ABSTRACT
Postmodernism is most readily defined as the set of responses – cultural, political, intellectual – to the perceived failures of modernism both as a vanguard aesthetic movement and as a general ideology of human progress forged in the fires and bellows of the industrial age. Given the sheer diversity of modernism itself, though, the various postmodernist responses to it from the mid-1970s to early 1990s are themselves variable, even paradoxical and contradictory. The corresponding term, ‘postmodernity’, applies to the socio-historical situation in which the discourses and practices of modernity, based in the ideals of the Enlightenment, are understood to have been superseded. And while this reputedly new epoch is best realized in a post-industrial America that also happens to be the primary locus for the cultural trends and intellectual debates associated with postmodernism, the theoretical inspirations for its analysis as simultaneously an aesthetic and a historical break – that is, as a fundamental change in social reality – are principally drawn from the writings of a number of French thinkers whose works are commonly grasped under the rubric poststructuralism, and more generally, that of critical theory. If the term poststructuralism, evokes the names of Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard (the philosophers most identified with the name and concept of the postmodern), as well as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the broader term, critical theory, hearkens back to an even earlier moment, that of the Frankfurt School for Social Research and the likes of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. Interestingly, both of these intellectual movements evolved primarily in reaction to the perceived failures of preceding schools of thought. In the case of the Frankfurt School, critical theory thought to expand beyond the narrow economic determinism of traditional Marxism by uncovering and analysing the entire world of lived experience and culture, including aesthetics, which had previously been treated as a mere superstructural reflection of the economic infrastructure of modes and relations of production. In the case of poststructuralism, as the very name declares, the reaction was to the reputedly universalizing and scientistic tendencies of classic structuralism. Where structuralism, as a theoretical approach inspired by linguistics and anthropology, insisted on finding commonalities, identities and recurring, self-replicating ‘structures’, poststructuralism emphasized disparities, irremediable differences, fragmentation and un-selfsame heterogeneities. But as movements that were themselves disparate in form and 16more readily defined negatively by what they were reacting to, both classic critical theory and poststructuralism already contain the germs of postmodernism by their critical recycling of earlier ideas, just as postmodern art cites previous forms of visual or plastic expression. Indeed, postmodernism as both a trend and an object of analysis within the broadly defined field of critical theory draws much inspiration from contemporary developments in the arts. As for what we mean by critical theory writ large, that would encompass the wide array of theoretical, interdisciplinary work in the humanities and social sciences based primarily in the contributions of the Frankfurt School and the various structuralisms while drawing also and heavily upon the older legacy of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Ferdinand de Saussure.
