Well like you said, pomo is a label used to describe so much at this point its almost meaningless. Like, there is a whole series of artistic ideas and movements under that label, check out Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic, which is a collection of short essays that itself is quite concise and highly readable, here is a pdf link. Also if you want to get a good sense of what postmodern art looks like, check out this short video about where the 80s aesthetic came from. There is also a whole poststructuralist linguistics which is like the foundation of all this that I don’t know very well. Since I don’t really have any expertise in linguistics, art or aesthetics, I’ll stick to describing the philosophical movement associated with the term.
Ok so what we usually mean by postmodern ideas is poststructuralist philosophy, a diverse and contentious body of theory developed by a specific generation of French thinkers. Poststructuralism was sort of the outcome of Louis Althusser’s structuralist Marxism, as many of the poststructuralists were his students although not all his students became poststructuralists (Etienne Balibar is a good example of the latter; check out his book The Philosophy of Marx, which is short and here’s a pdf). This is something important to remember: most of the poststructuralists’ intellectual development was shaped by Marxists and Marxism and their writings can be understood as an unfolding dialogue with Marx and French Marxists; poststructuralism is not anti-Marxist, its post-Marxist in the sense that it grows out of and remains constantly conscious of Marxism, as described by Simon Choat in Marx through Post-Structuralism which unfortunately I can’t find a pdf of. However, I use “post-Marxist” as a loose term in the previous sentence, there is a whole other official current of post-Marxism and post-Leftism that also developed simultaneously with poststructuralism but grew out of the Latin American leftist intellectual milieu, not the French. So there were self-described post-Leftists like Ernesto Laclau who are also called postmodernists nowadays, but while Laclau’s ideas have a lot of problems they are 1) not strictly tied to poststructuralism or any other “postmodern” current and 2) often mischaracterized and demonized. The real Laclau wasn’t anything like terminal/politics or any other obnoxious tumblr individualist anarchist, he was more like a radical social democrat who would cream his pants over Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. Anyway, back to the really big names. The most famous poststructuralists were
Foucault - challenged assumptions of linear historical progress by writing histories of punitive institutions that show how they have become more acutely repressive, not less, over time. His controversial insight was that we cannot expect to be liberated by further technological and social development because as they develop so do the systems of social control. This is often exaggerated as “technology and society are bad,” but Foucault also understood their positives and was merely saying we cannot expect the “scientific-technical revolution,” as it was called in Soviet propaganda at the time, to be the force that ultimately liberates us, instead we need to actively dismantle oppressive institutions and social practices. Foucauldian thought, with its emphasis on locating alternative ways of understanding and living from the past rather than formulating grand visions of future utopia, has since been deployed by many decolonial thinkers. The School of Life did a pretty good video on Foucault that emphasizes how being a gay man in a conservative society shaped his views. Also I really dig this quote: “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.”
Deleuze - I’m not as well versed in his thought but basically he further developed our understanding of how capitalism generates alienation and madness. His best insight is probably that chaos and disorder are not antithetical to capitalism, in fact capitalism loves chaos, it is chaos. I’m glossing over a ton here pretty much because I never really grasped it all that well like “micropolitics of desire” was always a very opaque idea to me.
Derrida - father of deconstruction as an approach to understanding literary texts. You ever read the tvtropes page on deconstruction? We wouldn’t have that without Derrida. Heavily maligned because he championed “aporia,” that is the state of intellectual confusion, as something positive because it is the state in which we are considering multiple contradictory and conflicting points of view. This is stigmatized as moral relativism but Derrida was committed to social change, he merely wished to nuance our understanding of our methods and goals by challenging our ways of thinking. One of his best later bits was his championing of a “materialism without matter” where we integrate personal subjectivities into our understanding of materialism. I’m going add a block text quote here that explains my point because y’all always get Derrida wrong
“In Specters of Marx (1994), Derrida spoke in passing of his “obstinate interest in a materialism without substance: a materialism of the khôra for a despairing ‘messianism.’” Although he did not explicitly elaborate on what this materialism would look like, he had in fact already given some sense of it in a 1971 interview. When pressed insistently by two Marxists to specify his position on Marxism, Derrida made a characteristically enigmatic but suggestive comment that cautioned against the conflation of deconstruction with materialism: “It follows that if, and in the extent to which, matter in this general economy designates … radical alterity … then what I write can be considered ‘materialist.’” His reticence in using the word “matter,” he added, was not idealist or spiritualist, but instead due to the insistent reinvestment of the term with logocentric values, “values associated with those of thing, reality, presence in general, sensible presence, for example, substantial plenitude, content, referent, etc.” As long as matter is not defined as “absolute exterior or radical heterogeneity,” materialism is complicit with idealism. Both fall back on a transcendental signified.”
“Realism or sensualism—“empiricism”—are modifications of logocentrism… . [T]he signifier “matter” appears to me problematical only at the moment when its reinscription cannot avoid making of it a new fundamental principle which, by means of a theoretical regression, would be reconstituted into a “transcendental signified.” … It can always come to reassure a metaphysical materialism. It then becomes an ultimate referent, according to the classical logic implied by the value of referent, or it becomes an “objective reality” absolutely “anterior” to any work of the mark, the semantic content of a form of presence which guarantees the movement of the text in general from the outside.”
That is from the article “Nondialectical Materialism” by Pheng Cheah in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s edited volume New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. What it means is that a poor understanding of what matter is and where its boundaries are can cause people to construct a “materialist” politics that are actually idealist because they refuse to consider all the things that matter. A good example of avoiding this might be understanding closeted trans women as victims of misogyny and transmisogyny because even though they are not subject to them directly, our consciousness is still being beaten and shaped by the misogyny and transmisogyny of our culture, leaving deep mental scars that have physical consequences. Hatred of women and women’s bodies bodies affects the entire culture, and thus has consequences for trans women (and nb/gnc gay men, tbh) since we are expected to perform sexual labor for men and thus we are placed in class position under them that we are cognizant of all the time even before we are entirely “out.”
Lyotard - the only one of the bunch to self-identify (maybe) as a “postmodernist,” Lyotard characterized what he called the postmodern condition as one of “incredulity toward metanarratives” where instead of building radical politics out of faith in big teleological ideologies, we would instead focus on the individual concerns of different people and groups, cultivating what he called an ethic of dissensus where we could understand our disagreements and differing points of view not as deviations from some ideologically correct line of thinking but rather as the constitutive forces of a pluralistic politics.
Baudrillard - ok so when people say poststructuralism is anti-Marxist, they are really just referring to Baudrillard. Marx was like Baudrillard’s stepfather, he hated him but he respected him. Baudrillard claimed that material analysis was pointless because material forces had ceased to govern our lives. Instead, he claimed, we live in a simulacrum, a world of signs that don’t signify anything real. Advertisements are what really control us now, a spectacle of falsehoods that we cannot see past. We are told what we need, what we want, what we like and what we hate, so there is no point in speaking of human needs or human nature.
Finally, while many Marxist thinkers at the time disdained poststructuralism, some worked to incorporate insights they understood as valuable into a more orthodox Marxist politics. The best examples of this trend are Frederic Jameson and Douglas Kellner. Kellner’s writings on postmodern thinkers can be understood as an attempt to critique them through Critical Theory, rather than through vulgar Marxism and cheap shots like some contemporaries were doing and still do. Jameson argued against the postmodern indifference to narratives, demanding instead that we “always historicize” our object of study as opposed to conceded some sort of randomness as characteristic of the flow of events.
Also ok you mentioned Lacan which is funny because Lacan was not a postmodernist in any sense. Lacan was just the most famous French psychoanalyst, so when French poststructuralist philosophers wrote in dialogue with psychoanalysis, they were in dialogue with Lacan. Lacan is a controversial figure and ultimately he did not make a tremendous impact on the practice of depth psychology (the blanket term for psychoanalysis and other therapies influenced by it). His big positive contribution, I would say, is emphasizing how our psychological orientation is shaped by relational, rather than individual processes. We learn to be ourselves through our interactions with other people, not through simply mirroring them but rather responding to them, to their otherness. Again, I’m linking on of the better School of Life videos that explains Lacan a bit more.
