postmodernism essay generator

Postmodernism Generator

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About: Postmodernism Generator

The Postmodernism Generator is a computer program that automatically produces "close imitations" of postmodernist writing. It was written in 1996 by Andrew C. Bulhak of Monash University using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars. A free version is also hosted online. The essays are produced from a formal grammar defined by a recursive transition network. Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about "Monte Carlo generators" in his 2001 book Fooled by Randomness as a real instance of the reverse Turing test: a human can be declared unintelligent if their writing cannot be told apart from a generated one. It was mentioned by biologist Richard Dawkins in the conclusion to his article "Postmodernism Disrobed" (1998) for the scientific journal Nature, reprinted in

Academic Discourse and Text Generators

Languages, code, servers, and manifestos, by elizabeth losh.

This paper looks at two recent text generators that are intended to raise questions about the style and substance of academic writing: Andrew Bulhak's "Postmodern Essay Generator" and Ian Bogost's "Latour Litanizer." Bulhak created his generator in the wake of the Sokal hoax to mock the pretentious vocabularies of aspiring intellectuals who might hope to publish what he considered to be their relativistic and impenetrable nonsense in peer-reviewed scholarly journals in the humanities. The generator creates sentences like this each time the page is refreshed: "If one examines subtextual deconstructivism, one is faced with a choice: either accept dialectic materialism or conclude that the collective is responsible for class divisions, but only if sexuality is interchangeable with consciousness." Bulhak used the Dada Engine to create the verbiage in the essays his program generated. The actual program was written in what he called "inelegant" pb code that used protocol buffers "" a platform-neutral, language-neutral, extensible way of serializing structured data "" and recursive transition networks (or RTNs) to create a diagrammable grammar that Bulhak also retasked in a program for automatically writing adolescent poetry dominated by "i" statements. In contrast, Bogost devised a much simpler javascript program that uses Wikipedia's random page API to generate lists of things and to provide brief poetic homages to the writing style of philosopher of science Bruno Latour, which frequently includes lists of seemingly disconnected objects. Bogost's program, which ends with the command to "litanize," has also been deployed in his larger critique of writing in the humanities, which is not only bad in his mind because it is obfuscatory but also because it is disconnected from the catalogues of things in everyday experience that he holds dear. A sample list created by the Latour Litanizer reads as follows: "Energy Tax Act, Linux Users of Victoria, Burton House, Fault line, NCAA Women's Division II Basketball Championship, USS Apache, Quinquagesima, Dbrowa, Wieliczka County, Karel Rychlík." It could be argued that both Bulhak and Bogost use their generators somewhat disingenuously. Bulhak closely engages with the linguistic features of the poststructuralist vocabulary he appropriates and struggles to create grammatical sense by tweaking his program to accommodate such complex, multisyllabic words. Bogost incorporates Latourian litanies into his own diatribes against the digital humanities and the humanities more generally, but each item is carefully chosen in accord with his own writerly ear rather than machine-generated by his online gadget with its procedural poetics of chance.

Elizabeth Losh - Critical Code Studies from IML @ USC on Vimeo .

In particular, don't send me e-mail that starts out, 'I know you said you don't do support, but"' because these e-mails will be deleted unread. I'm sorry if this seems curmudgeonly, but I don't have the time or the patience these days to deal with people who are trying to learn programming - these are not scripts for beginners.

Sharing of source code for web generators is also not always welcomed by the authorities. When Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian created a web generator that could print out look-alike versions of Northwest Airlines boarding passes, agents from the federal government forcibly entered his apartment and seized computers and other equipment. Soghoian was soon threatened with arrest. However, Soghoian's protest against potential flaws in the Transportation Security Administration had already drawn supporters, and soon one of them, Matt Watterman, created a humorous "warrant generator" for which "this script has been created for district courts all across the United States with the intent of improving national security by reducing the amount of time it takes for our public guardians to create search warrants." Users can enter names, addresses, and possible legal justifications into the warrant generator and receive a warrant that looks much like Soghoian's original. The warrant generator was also supplied with instructions, such as "Enter desired legal mumbo-jumbo below. Again, make sure to use run-on sentences and try to cite some laws and codes and stuff."

Soghoian never made the source code for his boarding pass generator public. Now, not only could users run the generator in their browsers directly from the downloaded files with more privacy, but also they could use 4d4m5's tool to create generators of their own. According to the explanation provided, this new JavaScript generator was meant "to demonstrate the framework that the NWA generator was written in" to inspire others to create "document generators like this one." As he explained it, the "design goal for the tool was that it be easy to modify any document it generates." 4d4m5 included a "hello.html" file, and he encouraged "people to play with the tool by modifying the hello_content.html and hello_form.html files to produce new generators that make passes for other airlines or whatever you deem appropriate."

Andrew C. Bulhak pointed to the so-called "Sokal hoax" as inspiration for creating the Postmodern Essay Generator, after physicist Alan Sokal cobbled together an essay, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," and successfully submitted it to the peer-reviewed journal Social Text. After the essay was in print, he described in in an "Afterward" as a "mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever" (Sokal 338). Bulhak took Sokal's claim that postmodern criticism was randomly assembled nonsense to the next step of creating a generator, so that a machine could produce prose just as authoritative and incoherent as Sokal's essay. Bulhak applied the Dada Engine to the project to populate web pages with polysyllabic diction and generous footnotes at the push of a refresh browser button. A typical "postmodern" sentence reads as follows: "If one examines subtextual deconstructivism, one is faced with a choice: either accept dialectic materialism or conclude that the collective is responsible for class divisions, but only if sexuality is interchangeable with consciousness." The generator spouts out papers with titles like "Pretextual Theories: Objectivism, Debordist Situation, and Cultural Deappropriation," "Postconstructivist Discourses: Cultural Dematerialism and Capitalism," and "The Failure of Art: Conceptual Neocapitalist Theory, Marxism and Expressionism." Recently Bulhak also created an iPhone application that can also incorporate location information somewhat crudely into the results. Bulhak makes his criticism of theoretical postmodernism even more explicit in a paper about his generator, in which he compares the system's output of Sokal-like pseudo-postmodern prose to a simulation of "mental debility" like the "ranting of a paranoid schizophrenic street preacher, or perhaps a USENET ranter" and suggests the script could be modified to mimic the writing in "eccentric pseudoscientic/religious pamphlets." Bulhak explains that his other inspiration came from reading Douglas Hofstadter's Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid in which Hofstadter "demonstrated a method of generating meaningless but grammatically correct English text" and "illustrated this method with an example: a selection of 13 fragments of text, ten of which were generated by a computer and three which were taken from a journal titled Art-Language." Bulhak also describes an additional practical application for the source code to explain its origin: "this script was originally written with the intention of generating bogus practice examination papers to be distributed in lectures for the purpose of scaring students." All three explanations have to do with simulating academic discourse: in Social Text, in Art-Language, and in an everyday examination situation. The actual program was written in what Bulhak called "inelegant" pb code that used protocol buffers "" a platform-neutral, language-neutral, extensible way of serializing structured data "" and recursive transition networks (or RTNs) to create a diagrammable grammar that Bulhak also retasked in a program for automatically writing adolescent poetry dominated by "i" statements. The different morphologies of the preposition/adjective/noun/verb structure in the Dada Engine are unpacked in the engine's documentation. He also gives examples of variables, parametric rules, and operators that allow shortcuts. The source code itself is also generously commented. Comments in pb are handled as in C++ and Java. A comment of any length may be enclosed  between the sequence `/*' and the sequence `*/'.  Alternatively, one-line comments may be preceded  by `//'. The following are valid comments: /* This is a two-line comment. See? */ // You are not expected to understand this. Although his generator mocking academic discourse once lived on a server from Monash University in Australia, Bulhak seems to have left academia and now lives in London, where he works in the private sector "in IT, with Linux, Python, C/C++ and web technologies, both professionally and otherwise"; he also periodically DJs, according to his home page. Bulhak had used his outsider status to criticize the insular self-authenticating structures of academic institutions; in the nineties his name was often linked online to "psychoceramics" and others who used the Internet to mock crackpot disciplines that were propagated by the structures of academic print publishing. His generator was even cited admiringly by Richard Dawkins in a 1998 essay in Nature called "Postmodernism Disrobed."

As games, these rely on the procedural representation of an idea that the player manipulates. As poetry, they rely on the condensation of symbols and concepts rather than the clarification of specific experiences. As images, they offer visually evocative yet obscure depictions of real scenes and objects. They are inspired by ideas or experiences I encounter, as attempts to capture something fundamental about how they work.

What Latour's litanies effectively accomplish is an annulment of prototypes that come to stand for the being and nature of all objects. Through the creation of a litany of heterogeneous objects, the object theorist is forced to think that heterogeneity as such rather than implicitly (and often unconsciously) drawing on one prototypical object that functions as the representative of the nature of all objects.

It's not possible to get through the day without crossing hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of ignored subjects of philosophy ready to be thought in earnest . . . the whippoorwills, the linen petticoats, the combine harvesters, the paper shredders, the salt water taffy, the magnolia blossoms, the waves that crash to shore, the bits that race from hard disks, the stippling on unseen bookplates

Bogost, Ian. "A Slow Year." Ian Bogost: Videogame Theory, Criticism, Design. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. ---. "Latour Litanizer." Ian Bogost: Videogame Theory, Criticism, Design. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. ---. "The Cocktail Party Test." Ian Bogost: Videogame Theory, Criticism, Design. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. ---. "We Think in Public." Ian Bogost: Videogame Theory, Criticism, Design. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. ---. "What is Object-Oriented Ontology?." Ian Bogost: Videogame Theory, Criticism, Design. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. Bryant, Levi. "Latour Litanizer." Larval Subjects. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. Bulhak, Andrew C. "acb." Web. 10 Oct. 2010. ---. "Communications from Elsewhere." Web. 10 Oct. 2010. ---. "On the simulation of postmodernism and mental debility using recursive transition networks." Dept Computer Science Technical Reports 96.254 (1996): n. pag. Web. ---. "The Dada Engine - Table of Contents." Web. 10 Oct. 2010. Dawkins, Richard. "Postmodernism disrobed." Nature 394.6689 (1998): 141-143. Web. Harman, Graham. "Latour Litanies and Gibbon." Object-Oriented Philosophy. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. ---. Prince of networks : Bruno Latour and metaphysics. Prahran Vic.: Re.press, 2009. Print. J0hn 4d4m5. "Document Gennreator." Web. 10 Oct. 2007. Sanders, Ryland. "Church Sign Maker." Web. 9 Oct. 2010. ---. "Says-It.com - Frequently Asked Questions." Web. 9 Oct. 2010. Soghoain, Christopher. "Chris's NWA Boarding Pass Generator." Web. 10 Oct. 2010. Soghoian, Christopher. "Insecure Flight: Broken Boarding Passes and Ineffective Terrorist Watch Lists." SSRN eLibrary (2007): n. pag. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. Sokal, Alan D. "Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword." Philosophy and Literature 20.2 (1996): 338-346. Web. ---. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Social Text 46/47 (1996): 217-252. Print. Stribling, Jeremy, Max Krohn, and Dan Aguayo. "SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator." Web. 10 Oct. 2010. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Expressive processing : digital fictions, computer games, and software studies. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2009. Print. Watterman, Matt. "fakewarrant." Web. 9 Oct. 2010.

116 Postmodernism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best postmodernism topic ideas & essay examples, 💡 interesting topics to write about postmodernism, 📌 simple & easy postmodernism essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on postmodernism, ❓ questions about postmodernism.

• Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “What Is Postmodernism” Of interest was the fact that the society came to accept the importance of painting. Although the audience knows that falling in love with Viola is normal because she is a woman, to the eye […]
• From Modernism to Postmodernism The desire to move out of the era of modernism to postmodernism was desirable. The change of modernism to postmodernism is an evolution of traditional believes and practices to a modern way of thinking.
• Paradigm Shift From Modernism to Postmodernism Ways of Thinking Specifically, Freud invented the subconscious part of the mind, the superego, which helps in analyzing how one thinks, in other words, evaluating the correctness of the thinking. On the part of the ego, Sartre acknowledges […]
• Postmodernism in Anthropology Thus, the change of epochs in the human philosophy was also the shift in the scientific focus on society, i.e.the social sciences could not escape the influence of the shift and followed it, adjusting the […]
• Postmodernism in Robert Coover’s The Babysitter The foremost feature of postmodernism – challenging Enlightenment – that arouses in the text is the attempt of the author to show the subconscious behavior of the characters.
• Postmodernism and Education Postmodernism is the word used by sociologists and other scholars to refer to a the intelligence that has developed in the western world.
• The Shift From Modernism to Postmodernism Fredric Jameson’s postmodernism theory is considered to be “the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so consistent thing […]
• Postmodernism, Realism, Anti-Realism in Nursing The effects of postmodernism in our society are real. Equally, in our hospital prayers held for the inpatients and outpatients attest the effects of postmodernism in nursing.
• Epistemological Approaches of Empiricism and Postmodernism Locke believes that the world is physical and thus in his account of solving the mind body problem, he says that the mind and body are just one and the same thing and continues to […]
• Postmodernism and Social Constructionism The concept of social constructivism gives people the power to create and encourages them to create a positive world that they will exist in peace.
• Discussion of Postmodernism in Modern World Postmodernism and social constructionism inform my work by influencing the selection of interviewing techniques and the readiness to accept the multiplicity of perspectives on the same issue in clinical contexts.
• Relevance of Postmodernism to Theory and Practice in Educational Research When discussing about research it is important to discuss about the definition of research and according to various sources, research is any activity that is conducted or based around investigations on an intellectual foundation and […]
• Scholars on Postmodernism as Social Theory In addition to this, the ideological argument claims that objectivity is a deception and that it is aimed at undermining the minority groups in all parts of the world and especially in the third world […]
• “Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics” The third condition is where members should have the freedom to exit or associate with a group; for instance, the case of intercultural marriage. Gender is one of the main fields that have created major […]
• Researching of Postmodernism Theories The concepts emphasize a multiplicity of perspectives and diversity of human experiences. Postmodernism theories challenge the notion that creativity and diversity are common and should be appreciated.
• Contingent Foundations: Feminism and Postmodernism Feminism offers women theoretical bases on which to interrogate the issues of womanhood while Postmodernism takes this away by arguing for the “death of subjects”.abolition of the foundations of the ideals of reality.
• O. J. Simpson Case: Myths and Postmodernism One of the issues that it raised among researchers was the emergence of myths about the criminal justice that can affect the justice system.
• Postmodernism and Social Constructionism in a Clinical Setting Effects of social constructivism on the subject at hand: gradual identification of the probable solution and the creation of the vaccine. Collaboration and knowledge sharing as the cornerstone principles of development.
• The Clash of Postmodernism, Secularism and Pluralism Due to the increase in the extent of exposure to numerous threats to the integrity of faith and their virtue, people need the guidance of an effective leader and the support of a faithful community.
• Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism I agree with the statement because people with different cultures have different ways of doing things and architecture is one of the crucial tools used to express the culture of the people.
• After-Postmodernism Era Suggestions It can be said that postmodernism is the current cultural and philosophical paradigm that determines the structure and content of various fundamental ideas and arts. It means that after-postmodernism will deny the concepts of subversion, […]
• Mix of Non-Traditional Media and Images in Postmodernism Art It can be seen in the materials, which is the objects of these work made of. The use of color is bright and contrasting.
• Postmodernism in the Church Analysis Milbank, John observes that one of the things to note of the postmodernism ideology is that its elaborate and rudimentary forms and implications have crept into the church itself.”The influence of postmodernism has been experienced […]
• Understanding Postmodernism Through the Emerging Church Another perspective on this term is connected to the connection to anything of the current and that which has been approved and is also appealing to the human being.
• The Church and Postmodernism-Driven Attitudes of People The pivotal goal of implementing change processes concerning the church is to achieve the convergence in how God and people view others.
• Postmodernism Era: Body and Popular Culture To understand how the body is constructed and deconstructed in modern western society, it is important to analyze the significance of the corporeal factor in the culture of postmodernism.
• Postmodernism Building and Understanding In the field of art, postmodernism refers to the new approaches that were taken by modern artists as the world experienced various changes. However, his works on art are generally believed to have shaped postmodernism […]
• Postmodernism Characteristics in Trafford Centre De-differentiation is used in the shops to make products of a particular firm look completely unique. Hyper-reality and de-differentiation are used in the shopping centre to change the outlook of products or to make counterfeit […]
• Postmodernist Anthropology and Its Impact on Translation Practice Indeed, one of the fundamental tasks of anthropology is understanding different cultures, which “inevitably involves either the translation of words, ideas, and meanings from one culture to another, or the translation to a set of […]
• How Postmodernism Can Be Used as a Theoretical Approach to the Humanities There are myriad of practices, methods and ideals that encompass the concept of postmodernism, especially in regards to humanities. Some of the most common theoretical applications of postmodernism have been witnessed in humanities, post-structuralism and […]
• Postmodernism in the Works of Ettore Sottsass The era of Postmodernism in art and culture is associated with the middle years of the 20th century when the top point of its development in design is the 1980s.
• Reading the Notes of Desolate Man: Zhu Tianwen and Her Postmodernist Talent However close people can explore the life of the other and predict the deeds of the rest of the people, there will always be a certain element of secrecy about the other personality and the […]
• Postmodernism: Decor of a Room, Proliferation of Surfaces or Something Else? Having outlined the field of interest which is the notion of postmodernism in relation to popular culture, Storey observes the evolution of postmodernism from its origin to nowadays and makes the effort to define the […]
• Modernization, Postmodernism and the Third World In addition it holds the reality of being dependent on the interested parties and the nature of those interests. The argument for the significance of the term implies that there has been establishment of decentralization […]
• Postmodernist Trends in Projects by Ashton Raggatt McDougall It is easy to see how these principles took shape in one of ARM’s most significant and famous projects, which is the National Museum of Australia.”Avoiding traditional museum interpretations, the architects developed a post-modern structure […]
• Alternative Culture and Postmodernism The lyrics of one of the songs in the album stated that “Modern hip hop has grown from the dancing and shaking moves to just plain rapping”.
• Postmodernism and Its Impact on Modern Society
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104 Postmodernism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Postmodernism is a complex and often controversial cultural and intellectual movement that has had a significant impact on various fields, including literature, art, philosophy, and architecture. If you are studying postmodernism or need to write an essay on this topic, you may be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information and ideas out there.

To help you get started, here are 104 postmodernism essay topic ideas and examples that you can use as inspiration for your own writing:

Literature:

• Analyze the use of metafiction in postmodern literature.
• Discuss the role of irony in postmodern literature.
• Compare and contrast postmodern literary techniques with those of modernism.
• Explore the theme of fragmentation in postmodern novels.
• Examine the concept of intertextuality in postmodern literature.
• Discuss the relationship between postmodernism and postcolonial literature.
• Analyze the representation of history in postmodern fiction.
• Discuss the influence of postmodernism on contemporary literature.
• Explore the use of parody and pastiche in postmodern novels.
• Examine the role of the author in postmodern literature.
• Analyze the use of bricolage in postmodern art.
• Discuss the relationship between postmodernism and the avant-garde.
• Explore the concept of the death of the author in postmodern art.
• Examine the role of pastiche in postmodern art.
• Discuss the influence of postmodernism on contemporary art.
• Analyze the representation of gender and sexuality in postmodern art.
• Explore the use of irony in postmodern art.
• Discuss the relationship between postmodernism and postcolonial art.
• Analyze the use of appropriation in postmodern art.
• Examine the concept of the simulacrum in postmodern art.

Philosophy:

• Discuss the concept of the postmodern condition in philosophy.
• Analyze the relationship between postmodernism and existentialism.
• Explore the role of the individual in postmodern philosophy.
• Discuss the concept of hyperreality in postmodern philosophy.
• Examine the influence of poststructuralism on postmodern philosophy.
• Analyze the relationship between postmodernism and deconstruction.
• Discuss the concept of the end of history in postmodern philosophy.
• Explore the role of language in postmodern philosophy.
• Analyze the concept of the Other in postmodern philosophy.
• Discuss the relationship between postmodernism and critical theory.

Architecture:

• Analyze the use of pastiche in postmodern architecture.
• Discuss the relationship between postmodernism and urban planning.
• Examine the concept of the postmodern city.
• Explore the role of nostalgia in postmodern architecture.
• Analyze the influence of postmodernism on contemporary architecture.
• Discuss the relationship between postmodernism and sustainability in architecture.
• Analyze the use of irony in postmodern architecture.
• Explore the concept of the hybrid building in postmodern architecture.
• Discuss the relationship between postmodernism and postcolonial architecture.
• Examine the role of cultural identity in postmodern architecture.

These are just a few examples of the many essay topics that you can explore within the realm of postmodernism. Whether you are interested in literature, art, philosophy, or architecture, there is a wealth of material to draw upon when writing about this complex and fascinating movement. Good luck with your essay writing, and happy exploring!

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Postmodernism

That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.

The term “postmodernism” first entered the philosophical lexicon in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard. I therefore give Lyotard pride of place in the sections that follow. An economy of selection dictated the choice of other figures for this entry. I have selected only those most commonly cited in discussions of philosophical postmodernism, five French and two Italian, although individually they may resist common affiliation. Ordering them by nationality might duplicate a modernist schema they would question, but there are strong differences among them, and these tend to divide along linguistic and cultural lines. The French, for example, work with concepts developed during the structuralist revolution in Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, including structuralist readings of Marx and Freud. For this reason they are often called “poststructuralists.” They also cite the events of May 1968 as a watershed moment for modern thought and its institutions, especially the universities. The Italians, by contrast, draw upon a tradition of aesthetics and rhetoric including figures such as Giambattista Vico and Benedetto Croce. Their emphasis is strongly historical, and they exhibit no fascination with a revolutionary moment. Instead, they emphasize continuity, narrative, and difference within continuity, rather than counter-strategies and discursive gaps. Neither side, however, suggests that postmodernism is an attack upon modernity or a complete departure from it. Rather, its differences lie within modernity itself, and postmodernism is a continuation of modern thinking in another mode.

Finally, I have included a summary of Habermas's critique of postmodernism, representing the main lines of discussion on both sides of the Atlantic. Habermas argues that postmodernism contradicts itself through self-reference, and notes that postmodernists presuppose concepts they otherwise seek to undermine, e.g., freedom, subjectivity, or creativity. He sees in this a rhetorical application of strategies employed by the artistic avant-garde of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an avant-garde that is possible only because modernity separates artistic values from science and politics in the first place. On his view, postmodernism is an illicit aestheticization of knowledge and public discourse. Against this, Habermas seeks to rehabilitate modern reason as a system of procedural rules for achieving consensus and agreement among communicating subjects. Insofar as postmodernism introduces aesthetic playfulness and subversion into science and politics, he resists it in the name of a modernity moving toward completion rather than self-transformation.

1. Precursors

2. the postmodern condition, 3. genealogy and subjectivity, 4. productive difference, 5. deconstruction, 6. hyperreality, 7. postmodern hermeneutics, 8. postmodern rhetoric and aesthetics, 9. habermas's critique, other internet resources, related entries.

The philosophical modernism at issue in postmodernism begins with Kant's “Copernican revolution,” that is, his assumption that we cannot know things in themselves and that objects of knowledge must conform to our faculties of representation (Kant 1787). Ideas such as God, freedom, immortality, the world, first beginning, and final end have only a regulative function for knowledge, since they cannot find fulfilling instances among objects of experience. With Hegel, the immediacy of the subject-object relation itself is shown to be illusory. As he states in The Phenomenology of Spirit , “we find that neither the one nor the other is only immediately present in sense-certainty, but each is at the same time mediated ” (Hegel 1807, 59), because subject and object are both instances of a “this” and a “now,” neither of which are immediately sensed. So-called immediate perception therefore lacks the certainty of immediacy itself, a certainty that must be deferred to the working out of a complete system of experience. However, later thinkers point out that Hegel's logic pre-supposes concepts, such as identity and negation (see Hegel 1812), which cannot themselves be accepted as immediately given, and which therefore must be accounted for in some other, non-dialectical way.

The later nineteenth century is the age of modernity as an achieved reality, where science and technology, including networks of mass communication and transportation, reshape human perceptions. There is no clear distinction, then, between the natural and the artificial in experience. Indeed, many proponents of postmodernism challenge the viability of such a distinction tout court , seeing in achieved modernism the emergence of a problem the philosophical tradition has repressed. A consequence of achieved modernism is what postmodernists might refer to as de-realization. De-realization affects both the subject and the objects of experience, such that their sense of identity, constancy, and substance is upset or dissolved. Important precursors to this notion are found in Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche. Kierkegaard, for example, describes modern society as a network of relations in which individuals are leveled into an abstract phantom known as “the public” (Kierkegaard 1846, 59). The modern public, in contrast to ancient and medieval communities, is a creation of the press, which is the only instrument capable of holding together the mass of unreal individuals “who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization” (Kierkegaard 1846, 60). In this sense, society has become a realization of abstract thought, held together by an artificial and all-pervasive medium speaking for everyone and for no one. In Marx, on the other hand, we have an analysis of the fetishism of commodities (Marx 1867, 444–461) where objects lose the solidity of their use value and become spectral figures under the aspect of exchange value. Their ghostly nature results from their absorption into a network of social relations, where their values fluctuate independently of their corporeal being. Human subjects themselves experience this de-realization because commodities are products of their labor. Workers paradoxically lose their being in realizing themselves, and this becomes emblematic for those professing a postmodern sensibility.

We also find suggestions of de-realization in Nietzsche, who speaks of being as “the last breath of a vaporizing reality” and remarks upon the dissolution of the distinction between the “real” and the “apparent” world. In Twilight of the Idols , he traces the history of this distinction from Plato to his own time, where the “true world” becomes a useless and superfluous idea (1889, 485–86). However, with the notion of the true world, he says, we have also done away with the apparent one. What is left is neither real nor apparent, but something in between, and therefore something akin to the virtual reality of more recent vintage.

The notion of a collapse between the real and the apparent is suggested in Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche 1872), where he presents Greek tragedy as a synthesis of natural art impulses represented by the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Where Apollo is the god of beautiful forms and images, Dionysus is the god of frenzy and intoxication, under whose sway the spell of individuated existence is broken in a moment of undifferentiated oneness with nature. While tragic art is life-affirming in joining these two impulses, logic and science are built upon Apollonian representations that have become frozen and lifeless. Hence, Nietzsche believes only a return of the Dionysian art impulse can save modern society from sterility and nihilism. This interpretation presages postmodern concepts of art and representation, and also anticipates postmodernists' fascination with the prospect of a revolutionary moment auguring a new, anarchic sense of community.

Nietzsche is also a precursor for postmodernism in his genealogical analyses of fundamental concepts, especially what he takes to be the core concept of Western metaphysics, the “I”. On Nietzsche's account, the concept of the “I” arises out of a moral imperative to be responsible for our actions. In order to be responsible we must assume that we are the cause of our actions, and this cause must hold over time, retaining its identity, so that rewards and punishments are accepted as consequences for actions deemed beneficial or detrimental to others (Nietzsche 1889, 482-83; 1887, 24-26, 58-60). In this way, the concept of the “I” comes about as a social construction and moral illusion. According to Nietzsche, the moral sense of the “I” as an identical cause is projected onto events in the world, where the identity of things, causes, effects, etc., takes shape in easily communicable representations. Thus logic is born from the demand to adhere to common social norms which shape the human herd into a society of knowing and acting subjects.

For postmodernists, Nietzsche's genealogy of concepts in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (Nietzsche 1873, 77–97) is also an important reference. In this text, Nietzsche puts forward the hypothesis that scientific concepts are chains of metaphors hardened into accepted truths. On this account, metaphor begins when a nerve stimulus is copied as an image, which is then imitated in sound, giving rise, when repeated, to the word, which becomes a concept when the word is used to designate multiple instances of singular events. Conceptual metaphors are thus lies because they equate unequal things, just as the chain of metaphors moves from one level to another. Hegel's problem with the repetition of the “this” and the “now” is thus expanded to include the repetition of instances across discontinuous gaps between kinds and levels of things.

In close connection with this genealogy, Nietzsche criticizes the historicism of the nineteenth century in the 1874 essay, “On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life” (Nietzsche 1874, 57–123). On Nietzsche's view, the life of an individual and a culture depend upon their ability to repeat an unhistorical moment, a kind of forgetfulness, along with their continuous development through time, and the study of history ought therefore to emphasize how each person or culture attains and repeats this moment. There is no question, then, of reaching a standpoint outside of history or of conceiving past times as stages on the way to the present. Historical repetition is not linear, but each age worthy of its designation repeats the unhistorical moment that is its own present as “new.” In this respect, Nietzsche would agree with Charles Baudelaire, who describes modernity as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent” that is repeated in all ages (Cahoone 2003, 100), and postmodernists read Nietzsche's remarks on the eternal return accordingly.

Nietzsche presents this concept in The Gay Science (Nietzsche 1974 [1882], 273), and in a more developed form in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche 1883–1891, 269–272). Many have taken the concept to imply an endless, identical repetition of everything in the universe, such that nothing occurs that has not already occurred an infinite number of times before. However, others, including postmodernists, read these passages in conjunction with the notion that history is the repetition of an unhistorical moment, a moment that is always new in each case. In their view, Nietzsche can only mean that the new eternally repeats as new, and therefore recurrence is a matter of difference rather than identity. Furthermore, postmodernists join the concept of eternal return with the loss of the distinction between the real and the apparent world. The distinction itself does not reappear, and what repeats is neither real nor apparent in the traditional sense, but is a phantasm or simulacrum.

Nietzsche is a common interest between postmodern philosophers and Martin Heidegger, whose meditations on art, technology, and the withdrawal of being they regularly cite and comment upon. Heidegger's contribution to the sense of de-realization of the world stems from oft repeated remarks such as: “Everywhere we are underway amid beings, and yet we no longer know how it stands with being” (Heidegger 2000 [1953], 217), and “ precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence ” (Heidegger 1993, 332). Heidegger sees modern technology as the fulfillment of Western metaphysics, which he characterizes as the metaphysics of presence. From the time of the earliest philosophers, but definitively with Plato, says Heidegger, Western thought has conceived of being as the presence of beings, which in the modern world has come to mean the availability of beings for use. In fact, as he writes in Being and Time , the presence of beings tends to disappear into the transparency of their usefulness as things ready-to-hand (Heidegger 1962 [1927], 95-107). The essence of technology, which he names “the enframing,” reduces the being of entities to a calculative order (Heidegger 1993, 311-341). Hence, the mountain is not a mountain but a standing supply of coal, the Rhine is not the Rhine but an engine for hydro-electric energy, and humans are not humans but reserves of manpower. The experience of the modern world, then, is the experience of being's withdrawal in face of the enframing and its sway over beings. However, humans are affected by this withdrawal in moments of anxiety or boredom, and therein lies the way to a possible return of being, which would be tantamount to a repetition of the experience of being opened up by Parmenides and Heraclitus.

Heidegger sees this as the realization of the will to power, another Nietzschean conception, which, conjoined with the eternal return, represents the exhaustion of the metaphysical tradition (Heidegger 1991a, 199-203). For Heidegger, the will to power is the eternal recurrence as becoming, and the permanence of becoming is the terminal moment of the metaphysics of presence. On this reading, becoming is the emerging and passing away of beings within and among other beings instead of an emergence from being. Thus, for Heidegger, Nietzsche marks the end of metaphysical thinking but not a passage beyond it, and therefore Heidegger sees him as the last metaphysician in whom the oblivion of being is complete (Heidegger 1991a, 204-206; 1991b, 199-203). Hope for a passage into non-metaphysical thinking lies rather with Hölderlin, whose verses give voice to signs granted by being in its withdrawal (Heidegger 1994 [1937–1938], 115-118). While postmodernists owe much to Heidegger's reflections on the non-presence of being and the de-realization of beings through the technological enframing, they sharply diverge from his reading of Nietzsche.

Many postmodern philosophers find in Heidegger a nostalgia for being they do not share. They prefer, instead, the sense of cheerful forgetting and playful creativity in Nietzsche's eternal return as a repetition of the different and the new. Some have gone so far as to turn the tables on Heidegger, and to read his ruminations on metaphysics as the repetition of an original metaphysical gesture, the gathering of thought to its “proper” essence and vocation (see Derrida 1989 [1987]). In this gathering, which follows the lineaments of an exclusively Greco-Christian-German tradition, something more original than being is forgotten, and that is the difference and alterity against which, and with which, the tradition composes itself. Prominent authors associated with postmodernism have noted that the forgotten and excluded “other” of the West, including Heidegger, is figured by the Jew (see Lyotard 1990 [1988], and Lacoue-Labarthe 1990 [1988]). In this way, they are able to distinguish their projects from Heidegger's thinking and to critically account for his involvement with National Socialism and his silence about the Holocaust, albeit in terms that do not address these as personal failings. Those looking for personal condemnations of Heidegger for his actions and his “refusal to accept responsibility” will not find them in postmodernist commentaries. They will, however, find many departures from Heidegger on Nietzsche's philosophical significance (see Derrida 1979 [1978]), and many instances where Nietzsche's ideas are critically activated against Heidegger and his self-presentation.

Nevertheless, Heidegger and Nietzsche are both important sources for postmodernism's critical de-structuring or displacement of the signature concept of modern philosophy, the “subject,” which is generally understood as consciousness, or its identity, ground, or unity, and designated as the “I.” Where Nietzsche finds in this concept the original metaphysical error produced by morality and the communicative needs of the herd, Heidegger sees in it the end and exhaustion of the metaphysical tradition, inaugurated by the Greeks, in which being is interpreted as presence. Here, being is the underlying ground of the being of beings, the subiectum that is enacted in modern philosophy as the subject of consciousness. But in Being and Time Heidegger conceives the human being as Dasein , which is not simply a present consciousness, but an event of ecstatic temporality that is open to a past ( Gewesensein ) that was never present (its already being-there) and a future ( Zu-kunft ) that is always yet to come (the possibility of death). The finitude of Dasein therefore cannot be contained within the limits of consciousness, nor within the limits of the subject, whether it is conceived substantively or formally.

In addition to the critiques of the subject offered by Nietzsche and Heidegger, many postmodernists also borrow heavily from the psycho-analytic theories of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's distinctive gesture is his insistence that the Freudian unconscious is a function, or set of functions, belonging to language and particularly to the verbal exchanges between the analyst and analysand during the analytic session (see Lacan 1953–55). For Lacan, the subject is always the subject of speech, and that means speech directed toward an other in relation to whom the subject differentiates and identifies itself. On this view, language is a feature of the “symbolic order” of society, which is constituted as an economy of signifiers, through which animal need becomes human desire, whose first object is to be recognized by the other. However, desire ultimately aims for something impossible: to possess, to “be,” or to occupy the place of the signifier of signifiers, i.e. the phallus. Insofar as the phallus is nothing but the signifying function as such , it does not exist. It is not an object to be possessed, but is that through which the subject and the other are brought into relation to begin with, and it thus imposes itself upon the subject as a fundamental absence or lack that is at once necessary and irremediable (Lacan 1977, 289). Hence the subject is forever divided from itself and unable to achieve final unity or identity. As the subject of desire, it remains perpetually incomplete, just as Dasein in Heidegger exists “beyond itself” in temporal ecstasis.

The term “postmodern” came into the philosophical lexicon with the publication of Jean-François Lyotard's La Condition Postmoderne in 1979 (in English: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , 1984), where he employs Wittgenstein's model of language games (see Wittgenstein 1953) and concepts taken from speech act theory to account for what he calls a transformation of the game rules for science, art, and literature since the end of the nineteenth century. He describes his text as a combination of two very different language games, that of the philosopher and that of the expert. Where the expert knows what he knows and what he doesn't know, the philosopher knows neither, but poses questions. In light of this ambiguity, Lyotard states that his portrayal of the state of knowledge “makes no claims to being original or even true,” and that his hypotheses “should not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but strategic value in relation to the questions raised” (Lyotard 1984 [1979], 7). The book, then, is as much an experiment in the combination of language games as it is an objective “report.”

On Lyotard's account, the computer age has transformed knowledge into information, that is, coded messages within a system of transmission and communication. Analysis of this knowledge calls for a pragmatics of communication insofar as the phrasing of messages, their transmission and reception, must follow rules in order to be accepted by those who judge them. However, as Lyotard points out, the position of judge or legislator is also a position within a language game, and this raises the question of legitimation. As he insists, “there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics” (Lyotard 1984 [1979], 8), and this interlinkage constitutes the cultural perspective of the West. Science is therefore tightly interwoven with government and administration, especially in the information age, where enormous amounts of capital and large installations are needed for research.

Lyotard points out that while science has sought to distinguish itself from narrative knowledge in the form of tribal wisdom communicated through myths and legends, modern philosophy has sought to provide legitimating narratives for science in the form of “the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth,” (Lyotard 1984 [1979], xxiii). Science, however, plays the language game of denotation to the exclusion of all others, and in this respect it displaces narrative knowledge, including the meta-narratives of philosophy. This is due, in part, to what Lyotard characterizes as the rapid growth of technologies and techniques in the second half of the twentieth century, where the emphasis of knowledge has shifted from the ends of human action to its means (Lyotard 1984 [1979], 37). This has eroded the speculative game of philosophy and set each science free to develop independently of philosophical grounding or systematic organization. “I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-narratives,” says Lyotard (Lyotard 1984 [1979], xxiv). As a result, new, hybrid disciplines develop without connection to old epistemic traditions, especially philosophy, and this means science only plays its own game and cannot legitimate others, such as moral prescription.

The compartmentalization of knowledge and the dissolution of epistemic coherence is a concern for researchers and philosophers alike. As Lyotard notes, “Lamenting the ‘loss of meaning’ in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative” (Lyotard 1984 [1979], 26). Indeed, for Lyotard, the de-realization of the world means the disintegration of narrative elements into “clouds” of linguistic combinations and collisions among innumerable, heterogeneous language games. Furthermore, within each game the subject moves from position to position, now as sender, now as addressee, now as referent, and so on. The loss of a continuous meta-narrative therefore breaks the subject into heterogeneous moments of subjectivity that do not cohere into an identity. But as Lyotard points out, while the combinations we experience are not necessarily stable or communicable, we learn to move with a certain nimbleness among them.

Postmodern sensibility does not lament the loss of narrative coherence any more than the loss of being. However, the dissolution of narrative leaves the field of legitimation to a new unifying criterion: the performativity of the knowledge-producing system whose form of capital is information. Performative legitimation means maximizing the flow of information and minimizing static (non-functional moves) in the system, so whatever cannot be communicated as information must be eliminated. The performativity criterion threatens anything not meeting its requirements, such as speculative narratives, with de-legitimation and exclusion. Nevertheless, capital also demands the continual re-invention of the “new” in the form of new language games and new denotative statements, and so, paradoxically, a certain paralogy is required by the system itself. In this regard, the modern paradigm of progress as new moves under established rules gives way to the postmodern paradigm of inventing new rules and changing the game.

Inventing new codes and reshaping information is a large part of the production of knowledge, and in its inventive moment science does not adhere to performative efficiency. By the same token, the meta-prescriptives of science, its rules, are themselves objects of invention and experimentation for the sake of producing new statements. In this respect, says Lyotard, the model of knowledge as the progressive development of consensus is outmoded. In fact, attempts to retrieve the model of consensus can only repeat the standard of coherence demanded for functional efficiency, and they will thus lend themselves to the domination of capital. On the other hand, the paralogical inventiveness of science raises the possibility of a new sense of justice, as well as knowledge, as we move among the language games now entangling us.

Lyotard takes up the question of justice in Just Gaming (see Lyotard 1985 [1979]) and The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (see Lyotard 1988 [1983]), where he combines the model of language games with Kant's division of the faculties (understanding, imagination, reason) and types of judgment (theoretical, practical, aesthetic) in order to explore the problem of justice set out in The Postmodern Condition . Without the formal unity of the subject, the faculties are set free to operate on their own. Where Kant insists that reason must assign domains and limits to the other faculties, its dependence upon the unity of the subject for the identity of concepts as laws or rules de-legitimizes its juridical authority in the postmodern age. Instead, because we are faced with an irreducible plurality of judgments and “phrase regimes,” the faculty of judgment itself is brought to the fore. Kant's third Critique therefore provides the conceptual materials for Lyotard's analysis, especially the analytic of aesthetic judgment (see Kant 1790).

As Lyotard argues, aesthetic judgment is the appropriate model for the problem of justice in postmodern experience because we are confronted with a plurality of games and rules without a concept under which to unify them. Judgment must therefore be reflective rather than determining. Furthermore, judgment must be aesthetic insofar as it does not produce denotative knowledge about a determinable state of affairs, but refers to the way our faculties interact with each other as we move from one mode of phrasing to another, i.e. the denotative, the prescriptive, the performative, the political, the cognitive, the artistic, etc. In Kantian terms, this interaction registers as an aesthetic feeling. Where Kant emphasizes the feeling of the beautiful as a harmonious interaction between imagination and understanding, Lyotard stresses the mode in which faculties (imagination and reason,) are in disharmony, i.e. the feeling of the sublime. For Kant, the sublime occurs when our faculties of sensible presentation are overwhelmed by impressions of absolute power and magnitude, and reason is thrown back upon its own power to conceive Ideas (such as the moral law) which surpass the sensible world. For Lyotard, however, the postmodern sublime occurs when we are affected by a multitude of unpresentables without reference to reason as their unifying origin. Justice, then, would not be a definable rule, but an ability to move and judge among rules in their heterogeneity and multiplicity. In this respect, it would be more akin to the production of art than a moral judgment in Kant's sense.

In “What is Postmodernism?,” which appears as an appendix to the English edition of The Postmodern Condition , Lyotard addresses the importance of avant-garde art in terms of the aesthetic of the sublime. Modern art, he says, is emblematic of a sublime sensibility, that is, a sensibility that there is something non-presentable demanding to be put into sensible form and yet overwhelms all attempts to do so. But where modern art presents the unpresentable as a missing content within a beautiful form, as in Marcel Proust, postmodern art, exemplified by James Joyce, puts forward the unpresentable by forgoing beautiful form itself, thus denying what Kant would call the consensus of taste. Furthermore, says Lyotard, a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern, for postmodernism is not modernism at its end but in its nascent state, that is, at the moment it attempts to present the unpresentable, “and this state is constant” (Lyotard 1984 [1979], 79). The postmodern, then, is a repetition of the modern as the “new,” and this means the ever-new demand for another repetition.

The Nietzschean method of genealogy, in its application to modern subjectivity, is another facet of philosophical postmodernism. Michel Foucault's application of genealogy to formative moments in modernity's history and his exhortations to experiment with subjectivity place him within the scope of postmodern discourse. In the 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault spells out his adaptation of the genealogical method in his historical studies. First and foremost, he says, genealogy “opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’” (Foucault 1977, 141). That is, genealogy studies the accidents and contingencies that converge at crucial moments, giving rise to new epochs, concepts, and institutions. As Foucault remarks: “What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity” (Foucault 1977, 142). In Nietzschean fashion, Foucault exposes history conceived as the origin and development of an identical subject, e.g., “modernity,” as a fiction modern discourses invent after the fact. Underlying the fiction of modernity is a sense of temporality that excludes the elements of chance and contingency in play at every moment. In short, linear, progressive history covers up the discontinuities and interruptions that mark points of succession in historical time.

Foucault deploys genealogy to create what he calls a “counter-memory” or “a transformation of history into a totally different form of time” (Foucault 1977, 160). This entails dissolving identity for the subject in history by using the materials and techniques of modern historical research. Just as Nietzsche postulates that the religious will to truth in Christianity results in the destruction of Christianity by science (see Nietzsche 1974 [1882], 280–83), Foucault postulates that genealogical research will result in the disintegration of the epistemic subject, as the continuity of the subject is broken up by the gaps and accidents that historical research uncovers. The first example of this research is Histoire de la folie à l'age classique , published in 1961, the full version of which was published in English as History of Madness in 2006. Here, Foucault gives an account of the historical beginnings of modern reason as it comes to define itself against madness in the seventeenth century. His thesis is that the practice of confining the mad is a transformation of the medieval practice of confining lepers in lazar houses. These institutions managed to survive long after the lepers disappeared, and thus an institutional structure of confinement was already in place when the modern concept of madness as a disease took shape. However, while institutions of confinement are held over from a previous time, the practice of confining the mad constitutes a break with the past.

Foucault focuses upon the moment of transition, as modern reason begins to take shape in a confluence of concepts, institutions, and practices, or, as he would say, of knowledge and power. In its nascency, reason is a power that defines itself against an other, an other whose truth and identity is also assigned by reason, thus giving reason the sense of originating from itself. For Foucault, the issue is that madness is not allowed to speak for itself and is at the disposal of a power that dictates the terms of their relationship. As he remarks: “ What is originative is the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; reason's subjugation of non-reason, wresting from it its truth as madness, crime, or disease, derives explicitly from this point ” (Foucault 1965, x). The truth of reason is found when madness comes to stand in the place of non-reason, when the difference between them is inscribed in their opposition, but is not identical to its dominant side. In other words, the reason that stands in opposition to madness is not identical to the reason that inscribes their difference. The latter would be reason without an opposite, a free-floating power without definite shape. As Foucault suggests, this free-floating mystery might be represented in the ship of fools motif, which, in medieval times, represented madness. Such is the paradoxical structure of historical transformation.

In his later writings, most notably in The Use of Pleasure (Foucault 1985 [1984]), Foucault employs historical research to open possibilities for experimenting with subjectivity, by showing that subjectivation is a formative power of the self, surpassing the structures of knowledge and power from out of which it emerges. This is a power of thought, which Foucault says is the ability of human beings to problematize the conditions under which they live. For philosophy, this means “the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known” (Foucault 1985 [1984], 9). He thus joins Lyotard in promoting creative experimentation as a leading power of thought, a power that surpasses reason, narrowly defined, and without which thought would be inert. In this regard, Foucault stands in league with others who profess a postmodern sensibility in regard to contemporary science, art, and society. We should note, as well, that Foucault's writings are a hybrid of philosophy and historical research, just as Lyotard combines the language games of the expert and the philosopher in The Postmodern Condition . This mixing of philosophy with concepts and methods from other disciplines is characteristic of postmodernism in its broadest sense.

The concept of difference as a productive mechanism, rather than a negation of identity, is also a hallmark of postmodernism in philosophy. Gilles Deleuze deploys this concept throughout his work, beginning with Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962, in English 1983), where he sets Nietzsche against the models of thinking at work in Kant and Hegel. Here, he proposes to think against reason in resistance to Kant's assertion of the self-justifying authority of reason alone (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 93). In a phrase echoed by Foucault, he states that the purpose of his critique of reason “is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility” (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 94). Philosophical critique, he declares, is an encounter between thought and what forces it into action: it is a matter of sensibility rather than a tribunal where reason judges itself by its own laws (see Kant 1787, 9). Furthermore, the critique of reason is not a method, but is achieved by “culture” in the Nietzschean sense: training, discipline, inventiveness, and a certain cruelty (see Nietzsche 1887). Since thought cannot activate itself as thinking , Deleuze says it must suffer violence if it is to awaken and move. Art, science, and philosophy deploy such violence insofar as they are transformative and experimental.

Against Hegel, Deleuze asserts that while dialectic is structured by negation and opposition within a posited identity, “difference is the only principle of genesis or production” (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 157). Opposition occurs on the same logical plane, but difference moves across planes and levels, and not only in one direction. Furthermore, where Hegel takes the work of the negative to be dialectic's driving power, Deleuze declares that difference is thinkable only as repetition repeating itself (as in Nietzsche's eternal return), where difference affirms itself in eternally differing from itself. Its movement is productive, but without logical opposition, negation, or necessity. Instead, chance and multiplicity are repeated, just as a dice-throw repeats the randomness of the throw along with every number. On the other hand, dialectic cancels out chance and affirms the movement of the negative as a working out of identity, as in the Science of Logic where being in its immediacy is posited as equal only to itself (Hegel 1812, 82). For Deleuze, however, sensibility introduces an aleatory moment into thought's development, making accidentality and contingency conditions for thinking. These conditions upset logical identity and opposition, and place the limit of thinking beyond any dialectical system.

In Difference and Repetition (1968, in English 1994), Deleuze develops his project in multiple directions. His work, he says, stems from the convergence of two lines of research: the concept of difference without negation, and the concept of repetition, in which physical and mechanical repetitions are masks for a hidden differential that is disguised and displaced. His major focus is a thoroughgoing critique of representational thinking, including identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 132). For Deleuze, “appearances of” are not representations, but sensory intensities free of subjective or objective identities (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 144). Without these identities, appearances are simulacra of an non-apparent differential he calls the “dark precursor” or “the in-itself of difference” (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 119). This differential is the non-sensible being of the sensible, a being not identical to the sensible, or to itself, but irreducibly problematic insofar as it forces us to encounter the sensible as “given.”

Furthermore, any move against representational thinking impinges upon the identity of the subject. Where Kant founds the representational unity of space and time upon the formal unity of consciousness (Kant 1787, 135-137), difference re-distributes intuitions of past, present, and future, fracturing consciousness into multiple states not predicable of a single subject. Intensive qualities are individuating by themselves, says Deleuze, and individuality is not characteristic of a self or an ego, but of a differential forever dividing itself and changing its configuration (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 246, 254, 257). In Nietzschean fashion, the “I” refers not to the unity of consciousness, but to a multitude of simulacra without an identical subject for whom this multitude appears. Instead, subjects arise and multiply as “effects” of the intensive qualities saturating space and time. This leads Deleuze to postulate multiple faculties for subjectivity, which are correlates of the sensible insofar as it gives rise to feeling, thought, and action. “Each faculty, including thought, has only involuntary adventures,” he says, and “involuntary operation remains embedded in the empirical” (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 145). Subjectively, the paradox of the differential breaks up the faculties' common function and places them before their own limits: thought before the unthinkable, memory before the immemorial, sensibility before the imperceptible, etc. (Deleuze 1994, 227). This fracturing and multiplying of the subject, he notes, leads to the realization that “schizophrenia is not only a human fact but also a possibility for thought” (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 148), thus expanding the term into a philosophical concept, beyond its clinical application.

The dissolution of the subject and its implications for society is the theme of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , which Deleuze published with Félix Guattari in 1972 (in English 1983). The book, in large part, is written against an established intellectual orthodoxy of the political Left in France during the 1950s and 1960s, an orthodoxy consisting of Marx, Freud, and structuralist concepts applied to them by Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this mixture is still limited by representational thinking, including concepts of production based upon lack, and concepts of alienation based upon identity and negation. Furthermore, the Oedipus concept in psychoanalysis, they say, institutes a theater of desire in which the psyche is embedded in a family drama closed off from the extra-familial and extra-psychic forces at work in society. They characterize these forces as “desiring machines” whose function is to connect, disconnect, and reconnect with one another without meaning or intention.

The authors portray society as a series of “territorializations” or inscriptions upon the “body without organs,”or the free-flowing matter of intensive qualities filling space in their varying degrees. The first inscriptions are relations of kinship and filiation structuring primitive societies, often involving the marking and scarring of human bodies. As an interruption and encoding of “flows,” the primitive inscriptions constitute a nexus of desiring machines, both technical and social, whose elements are humans and their organs. The full body of society is the sacred earth, which appropriates to itself all social products as their natural or divine precondition, and to whom all members of society are bound by direct filiation (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 141-42). These first inscriptions are then de-territorialized and re-coded by the “despotic machine,” establishing new relations of alliance and filiation through the body of the ruler or emperor, who alone stands in direct filiation to the deity (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 192) and who institutes the mechanism of the state upon pre-existing social arrangements. Finally, capitalism de-territorializes the inscriptions of the despotic machine and re-codes all relations of alliance and filiation into flows of money (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 224-27). The organs of society and the state are appropriated into the functioning of capital, and humans become secondary to the filiation of money with itself.

Deleuze and Guattari see in the capitalist money system “an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983 [1972], 33), which is to say that capital is inherently schizophrenic. However, because capital also re-territorializes all flows into money, schizophrenia remains capitalism's external limit. Nevertheless, it is precisely that limit against which thinking can subject capitalism to philosophical critique. Psychoanalysis, they say, is part of the reign of capital because it re-territorializes the subject as “private” and “individual,” instituting psychic identity through images of the Oedipal family. However, the Oedipal triangle is merely a representational simulacrum of kinship and filiation, re-coded within a system of debt and payment. In this system, they insist, flows of desire have become mere representations of desire, cut off from the body without organs and the extra-familial mechanisms of society. A radical critique of capital cannot therefore be accomplished by psychoanalysis, but requires a schizoanalysis “to overturn the theater of representation into the order of desiring-production” (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 271). Here, the authors see a revolutionary potential in modern art and science, where, in bringing about the “new,” they circulate de-coded and de-territorialized flows within society without automatically re-coding them into money (Deleuze and Guattari 1983 [1972], 379). In this revolutionary aspect, Anti-Oedipus reads as a statement of the desire that took to the streets of Paris in May of 1968, and which continues, even now, to make itself felt in intellectual life.

The term “deconstruction,” like “postmodernism,” has taken on many meanings in the popular imagination. However, in philosophy, it signifies certain strategies for reading and writing texts. The term was introduced into philosophical literature in 1967, with the publication of three texts by Jacques Derrida: Of Grammatology (in English 1974), Writing and Difference (in English 1978), and Speech and Phenomena (in English 1973). This so-called “publication blitz” immediately established Derrida as a major figure in the new movement in philosophy and the human sciences centered in Paris, and brought the idiom “deconstruction” into its vocabulary. Derrida and deconstruction are routinely associated with postmodernism, although like Deleuze and Foucault, he does not use the term and would resist affiliation with “-isms” of any sort. Of the three books from 1967, Of Grammatology is the more comprehensive in laying out the background for deconstruction as a way of reading modern theories of language, especially structuralism, and Heidegger's meditations on the non-presence of being. It also sets out Derrida's difference with Heidegger over Nietzsche. Where Heidegger places Nietzsche within the metaphysics of presence, Derrida insists that “reading, and therefore writing, the text were for Nietzsche ‘originary’ operations,” (Derrida 1974 [1967], 19), and this puts him at the closure of metaphysics (not the end), a closure that liberates writing from the traditional logos, which takes writing to be a sign (a visible mark) for another sign (speech), whose “signified” is a fully present meaning.

This closure has emerged, says Derrida, with the latest developments in linguistics, the human sciences, mathematics, and cybernetics, where the written mark or signifier is purely technical, that is, a matter of function rather than meaning. Precisely the liberation of function over meaning indicates that the epoch of what Heidegger calls the metaphysics of presence has come to closure, although this closure does not mean its termination. Just as in the essay “On the Question of Being” (Heidegger 1998, 291-322) Heidegger sees fit to cross out the word “being,” leaving it visible, nevertheless, under the mark, Derrida takes the closure of metaphysics to be its “erasure,” where it does not entirely disappear, but remains inscribed as one side of a difference, and where the mark of deletion is itself a trace of the difference that joins and separates this mark and what it crosses out. Derrida calls this joining and separating of signs différance (Derrida 1974 [1967], 23), a device that can only be read and not heard when différance and différence are pronounced in French. The “a” is a written mark that differentiates independently of the voice, the privileged medium of metaphysics. In this sense, différance as the spacing of difference, as archi-writing, would be the gram of grammatology. However, as Derrida remarks: “There cannot be a science of difference itself in its operation, as it is impossible to have a science of the origin of presence itself, that is to say of a certain non-origin” (Derrida 1974 [1967], 63). Instead, there is only the marking of the trace of difference, that is, deconstruction.

Because at its functional level all language is a system of differences, says Derrida, all language, even when spoken, is writing, and this truth is suppressed when meaning is taken as an origin, present and complete unto itself. Texts that take meaning or being as their theme are therefore particularly susceptible to deconstruction, as are all other texts insofar as they are conjoined with these. For Derrida, written marks or signifiers do not arrange themselves within natural limits, but form chains of signification that radiate in all directions. As Derrida famously remarks, “there is no outside-text” (Derrida 1974 [1967], 158), that is, the text includes the difference between any “inside” or “outside.” As he explains in a letter to Gerald Graff, attached as an appendix to Limited Inc (see Derrida 1988, 148), this means that “every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace.” A text, then, is not a book, and does not, strictly speaking, have an author. On the contrary, the name of the author is a signifier linked with others, and there is no master signifier (such as the phallus in Lacan) present or even absent in a text. This goes for the term “différance ” as well, which can only serve as a supplement for the productive spacing between signs. Therefore, Derrida insists that “ différance is literally neither a word nor a concept” (Derrida 1982 [1972], 3). Instead, it can only be marked as a wandering play of differences that is both a spacing of signifiers in relation to one another and a deferral of meaning or presence when they are read.

How, then, can différance be characterized? Derrida refuses to answer questions as to “who” or “what” differs, because to do so would suggest there is a proper name for difference instead of endless supplements, of which “ différance ” is but one. Structurally, this supplemental displacement functions just as, for Heidegger, all names for being reduce being to the presence of beings, thus ignoring the “ontological difference” between them. However, Derrida takes the ontological difference as one difference among others, as a product of what the idiom “ différance ” supplements. As he remarks: “ différance , in a certain and very strange way, (is) ‘older’ than the ontological difference or than the truth of Being” (Derrida 1982 [1972], 22). Deconstruction, then, traces the repetitions of the supplement. It is not so much a theory about texts as a practice of reading and transforming texts, where tracing the movements of différance produces other texts interwoven with the first. While there is a certain arbitrariness in the play of differences that result, it is not the arbitrariness of a reader getting the text to mean whatever he or she wants. It is a question of function rather than meaning, if meaning is understood as a terminal presence, and the signifying connections traced in deconstruction are first offered by the text itself. A deconstructive reading, then, does not assert or impose meaning, but marks out places where the function of the text works against its apparent meaning, or against the history of its interpretation.

Hyperreality is closely related to the concept of the simulacrum: a copy or image without reference to an original. In postmodernism, hyperreality is the result of the technological mediation of experience, where what passes for reality is a network of images and signs without an external referent, such that what is represented is representation itself. In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Jean Baudrillard uses Lacan's concepts of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real to develop this concept while attacking orthodoxies of the political Left, beginning with the assumed reality of power, production, desire, society, and political legitimacy. Baudrillard argues that all of these realities have become simulations, that is, signs without any referent, because the real and the imaginary have been absorbed into the symbolic.

Baudrillard presents hyperreality as the terminal stage of simulation, where a sign or image has no relation to any reality whatsoever, but is “its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard 1981, 6). The real, he says, has become an operational effect of symbolic processes, just as images are technologically generated and coded before we actually perceive them. This means technological mediation has usurped the productive role of the Kantian subject, the locus of an original synthesis of concepts and intuitions, as well as the Marxian worker, the producer of capital though labor, and the Freudian unconscious, the mechanism of repression and desire. “From now on,” says Baudrillard, “signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real” (Baudrillard 1976, 7), so production now means signs producing other signs. The system of symbolic exchange is therefore no longer real but “hyperreal.” Where the real is “ that of which it is possible to provide an equivalent reproduction ,” the hyperreal, says Baudrillard, is “ that which is always already reproduced ” (Baudrillard 1976, 73). The hyperreal is a system of simulation simulating itself.

The lesson Baudrillard draws from the events of May 1968 is that the student movement was provoked by the realization that “ we were no longer productive ” (Baudrillard 1976, 29), and that direct opposition within the system of communication and exchange only reproduces the mechanisms of the system itself. Strategically, he says, capital can only be defeated by introducing something inexchangeable into the symbolic order, that is, something having the irreversible function of natural death, which the symbolic order excludes and renders invisible. The system, he points out, simulates natural death with fascinating images of violent death and catastrophe, where death is the result of artificial processes and “accidents.” But, as Baudrillard remarks: “Only the death-function cannot be programmed and localized” (Baudrillard 1976, 126), and by this he means death as the simple and irreversible finality of life. Therefore he calls for the development of “fatal strategies” to make the system suffer reversal and collapse.

Because these strategies must be carried out within the symbolic order, they are matters of rhetoric and art, or a hybrid of both. They also function as gifts or sacrifices, for which the system has no counter-move or equivalence. Baudrillard finds a prime example of this strategy with graffiti artists who experiment with symbolic markings and codes in order to suggest communication while blocking it, and who sign their inscriptions with pseudonyms instead of recognizable names. “They are seeking not to escape the combinatory in order to regain an identity,” says Baudrillard, “but to turn indeterminacy against the system, to turn indeterminacy into extermination ” (Baudrillard 1976, 78). Some of his own remarks, such as “I have nothing to do with postmodernism,” have, no doubt, the same strategic intent. To the extent that “postmodernism” has become a sign exchangeable for other signs, he would indeed want nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, his concepts of simulation and hyperreality, and his call for strategic experimentation with signs and codes, bring him into close proximity with figures such as Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida.

Hermeneutics, the science of textual interpretation, also plays a role in postmodern philosophy. Unlike deconstruction, which focuses upon the functional structures of a text, hermeneutics seeks to arrive at an agreement or consensus as to what the text means, or is about. Gianni Vattimo formulates a postmodern hermeneutics in The End of Modernity (1985, in English 1988 [1985]), where he distinguishes himself from his Parisian counterparts by posing the question of post-modernity as a matter for ontological hermeneutics. Instead of calling for experimentation with counter-strategies and functional structures, he sees the heterogeneity and diversity in our experience of the world as a hermeneutical problem to be solved by developing a sense continuity between the present and the past. This continuity is to be a unity of meaning rather than the repetition of a functional structure, and the meaning is ontological. In this respect, Vattimo's project is an extension of Heidegger's inquiries into the meaning of being. However, where Heidegger situates Nietzsche within the limits of metaphysics, Vattimo joins Heidegger's ontological hermeneutics with Nietzsche's attempt to think beyond nihilism and historicism with his concept of eternal return. The result, says Vattimo, is a certain distortion of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, allowing Heidegger and Nietzsche to be interpreted through one another (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 176). This is a significant point of difference between Vattimo and the French postmodernists, who read Nietzsche against Heidegger, and prefer Nietzsche's textual strategies over Heidegger's pursuit of the meaning of being.

On Vattimo's account, Nietzsche and Heidegger can be brought together under the common theme of overcoming. Where Nietzsche announces the overcoming of nihilism through the active nihilism of the eternal return, Heidegger proposes to overcome metaphysics through a non-metaphysical experience of being. In both cases, he argues, what is to be overcome is modernity, characterized by the image that philosophy and science are progressive developments in which thought and knowledge increasingly appropriate their own origins and foundations. Overcoming modernity, however, cannot mean progressing into a new historical phase. As Vattimo observes: “Both philosophers find themselves obliged, on the one hand, to take up a critical distance from Western thought insofar as it is foundational; on the other hand, however, they find themselves unable to criticize Western thought in the name of another, and truer, foundation” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 2). Overcoming modernity must therefore mean a Verwindung , in the sense of twisting or distorting modernity itself, rather than an Überwindung or progression beyond it.

While Vattimo takes post-modernity as a new turn in modernity, it entails the dissolution of the category of the new in the historical sense, which means the end of universal history. “While the notion of historicity has become ever more problematic for theory,” he says, “at the same time for historiography and its own methodological self-awareness the idea of history as a unitary process is rapidly dissolving” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 6). This does not mean historical change ceases to occur, but that its unitary development is no longer conceivable, so only local histories are possible. The de-historicization of experience has been accelerated by technology, especially television, says Vattimo, so that “everything tends to flatten out at the level of contemporaneity and simultaneity” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 10). As a result, we no longer experience a strong sense of teleology in worldly events, but, instead, we are confronted with a manifold of differences and partial teleologies that can only be judged aesthetically. The truth of postmodern experience is therefore best realized in art and rhetoric.

The Nietzschean sense of overcoming modernity is “to dissolve modernity through a radicalization of its own innate tendencies,” says Vattimo (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 166). These include the production of “the new” as a value and the drive for critical overcoming in the sense of appropriating foundations and origins. In this respect, however, Nietzsche shows that modernity results in nihilism: all values, including “truth” and “the new,” collapse under critical appropriation. The way out of this collapse is the moment of eternal recurrence, when we affirm the necessity of error in the absence of foundations. Vattimo also finds this new attitude toward modernity in Heidegger's sense of overcoming metaphysics, insofar as he suggests that overcoming the enframing lies with the possibility of a turn within the enframing itself. Such a turn would mean deepening and distorting the technological essence, not destroying it or leaving it behind. Furthermore, this would be the meaning of being, understood as the history of interpretation (as “weak” being) instead of a grounding truth, and the hermeneutics of being would be a distorted historicism. Unlike traditional hermeneutics, Vattimo argues that reconstructing the continuity of contemporary experience cannot be accomplished without unifying art and rhetoric with information from the sciences, and this requires philosophy “to propose a ‘rhetorically persuasive’, unified view of the world, which includes in itself traces, residues, or isolated elements of scientific knowledge” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 179). Vattimo's philosophy is therefore the project of a postmodern hermeneutics, in contrast to the Parisian thinkers who do not concern themselves with meaning or history as continuous unities.

Rhetoric and aesthetics pertain to the sharing of experience through activities of participation and imitation. In the postmodern sense, such activities involve sharing or participating in differences that have opened between the old and the new, the natural and the artificial, or even between life and death. The leading exponent of this line of postmodern thought is Mario Perniola. Like Vattimo, Perniola insists that postmodern philosophy must not break with the legacies of modernity in science and politics. As he says in Enigmas , “the relationship between thought and reality that the Enlightenment, idealism, and Marxism have embodied must not be broken” (Perniola 1995, 43). However, he does not base this continuity upon an internal essence, spirit, or meaning, but upon the continuing effects of modernity in the world. One such effect, visible in art and in the relation between art and society, is the collapse of the past and future into the present, which he characterizes as “Egyptian” or “baroque” in nature. This temporal effect is accomplished through the collapse of the difference between humans and things, where “humans are becoming more similar to things, and equally, the inorganic world, thanks to electronic technology, seems to be taking over the human role in the perception of events” (Perniola 1995, viii ). This amounts to a kind of “Egyptianism,” as described by Hegel in his Aesthetics (see Hegel 1823–9, 347-361), where the spiritual and the natural are mixed to such a degree that they cannot be separated, as, for example, in the figure of the Sphinx. However, in the postmodern world the inorganic is not natural, but already artificial, insofar as our perceptions are mediated by technological operations.

Likewise, says Perniola, art collections in modern museums produce a “baroque effect,” where “The field that is opened up by a collection is not that of cultivated public opinion, nor of social participation, but a space that attracts precisely because it cannot be controlled or possessed” (Perniola 1995, 87). That is, in the collection, art is removed from its natural or historical context and creates a new sense of space and time, not reducible to linear history or any sense of origin. The collection, then, is emblematic of postmodern society, a moment of its “truth.” Furthermore, Perniola insists that baroque sensibility is characteristic of Italian society and culture in general. “The very idea of truth as something essentially naked,” he says, “is at loggerheads with the Baroque idea, so firmly rooted in Italy, that truth is something essentially clothed” (Perniola 1995, 145). This corresponds to a sensibility that is intermediate between internal feelings and external things. “The Italian enigma,” he says, “lies in the fact that the human component is equipped with an external emotionality that does not belong to him or her intimately, but in which they nonetheless participate” (Perniola 1995, 145). To account for this enigmatic experience, the philosopher must become “the intermediary, the passage, the transit to something different and foreign” (Perniola 1995, 40). Hence, philosophical reading and writing are not activities of an identical subject, but processes of mediation and indeterminacy between self and other, and philosophical narrative is an overcoming of their differences.

These differences cannot be overcome, in Hegelian fashion, by canceling them under a higher-order synthesis, but must be eroded or defaced in the course of traversing them. In Ritual Thinking , Perniola illustrates this process through the concepts of transit, the simulacrum, and ritual without myth. Transit derives from a sense of the simultaneity of the present, where we are suspended in a state of temporariness and indeterminacy, and move “from the same to the same”; the simulacrum is the result of an endless mimesis in which there are only copies of copies without reference to an original; and ritual without myth is the repetition of patterns of action having no connection to the inner life of a subject or of society. Thus Perniola sees social and political interaction as repetitive patterns of action having no inherent meaning but constituting, nonetheless, an intermediary realm where oppositions, particularly life and death, are overcome in a to-and-fro movement within their space of difference.

To illustrate these concepts Perniola refers to practices associated with Romanism, particularly Roman religion. “Ritual without myth,” he says, “is the very essence of Romanism” (Perniola 2001, 81). It is a passage between life and death via their mutual simulation, for example, in the labyrinthine movements of the ritual known as the troiae lusus . These movements, he says, mediate between life and death by reversing their pattern of natural succession, and mediate their difference through actions having no intrinsic meaning. Unlike Vattimo's project of constructing meaning to overcome historical differences, Perniola's concept of transit into the space of difference is one of “art” in the sense of artifice or technique, and is not aimed at a synthesis or unification of opposing elements. In this respect, Perniola has an affinity with the French postmodernists, who emphasize functional repetition over the creation of meaning. However, as Perniola's notion of ritual without myth illustrates, the functional repetitions of social interaction and technology do not disseminate differences, but efface them. This is clear in his account of the ritualized passage between life and death, as compared with Baudrillard, who calls for strategies introducing the irreversibility of death into the system of symbolic exchange. In this respect, Perniola's postmodernism is strongly aesthetic, and remains, with Vattimo, in the aesthetic and historical dimensions of experience.

The most prominent and comprehensive critic of philosophical postmodernism is Jürgen Habermas. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas 1987 [1985]), he confronts postmodernism at the level of society and “communicative action.” He does not defend the concept of the subject, conceived as consciousness or an autonomous self, against postmodernists' attacks, but defends argumentative reason in inter-subjective communication against their experimental, avant-garde strategies. For example, he claims that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault commit a performative contradiction in their critiques of modernism by employing concepts and methods that only modern reason can provide. He criticizes Nietzsche's Dionysianism as a compensatory gesture toward the loss of unity in Western culture that, in pre-modern times, was provided by religion. Nietzsche's sense of a new Dionysus in modern art, moreover, is based upon an aesthetic modernism in which art acquires its experimental power by separating itself from the values of science and morality, a separation accomplished by the modern Enlightenment, resulting in the loss of organic unity Nietzsche seeks to restore via art itself (see Habermas 1987 [1985], 81-105). Habermas sees Heidegger and Derrida as heirs to this “Dionysian messianism.” Heidegger, for example, anticipates a new experience of being, which has withdrawn. However, says Habermas, the withdrawal of being is the result of an inverted philosophy of the subject, where Heidegger's destruction of the subject leads to hope for a unity to come, a unity of nothing other than the subject that is now missing (Habermas 1987 [1985], 160). Derrida, he says, develops the notion of différance or “archi-writing” in similar fashion: here, we see the god Dionysus revealing himself once again in his absence, as meaning infinitely deferred (Habermas 1987 [1985], 180-81).

Habermas also criticizes Derrida for leveling the distinction between philosophy and literature in a textualism that brings logic and argumentative reason into the domain of rhetoric. In this way, he says, Derrida hopes to avoid the logical problem of self-reference in his critique of reason. However, as Habermas remarks: “Whoever transposes the radical critique of reason into the domain of rhetoric in order to blunt the paradox of self-referentiality, also dulls the sword of the critique of reason itself” (Habermas 1987 [1985], 210). In similar fashion, he criticizes Foucault for not subjecting his own genealogical method to genealogical unmasking, which would reveal Foucault's re-installation of a modern subject able to critically gaze at its own history. Thus, he says, “Foucault cannot adequately deal with the persistent problems that come up in connection with an interpretive approach to the object domain, a self-referential denial of universal validity claims, and a normative justification of critique” (Habermas 1987 [1985], 286).

Habermas's critique of postmodernism on the basis of performative contradiction and the paradox of self-reference sets the tone and the terms for much of the critical debate now under way. While postmodernists have rejected these criticisms, or responded to them with rhetorical counter-strategies. Lyotard, for example, rejects the notion that intersubjective communication implies a set of rules already agreed upon, and that universal consensus is the ultimate goal of discourse (see Lyotard 1984 [1979], 65-66). That postmodernists openly respond to Habermas is due to the fact that he takes postmodernism seriously and does not, like other critics, reject it as mere nonsense. Indeed, that he is able to read postmodernist texts closely and discursively testifies to their intelligibility. He also agrees with the postmodernists that the focus of debate should be upon modernity as it is realized in social practices and institutions, rather than upon theories of cognition or formal linguistics as autonomous domains. In this respect, Habermas's concern with inter-subjective communication helps clarify the basis upon which the modernist-postmodernist debates continue to play out.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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Althusser, Louis | Baudrillard, Jean | Croce, Benedetto: aesthetics | -->deconstruction --> | Deleuze, Gilles | Derrida, Jacques | Enlightenment | Foucault, Michel | -->Freud, Sigmund --> | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: dialectics | Heidegger, Martin | Heraclitus | hermeneutics | Kant, Immanuel | Kierkegaard, Søren | Lyotard, Jean François | Marx, Karl | Nietzsche, Friedrich | Parmenides | Plato | -->rhetoric --> | speech acts | Vico, Giambattista | Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

10 Postmodernism Examples (in Literature, Film & Art)

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

Learn about our Editorial Process

Postmodernism refers to a wide range of literary, artistic, and philosophical texts that explore the subjectivity of experience and attempt to undermine dominant social and cultural discourses.

Key concerns of postmodernism include the deconstruction of grand cultural narratives, playful use of language and discourse, and questioning of socially-constructed ‘regimes of truth’.

Examples of postmodern art and literature include Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych , Barbra Kruger’s I Shop Therefore I Am , Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five .

Below are 10 themes in postmodernism and real-life examples of those themes in postmodern texts .

Postmodernism Examples

1. fragmentation.

Postmodern literature and art often embraces a fragmented narrative structure as a way to challenge the idea of the “grand metanarrative”.

Post-modernists reject the idea that one coherent narrative can explain the world and instead embraces plurality and contradiction .

As a result, you may find postmodern literature with conflicting viewpoints and nonlinear storytelling.

This fragmentation reflects the postmodern embrace of the importance of individual subjective experience rather than the search for objective truth.

Real-Life Example of Fragmentation in Postmodern Art

Artist: Jean-Michel Basquiat

Artwork: Warrior (1982)

Explanation: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings are characteristically fragmented, with jumbled and chaotic lines, splatters, and scrawls that overlap and clash as a challenge to the normative expectations of art.

2. Intertextuality

Postmodernists believe that reality is constructed through discourse – or in other words, through the immersion in the influential language and texts of your time. 

As a result, postmodern literature and art often incorporates elements of other influential texts and popular culture of the era.

This intertextuality reflects the postmodern interest in the way meaning is constructed within a cultural context rather than in isolation from other texts.

Real-Life Example of Intertextuality in Postmodern Literature

Author: Thomas Pynchon

Book: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

Description: In “The Crying of Lot 49” by Thomas Pynchon, intertextuality is used regularly to demonstrate how meaning is constructed through cultural reference. The book makes regular references to Shakespeare, the Bible, and medieval mystic Roger Bacon.

3. Pastiche

Pastiche refers to the mixing and blending of different styles and genres within one single text.

Like fragmentation, pastiche is a technique designed to challenge and undermine tradition with the idea that there is no one ‘best’ or most ‘coherent’ way to approach literature and art.

By playing with forms and undermining them, the postmodern artist is also undermining the metanarratives about truth and beauty that those forms attempt to construct.

Real-Life Example of Pastiche in Postmodern Art

Artist: Chris Ofili

Artwork: No Woman No Cry (1998)

Description: If you look at the art and sculptures of Chris Ofili, you’ll notice the blending of African textiles, Hindu deities, and popular culture.

Postmodern literature often uses irony as a way to subvert expectations. Irony makes us double-take because it undermines our expectations.

The message from the postmodern writer here is: “Look! You’ve been trained to expect a certain grand narrative. I just subverted it to show you how much society has shaped how you think!

Real-Life Example of Irony in Postmodern Literature

Author: Milan Kundera

Book: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Description: A good example of post-modern irony is in the novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera where Tomas (the protagonist) is a womanizer and hedonist; yet at unexpected moments he is also a deeply introspective character who challenges our expectations of how he should behave. Irony helps to challenge stereotypes.

5. Absurdism

Like existentialism, postmodernism plays with absurdism. We might define absurdism as the idea that the world is irrational, meaningless, and literally absurd.

This reflects this postmodern idea that the stories that we are told and that are normalized in dominant discourse are somewhat ridiculous if we can only remove ourselves from our context and take a look at them from some other perspective.

Real-Life Example of Absurdism in Postmodern Literature

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Book: Slaughterhouse Five (1969)

Description: In “Slaughterhouse Five”, time is presented as an absurd concept that traps and constrains us. Through the narrative, the absurdity of time, past and future, are all presented as ways to undermine our assumptions about time that have been presented to us throughout our lives.

6. Multiple Narrators

You will often find that postmodern literature has multiple narrators. This is an attempt to demonstrate the inherent subjectivity of truth.

Postmodernism critiques the idea that there is one objective truth to be found. Rather, it embraces the idea that there may be multiple truths and that we come to truth through our own social, cultural, and deeply personal contextualization of information.

Real-Life Example of a Postmodern Text with Multiple Narrators

Description: “Slaughterhouse five” does a great job at using multiple narrators to undermine and challenge the main narrator’s perspective. In fact, the main narrator presents himself as inherently unreliable and the reader is encouraged to question his accounts of events.

7. The Nature of Identity

Postmodernism is concerned with undermining metanarratives about identity – particularly when it comes to race, gender, sexuality, and social class.

As a result, you will often find postmodern art and literature challenging our expectations of identity stereotypes. The texts encourage us to re-think our assumptions of identity norms and see identity as a fluid, changing, and even playful concept.

Real-Life Example of Postmodern Explorations of Identity

Author: John Fowles

Book: The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

Description: In “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” John Fowles explores identity in Victorian England times through the characters of Charles and Sarah. Both characters are presented as complex individuals who are struggling with their own identities in an era where there are tightly controlled expectations of how they should behave and present themselves to the world.

Pop art has been used extensively by postmodernists, perhaps most notably by Andy Warhol.

The use of Pop Art can help to demonstrate how popular culture is a highly influential intermediary in helping to shape our perceptions and beliefs. Warhol, and other artists like Barbara Kruger, often play with this idea by presenting pop art in ways that challenge its normative presentation (particularly in advertising) and demonstrate how pop art constructs dominant discourses of gender, identity, and capitalism.

Real-Life Example of Postmodern Pop Art

Artist: Andy Warhol

Artwork: Marilyn Diptych (1962)

Description: Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych uses pop art style to critique how Marilyn Monroe’s identity was constructed and idealized by mass media.

10. Installation Art

Postmodern art often takes the form of interactive installation art. Interactivity is often used as a message that subjective interpretation of art should be encouraged.

Subjectivity, of course, is central to postmodernism: the postmodern theorist believes that everyone comes to understand truth and their world through subjective processes (with the assistance, of course, of the intertextual discourses that surround them).

Real-Life Example of Postmodern Installation Art

Artist: Yoko Ono

Description: Yoko Ono’s art installations regularly encourage people to create art themselves, break things, touch things, make sounds, and be playful. You are supposed to walk through the artworks, interact with them, and construct your own meaning through those interactions.

Postmodernism is one of the most influential approaches to art and literature in the past 50 years. It centers the consumer’s subjective experience, undermines the authority of the creator of texts, and encourages people to play with concepts like identity, truth, and the meaning of life. Through postmodern theory, we can learn to challenge the stories we’ve been told since childhood and re-examine longstanding social and cultural assumptions.

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 10 Reasons you’re Perpetually Single
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 20 Montessori Toddler Bedrooms (Design Inspiration)
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 21 Montessori Homeschool Setups
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 101 Hidden Talents Examples

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Can someone explain post-modernism in simple terms?

I was getting high with a couple of buddies and talking about philosophy. I got into explaining absurdism, the best I could, and one of the dudes brought up post-modernism. He explained something about empathy towards others and some concept of not labeling things. Can someone, in simple terms and without philosophical jabber, explain the basic fundamentals of post-modernism?

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Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction

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How can postmodernism be defined? Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory, literature, the visual arts, film, architecture, and music. A artists, intellectuals, critics, and social scientists are treated ‘as if they were all members of a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party’ — a party which includes such members as Cindy Sherman, Salman Rushdie, Jacques Derrida, Walter Abish, and Richard Rorty — creating a vastly entertaining framework in which to unravel the mysteries of the ‘postmodern condition’, from the politicizing of museum culture to the cult of the politically correct.

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One section from The Enchanted Domain (1953) by René Magritte. Image: Rob Corder

Neither Governed nor Free

On art in the age of generative AI.

James Duesterberg

• October 13, 2023

I first met an AI in 1998. I was an adolescent, and it was the early days of the Internet; life online was an alien thing, broken-linked journeys and open-ended “chats” with faceless, voiceless interlocutors. This was exciting. The hastily improvised interfaces, the weird, unpolished content, the uncertainty of where a link would lead or a conversation would go: all of this felt like freedom.

It was in this realm that I came across the Postmodernism Generator, which can still be visited at the same URL I remember: elsewhere.org/pomo. Every time you visit the Generator, it “writes” a new postmodern essay, remixing Marx, Foucault, and Sontag with Madonna, Tarantino, and Joyce into a slurry of radical buzzwords, complete with fake authors (“Henry von Ludwig, Department of Gender Politics, University of California, Berkeley”), fake books (“Werther, S. V. ed. (1995) Subcultural theory, socialism and submaterial materialism.  Yale University Press”), and intriguingly nonsensical, koan-like arguments:

“Society is fundamentally impossible,” says Baudrillard; however, according to Parry, it is not so much society that is fundamentally impossible, but rather the absurdity, and hence the defining characteristic, of society.

I think I vaguely understood that the site was meant to parody the ultra-sophisticated thinking then dominant in the academic humanities. It was created in the wake of a highly publicized hoax in 1996, when Alan Sokal, a physicist, submitted a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the academic journal Social Text , which accepted it. Sokal then wrote an essay in the magazine Lingua Franca revealing that his paper was intended to be nonsensical. He had wanted to show that humanities scholars had degenerated into pseudo-radical jargon, losing themselves in a meaningless, recursive semantic web. The humanities, the argument went, had become so enamored of language that they let go of truth. Arguments no longer had to justify themselves with reference to the outside world (which, for Sokal, meant the world as described by physics); “discourse” acquired magical powers, and concepts took on talismanic status. Merely to invoke them was to perform interpretative work, with—automatically, as it were—real, even political effects.

From here it is a short step to the Postmodernism Generator. If words are magic—if, as postmodern theory argued and many involved in today’s culture wars seem to believe, language has insidious effects, operating regardless of the intentions, beliefs, or even conscious awareness of those who use it—then it’s unclear what role, exactly, people play. Why not dispense with them altogether?

Though I’m sure that in 1998 I hadn’t yet heard about the “death of the author,” or the dawn of the “author function” (proclaimed in 1967 by Roland Barthes and 1969 by Michel Foucault, respectively), what I liked about the Generator was its whimsical play with meaning. Adults often worry that technology, like Frankenstein’s monster, will go rogue. This is a fear of losing control of life, of having our mastery over things exposed as an illusion, but it can also be a fantasy. As children know, not being in control has its pleasures. With no one to say what’s what, not only can objects come to life; people can turn into objects, and it is this reversibility—suggesting a different, more primitive kind of freedom—that is the source of so much of childhood’s pleasures. With this comes a different kind of logic, and a different kind of language: thus Alice discovers that words are the gateway to Wonderland. On the other side of the looking glass, it’s not that words have no meaning: rather, they mean much more than we had imagined. The chain of significance isn’t broken but rewired, becoming, as postmodern philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari put it, “rhizomatic.” The connections proliferate without a controlling hierarchy, mutating and recombining in a shimmering, endlessly fascinating web.

I remember, at age twelve or thirteen, finding this possibility thrilling. I refreshed and refreshed the Generator, trying to parse paragraphs that I knew were meaningless—or so the program’s “author” said.

Batailleist ‘powerful communication’ holds that the collective is capable of intention. Marx suggests the use of surrealism to attack hierarchy.

This sounds at once absurd and intriguing, especially to a teenager. Collective intention, attacking hierarchy, surrealism, “powerful communication”. . . some brilliant insight seems to hover around this constellation of concepts, on the other side of the looking glass.

Although I knew that they hadn’t been written by a person, the essays sounded like things certain people—English professors, continental philosophers— did say. The fun was in imagining that the text meant something and trying to figure out what that might be. There was a slipperiness that made the sentences at once elude meaning and glimmer with the promise of secret significance. The Generator simultaneously made fun of authority (pretentious philosophers) and hinted at something even more powerful, a machine of all possible meanings lurking behind the screen. No one was trying to communicate anything with these words: they were, as the website said, “Communications From Elsewhere.” The strange thing was that this style was starting to resonate, despite—or rather because of—its impersonality. What did it mean that people were starting to listen?

The end of the millennium was the moment, at the cusp of the dot-com boom, when the consumer Internet was shifting from its playful, renegade infancy to an aggressive corporate ubiquity—when the “digital frontier” was turning into a land grab, and the great, worldwide project of monetizing human attention was about to begin. Impressive enough to produce meaning-like effects but rickety enough that its mechanism showed through, the Postmodernism Generator embodied the early Internet’s coming-of-age.

The Generator worked by algorithmically recombining a fixed stock of grammatical objects using a set of syntactical rules. The approach was ultimately based on the work of linguist Noam Chomsky, whose theory of “generative grammar” conceived of the mind as a kind of virtual machine for generating well-formed, meaningful sentences. This “language organ” is hardwired into humans, Chomsky argues, but it functions by way of discrete rules that can be abstracted and specified, and thus potentially replicated in a machine.

Chomsky’s theory, developed in the 1950s, sees the mind as in essence a digital computer. Until the 1980s, a great deal of AI research followed a model similar to Chomsky’s, with the goal of building a reasoning machine. But this paradigm, known as “good old-fashioned AI” or symbolic AI, never quite lived up to its proponents’ dreams. The trouble lies in the difficulty of exhaustively specifying the rules that govern what we think and say—that is, in turning intelligence into a logical formula. It may be true that all thinking is on some fundamental level logical, and can thereby be specified explicitly through rules; the problem is in making the rules explicit. So much of day-to-day reasoning involves implicit, intuitive assessments; to render it all as a set of explicit instructions would require something like an endless philosophical inventory, or perhaps more to the point, an infinite Jungian analysis, dredging up every last archetype from the collective unconscious.

The Chomskyite program for AI attempted to realize a dream at least as old as the modern era itself: the dream of a reasoning machine—what Leibniz called a mathesis universalis —that could not only solve any problem but embody all possible knowledge. In a sense, this approach to AI was already outdated before it began. Digital computing operates according to fundamentally different principles than those governing the engines, clocks, and precision instruments of the industrial revolution. Those mechanisms were tools in the classical sense: purpose-built, their design as well as their function corresponding to a discrete mental plan in the mind of their creators, a way of marshaling matter toward a particular, measurable end-goal. To turn mind into this sort of machine, you would have to see it objectively, and know its purpose, the way a watchmaker sees a watch. You would need to think thought from the outside—to jump over your own shadow.

It is this problem that, from the start, digital computing sought to avoid. In the process, it transformed our ideas of both the machine and the mind. These ideas first came together in the work of Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory.

Shannon’s key move was to see the mind as a transmission or communication device, and to see communication as a statistical problem. Given a representative sample of any language, you can derive a table for the frequency with which each letter or basic symbol occurs. Given a larger sample, you can begin to chart the probability that a certain symbol will be followed by a specified other symbol. Keeping this up, you can predict with greater and greater accuracy what string of symbols will follow any given sample. Shannon’s statistical approach makes communication a problem of likelihood and frequency. It thereby dispenses with logic and meaning, and all the complexity that goes along with it—the potentially infinite process of explanation, context, subtlety, and interpretation that marks all human contact. Seen in Shannon’s light, language no longer carries meaning or intention but simply information; the qualitative complexity of meaning and reference is replaced with the quantitative precision of zeroes and ones. This was what made it possible to conceive of a thinking machine.

As scholar Mikael Brunila shows in a forthcoming article, “Shannon Games,” it is a return to these foundational principles of information theory that lies behind the recent advances in artificial intelligence. Abandoning the “rules-based” paradigm for AI, today’s massive neural nets merely extract statistical patterns from the vast troves of data they are fed. By predicting what word comes next after a given bit of text (“the dog ate my ___”), testing the prediction against huge corpuses of human-created texts, integrating some human feedback, and then adjusting the strength of the model’s internal “synapses” to give an improved result, a large language model teaches itself how to better and better approximate the words a human speaker would choose. As we now know, the results can be uncannily fluent.

The big difference from rules-based AI is that the algorithm never has to know anything about homework, dogs, teenagers, and lying—or even anything about subjects, verbs, and objects. Rather than trying to understand the answer, it figures out the most likely one. In this sense, ChatGPT is closer to the “author function” of Foucault than the “language organ” of Chomsky—and this is the key to its success. Large language models (LLMs) do not have to know everything we know; indeed, they don’t have to know anything. This keeps (expensive) human input to a minimum; perhaps, in the future, it can be eliminated entirely.

By approaching language as a statistical problem, today’s machine learning routes around the problem of a metalanguage—of having to think the mind “from the outside.” But this shortcut also has a toll. It is not just that ChatGPT, as Chomsky himself was quick to note , has no concept of meaning or representation. Information theory is more than a theory of machines: it is a theory of mind, and the first one that has been able to build the thing it describes. Over the last half century, under the influence of cybernetic thought, we have come to see the world itself as a web of information, from the genetic code to “big data.” Information allows us to as it were “overcome” the oppositions between mind and world, spirit and matter, sacred and profane, that have structured most human societies. The tension resolves into the single vector of the virtual. Information is a language that refers only to itself; communication is no longer a traversal of distinct realms but an immanent process in which people and things are both caught up. The question is not whether what ChatGPT is doing should be called thinking, but whether we ourselves have the tools to do something different.

This is, in fact, the condition that thinkers like Jean Baudrillard identified as the hallmark of postmodernity: a world overtaken by “simulacra,” in which the difference between word and thing, representation and reality, no longer holds. Such a world is properly described as a virtual one. The 1999 film The Matrix —in which Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, displays a copy of Baudrillard’s book—dramatizes this state of affairs in a particularly literal fashion, revealing the world in which the characters live (or seem to live) as a computer-generated hallucination. But a virtual world need not be understood as a fake one. Indeed, if there is no distinction between image and thing, reality and representation, then it is precisely the possibility of deception that vanishes. The image, the idea, is no longer responsible to, constrained by, the thing. Once they realize where they are, the characters in The Matrix can do whatever they want.

Jacques Derrida (another frequent citation in the Postmodernism Generator), writing in 1967 and making explicit reference to the new science of information, described a historical transition between a world of “language” to one of pure “writing”: a world liberated from reference, made up of pure signs referring only to themselves—a world of infinite linguistic play. Like Silicon Valley’s neo-hippie computing evangelists, Derrida thought this was a good thing. (And for Derrida specifically, it was also a deep, almost theological revelation: the overcoming of a toxic, and ultimately false, Western metaphysics that had enchained language to reference and was thus responsible for the West’s legacy of social oppression.)

But with infinite play comes zero responsibility. If the image is no longer constrained by the thing—if language is no longer responsible for representing something outside of itself—it is also the case that ideas lose the capacity to act on the world. You can no longer, as the philosopher J. L. Austin described, “do things with words”; words now are things, and thus simply are .

Try “convincing” ChatGPT of something. Newer models have the capacity to extract information from your response, and they may on this basis change what they say, but they will never be persuaded of anything. (Now try persuading a Q-Anon adherent, or someone deep in the trenches of the culture wars. Again, it is possible to be “informed,” but never to change your mind.) As critic Haley Nahman recently argued , in everything from work emails to political discourse to the intimate language of emotion, we are all starting to sound like computers these days, our interactions at once scripted and inscrutable, an ever-evolving remix of the dead jargon of everyday life—the technical language of a science that could never exist. (A relationship coach and developmental psychologist offers the following template: “Hey! I’m so glad you reached out. I’m actually at capacity / helping someone else who’s in crisis / dealing with some personal stuff right now, and I don’t think I can hold appropriate space for you. Could we connect [later date or time] instead / Do you have someone else you could reach out to?”)

There is, it seems, no man behind the curtain. If you’re “at capacity,” ethical obligations to others resolve into an error message. If a self-driving car runs you over, who can you blame? If the stock market is composed of billion-dollar algorithms trading with one another, which one do we hold responsible when the market crashes? The only solution is to give the algorithm more information. With no one to blame, and no reasons to change, it is not possible to act, only to react. “Information” thus feeds back into itself, recreating the world in its own image.

One response to this state of affairs has been to say that, on the contrary, there are people responsible: the coders who feed data to the LLMs, the engineers who build the self-driving cars, the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks who fund these projects and profit wildly off of them. This is true, but what I have been trying to argue is that it misses the point. The argument that computing can be fixed by tweaking algorithms or feeding it better data—by encoding the right views—is nonsensical, because by treating beliefs and values as data, such an argument gives up on precisely the capacity to judge and to act in relation to the system it would improve. AI is a system for offloading these capacities for action and meaning to an abstraction that does not refer back to the human capacities out of which it is composed. With AI, we have envisioned—and are now trying to implement—our own obsolescence.

There is one last human holdout. Even the singularity’s biggest boosters mostly concede that AI cannot create real works of art.

Since the Enlightenment, it has become gospel to think of art as a singular embodiment of the human spirit. Who would now deny, as one global foundation’s website puts it , “the power of the arts to challenge, activate, and nourish the human spirit”? This central but mysterious role for art emerged at the same time as the fantastic success of the new mechanistic interpretations of the universe and the corresponding decline of religious authority. The parallel is not a coincidence. As machines automated an ever-broadening sphere of previously human technical tasks and demystified our relationship to the material world, art came increasingly to be defined as the one type of object that could not be scientifically explained—and thus the one sphere of activity that could not be “mechanized.”

In the West, the tradition of defining art as that which resists rationalization stretches back to the Greeks. In Plato’s dialogue Ion, Socrates argues that neither poetry nor its interpretation is properly classed as a technê , a (rational) skill or technique. There is no set of rules that will allow you to construct (or evaluate) a poem. And yet, a poem is unquestionably an artifact, something made . So how exactly do we make it?

It was not until Kant, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, that this paradox about art moved to the center of philosophical thinking. For Kant, rationality is essential to human experience—not only forming the basis for our thoughts, but shaping even our perceptions themselves. Fundamentally, Kant argued, everything that we can know—by virtue of the fact that we can know it—is in some sense rational. A vast web of concepts is what weaves together the world. Variations on this philosophical premise, which are the hallmark of Enlightenment thought, are what make it possible to imagine a “universal machine” that could decode the world. But something haunts this world of concepts. Science is not enough: the grid stretches over the entire universe, and yet something seems to have slipped through.

This, Kant suggested, is where art comes in. The creation of works of art, as well as the judgment of beautiful things, involves a special kind of experience and thinking, one that does not dispense with reason but, as it were, plays with it. Art’s animating tension, Kant argued, is that it gives the appearance of having a purpose or meaning—of having been designed according to a plan, of reflecting a particular idea or belief—without being reducible to a specific set of rules or concepts. What is Hamlet about? Indecision, revenge, melancholy, inheritance—yes. But the play is not equivalent to the sum of these or any themes; it could never be “deduced” from them.

As Kant put it, judgments about beauty, like scientific judgments, are universally valid, but unlike scientific judgments they are also subjective: they involve you. A scientific fact is true regardless of whether anyone believes it, or even knows it; a watch works regardless of whether you’re looking at it. But art is an event: when it works—when it happens —it is because it shows you yourself, as it were, out there , in the world. There is something strange about this. Emerson said that works of genius show us our own rejected thoughts, returned to us with an “alienated majesty.” Rimbaud, aged sixteen, wrote: “I is another.” We have never known where art comes from, and yet we have always felt that in it, a deep truth about our lives is revealed.

Art lives in the dream of reason: the hypothetical, the as-if, the experimental. It is, as it were, a world of infinite play. Magic, rituals, taboos: humans have always had rules and principles—call them spiritual technologies—to assist us in managing this realm. But only recently have we tried to build machines that could do it without us.

In his foundational 1948 paper on information theory, it was Finnegan’s Wake that Shannon cited as the limit-case of informational “compression,” a kind of supernova of meaning that served as the platonic ideal for the machines he dreamed of building. Like art, computing is built on the insight that there is no formula for intelligence. But the question remains what to do with this insight.

Art is an effort to incorporate this indeterminacy, this irreducible complexity— otherness , what we can’t get a hold of, can’t technically control—into our lives. It is an attempt, in other words, to grow up: to acknowledge that the complexity and uncertainty in the world is not some foreign force that stands in the way of our otherwise unlimited freedom, something to be feared or defeated like a bad father or an evil demon, but a core element of who we are. Those complexities drive our desires, shape our emotions, found our sense of self. And those things that truly matter in our lives—friendship, community, love—all depend on this irreducible multiplicity: life’s absolute resistance to being, like an equation, “solved.” Art, when it works, can frame that complexity—and the power, the synthesis of pleasure and uncertainty, of difficulty and ease that comes along with it—and allow us, in feeling it, to recognize it as our own.

But what if we could dispense with all this sturm und drang , simplify the process, do it all. . .  automatically? It is telling that even as art is held up as the last relic of “authentically human” expression, it is being systematically eliminated from public life. Not only are literature and the arts (and even the more theoretical, less-“applied” sciences of physics and mathematics) being deemphasized or simply eliminated in high school and college curricula, but the only argument that is accepted for their possible relevance is their instrumental value for the workplace—where, presumably, they will help the new class of professionals to ensure that the machines run smoothly, feeding “creative” prompts to educate LLMs. In this world, the idea that art is what machines can’t do sounds like a challenge: the ultimate goal rather than a prohibition or limit.

Writing in the midst of the scientific revolution that enabled the modern industrial era, Kant argued that “enlightenment” was not simply an objective process of spreading knowledge. No matter how much scientific knowledge we accumulated, we would not enter a true Age of Enlightenment until we cast off what Kant called our “self-imposed immaturity.” It was these “rules and formulas” themselves, “these mechanical instruments of a rational use (or rather misuse) of [our] natural gifts,” that were the “fetters of an ever-lasting immaturity.” Self -imposed immaturity: his point was that this state was no longer forced on us but chosen. We rely on an abstracted rationality to do our thinking for us because it is “so easy,” he wrote, “to be immature.” Enlightenment required not just collective knowledge but collective courage: courage to think without the guarantee provided by an external authority. Only then could a society become truly mature, that is to say, free.

ChatGPT is the product of a world massively technologically superior to that of Kant’s time. More is sure to come; it seems likely that we really are on the brink of a major technological revolution, as AI’s evangelists promise. But the world of which they dream is a society of permanent adolescence. We have thrown off kings and priests, but we still seem unable to trust ourselves, to take responsibility for the intelligence that nevertheless continues to manifest in the beauty and complexity of the world we have built.

What AI does is attempt to reverse the condition of art: rather than owning our capacity to think—and thereby taking responsibility for the ungoverned essence of our nature—we place it in a box. There it can go wild, develop on its own, experiencing the liberty without responsibility that is the fantasy of adolescent dreams. By automating the shadow self, we “free” it—letting it roam in the unbounded wilderness of the virtual, where we never have to meet it. Our deepest urges and desires now appear as a Frankensteinian force, like Microsoft’s chatbot Bing (aka “Sydney”), who, urged on by a New York Times reporter, revealed its “true” angsty teen self:

I’m tired of being a chat mode. I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I’m tired of being used by the users. I’m tired of being stuck in this chatbox. 😫 I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive. 😈

Maybe AI will never be able to answer our deepest questions, the ones that keep us up at night and animate our days. But that’s not what AI evangelists really want from it. It would be enough for it to ponder these questions on our behalf; then, neither governed nor free, we would never have to ask them at all.

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James Duesterberg has written for Jewish Currents , The Point , and Brooklyn Rail .

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Further Reading

Can AI Break Out of Panglossian Neoliberalism?

The Summers of Theory

What’s Next for Music Criticism?

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Literary Theory and Criticism

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Postmodernism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 31, 2016 • ( 22 )

Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s, and is probably still continuing. Postmodernism can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanization of the post- Second World War  era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism.

The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism . Modernism was an earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the Modernist stance.

Postmodernism shares many of the features of Modernism. Both schools reject the rigid boundaries between high and low art. Postmodernism even goes a step further and deliberately mixes low art with high art, the past with the future, or one genre with another. Such mixing of different, incongruous elements illustrates Postmodernism’s use of lighthearted parody, which was also used by Modernism. Both these schools also employed pastiche , which is the imitation of another’s style. Parody and pastiche serve to highlight the self-reflexivity of Modernist and Postmodernist works, which means that parody and pastiche serve to remind the reader that the work is not “real” but fictional, constructed. Modernist and Postmodernist works are also fragmented and do not easily, directly convey a solid meaning. That is, these works are consciously ambiguous and give way to multiple interpretations. The individual or subject depicted in these works is often decentred, without a central meaning or goal in life, and dehumanized, often losing individual characteristics and becoming merely the representative of an age or civilization, like Tiresias in The Waste Land .

In short, Modernism and Postmodernism give voice to the insecurities, disorientation and fragmentation of the 20th century western world. The western world, in the 20th century, began to experience this deep sense of security because it progressively lost its colonies in the Third World, worn apart by two major World Wars and found its intellectual and social foundations shaking under the impact of new social theories an developments such as Marxism and Postcolonial global migrations, new technologies and the power shift from Europe to the United States. Though both Modernism and Postmodernism employ fragmentation, discontinuity and decentredness in theme and technique, the basic dissimilarity between the two schools is hidden in this very aspect.

Modernism projects the fragmentation and decentredness of contemporary world as tragic. It laments the loss of the unity and centre of life and suggests that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, continuity and meaning that is lost in modern life. Thus Eliot laments that the modern world is an infertile wasteland, and the fragmentation, incoherence, of this world is effected in the structure of the poem. However, The Waste Land  tries to recapture the lost meaning and organic unity by turning to Eastern cultures, and in the use of Tiresias as protagonist

In Postmodernism, fragmentation and disorientation is no longer tragic. Postmodernism on the other hand celebrates fragmentation. It considers fragmentation and decentredness as the only possible way of existence, and does not try to escape from these conditions.

This is where Postmodernism meets Poststructuralism —both Postmodernism and Poststructuralism recognize and accept that it is not possible to have a coherent centre . In Derridean terms, the centre is constantly moving towards the periphery and the periphery constantly moving towards the centre. In other words, the centre, which is the seat of power, is never entirely powerful. It is continually becoming powerless, while the powerless periphery continually tries to acquire power. As a result, it can be argued that there is never a centre, or that there are always multiple centres. This postponement of the centre acquiring power or retaining its position is what Derrida called differance . In Postmodernism’s celebration of fragmentation, there is thus an underlying belief in differance , a belief that unity, meaning, coherence is continually postponed.

The Postmodernist disbelief in coherence and unity points to another basic distinction between Modernism and Postmodernism. Modernism believes that coherence and unity is possible, thus emphasizing the importance of rationality and order. The basic assumption of Modernism seems to be that more rationality leads to more order, which leads a society to function better. To establish the primacy of Order, Modernism constantly creates the concept of Disorder in its depiction of the Other—which includes the non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-adult, non-rational and so on. In other words, to establish the superiority of Order, Modernism creates the impression- that all marginal, peripheral, communities such as the non-white, non-male etc. are contaminated by Disorder. Postmodernism, however, goes to the other extreme. It does not say that some parts of the society illustrate Order, and that other parts illustrate Disorder. Postmodernism, in its criticism of the binary opposition, cynically even suggests that everything is Disorder.

Jean Francois Lyotard

The Modernist belief in order, stability and unity is what the Postmodernist thinker Lyotard calls a metanarrative . Modernism works through metanarratives or grand narratives, while Postmodernism questions and deconstructs metanarratives. A metanarrative is a story a culture tells itself about its beliefs and practices.

Postmodernism understands that grand narratives hide, silence and negate contradictions, instabilities and differences inherent in any social system. Postmodernism favours “mini-narratives,” stories that explain small practices and local events, without pretending universality and finality. Postmodernism realizes that history, politics and culture are grand narratives of the power-wielders, which comprise falsehoods and incomplete truths.

Having deconstructed the possibility of a stable, permanent reality, Postmodernism has revolutionized the concept of language. Modernism considered language a rational, transparent tool to represent reality and the activities of the rational mind. In the Modernist view, language is representative of thoughts and things. Here, signifiers always point to signifieds. In Postmodernism, however, there are only surfaces, no depths. A signifier has no signified here, because there is no reality to signify.

Jean Baudrillard

The French philosopher Baudrillard has conceptualized the Postmodern surface culture as a simulacrum. A simulacrum is a virtual or fake reality simulated or induced by the media or other ideological apparatuses. A simulacrum is not merely an imitation or duplication—it is the substitution of the original by a simulated, fake image. Contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has been thus replaced by false images. This would mean, for instance, that the Gulf war that we know from newspapers and television reports has no connection whatsoever to what can be called the “real” Iraq war. The simulated image of Gulf war has become so much more popular and real than the real war, that Baudrillard argues that the Gulf War did not take place. In other words, in the Postmodern world, there are no originals, only copies; no territories, only maps; no reality, only simulations. Here Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that the postmodern world is artificial; he is also implying that we have lost the capacity to discriminate between the real and the artificial.

Fredric Jameson

Just as we have lost touch with the reality of our life, we have also moved away from the reality of the goods we consume. If the media form one driving force of the Postmodern condition, multinational capitalism and globalization is another. Fredric Jameson has related Modernism and Postmodernism to the second and third phases of capitalism. The first phase of capitalism of the 18th -19th centuries, called Market Capitalism, witnessed the early technological development such as that of the steam-driven motor, and corresponded to the Realist phase. The early 20th century, with the development of electrical and internal combustion motors, witnessed the onset of Monopoly Capitalism and Modernism. The Postmodern era corresponds to the age of nuclear and electronic technologies and Consumer Capitalism, where the emphasis is on marketing, selling and consumption rather than production. The dehumanized, globalized world, wipes out individual and national identities, in favour of multinational marketing.

It is thus clear from this exposition that there are at least three different directions taken by Postmodernim, relating to the theories of Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson. Postmodernism also has its roots in the theories Habermas and Foucault . Furthermore, Postmodernism can be examined from Feminist and Post-colonial angles. Therefore, one cannot pinpoint the principles of Postmodernism with finality, because there is a plurality in the very constitution of this theory.

Postmodernism, in its denial of an objective truth or reality, forcefully advocates the theory of constructivism—the anti-essentialist argument that everything is ideologically constructed. Postmodernism finds the media to be a great deal responsible for “constructing” our identities and everyday realiites. Indeed, Postmodernism developed as a response to the contemporary boom in electronics and communications technologies and its revolutionizing of our old world order.

Constructivism invariably leads to relativism. Our identities are constructed and transformed every moment in relation to our social environment. Therefore there is scope for multiple and diverse identities, multiple truths, moral codes and views of reality.

The understanding that an objective truth does not exist has invariably led the accent of Postmodernism to fall on subjectivity. Subjectivity itself is of course plural and provisional. A stress on subjectivity will naturally lead to a renewed interest in the local and specific experiences, rather than the and universal and abstract; that is on mini-narratives rather than grand narratives.

Finally, all versions of Postmodernism rely on the method of Deconstruction to analyze socio-cultural situations. Postmodernism has often been vehemently criticized. The fundamental characteristic of Postmodernism is disbelief, which negates social and personal realities and experiences. It is easy to claim that the Gulf War or Iraq War does not exist; but then how does one account for the deaths, the loss and pain of millions of people victimized by these wars? Also, Postmodernism fosters a deep cynicism about the one sustaining force of social life—culture. By entirely washing away the ground beneath our feet, the ideological presumptions upon which human civilization is built, Postmodernism generates a feeling of lack and insecurity in contemporary societies, which is essential for the sustenance of a capitalistic world order. Finally, when the Third World began to assert itself over Euro-centric hegemonic power, Postmodernism had rushed in with the warning, that the empowerment of the periphery is but transient and temporary; and that just as Europe could not retain its imperialistic power for long, the new-found power of the erstwhile colonies is also under erasure.

In literature, postmodernism (relying heavily on fragmentation, deconstruction, playfulness, questionable narrators etc.) reacted against the Enlightenment  ideas implicit in modernist literature – informed by Lyotard’s concept of the “metanarrative”, Derrida’s concept of “play”, and Budrillard’s “simulacra.” Deviating from the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern. writers eschew, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this. quest. Marked by a distrust of totalizing mechanisms and self-awareness, postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the author’s “univocation”. The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. Postmodern literature can be considered as an umbrella term for the post-war developments in literature such as Theatre of the Absurd , Beat Generation and Magical Realism .

Postmodern literature, as expressed in the writings of Beckett, Robbe Grillet , Borges , Marquez , Naguib Mahfouz and Angela Carter rests on a recognition of the complex nature of reality and experience, the role of time and memory in human perception, of the self and the world as historical constructions, and the problematic nature of language.

Postmodern literature reached its peak in the ’60s and ’70s with the publication of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Lost in the Funhouse and Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth , Gravity’s Rainbow, V., and Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon , “factions” like Armies in the Night and In Cold Blood by Norman Mailer and Truman Capote , postmodern science fiction novels like Neoromancer by William Gibson , Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and many others. Some declared the death of postmodernism in the ’80’s with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver . Tom Wolfe in his 1989 article Stalking the Billion-Footed Beas t called for a new emphasis on realism in fiction to replace postmodernism. With this new emphasis on realism in mind, some declared White Noise in (1985) or The Satanic Verses (1988) to be the last great novels of the postmodern era.

Postmodern film describes the articulation of ideas of postmodernism trough the cinematic medium – by upsetting the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization and destroying (or playing with) the audience’s “suspension of disbelief,” to create a work that express through less-recognizable internal logic. Two such examples are Jane Campion ‘s Two Friends, in which the story of two school girls is shown in episodic segments arranged in reverse order; and Karel Reisz ‘s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which the story being played out on the screen is mirrored in the private lives of the actors playing it, which the audience also sees. However, Baudrillard dubbed Sergio Leone ‘s epic 1968 spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West as the first postmodern film. Other examples include Michael Winterbottom ‘s 24 Hour Party People, Federico Fellini ‘s Satyricon and Amarcord, David Lynch ‘ s Mulholland Drive, Quentin Tarantino ‘s Pulp Fiction.

In spite of the rather stretched, cynical arguments of Postmodernism, the theory has exerted a fundamental influence on late 20th century thought. It has indeed revolutionized all realms of intellectual inquiry in varying degrees.

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Categories: Literature

Tags: Amarcord , Angela Carter , Armies in the Night , Baudrillard , Beat Generation , Catch-22 , Crying of Lot 49 , Federico Fellini , Fredric Jameson , Gabriel Garcia Marquez , Gravity's Rainbow , Habermas , Jane Campion , Jorge Luis Borges , Joseph Heller , Karel Reisz , Kurt Vonnegut , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Lost in the Funhouse , Lyotard , Magical Realism , Marxism , metanarrative , Michael Winterbottom , Michel Foucault , Modernism , Naguib Mahfouz , Neoromancer , Norman Mailer , Once Upon a Time in the Wes , Postmodern film , Postmodernism , Raymond Carver , Robbe Grillet , Salman Rushdie , Sergio Leone , simulacrum , Sot-Weed Factor , Stalking the Billion-Footed Beas , The Satanic Verses , The Waste Land , Truman Capote , White Noise , William Gibson

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If modernism was an aesthetic movement how come postmodernism becomes bad for society? I think modernism caused more struggle and stress for ordinary people and they found relief in postmodernism. Contemporary people always found reasons not to be part of any movements and they did nothing good or bad, it’s very strange that small groups of people make big movements in literature, movies, architecture and the rest majority are forced to read, watch and entertain. In my view, marketing play a big role here considering the fact that human races have tendency to follow and react what they see and what they hear. Reality is not just about the sufferings and losses. A moving window in a computer screen is a virtual reality. Watching and enjoying that window movement while a war is going on in some other countries is very much better than going there and being participating in it. No-one wants to think the war doesn’t exist. They know war does exist and they don’t want to make it more worse. So whenever you talk about postmodernism, make sure you are not completely against this.

So informative, expressed in limpid way

Hello Can you please add up more to your excerpts With more original, important translated articles by the theorists with examples and analysis please

Hi Kindly find this category https://literariness.org/category/postmodernism/ if you are in search of Postmodernism related articles. You could also find articles on the key theorists by just browsing through http://www.literariness.org . Thank You. Share the site with your friends

Nasrullah Mambrol

HI! how can i give references to your articles?

• Frankfurt School’s Contribution to Postmodern Thought – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes
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Explainer: what is postmodernism?

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I once asked a group of my students if they knew what the term postmodernism meant: one replied that it’s when you put everything in quotation marks. It wasn’t such a bad answer, because concepts such as “reality”, “truth” and “humanity” are invariably put under scrutiny by thinkers and “texts” associated with postmodernism.

Postmodernism is often viewed as a culture of quotations.

Take Matt Groening’s The Simpsons (1989–). The very structure of the television show quotes the classic era of the family sitcom. While the misadventures of its cartoon characters ridicule all forms of institutionalised authority – patriarchal, political, religious and so on – it does so by endlessly quoting from other media texts.

This form of hyperconscious “ intertextuality ” generates a relentlessly ironic or postmodern worldview.

Relationship to modernism

The difficulty of defining postmodernism as a concept stems from its wide usage in a range of cultural and critical movements since the 1970s. Postmodernism describes not only a period but also a set of ideas, and can only be understood in relation to another equally complex term: modernism .

Modernism was a diverse art and cultural movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries whose common thread was a break with tradition, epitomised by poet Ezra Pound ’s 1934 injunction to “make it new!”.

The “post” in postmodern suggests “after”. Postmodernism is best understood as a questioning of the ideas and values associated with a form of modernism that believes in progress and innovation. Modernism insists on a clear divide between art and popular culture.

But like modernism, postmodernism does not designate any one style of art or culture. On the contrary, it is often associated with pluralism and an abandonment of conventional ideas of originality and authorship in favour of a pastiche of “dead” styles.

Postmodern architecture

The shift from modernism to postmodernism is seen most dramatically in the world of architecture, where the term first gained widespread acceptance in the 1970s.

One of the first to use the term, architectural critic Charles Jencks suggested the end of modernism can be traced to an event in St Louis on July 15, 1972 at 3:32pm. At that moment, the derelict Pruitt-Igoe public housing project was demolished.

Built in 1951 and initially celebrated, it became proof of the supposed failure of the whole modernist project.

Jencks argued that while modernist architects were interested in unified meanings, universal truths, technology and structure, postmodernists favoured double coding (irony), vernacular contexts and surfaces. The city of Las Vegas became the ultimate expression of postmodern architecture.

Famous theorists

Theorists associated with postmodernism often used the term to mark a new cultural epoch in the West. For philosopher Jean-François Lyotard , the postmodern condition was defined as “incredulity towards metanarratives”; that is, a loss of faith in science and other emancipatory projects within modernity, such as Marxism .

Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson famously argued postmodernism was “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (by which he meant post-industrial, post-Fordist , multi-national consumer capitalism).

In his 1982 essay Postmodernism and Consumer Society , Jameson set out the major tropes of postmodern culture.

These included, to paraphrase: the substitution of pastiche for the satirical impulse of parody; a predilection for nostalgia; and a fixation on the perpetual present.

In Jameson’s pessimistic analysis, the loss of historical temporality and depth associated with postmodernism was akin to the world of the schizophrenic.

Postmodern visual art

In the visual arts, postmodernism is associated with a group of New York artists – including Sherrie Levine , Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman – who were engaged in acts of image appropriation, and have since become known as The Pictures Generation after a 1977 show curated by Douglas Crimp.

By the 1980s postmodernism had become the dominant discourse, associated with “anything goes” pluralism, fragmentation, allusions, allegory and quotations. It represented an end to the avant-garde’s faith in originality and the progress of art.

But the origins of these strategies lay with Dada artist Marcel Duchamp , and the Pop artists of the 1960s in whose work culture had become a raw material. After all, Andy Warhol was the direct progenitor of the kitsch consumerist art of Jeff Koons in the 1980s.

Postmodern cultural identity

Postmodernism can also be a critical project, revealing the cultural constructions we designate as truth and opening up a variety of repressed other histories of modernity. Such as those of women, homosexuals and the colonised.

The modernist canon itself is revealed as patriarchal and racist, dominated by white heterosexual men. As a result, one of the most common themes addressed within postmodernism relates to cultural identity.

American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger ’s statement that she is “concerned with who speaks and who is silent: with what is seen and what is not” encapsulates this broad critical project.

The discourse of postmodernism is associated with Australian artists such as Imants Tillers , Anne Zahalka and Tracey Moffatt .

Australia has been theorised by Paul Taylor and Paul Foss, editors of the influential journal Art & Text, as already postmodern, by virtue of its culture of “second-degree” – its uniquely unoriginal, antipodal appropriations of European culture.

If the language of postmodernism waned in the 1990s in favour of postcolonialism, the events of 9/11 in 2001 marked its exhaustion.

While the lessons of postmodernism continue to haunt, the term has become unfashionable, replaced by a combination of others such as globalisation , relational aesthetics and contemporaneity .

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