A description of “postmodernism” to which I am partial, but which will do little to reassure the already suspicious.

“‘Postmodern,’ to begin with, is a term that will serve rather loosely to indicate a variety of styles, perspectives, prejudices, and premises for which no single word is truly adequate. ‘Postmodernity,’ for the purposes of this text, marks out a certain territory in current intellectual culture, a general convergence of various ideologies and methods, each of whose proponents might justifiably object to so tidy and comprehensive an abstraction, because all other terms that could be used — ‘poststructuralism,’ ‘late modernity,’ ‘deconstruction,’ etc. — suffer from too confined a range of associations. In the exceedingly elementary, and perhaps misleading, sense given the word above — the ascendancy of rhetoric over dialectic — the postmodern indicates an auroral astonishment following upon a nocturnal oblivion: the West at long last awakes from the nightmare of philosophy, even the last ghosts of Enlightenment reason having been chased away, to discover and rejoice in the irreducibly aesthetic character and ultimate foundationlessness of ‘truth.’ In a world of ungovernable plurality, composed of an endless multiplicity of narratives, there can be no grand metanarrative that extracts itself from, and then comes to comprise, all the finite and culturally determined narratives that throng the horizons of meaning; no discourse can triumph over the particularities of all the stories that pass one another by in the general congress of cultures; there is no overarching dialectic by which a single and rationally ascertainable truth might be set above all merely contingent truths.”

-David Bentley Hart. The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 2003. (5)

This has to do with a discussion that came up over on, umm, Another Damned Blog. If I ever say “postmodern,” this is probably what I have in mind.