Emerging and spreading about 20 years ago, in a period of reaction with almost no social movements, postmodernism bears the imprint of conservatism and lowered expectations. Postmodernism tells us that we can't grasp the whole, indeed that the desire for an overview of what's going on out there is unhealthy and suspect, even totalitarian. Having hit on this epiphany, the pomo troops were quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Skeptical about the claims and results of previous systems of thought, postmodernism has in fact jettisoned nearly all desire or hope of making sense of what we experience. Instead, postmodernists focus on surfaces, fragments, margins.
Reality is too shifting, complex, and indeterminate to decipher or judge.
The postmodern style is notorious for its dense language and games of contradiction. Shared and direct experience, which once helped us understand the meaning and texture of life, are two major casualties of this cyborg imperative. Things grow stark and menacing in every sphere, and still Haraway and the postmodern crowd insist that conclusions be avoided. Postmodernism celebrates evanescent flows, a state of no boundaries, the transgressive. If this sounds familiar, it's because these values are shared by the most ardent architects of both consumerism and capitalist globalization.