philosophy originated primarily in France during the 1960s and 1970s and was greatly influenced by phenomenology , existentialism , psychoanalysis , Marxism , and structuralism . These intellectual movements portrayed the human subject as alienated in contemporary society , estranged from his or her authentic modes of experience and being , whether the source of that estrangement was capitalism ( for Marxism ) , the scientific naturalism ( for phenomenology ) , excessive repressive social mores ( for Freud ) , and bureaucratically organized social life and mass culture ( for existentialism ) . In fact , all rejected the belief that the study of humanity could be modeled on ( objectivity ) or reduced to the physical science ( reductionism ) ; hence , they avoided behaviorism and naturalism . Unlike hard sciences , they focus not merely on facts but on the meaning of facts for human subjects . Furthermore , studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast doubt on the credibility of the science which was the mainstream Western scientific practice ( Kuhn , 1962 ) , revealing that physical reality is no less than social reality is at bottom a social and linguistic construct and the truth claims of science are inherently theory - laden and self - referential . In fact , there was a return to the true , or authentic , or free integrated human self as the center of lived experience ( Cahoone , 2003 ) . In the 1960s , some French philosophers including Jean - Francis Lyotard , Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault radicalized structuralism . Like structuralism , they rejected the centrality of the self , believing that it is not the self that creates culture , it is culture that creates the self ; and unlike structuralism , they rejected scientific pretensions and applied the structural - cultural analysis of human phenomena to the human sciences themselves , which are after all human cultural constructions . Hence , they are commonly named " poststructuralists ." In fact , they undermine any and all positive philosophical and political positions and announce the end of rational enquiry into truth , the illusory nature of any unified self , and the impossibility of clear and unequivocal meaning . Another important factor in the development of postmodernism was the situations after the Second World War which led to the decline of grand theories including Nazism , Fascism , and finally Marxism . Lyotard ( 1984 ) argued that modern philosophies legitimized truth - claims not on logical or empirical ground , but rather on the grounds of accepted stories or " metanarrative " about knowledge of the world-- what Wittgenstein termed as " language games " .Baudrillard ( 1983 ) denounced hyper - reality , in which technology's reproduction of images and objects blurred the distinction between real and unreal and transformed persons into media projections .It rejects the idea of progress in utopian assumptions about evolution , social improvement and efforts in education to produce reform .Postomdernism.