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Chapter Four. Postomdernism. Postmodernism is a concept which appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study including art , music , film , literature , architecture , and technology and nowadays has burst into popular usage as a term for everything from rock music to the whole cultural style and mood of recent decades . Blackburn ( 1994 ) defined postmodernism as a reaction against a naïve confidence in objective or scientific truth . It rejects the idea of progress in utopian assumptions about evolution , social improvement and efforts in education to produce reform . It denies the idea of fixed meanings , or any correspondence between language and the world , or any fixed reality or truth or fact to be the object of enquiry . 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 " . He further argued that in our postmodern condition , these metanarratives no longer work to legitimize truth- claims . In a way , he stressed the fragmentary and plural characteristics of reality , believing that there is no universal truth and no grand theory is credible . In the 1970s , in America changes were also taking place . Richard Rorty revived the pragmatism of Pierce , James , and Dewey . Pragmatism championed those ideas that apply practically , repudiating philosophy's reputation of being essentially idealistic and abstract . It finds troubling philosophy's insistence on truth and certainty , instead of insisting on the importance of trying different methods and ways of life and then evaluating them with regard to their consequences ( Rorty , 1979 ) . In the field of science , all the hopes of Newtonian physics eternal physical laws which are objective and absolute-- were dashed with the emergence of Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity in which the space - time manifold ceases to exist , an objective physical reality , and geometry becomes relational and contextual . Furthermore , in the last decades of the century developments in the theory of self - regulating systems in biology and cybernetics , chaos theory and catastrophe theory have been exploited as a part of new sciences with postmodern implications . Another strain of postmodernism refers to the radical changes of the society : the end of the last vestiges of European colonialism after the Second World War , the development of mass communications and a media culture and the shrinking of the globe by internal marketing , telecommunications , and intercontinental missiles which led to a significant delegitimization of authority and to a more egalitarian society . Edward Said ( 1978 ) found that colonized people were dehumanized , stereotyped , and treated not as communities of individuals but as an indistinguishable mass about whom one amasses knowledge . 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 . Derrida ( 1976 ) denounced the " mercantilization of knowledge " ( p . 51 ) and the contrived invisibility of the author , a presence behind the text exerting authority and influence but protected from recognition and critique unless deconstructed . For postmodernists , Habermas's ( 1975 ) " crisis of legitimation " is the recognition that every author exercises authority that promotes an agenda , denies alternative views , and fails to guarantee its own truth . Foucault ( 1973 ) examined how power is legitimized through complex social structures and objected to discourses in which " the privileges of one subject-- to tell stories or decide what the topic is-- materially diminish the rights of other subjects . "He showed how discourse regulates what can be said , what can be thought , and what is considered true or correct . In his opinion , discourse is the medium through which power is expressed and people and practices are governed . Outside philosophical and scientific inquiry after the Second World War new tendencies in art , literature , music and architecture emerged which critiqued the bourgeois capitalist social order that carried the economic load of modernity . To name a few developments : dissonant and atonal music , impressionism , surrealism , and expressionism in painting , literary realism , and the stream of consciousness novel emerged which seemed to open the imagination to a subjective world of experience which was ignored by the modern society and technology .