____ characterizes Postmodernism, in which a number of styles and trends exist simultaneously.

Postmodernism is a movement which began in the social
sciences, arts and humanities just after the second world war. Although various
postmodernisms differ in intellectual heritage and theoretical perspective, they share
in common a sceptical attitude towards the knowability or even existence of any uniform
objective realities or criteria of truth, but instead insist on radical relativism.
Another shared characteristic of various postmodernisms is that they respond to what
Richard Rorty refers to as the "Linguistic Turn", in which language is seen not merely
as a tool of an intellectual discipline but constituative of the modes of disciplinary
knowledge.

In the arts, postmodernist works and criticism
are characterized by self-referentiality. Rather than the artist being an invisible
creator, often the artist intrudes into the work or the experience of the audience, and
the work itslef, rather than attempting to seamlessly portray a subject, often contains
jarring references to or commentaries on its own artificiality, in the form of visible
structural elements in qrchitecture, intrusive narration in fiction, or the breaking of
the illusion of the proscenium arch in Brecht.

The major
philosophical systems of postmodernism divide into the "high theory" or metaphysics of
Derrida, Lyotard, Heidegger and Baudrillard, the more historical work of Foucault
and Jameson, and the Anglo-Saxon neo-pragmatism of Rorty and
Fish.