1216 POSTMODERNISM
Wolfe, C. (2003). Animal Rites: American Culture,
the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Postmodernism
MICHAEL RYAN
Postmodernism refers both to a historical
moment and to an intellectual and artistic
movement that can be seen either as unique-
ly contemporary or as a continuation of a
dissonant tradition within Western culture
that originates with the sophists and the pre-
Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece and
that is evident in bohemian, countercultur-
al, and avant-garde intellectual and cultural
movements throughout Western history
down to the present, from the Albigensians
and the aesthetes to the anarchists and the
punks.
As the artistic and intellectual movement
that comes “after modernism,” post-
modernism can be said to begin in the
1960s when modernism in architecture,
painting, and especially literature began to
wane. Modernist literature was technically
innovative; it sought new means of repre-
sentation, such as the stream-of-conscious-
ness technique of narration and journalistic
reporting, which aimed at a brutal honesty
of expression. Modernist painting sought
to depict reality in its simplest constitutive
abstract elements, while modernist architec-
ture privileged the most efficient and ratio-
nally functional design.
With the emergence of postmodernism
in the 1960s, clarity of line, efficiency of
function, and technical innovation gave
way to a more self-reflexive style that fore-
grounded the conventions of construction
that constitute buildings or works of art.
Postmodernists began to question the very
concept of “art” and to examine the con-
ventions that made it different from other
forms of cultural representation. Already in
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the aftermath of World War II, painters such
as Jackson Pollock exploded what constitut-
ed “art” by creating wildly nonrepresenta-
tional paintings that drew attention to the
potential for disorder in the world and fo-
cused the viewer’s attention on the artistic
medium. His work broke with traditional
principles of composition and challenged
the idea that art should depict reality at
all. Following upon Pollock, postmodern
painting in the late 1950s and early 1960s
ceased to be about abstract forms and be-
came reflections on the distinction between
“art” and other forms of culture, such as
comic books and advertisements. The work
of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein,
which dissolved the conventional division
between art and everyday life, eroded the
status value of art in bourgeois culture. The
organizers of “happenings” departed from
the classic bourgeois notion of art as a
“work” that existed to be appreciated in
museums. By the end of the 1960s, art
aspired to get closer to the flow and flux
of life itself. Everything was art.
Central to the postmodernist impulse as
it evolved in the 1960s was the idea that by
making visible the hidden conventions or
rules that make literature literary and art
artistic, postmodern practitioners could
rupture the pretenses that sustained bour-
geois culture – the pretense, for example,
that what that culture called reality was
acceptable and reasonable rather than con-
structed and fabricated or irrational and
self-deluded. Bourgeois culture is founded
on the idea that disciplined work for the
sake of accumulating wealth is the most
important way to organize human life. Post-
modernists largely thought otherwise. For
them, more playful life and artistic options
were possible, but those were suppressed by
bourgeois ideals of self-control and disci-
pline linked to a capitalist economic form
that fostered social inequality, the destruc-
tion of nature, and the reduction of human

relations to mutual exploitation. The expo-
sure of the conventions that made art art and
the troubling of the distinctions that sepa-
rated art from life were thus not merely
aesthetic gestures. They challenged the basic
assumptions of the surrounding culture to
the extent that that culture depends on the
suppression of a critical examination of its
founding assumptions and its constitutive
conventions. In the eyes of believers in that
culture, these conventions are not conven-
tions at all; they are “reality.” The post-
modern challenge to the very idea of
“reality” should thus be understood as a
political gesture aimed at the founding belief
system of an irrational bourgeois society
which survives by getting people to believe
assumptions that do not withstand the chal-
lenge of critical reflection and analysis. They
are lies presented as truths to a duped pop-
ulation to lull them into compliance and
conformity. Postmodernism aimed to re-
move the blinds and to show the world
for what it really was – a construction, a
representation, an ideological mirage with,
oftentimes, horrifying consequences – as
postmodern writers like Kurt Vonnegut sug-
gested in novels such as Slaughterhouse 5
(1969).
In the literary postmodernism of the
1960s and ’70s, novels were no longer about
a “reality” that is supposedly represented
“realistically,” but were instead about the
way representational forms and literary
techniques construct our sense of what is
“real.” John Barth’s novels such as Giles
Goat-Boy (1966) exposed and subverted
the usual conventions of fictional realism,
often playing out to exhaustion some of the
most familiar novelist techniques (episto-
lary form, frame narratives, and the like).
Other writers explored the irrational dimen-
sions of human life and the repressive ap-
paratuses of bourgeois culture that held
good natural impulses in check. Joseph
Heller depicted the irrationality of
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POSTMODERNISM 1217
supposedly rational modern organizations
in Catch-22 (1961), while Ken Kesey
depicted madness as bureaucratic reason
in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(1962). Other postmodern writers, such as
Robert Coover, developed new modes of
writing altogether in Pricksongs and Descants
(1969). And Thomas Pynchon, in The Cry-
ing of Lot 49 (1966), portrayed America as a
failed project that depletes human empathy
and removes meaning from life for the sake
of a meaningless pursuit of wealth. For
postmodern writers of the 1960s, the bour-
geois ideals of realism and rationality, which
had gained prominence in the conservative
culture of America after World War II es-
pecially, no longer counted as virtue in a
world in which the most rational and real-
istic political leaders were fomenting unjust
wars in places like Vietnam and moving the
world toward mass self-destruction in a
nuclear holocaust. The rationality of sup-
posedly “modern” bourgeois culture
seemed increasingly to the postmodernists
to be itself a form of madness that had to be
resisted, often through the development of
artistic forms that subverted the classic as-
sumption that art should represent the real
or the true. The productions of the Living
Theater (founded in 1947 but rising to
prominence in the 1960s) made no attempt
to “represent” anything; the spectacle of
squirming interlaced bodies was designed
to incite the audience to critical reflection by
breaking both social and aesthetic conven-
tions. For Andy Warhol, what was real and
true was not a landscape or a seated figure or
even an abstract image as in modernism; it
was rather the banal but mesmerizing dazzle
and color of such pop culture icons as a
Campbell’s Soup can and Marilyn Monroe’s
face. Later artists in the postmodern tradi-
tion such as Cindy Sherman blurred the line
between real and representation by inserting
herself into her photographic works in play-
ful pantomimes. And architects such as
1218 POSTMODERNISM
Robert Venturi deliberately overthrew mod-
ernist ideals of purity in architectural forms
by merging different styles in new, eclectic,
and ironic ways. Buildings such as the Pom-
pidou Centre in Paris (which opened in
1977) turned architecture inside out so
that how buildings were made became vis-
ible. It was as if people took to wearing
underwear outside their business suits rath-
er than underneath, and the purpose was to
shock and awaken.
This questioning of the relationship
between art and the life it supposedly repre-
sented or between the social ideal of capi-
talist development and the efficient mod-
ernist buildings that embodied its principles
was connected with the numerous radical
movements of the 1960s era that carried out
a similar questioning of the ideals and pol-
icies of the ruling elites of the major capitalist
countries such as the United States. From
feminism to the antiwar movement, from
rebelliousness of dress and personal style to
new forms of nonrationalist thinking, these
movements were also “postmodern.” They
took issue with the “reality” of the ideals of
“imperialist patriarchal capitalism” and
noted that those ideals were products and
constructs maintained by cultural represen-
tation owned and controlled by those with
social and economic power. To draw atten-
tion to the conventions that constructed a
society’s sense of what counted as “real” was
therefore to take issue with the way power
was configured in that society. Art and lit-
erature became privileged arenas for such
explorations, as did entire new fields of
scholarly inquiry such as cultural studies
that took as their starting point the idea
that what we take for reality in our lived
experience of the world is constructed for us
by media representations.
As a result of these cultural and social
upheavals, modernism was no longer seen
as the realization of a good dream of social
utopia predicated on a benign rational use of
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
technology. Instead it came to be seen as part
of a capitalist culture that was responsible for
the repression of good creative energies at
odds with the bourgeois ideal of self-restraint
and social control. The postmodernists asked
the following questions: what if such controls
were negative and repressive, and what if
what was repressed was in fact good and
worthy of liberation? What if the conventions
or rules that made modernist art possible
were linked to social conventions that limited
and restricted people’s lives by making peo-
ple be, like modernist architecture itself,
more efficient and functional parts of an
irrational society? They were working parts
of a society that postmodernists increasingly
came to view negatively because it was
dominated by irrational ideals of material
progress. In consequence, postmodernists
rejected the tone of high seriousness in mod-
ernism and turned instead to play, irony,
mock citation, pastiche. By being deliberately
unoriginal, postmodern writers and artists
drew attention to the way we are all im-
mersed in cultural imagery that shapes our
lives. We inherit without realizing it a legacy
of assumptions, prejudices, beliefs, and iden-
tities that become visible to us only when we
reflect on how the world we live in is con-
structed. The exposure of the conventions of
culture thus had both an aesthetic and
a political purpose.
While postmodernism names a clearly
demarcated period “after modernism,” it
should also be seen as part of a counter-
tradition in Western thought and culture,
from the sophists down to the aesthetes of
the late nineteenth century and the Dadaists
and surrealists of the early twentieth, which
posed a sustained and continuous challenge
to the conservatism that suppressed way-
ward natural energies for the sake of creating
disciplined, conformist, and unequal socie-
ties and imposed dull, leaden-headed modes
of knowledge and belief that assured the
power of the powerful. These societies

were sustained by ideological systems, from
Platonic idealism to Roman Catholicism,
from fascism to modern conservatism,
that made social and economic inequality
and hierarchical authority seem unchange-
able and indelibly “real.” The sophists chal-
lenged the Platonic system of absolute truth
by arguing that people can be made to
believe certain things through the astute
use of language. They disagreed with the
Platonic claim that truth consisted of uni-
versal forms that existed outside history and
possessed an unquestionable authority, be-
lieving instead that truth was more complex,
and that it was embedded in discourse and in
historical life itself: it could not be separated
from the position of the knower anchored in
the historical world and living in discourse.
The sophist position was more democratic
than the authoritarian Platonic one, and
that difference – between a democratic epis-
temology and an authoritarian one – con-
tinues down to the present to define the
difference between the conservative attempt
to shore up political authority and economic
inequality and the radical attempt to ques-
tion those institutions and to promote
equality by developing an epistemology
and an ontology founded on world-
embedded complexity.
It is in relation to this long struggle be-
tween philosophical conservatism working
in the service of political authoritarianism
and social inequality on the one hand and its
numerous critical opponents on the other
that one must understand the intellectual
movement known first as poststructuralism
and subsequently as postmodernism which
emerged in France in the 1960s. Not sur-
prisingly, the early work of such postmodern
French theorists as Jacques Derrida and Julia
Kristeva was on late nineteenth-century
avant-garde writers such as the Comte de
Lautreamont and St
ephane Mallarm
e. The
affinities were real because they all partici-
pated in the same antithetical tradition
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POSTMODERNISM 1219
in Western culture. Theorists such as
Derrida and Kristeva linked those historical
examples of aesthetic and linguistic revolt
to the work being done in France in the
1960s on structuralist linguistics. Language
itself, with its enormous potential for
semantic polyvalence and syntactic playful-
ness, became a privileged lever in the
“deconstruction” of what was seen to be
a conservative and repressive “Western
metaphysics.”
Intellectual postmodernism of the kind
that had the greatest influence on literary
and cultural theory took the form of major
statements by writers such as Derrida,
Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault,
Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, H
elene
Cixous, and Luce Irigaray in the years
from 1966 to 1975. A major source of ideas
for these thinkers was structuralist linguis-
tics. Philosophy had continued to seek au-
thoritative models of truth in the mind’s
powers of ideation down through early
twentieth-century phenomenology, the
German philosophic school promoted by
Edmund Husserl. But developments in lin-
guistics in the mid twentieth century under-
mined that quest by drawing attention to the
way the human mind’s operations were
anchored in and made possible by language,
a system of sounds that was practical and
nonideational. How could truth, which was
supposedly absolute, authoritative, and
purely mental, rely on a system of merely
practical marks or sonic differences that
were inherently polyvalent and polyseman-
tic? The great project of philosophic conser-
vatism – the search for truth in some abso-
lute ground that would make hierarchical,
inegalitarian, and authoritarian social insti-
tutions appear beyond contest or criticism –
was scuppered once and for all. The conser-
vative ideal of the “Great Writer,” which
paralleled the conservative ideal of the Great
Leader, was replaced by a model of how all
individual writing is part of a discourse that
1220 POSTMODERNISM
is in turn locatable in larger social, historical,
cultural fields.
The major linguistic influence on post-
modern thinkers was Ferdinand de Saus-
sure, whose Course in General Linguistics
(1959[1916]) shaped the thinking of a gen-
eration of French intellectuals. Two of
Saussure’s ideas were especially influential.
One was that language is a self-contained
system. Words are able to function as the
names of things or actions because they are
part of that system. The relation between
words and things is entirely arbitrary. The
word “cat” could name a flower if we wanted
it to, but our linguistic and cultural conven-
tions make the sound evoke the idea of an
animal instead. Language, in other words,
is entirely agreement-based. And it works
because it is a self-contained system, not
because there is any real connection between
words and things. A sound image like “cat”
evokes an image in our minds and allows us
to think of a real cat, but that occurs within a
linguistic system that has no direct contact
with the world of things. Words are not
names; they are arbitrary and conventional
directional signals that orient our thinking
in the world. One important “postmodern”
conclusion derived from this idea is that we
can never get direct, unmediated access to
reality, to a real world of objects or things; we
always know the world through language.
Another influential idea of Saussure’s is
that language is a sign-system made up of
interrelated terms none of which has sub-
stance or identity outside the system of
relations. Saussure called such relations
“differences,” and as a result “difference”
becomes an important term in postmodern-
ist thinking. Saussure broke the basic com-
ponent of language (what he called the
“sign”) into two parts – the signifier, or
phonic image, and the signified, or the men-
tal image the signifier referred to. A signifier
has an identity only by virtue of its difference
from all other signifiers. It has no substance
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in its own right. “Cat” can name a cat
because it sounds different from “hat,”
which as a result of that difference can
name something else. Individual words
have no reality or identity on their own apart
from their place in the whole language sys-
tem of differential relations between terms.
This simple idea had shocking conse-
quences. When applied to the world we
know, it suggested that what makes anything
what it is is largely invisible and “not there.”
The presence of the thing before our eyes – a
traditional gold standard for accuracy and
truthfulness – no longer counted if the
automobile you love, for example, has
meaning or being or “ontology” only inso-
much as it is part of a mesh of relations to
other things which exceed the grasp of a
consciousness that thinks only in terms of
the presence of the thing, like the car, before
our eyes. The car really is the links to the
factory that make it, which links to the
corporation that built the factory, which
has meaning only in a complex interre-
lational economic system, and so on. For
postmodernist philosophy, there is no there
there. There – the presence of any thing
before us – is always elsewhere. Thinking
in terms of objects that are present to the
mind loses all validity as a way of determin-
ing what is true. We have instead to take into
account the complex relational field in
which the object is located and that gives
it its meaning.
If structuralists noticed that human cul-
ture and society work in similar ways to
language so that meaning is generated by
relations between terms and so that to know
a “fact” is to know a relation, the poststruc-
turalists took that idea one step further by
noting that the relations never end. What
Derrida called “textuality” was the endless
proliferation of connections and relations,
the deep network that made the presence of
the thing before our eyes and mind possible;
knowledge, therefore, is always incomplete.

There is no such thing as absolute certainty
or complete knowledge of anything. But just
as compellingly, there is no stable and sure
identity of anything in human culture and
society. Our selves are relational as much as
our cultural products. Knowledge and life
are complex rather than simple. All the
certainties of bourgeois culture – from the
“individual” to “facts” to the “truth” that
sustained the culture’s moral platitudes –
were thrown in doubt. In postmodernist
eyes, moral and cognitive simplicity gives
way to a norm-disturbing complexity.
The years 1966 and 1967 witnessed the
publication of some of the major works of
what would come to be called postmodern-
ism. Lacan’s
Ecrits (1966) articulated a new
version of psychoanalysis that drew on
Saussure’s theories. The mind, according
to Lacan, is such a system of interrelated
parts, and because the unconscious mani-
fests itself in the form of symptoms that are
in fact signs, one could say the mind is itself
a language system. Moreover, because the
mind resembles language in that it is a self-
contained system of relations that does not
connect in any way with the world of objects,
our conscious life and all of our conscious
feelings, desires, and ideas are a kind of
bubble through which we see the world
and even ourselves. But we can never get
access, direct and tangible, to that world.
We can never know ourselves fully or know
the world accurately and in a purely objec-
tive way. Our languages always mediate our
knowledge.
Foucault made a similar point in The
Order of Things (1973[1966]), a history of
knowledge that demonstrated that our
ways of knowing the world have changed
over time and are characterized by different
regimes of knowledge and signification.
Some knowledge regimes (or epistemes) as-
pired to organize knowledge through hier-
archical discourses (like the Renaissance
“chain of being”) that reflected relations
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POSTMODERNISM 1221
of social and political power; others have
worked taxonomically to arrange the world
in an orderly fashion, as if the world obeyed
rules similar to those of the concepts used to
understand it. Other regimes of knowledge
aspire to be more scientific and to append
absolutely accurate names to clearly defined
things. The important point Foucault made
was that we know the world always through
language or what he called “discourse.”
Jacques Derrida published three remark-
ably influential books in a single year: Writ-
ing and Difference (1978[1967]), Speech and
Phenomena, 1973[1967], and Of Gramma-
tology (1974[1967]). In an early essay called
“Diff
erance,” Derrida explores the ramifica-
tions for philosophy of Saussure’s idea that
identities in language are in fact made up of
differences between terms. According to
Derrida, there is in the world a similar
relationality or differentiality that operates
in both time and space. “Presence” is the
usual criterion of truth in philosophy,
according to Derrida, either in the form of
the presence of the “thing itself” to con-
sciousness or in the form of the idea grasped
clearly by the mind as a presence. Phenom-
enology argued that we see something
present in our minds, a “true idea,” and
we know it is true because our mind can
grasp it clearly. But, according to Derrida,
that presence is hollowed out by the fact that
it is in time. It is as much what it just was as
what it is just about to become. The presence
of an object in consciousness is like a “ghost
effect,” the image created by a series of cards
whose fast flipping gives the impression of
something real. That same flickering repe-
tition in time makes the “present” present
for us in our minds. Derrida’s conclusion is
that if we pin our hopes for truth on some-
thing as unstable as that, we are foolish
indeed. In a similar vein, he argues that all
objects that appear present to our mind are
different in space from other objects. All
are field-dependent, to use another term.
1222 POSTMODERNISM
One always knows the field, not the thing-
in-itself.
Because things in the world are like
Saussure’s words, when we try to know
things clearly and accurately, we are always
led on to other things to which the first
things relate, just as signs in language lead
only to other signs because any sign is made
up of differences from other signs. Knowl-
edge, in other words, is always complex
rather than simple, always a matter of rela-
tions or differences that have no substance as
“things.” When we try to determine what a
literary text is about, we usually move from
words to things – be they ideas in the
author’s mind or real things in the world
like a historical event. But if those things are
themselves differential relations, points in
a network, then what really happens when
one moves from literary text to author’s idea
or to historical event is a move from signs
to a field of differential relation. If by “text”
we mean “differential relations without
identity,” then the “referent” of a text, be
it an idea or an event, is itself a text, which is
to say, a network of relations in which any
one term has identity through its relations of
difference to other terms. To move from
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet
Letter to the world it is about is to move
from literary devices such as symbols and
themes such as moral government to a world
of real people and ideologies, but it is also to
move to fields of differential relations that
are themselves like signs in that they refer to
other things in order to be what they are. If
one attempted to fully account for all the
references the text generates, one would
never come to a point that was not itself
differential and relational, not itself a “text.”
Derrida is also known as a critic of
the strand of philosophy known as
“metaphysics.” Metaphysics means “beyond
or outside physicality,” and it is usually
associated with idealism, the belief that ideas
exist in a spirit realm apart from the physical
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
one. But it also names the belief that truth
can be determined as an idea that is true
because it is present to consciousness in a
way that transcends or is above and separate
from signification. Derrida argued that
metaphysics ignores the way temporal and
spatial difference constitutes presence. The
presence of the idea in consciousness is
made possible by difference in time and
space. The presence of the idea in conscious-
ness is thus actually a sign of other things; to
be what it is “in itself,” it must refer to them –
to versions of itself that are past and about to
come and to other things from which it is
different in space. Its identity is therefore
made possible by “others” of various kinds.
The word “alterity” (“alter” means “other”)
is often used to name this state of affairs.
Metaphysics associates the voice of con-
sciousness, the way we all speak to ourselves
in our minds, with this gold standard of
truth. The voice of the mind is supposedly
aloof from writing, that exterior graphic
practical script that embodies our ideas
but not as a living thing like the voice of
the mind. Instead, writing is a dead letter,
something empty and artificial and purely
representational. If the voice of the mind is
a guarantor of living presence (one’s pres-
ence to oneself) that is akin to the living
presence of ideas in consciousness, then
writing is like death because it connotes
the absence of the speaker. Moreover, all
writing is a sign of a sign. It works only by
referring to the vocal signs of the voice in the
mind. It is representation rather than pres-
ence, an empty sign rather than the real thing
to which the sign refers. But this is not true,
Derrida contends. In fact, even presence in
the mind is representation. It is a form of
writing if we understand by that something
that is a “sign of a sign” rather than being
a real living presence. If presence in the
mind is, like all things, relational, then
that presence also refers to other things in
order to be what it is. Presence is thus not

distinguishable from writing; both are signs
of signs, both are relational and differential.
There is no transcendental point, therefore,
that stands outside relations of difference.
Such an imaginary point of transcendence
had been used down through the philosoph-
ic ages to create an illusion of a truth so
removed from worldly differences of time
and space that it was absolutely true, from
Plato’s Ideas to Hegel’s Spirit to Husserl’s
transcendental logic. Derrida proved that
logically such points of authority are unsus-
tainable. They always have to be different
from the differences they say they are not,
which means, of course, that they are made
possible by difference.
This argument has wider repercussions
for ethical, economic, and political philos-
ophy. According to Derrida, many meta-
physical value systems arrange their values
in a way similar to how the transcendental
idea of truth-as-presence is conceived in
metaphysical thinking. In conservative ide-
ologies especially, something akin to the
metaphysical ideal of truth grasped as an
authentic, natural, real, living presence in
the mind is elevated into an axiomatic po-
sition of value. All else is declared to be
derivative, merely artificial, and a decline
away from the origin or axiom, much as
writing is seen in metaphysics as a loss or
depletion of presence, vividness, truthful-
ness, etc., in relation to the presence of ideas
in the silent speech of the voice of the mind.
In politics, norms and ideals such as “family
values” or “proper morals” or “national
interest” are assumed to be norms with a
natural, unquestioned value. They tran-
scend the field of rhetorical debate about
values. Their authority is assured by an
unquestionable sense of axiomatic natural-
ness that is beyond contestation. It is taken
for granted.
The task of deconstruction is to reveal just
how constructed and differential such tran-
scendental norms are. They are not natural
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
POSTMODERNISM 1223
truths that can go unquestioned because
they bear in them a supreme form of au-
thority. They are rather as contingent and
constructed as any other possible statement
about the world, even those that are made
to appear “permissive,” “unpatriotic,” or
“immoral” by those supposedly authorita-
tive values. Each statement has to justify
itself using rhetorical argument, and that
places it in relation to and different from
other possible statements about norms.
Norms cannot simply declare themselves
to be true because they are more “authentic,”
or “natural,” or “present” as an idea in the
mind of the holder of the belief. Each norm
is made possible by a field of differences.
Each frames the world so that certain forms
of thought and action are excluded while
others are declared acceptable and included.
Every normative system, therefore, is made
possible by differentiations. No such system
can claim as a result to be founded on a
moment of nature, truth, or presence that is
aloof from difference and that transcends
worldly contingency. All norms express
interests and perform operations of differ-
entiation. None is simply “true” in a way that
goes “beyond saying.” All norms must be
spoken, and once they are, they enter into
the very world of rhetorical difference they
claim to transcend.
Deconstruction thus upsets assumptions
about what counts as true and about how
we determine what is true in a socially
normative sense. It puts pressure especially
on traditional conservative assumptions
about how authenticity is better than arti-
fice, presence better than representation,
nature better than technology, truth better
than rhetoric, and the “real” better than the
semiotic. By showing the first term in each
instance to be infected in its very constitu-
tion by the second, deconstruction destroys
old ways of thinking and makes possible new
ones that are less easy, more complex, and
far more risky. One can no longer declare
1224 POSTMODERNISM
a norm or value to be beyond question
because it is more natural than other norms
that are merely artificial. All norms are
caught in the same field of differences and
relations; none stands above the others; all
must justify themselves. This egalitarianism
is sometimes mistaken for an abandonment
of all values, but what it really abandons is
the conservative tendency to win value argu-
ments simply by declaring a particular kind
of moral norm to be so natural or good or
real that it stands above all others, which are
characterized using terms connoting arti-
fice, representation, a loosening of author-
ity, a loss of truth, etc. – all terms that in the
metaphysical tradition had been associated
with writing.
The new vision of language postmodern
thinkers offered emphasized its rhetorical
power to create realities, to convince others
that certain propositions were true or real.
This model of an active creative power of
language drew on the work of proto-post-
moderns such as Friedrich Nietzsche,
Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgen-
stein; it inverted the conservative intellectual
model of truth understood as something
inherent in reality – be it a particular vision
of moral laws or of ideal universal truths –
that then got represented in languages that
had no power of their own apart from
representing pre-existing laws or truths.
Postmodernists such as Jean-François
Lyotard inverted this model and claimed
words had the power to create truth and
that in fact truth could not be said to exist
apart from that discursive and rhetorical pow-
er of words. Things are true because we
convince one another that they are true, but
those truths do not exist apart from those
discursive processes and acts. The American
philosopher Richard Rorty became associated
with this position and argued for it in the
Anglo-American intellectual context.
These postmodern thinkers sought to
create a new, more complex way of knowing
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
the world that emphasized relations over
things and that heeded how language med-
iates our knowledge of the world. Like post-
modern artists, some of them drew attention
to the irrationality of the kinds of rationality
that passed for wisdom in bourgeois culture,
and argued that that culture represses ma-
terial energies that are inherently beneficial
and creative. This intellectual postmodern-
ism clearly was in the tradition of dissent in
Western culture dating back to the sophists.
It challenged irrational claims to authority
by questioning the ideas regarding meaning
that have dominated philosophy and literary
study. In cultural studies, it questioned the
idea that the reality we know exists apart
from influence by language and imagery; we
know through representations, the post-
modernists argued, and what we know is
often only a simulation of the real.
The term “postmodernism” has also been
used to describe a new historical era in
capitalism that is characterized by the as-
cendancy of finance capital over traditional
production, the replacement of “Fordism” –
the organization of capitalism around the
mass production of commodities by a mass
workforce that is often unionized and with
whom a certain peace must be established
and maintained – with more “flexible”
forms of labor such as temporary labor,
part-time workers, and outsourcing of
work to foreign, extranational locations,
and the globalization of capitalism through
the spread of free market values and prin-
ciples around the world.
“Postmodernism” was first used in this
more negative sense by critics concerned
with the poverty of American mass culture
in the 1950s, but the term took on more
positive connotations in the late 1960s,
when critics such as Ihab Hassan celebrated
postmodernism as a radical, new, emanci-
patory form of cultural production. How-
ever, Marxist critics such as Fredric Jameson
have been highly suspicious of the subversive

and anti-authoritarian energies of post-
modernism. For such critics, postmodern-
ism was brought into being by the most
recent developments in capitalism. As cap-
italism saturates all of life and spreads itself
over the globe, human life must become
profitable for an elite of wealthy investors.
New thought processes develop that are
congruent with a global capitalism that
uproots old traditions and fragments previ-
ous ways of unifying human experience.
Radical disparities in income develop within
modern capitalist societies that can appear
acceptable only if human consciousness
is rendered incapable of critical thinking.
The narratives and ideals of liberalism and
socialism that provided moral compasses in
the past for judging and condemning such
disparities are rendered useless in a culture
that fragments experience and makes critical
judgment impossible. For the Marxist critics
of this era, the postmodernist artistic, liter-
ary, and intellectual movement itself is a
symptom of this new capitalist reality. Its
celebration of fragmentation and play is part
and parcel of a global market economy that
thrives on decentering, distraction, and the
disintegration of old certainties.
These critics rarely take into account the
work of the most politically radical of the
postmodernists, thinkers such as Jean Bau-
drillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.
Baudrillard’s work evolves from a critique of
the “society of consumption” to a dismissive
evaluation of the discourse of Marxism
(which he sees as complicit with capitalism
in that it is a regime of labor exploitation) to
an analysis of how modern culture fosters
a simulated “hyper-reality” to gain compli-
ance and consent from populations. We live
in simulations of the real rather than the real
itself because our lived experience is so
pervasively constituted by the media. Other
politically radical postmodernists were in-
terested in how regimes of social order are
also regimes of semiotic order. “Semiotic”
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
POSTMODERNISM 1225
means “pertaining to signs.” Kristeva noted
that literature contains two aspects or levels.
One is orderly, the grammar that arranges
words so that we understand them accord-
ing to conventional rules; the other is psy-
chological and material, the realm of desire
and fantasy, the flows of material and libid-
inal energy that make up our physical selves.
This other realm, which is akin to the un-
conscious dimension of the mind that Freud
and Lacan describe, is often figured as mad-
ness in literature. It emerges in what Kristeva
describes as potentially revolutionary forms
in avant-garde literary works. Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari advanced similar ideas
in their analyses of capitalism and psycho-
analysis, especially in Anti-Oedipus (1984
[1972]) and A Thousand Plateaus (1988
[1980]). They argue that society itself is
dual. We live with civilized order, but un-
derneath are flows of energy that pertain to
the realm of matter and physicality that
always threaten to disrupt our civilized
orders. Order always consists of the repres-
sion of this realm in favor of the mandates
(self-control, social discipline) of the capi-
talist economy.
Postmodernism considered as a cultural
strain continues to be influential in artistic
and intellectual circles and has made its
impact felt throughout the world. The ideas
of Baudrillard – that the real is a simulation
constructed by the media – have influenced
such films as The Matrix (1999), and the
postmodernist idea that conventions fabri-
cate our identities has influenced artists
such as Madonna, Cindy Sherman, and
David Byrne and writers such as Kathy
Acker, Dave Eggers, and the cyberpunk nov-
elist William Gibson. The postmodernist
emphasis on fragmentation, artifice, and
the radical difference that constitutes our
reality has troubled many social critics who
see such a development as a departure from
the political values and ideals necessary for
achieving a just society. But if the survival of
1226 POSTMODERNISM IN POPULAR CULTURE
a capitalism untroubled by critique would
sustain the exploitation and inequality that
have haunted modernity, postmodernism
potentially offers an alternative way of
thinking that clears a space for new social
relations and new models of knowledge
that “dehierarchize” social power and that
make possible just and egalitarian political
institutions.
SEE ALSO: Adorno, Theodor; Baudrillard,
Jean; Benjamin, Walter; Cixous, H
elene;
Derrida, Jacques; Foucault, Michel; Husserl,
Edmund; Irigaray, Luce; Jameson, Fredric;
Kristeva, Julia; Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe,
Chantal; Lyotard, Jean-François; Marxism;
Nietzsche, Friedrich; Phenomenology;
Postmodernism in Popular Culture;
Poststructuralism; Rorty, Richard; Saussure,
Ferdinand de; Semiotics/Semiology;
Structuralism
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED
READINGS
Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations (trans. P. Foss,
P. Patton, & P. Beitchman). New York: Semio-
text(e).
Baudrillard, J. (1998). The Consumer Society: Myths
and Structures. London: Sage. (Original work
published 1970.)
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. R. Hurley,
M. Seem, & H. R. Lane). London: Athlone Press.
(Original work published 1972.)
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans.
B. Massumi). London: Athlone Press. (Original
work published 1980.)
Derrida, J. (1973). Speech and Phenomena. Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Orig-
inal work published 1967.)
Derrida, J. (1974). Of Grammatology (trans. G. C.
Spivak). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press. (Original work published 1967.)
Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. (Original work
published 1967.)
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Foucault, M. (1973). The Order of Things. New York:
Vintage. (Original work published 1966 as Les
Mots et les choses)
Hassan, I. (1971). Postmodernism. New Literary
History, 3, 5–30.
Huyssen, A. (1986). After the Great Divide: Modern-
ism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1984). Revolution in Poetic Language.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Lacan, J. (1966).
Ecrits. Paris: Seuil.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge (trans. G. Bennington &
B. Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press. (Original work published 1979.)
Lyotard, J.-F. (1988). The Differend: Phrases in Dis-
pute (trans. G. Van Den Abbeele). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. (Original work
published 1983.)
Lyotard, J.-F. (1993). Libidinal Economy (trans;
I. Hamilton Grant). London: Athlone. (Original
work published 1974.)
Rorty, R. (1980). Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony, Solidarity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Saussure de, F. (1959). Course in General Linguistics
(ed. C. Bally & A. Reidlinger; trans. W. Baskin).
New York: Philosophical Library. (Original work
published 1916.)
Postmodernism in
Popular Culture
IRIS SHEPARD
Though first used in the 1930s to describe
a specific conservative counter-trend within
Latin American modernism, the term
“postmodernism” as we now generally use
it refers to a specific style of art and thought
that rose to prominence in the United States
and Europe after World War II, reaching its
full definition as a movement by the early
1970s. As the name implies, postmodernism
is generally defined in relation to Western
modernism, though the exact nature of this
relationship is still contested. One thing
almost all theorists of postmodernism agree