To initiate the discussion on postmodernism, we must acknowledge its diverse historical applications and their influence on contemporary society’s understanding. Depending on the context, the term postmodernism is often associated with nihilism, Jewish communism, a vile bourgeois ideology, or a mere academic ploy to enhance professional careers and differentiate themselves from the mainstream academic community with obscure language. This complexity arises from the fact that postmodernism is often interpreted by individuals labeled as postmodernists. However, this definition fails to encapsulate the essence of postmodernism itself, as it is impossible to define a word within its own definition. Nevertheless, I will provide a concise explanation based on the insights of French sociologist Jean-François Lyotard: > “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. ... The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language ... Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?” Its varied use in history can be expanded on with its abstract development of its **“great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal”** which is in response to modernist political analysis and the moral implications which are dictated as morally valuable that follow from the production of art, cultural consumption, and the development of individuality within the context of that which allows for that expression of art and consumption to exist and be dictated as valuable which may include but aren’t limited to the bare material economic factors which drive the mutual economic interaction for which social forces strive for greater collective goals, like profit, trade, development, investment, or the sustenance of the production of art and culture. The documentation and evolution of the concept of postmodernism came alongside the development of technology, our mode of production, our social relations, and the existential understanding of ourselves. The modernist conceptions of these have been based upon liberal Enlightenment principles proceeding the decline of pre-modern conceptions of humanity/reality and its perceived decline as the predominant narrative based upon the increasing skepticism in society of what were once fundamental and primarily Christian principles that dominated it. Enlightenment values are based on the premise that human beings have the fundamental rational capacity to discover the truth, and that there is a moral necessity in educating humans to have the tools for independent analysis beyond ideological doctrines. In Foucault’s What is Enlightenment? (1983), an analysis of Immanuel Kant’s essay published in 1784, a year after the success of the American Revolution, Kant believes that “Enlightenment is a process that releases us from the status of 'immaturity.' And by 'immaturity,' he means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else's authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for.” Foucault elaborates on that, “ Enlightenment is defined by a modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason.” To Foucault and in his interpretation, Kant, Locke, Rousseau, and the various philosophers which base their influence as a response to the pre-modern notions of natural law, democracy, and as a response to the right to political rule being inherent to a class of people according to an unjustified notion of authority not based on reason, Enlightenment seeks to use the faculty of reason to rise humanity from the “immaturity” of blind acceptance of unjustified authority. Through unification of fields of study on the basis of human processes of reason being able to create the tools in which we can discover the truth, the meta-narrative of modernism was born. A meta-narrative is the arbitrary collection of facts into a cohesive narrative, be either historical or academic, or both, that a society is subjected to and subjects itself to in order to explain itself, its inhabitants’ behavior, and reality. The meta-narrative of modernism came alongside the moral implications from analysis of the raw data of the material sciences from a rational subject with an intrinsic nature through the processes of reason. What Post Modernism did was differentiate itself by rejecting the meta-narrative in order to deconstruct the processes which allow us to make conclusions of the Truth, and how in many ways the methods in which we have developed to discover it have been tinted mildly in service of an flawed understanding of ourselves, the ideology of human nature, contingent on historical circumstances such as the Catholic Church’s dominant control over power, knowledge, and academia, deafened and limited the capacity for philosophical inquiry which challenged the metaphysical and theological interpretation of Catholicism which dominated particularly Europe, but through historical colonization would thus effect the Colonized World. This extended into physics, biology, sociology, philosophy, and any other academic field you can think of. This ideology can be examined from the Catholic Church to the power of National States and how they exercise and regional corporate conglomerates, and in the most extreme sense, were used to fuel racist notions of human nature exacerbated by the distribution of knowledge from states which had a motive to eliminate groups of peoples. Nazi Germany developed a unique meta-narrative borrowing from then-academic notions of race, anti semitic conspiracy theories, and the mythological belief in the Germanic peoples’ inherent right to any European land they could conquer, which grew from contentious facts in an age of limited knowledge and technology, from the development of modernist political influences and feudalist notions of an inherent system of dominance necessary to subject those lesser into labor or subject to the flaming passions of their racist ideology. Despite that development from feudalist theocratic rule power, truth, and knowledge have historically been concentrated in a few hands and have evolved in some aspects into the control of corporations that profit off of everyday human expression through the authority within a contemporary capitalist economy. The ideology of human nature as having the capacity to discover the objective Truth, here in my opinion, exposes itself as ideology when we look at what was the generalized term for humanity and human nature for a long time, Man. A modernist thinker particularly influenced by Marx, Erich Fromm in his 1961 work Marx’s Concept of Man, says, > ‘ “Man's potential, for Marx, is a given potential; man is, as it were, the human raw material which, as such, cannot be changed, just as the brain structure has remained the same since the dawn of history. Yet, man does change in the course of history; he develops himself; he transforms himself, he is the product of history; since he makes his history, he is his own product. History is the history of man's self-realization; it is nothing but the self-creation of man through the process of his work and his production the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labor, and the emergence of nature for man; he therefore has the evident and irrefutable proof of his self-creation, of his own origins." Within its attempts to find objective meaning in our capacities as humans, we thus limit it in our historic analysis and our current concepts of human nature, through our emphasis on Man, on human nature from the perspective of human beings who primarily express masculinity, which in itself has had a dynamic expression and generalized interpretation of such phenomena that our concepts of human nature which include two sexes and various gender expressions, have been historically limited to the aspects of patriarchal expression and how it has developed. With the development of the industrial capitalist economy from feudalism came alongside the ideas that spurred on that desire stemming from a desire to liberate themselves from the inherent injustices found within feudalism. For that development, such as liberal Enlightenment principles, our values, and what we viewed as morally acceptable evolved alongside it. We went from the feudalist labor relations of an aristocrat in which the people who lived in land we’re not the owners of the land or the home they lived in that land but tended to the land as they saw fit alongside strict regulations from their feudal lord to provide to him proceeds of their profit and land as they saw fit, to the sale of one’s labor and individuality to corporations which seek to maximize their profits by lessening labor and general costs and incentivizing increased workload output without adequate compensation in return. The Enlightenment values of Reason, which is the moral value in the faculty of Reason, which is believed to help us move towards the Truth thus utilizing it for our collective and individual benefit, this was a modernist development of the rational human subject and understanding of our capacity to further understand the world. It was an understanding of the world influenced by philosophers like Descartes and the various Enlightenment thinkers he influenced believed and evolved from that belief that the only thing that can be known was through processes engaged by the subject and the judgments produced from it, because it was the only thing consistent and coherent in being able to interact and process the world. This philosophical theory widely influenced the humanities, philosophy, and our understanding of ourselves as we moved past the limited conclusion of Descartes and evolved past the subject and into its material and social relations with the world, and it created the seed with which Enlightenment philosophy could be born. The fundamental distinction between Modernism and Post Modernism within the topic of the individual subject and which in my opinion is the most distinct and fundamental in understanding it is that there is a question in our ability to objectively make that statement in the first place about a subject’s ability to determine the limits of its faculties or the goals of its faculties and whether our ideas of these limits come from historic preconceptions of the self. In a rebuke of the Enlightenment, Declarations of our ability to find out the Truth as ahistorical procedure and faculty, and declaring the Truth as ahistorical phenomenon is seen by Post Modernism as controlling attempts in setting the narratives of human capability and where human nature, which becomes an object of analysis and a concept alienated from individual control, dictates our behavior to be oriented towards and that these developments of how we view reality, which the material and social sciences intend to expand upon in their understanding and whose authority we alongside governmental authorities rely upon to dictate reality, are in many ways used by these governmental institutions particularly the political state in maintaining dominance over the human body and in effect society. This was the particular political development of Post Modernism elaborated on by Foucault and can be described as a more materialist analysis of the abstract concepts found within Post Modernism, in comparison to, say, Baudrillard, who focuses on the objects of concepts and how they dissolve in meaning due to intentional and unintentional developments in external pressures in which concepts are so marred from their origins that it is the foundational point of departure for external institutions, to use these concepts for intentional purposes that their use of the concept becomes that which is referred to as opposed to what it’s originally developed from. This is the main function of simulacra in Baudrillard’s concept of Post Modernity. For example, Bob Marley, who was an explicit activist and supporter of indigenous revolutionary groups and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, after death became a smiling, peaceful symbol equivalent to the beautiful, passive sun, roaming through rogue villages of brown children and fellow villagers in the remote jungles singing about peace, love, and marijuana. As opposed to the devout Rastafarian who actively had critical views of the same mechanisms of capital which distorted his image into the smiling hippy of love and peace. What is referred to as Bob Marley is merely an image of what is presented of him to us, by the conglomerates who own his legacy and a foundational form of his expression that was quintessentially him, his music. Post Modernity devolves objects into concepts which become copies of what it originally was, which Baudrillard calls through a process of simulacrum, a mockery of it, at times what may be perceived as a satirical and ironic take on these concepts in their subversion, such as the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Peace Prize was developed with the purpose of glorifying individuals as figures who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses” as dictated by the will of Alfred Nobel, an arms manufacturer and inventor of dynamite. Figures associated with contributing to peace and the prestige as archangels working towards peace are awarded by the proceeds of wealth and prestige from a weapons manufacturer who profited off of human suffering and political instability. This is emphasized by its nominations of war criminals such as Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama. This process of simulacrum is a function of postmodernity, which is what he calls what developed from the epoch of modernism and the subsequent values that evolved from it. Postmodernism is the tool upon which we can examine narratives, but it itself is a development within the historical process of the discourse of social sciences. It rejects a meta-narrative while at the same time, a documented fact for many, something perceived as contrary to the modernist meta-narratives upon which our moral values are based. To some, this is enough to call it a meta-narrative against meta-narratives. Any concept of postmodernism used by particular academics is often contrary to the wishes of those described as postmodernist. This is a term thinkers associated with Postmodernism never described their ideologies as that or that they are those who espoused some notion of a doctrine of postmodernism. Postmodernism is the same phenomenon as modernism to an extent. It is an elaboration and response to its material and social conditions, which is now the acceptance of modernism and its downstream effects on culture, art, society, and knowledge. Yet, as well as a development in an understanding of how we view ourselves rather than towards an understanding of the Truth with a moral purpose. But in my belief, its analysis comes alongside some moral implications of making declarations of the truth, reality, and the effects of political control. Citations: Lyotard, J.-F., Bennington, G., Massumi, B., & Jameson, F. (2005). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Manchester University Press. Foucault, Michel, et al. “What Is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader, Vintage, 2010, pp. 34–35. Could be a loved animated music video by Bob Marley https://youtu.be/1ti2YCFgCoI?si=SY6rBoNjXymYHjqB