Philosophically, ‘postmodern’ stands for the negation of science’s or a special paradigm’s dominance in the generation of common sense meaning. After the Middle Ages religion lost its power in this field, which was shifted to science and justified by technological achievements. Empiricism was the only acknowledged means for the generation of meanings.

But as contradictions grew and paradigmatic systems could not coexist, constructionist epistemologies became more popular, conceiving of reality as a social and biological construct and not as a perceivable, independent field ‘out there’. Many others before like Plato, Leibniz, or Kant had similar opinions, but none of them neither would nor could reason in a politically coloured postmodern manner.

Some characteristics of postmodernism are decontextualization, bricolage, constructivism, fragmental or loose structure, intertextuality, and polysemic signification.

Decontextualization is best exemplified by DocMarten’s shoes. First they were popular with the working class for the functional reason of foot protection. But with the working class in the political sense of the word disappeared the functional need for many people. Then punks and skinheads began to use the shoes as signifiers, placing them into another, non-pragmatic context.

For a film related example, refer to Blair Witch’s decontextualization of the amateur documentation frame or Trainspotting’s situating of the heroes in non-heroic contexts, turning them into antiheroes. Decontextualization can lead to bricolage, when the new combination of signifiers becomes significant to recognise a new genre or film identity copied and pasted from formerly foreign fields of meaning.