The Origins of Postmodernity
Postmodernity did not emerge as a distinct school of thought but rather as a historical mood — a reaction to the failure of the modern project with its cult of reason, progress, universals, and metanarratives. The philosophical articulation of postmodernity is typically traced back to 1960s France: Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. All three engaged in dismantling structures of power and knowledge, deconstructing “grand narratives,” and exposing supposedly neutral categories.
In The Postmodern Condition (1979), Lyotard proclaimed the death of the metanarrative — any universal explanation of historical processes. Foucault proposed understanding power not as a vertical structure but as a network of discourses. Derrida ultimately rejected the idea of objective meaning, giving intellectuals the tool of total critique applicable to any text or institution.
Philosophically, postmodernity was an act of destruction — not of the mundane, but of the fundamental: truth, reason, morality, even the subject itself. It rejected the very idea of objective reality, shifting the focus to interpretation, play, and simulation.
Made in USA: America’s Export Model of Postmodernity
French postmodernity was elitist and theoretical. The American version became applied and mass-market. In the U.S., postmodernity was first absorbed by universities — especially humanities departments from the late 1980s onward — where it gained institutional backing through “identity studies” and “critical theory.” Over time, these ideas passed through layers of institutionalization and entered mass culture — via journalism, film, television, the digital industry, and HR policies.
Export occurred through the global network of American universities, NGOs, grant programs, and the cultural industry. It coincided with the U.S. victory in the Cold War and the global dominance of the English-language media sphere. Postmodernity became the cultural analog of the dollar: it did not so much persuade as displace alternatives.
Modest Gains and Clear Failures
Postmodernity did help deconstruct certain colonial and racist narratives. It contributed to symbolic inclusion for minorities. It fostered methodological pluralism, expanding the boundaries of the humanities.
But its failures are more telling.
Postmodernity excels at dismantling but fails to build. It offered no positive program. Where modernity constructed intellectual architectures, postmodernity delivered only critique and irony.
The erosion of all forms of authority and truth led not to emancipation but to relativism and apathy. Cynicism became a cultural norm.
Many academic disciplines collapsed into self-referentiality, producing texts legible only to colleagues — not to the public. The result: intellectual decay.
Postmodernity not only failed to challenge capitalism — it became its ideal interface. The logic of simulation1 and commodification made it structurally compatible with late capitalism: flexible, decentered, and infinitely appropriable. Any protest is easily absorbed and rebranded (cf. Nike and BLM, Pride and corporate logos). Society fully capitulated to the market.
Cancel Culture and Other Products of Postmodernity
Cancel culture is the fusion of postmodernity with the normative rhetoric of the new morality. It tries to replace the loss of universal truth with identity-bound moralism: what matters is not what is said, but who says it. Rhetoric becomes total; distinctions vanish. A tweet error equals a crime.
Its logic stems from the idea of omnipresent power — a core concept in critical theory and late continental philosophy. Hence the compulsion to detect “oppression” even in its absence. Since truth is deemed unreachable, the only thing left to fight for is narrative primacy. Cancel culture operates as an aggressive meme — spreading without explanation or justification, but through coercion and fear.
Other destructive memes include the concept of microaggressions and the culture of safe spaces, where political engagement is displaced by demands for psychological comfort; administrative intersectionality2; performative ethics3, where symbolic displays of loyalty override actual behavior; and finally, a new form of censorship — exclusion from public and professional life, driven by institutional pressure and the threat of online retaliation.
Conclusion
Postmodernity won. And it failed.
It dismantled hierarchies — and failed to replace them.
It delegitimized norms — and left only fragmentation.
Truth became optional. Language became tribal.
The result was not emancipation, but entropy.
Only the first wave meant something. What followed was mass-produced simulation — critique without substance, grants without ideas, thought without effort. The rest was completed by free communication and algorithmic affirmation.
What’s Next
In 2010, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker wrote Notes on Metamodernism, describing “oscillation” between modernity and postmodernity as the core of a new sensibility. Metamodernism today is an attempt to move beyond the dead end of postmodernity without reverting to the naivety of modernist ideals. It accepts the loss of truth but persists in the search for value. Not a new paradigm — a symptom of intellectual interregnum4.
No compelling idea has yet emerged. Some thinkers (I call them realists) are returning to metaphysics: one now sees appeals to Christianity as a response to the so-called Islamic threat — something postmodernity clearly cannot address. Others try to invent a new vocabulary — one that cannot yet support thought, and whose purpose remains unclear.
I’ll return to that another time. ■
Simulation — as developed by Jean Baudrillard, refers to the replacement of reality with signs and models that no longer refer to anything “real.” In late capitalism, representation becomes autonomous: signs refer only to other signs, dissolving the boundary between the copy and the original.
Intersectionality — originally an analytical concept (Kimberlé Crenshaw) describing how overlapping structures of social inequality (race, gender, class, etc.) generate unique forms of vulnerability. In administrative practice, it has morphed into an identity hierarchy used to allocate institutional resources and access.
Performative ethics — a mode of moral signaling in which public gestures (apologies, acknowledgments, declarations of solidarity) substitute for actual behavior. Ethical standing is measured not by outcomes, but by the visibility of correct positions. The term draws contrast with Judith Butler’s notion of performativity — not about social signaling, but about the constitution of subjectivity through repeated acts.
Intellectual interregnum — Gramsci described a crisis when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” The term captures a historical moment of suspension between paradigms: normative structures have collapsed, but no new cognitive framework has consolidated to replace them.