ABSTRACT

The effort to apply poststructuralism and postmodernism to a methodical cultural analysis is resisted by the authors of these traditions like Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard. Poststructuralism helps change the way people think about cultural reception by showing that reading is a strong form of social practice. Postmodernism for its part is a theory of cultural, intellectual and societal discontinuity that rejects the linearism of Enlightenment notions of progress. Postmodernism adds to German critical theory a perspective on mass culture that is more ecumenical and less mandarin than some of the Frankfurt aesthetic theory, providing a valuable corrective to Adorno's cultural pessimism. Critical postmodernism is able carefully to disentangle aspects of culture that serve the interest of liberation from the dominant cultural hegemony. A critical postmodernism aims to be a total social theory, explaining all manner of political-economic, cultural and psychological developments in late capitalism.