Postmodernity is defined by the delegitimation of metanarratives

Evidence

The defining trait of the postmodern condition, by contrast, is the loss of credibility of these meta-narratives. For Lyotard, they have been undone by the immanent development of the sciences themselves: on the one hand, by a pluralization of types of argument, with the proliferation of paradox and paralogism — anticipated within philosophy by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Levinas; and on the other hand, by a technification of proof, in which costly apparatuses, commanded by capital or the state, reduce ‘truth’ to ‘performativity’. Science in the service of power finds a new legitimation in efficiency. But the genuine pragmatics of postmodern science lies not in the pursuit of the performative, but in the production of the paralogistic — in micro-physics, fractals, discoveries of chaos, ‘theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable and paradoxical’. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 65

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core Jameson-adjacent definition of postmodernity as loss of metanarrative credibility — essential vocabulary for the debate.
• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s own periodization and his differing account of postmodernism; also to Lyotard’s ‘The Postmodern Condition’ directly. — connects to: Lyotard defines postmodernism as a modernism that celebrates the loss of ordered totality; The Frankfurt School’s rejection of teleological progress anticipates postmodernism’s abandonment of meta-narratives; The Frankfurt School resists simple classification as a precursor to postmodernism — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 21 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Periodizing postmodernism as a unified system may betray its own logic of difference #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 739
• Postmodern texts relate through difference rather than organic unity #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 120