Ideas about Post-Modernists

I feel that Richard Rorty puts a main idea of post-modernism the best in the short phrase: “our task in the U.S. is to keep ‘the conversation going rather than to find objective truth’” (Smith 377). Perceptions of each person are put into perspective and this completely changes things. Objective truths that so many have argued for can now be seen as something that may work for some but not all. Lyotard makes arguments against metanarratives or how these stories don’t all sides of the story but are frequently used.

An example of a metanarrative would be Freud and his belief that human history is a narrative of the repression of sexual desires. Also, Christians believe adamantly in their religion and see everyone else as sinners. In a postmodern view, there is no one real answer or no one way to live out one’s life. It is what is appropriate at that moment or what sounds they best given a certain situation. Generalizations are conforming. Baudrillard adds other ideas about steering away from one objective truth.

Baudrillard argues that we are a culture of the “simulacrum.” As Saussure introduces ideas of the sign/signifier/signified, Baudrillard refutes this by introducing the simulacrum. The classic example of simulacrums is saying that someone owns and orginal Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa CD. Baudrillard would say that Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa is just a simulacrum. This CD is not really the one and only copy out there (or original) and the person who purchased the CD really doesn’t own it. To see the CD as an “original” is no longer true. The “distinction between the original and the copy is destroyed” (Storey 133). There are a million copies out thre that mean something different to each owner. Another example is that Andy Warhol paintings can be seen all over the place now. His paintings are on t-shirts, bags and notebooks to name a few. These paintings were once originals hanging on museum walls but now they reprints mimicking the original. The paintings have deviated from their original intended meaning from the author and now have thousands of meanings.

These ideas all play heavily into rhetoric because this creates multiple perspectives to which one can take. And to understand your audience in order to articulate yourself most effectively, all the perspectives that an audience member might understand should be taken into account and the post-modernists give us new ways of understanding these.


Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. An Introduction. 4th ed. The University of Georgia Press: 2006.