Talking pomo: An analysis of the postmodern movement

by Steve Mizrach (aka Seeker1)

Postmodernism according to friends, foes, and spectators
When people talk about postmodernism, the problem is that they are referring to something very
elusive and slippery. In the academic world, it is best understood as a new Weltanschaung - a new
organizing principle in thought, action, and reflection, connected to many changing factors in modern
society. The term postmodern was first applied, around 1971, to a new architectural style which
combined old, classical forms with modern pragmatism and scientific engineering. Since then, the
postmodernist advocates have used the term to describe their movement as a reaction to the wholesale
failure of modernity - the betrayals of the modernist movement in the arts, primarily, but also
modernity understood as a social process - industrialization, urbanization, centralization, and 'progress'
and 'civilization' as those terms are often used popularly. This movement is not called 'antimodernism'
because it is not a rejection of modernity in toto , but as its advocates claim, an effort to combine the
best of the modern world with the best elements of the traditions of the past, in an organic way that
eliminates the worst parts of both.
Critics of postmodernism come mainly from the Marxist camp. They feel that postmodernism is a
diversionary tactic, the last ditch of a late capitalism in the process of dying. They dislike fervently the
way that postmodern aesthetics rejects socialist realism - and, for that matter, epistemological realism.
They often point out how semiotics and the postmodern idea that everything is image and nothing is
substance are used cynically by advertising agencies - which, unable to sell us real goods of real
production, can now only sell us images of satisfaction and packaged happiness. Marxists also dislike
postmodernism's relativist treatment of science, since as they see 'criticism' (the critical method) and
science as being identical. And they are not all too pleased by postmodernism's rejection of the
proletariat and industrialism as liberators, nor its insistence (dating from the Situationists) that
liberation of leisure may be more important than liberation of work... the way postmodernism
intertwines with Nietzschean thought, deep ecology, mysticism, and libertarian individualism makes
many Marxists view it as right-wing, reactionary, perhaps even fascist!
Non-Marxist critics of postmodernism abound, too. The right wing foams at the mouth at the way it
dovetails with multiculturalism, feminism, 'direct democracy,' the "communitarian" movement, and
some concerns they see as left-wing. The right-wingers feel that postmodernism is the last-ditch effort
of a dying left wing... that left-wing academics, disappointed with Papa Joe Stalin and Pol Pot, have
found a new weapon with which to smash Western civilization and rationalism. Other critics of
postmodernism feel it is trying to have its cake and eat it too. From the modern world, it wants to take
McLuhan's electronic technology and the 'global village' it allows while ditching other parts of
modernity; without acknowledging that, sans modernity, such communication would not be possible.
From the premodern world, it wants to recover the 'religious sensibility' and 'traditional values' of the
past while jettisoning the intolerance and fundamentalism of religion or the "crushing weight" of
tradition upon free thought. The postmodernists, their critics claim, do not see that both tradition and
religion can be both liberating and stultifying, but you cannot "pick and choose" from both and claim to
be doing anything but generating fictions.
Sociologists see postmodernism at work everywhere. Take scientology or radionics, for example which combine sophisticated technology and scientific-sounding concepts with some very, very old,
perhaps antiquated ideas. If postmodernism is anything, I think, it is perhaps a rejection of linear
narrative, and our central linear narrative is History. Associated with that constellation are ideas like
Progress, whether one views it as the Hegelian spirit of consciousness or the inevitable progression of

the factors and relations of economic production. Scientists hate postmodernism because it suggests
there is no such thing as "superstition." In the discourse-world of Foucaultian geneaology, there can be
no ideas which are consigned to the "dustbin" of history. They can lose meaning as new discourses are
adopted, perhaps even be abandoned as parts of discourses, but that does not mean they are "gone," for
humanity never to reconsider. In the postmodern world, all things are subject to reconsideration . And
that is how one can look at postmodernism: a reconsideration of the central constellation of ideas in the
arts, economics, politics, philosophy, and sociology.
From prehistory to posthistory
The postmodernists point to various reasons for the end of history. Most disagree with the
Fukuyama/Whig version, which is that with liberal democracy we called an end to the game in 1789.
But most agree with the Joycean version, which is that "history is a nightmare from which we are all
trying to awaken." Some think that our postliterate civilization simply will no longer wish to preserve
history - at least, not in the oral or written way it has been done in the past. But most feel that the
year1945 (when the apocalypse became a historical possibility, in the camps at Aushwitz and in the
second sun of Hiroshima) or 1968 (when the world was turned upside down by a bunch of French
students) marked the true signpost of the end of history, and the search for the way out. We have moved
from anonymous prehistory to postnominal posthistory, to "history from below," where human actions
continue to generate history, even if no one really knows where it is going or can honestly claim to
control it. The task of the posthistorian is no longer charting the "lines" of history, but instead
geneaology - a process that branches and bifurcates, dead-ends at some points and leapfrogs at others.
Our posthistorical age is marked by several features, we are told. Its various Zeitgeists go by various
academic-sounding names: poststructuralism, postindustrialism, postliberalism, postrationalism, and
postpatriarchy. In each of these cases, the "post" is there for the same reason. The previous state of
affairs has neither been overthrown nor dissolved. Rather, it has been co-opted, supplanted,
reformulated, enantiodromized (made into its opposite), or transcended. Postmodernism is a parasite
within the body of modernity, digesting it with its enzymes; it is not a conqueror or a destroyer. No
discontinuity is noticeable: which is why some people still feel this is a 'modern' age, unable to see the
thousand simultaneous, invisible paradigm shifts which annulled modernity, fraying it at its edges,
rather than attacking its core. Some postmodernists deny that some of the core values of modernity such as humanism - are being attacked by their movement. Nor do they feel they are nostalgiacs,
reactionaries, or part of the continual "retro" fads of society. What is going on, they say, is a
reconsideration, a return to reflection, a reappraisal. Can that be so bad?
Poststructuralism in aesthetic appreciation and creation
The postmodernist movement in the arts has resulted in a new standard of aesthetic appreciation, and
new forms of aesthetic creation - 'performance art' - etc. It is not entirely clear whether the new modes
of criticism generated the new forms of creation, or if it was the other way around, but as with
everything in postmodernity, it is likely that it was an organic, mutual process. The key concept of
modern aesthetic appreciation was that intentionality did not matter and that representation had nothing
to do with resemblance. In literature, this meant the "New Criticism" and "the Death of the Author,"
where critics would deal strictly with what was on the page, as an autonomous structure of schemas,
devices, and tropes. Modernist poets eagerly experimented with various schemes of abandoning
canonical schemes of rhyme, meter, and metaphor and metonymy. In the plastic arts, it meant "art for
its own sake," and each painting or piece of sculpture was to be appreciated for its purely aesthetic
features (curves, lines) and its geometric structure and not for "resemblance" to anything else. Hence
cubism, abstraction, Action Painting, expressionism, futurism, surrealism, and Mondrianism.

Postmodern art takes the daring experimentation of modernism, but passes over its hesitant boundaries.
It questions the boundaries between the process of creation and the completed act, between the
creator/presenter/provider and the audience/appreciator/receiver, and between the private museum or
gallery and the place of 'public exhibition.'. Postmodern art is about appropriation, about the Dadaists
taking their urinals and putting them on display, about Warhol taking a Campbell soup can or Marilyn
Monroe's lips, about Man Ray borrowing eyelashes and fingers from other photographs, about rap
artists 'sampling' 1940s show tunes and turning them into bass rhythms, or Klein taking anything and
making it his art by painting it with International Klein Blue. It is about John Cage sitting down at his
piano for roughly five minutes, without touching a key, and receiving applause. Not because he has
played a single sound, but because he is John Cage. For the postmodernists, intention is everything, and
reception is everything, but content is nothing. For most modern artists, this makes postmodern art one
big fraud.
If postmodernity means the abandonment of structure and content in the plastic arts, many antideconstructionists feel it is the abandonment of meaning and theme altogether in literature. Utilizing
the ideas of Piercean semiotics, Sassurian linguistics, and Heidegger's philosophy, Derrida delivered
the crushing blow to literary structuralism at Johns Hopkins in 1968. Henceforth, in the wake of
poststructuralism, many literary critics have turned to other theories, such as Fish's reader-response
criticism, Searle's speech-act theory, or Derrida's own offering, deconstruction. The key concept in
postmodern literary criticism seems to be that any text contains additional meanings beyond what the
author could have 'structured' into it, and that literary criticism is a process of creating meaning, not
discovering it. As postmodernism is about breaking down boundaries, many critics feel that Derridean
criticism will destroy the 'literary canon' and put Tom Clancy and the great works of Western
civilization on the same level, and destroy the critical differentiation between 'high' art (which endures)
and 'low' art (which does not.)
In other art areas - music, architecture (where it all started), sculpture, etc. - aestheticism is being
challenged by postmodern critics. "Great" art's greatness, they say, does not adhere entirely within the
work of art autonomously: it has something to do with the relation that exists between artist and art
appreciator, a relation that exists within the field that we call "culture." For this reason, much of the
new postmodern academic criticism is going on in 'cultural studies' departments, which do not agree
with the modernist dictum that art is a mirror that dimly reflects society. The cultural studies profs feel
that art - broadly defined - is strongly patterned by culture, and can and must shape it in turn.
Poststructuralism, some modernist critics feel, has resulted in a proliferation of subjectivist positions,
and hence an abdandonment of objective standards and universal criteria in artistic appreciation. This,
they also argue, allows postmodern art creators to "get away with anything" - including canning shit
and putting it in on display. But some postmodernist critics feel modern art was a betrayal because it
did not admit its own dependence on context and situation.
Postindustrialism in economic organization
Marxist sociologists, always keen to see the economic transformations that precede (and, as they see it,
generate) changes in ideology, feel that the true basis of postmodern thought is the shift to a postindustrial economy. Many postmodernists would agree, suggesting that in the new economy, service
and information will be more important commodities than goods or labor power in the new
"information society". Both would agree that biotechnology, robotics, communications, and other
technologies may well eliminate the need for human labor power, at least in assembly-line mass
production, where the industrial proletariat has been trapped since the industrial revolution. Marxists
might see this as a form of liberation, since alienated and menial work will cease to be, and all will be
freed to do the work of the mind rather than the work of the hands, if they choose. But, their reaction

instead is to see post-industrialism as a tactic of class warfare gone genocidal - in late capitalism, the
bourgeouis have decided that liquidation of an increasingly racially stratified (i.e., in the U.S., AfricanAmerican or Third World) and unemployable (i.e., unexploitable) working class has become necessary.
As they see it, these economic historians feel that the wave of factory closings in the 1970s is part of
the collapse of capitalism. As capitalists are finding it increasingly difficult to compete in a global
market, they are more and more attempting to find their wealth through speculation (the 'junk bonds'
and 'merger mania' of the 80s) rather than production. As more and more 'real' goods are made in Third
World sweatshops, the capitalists are deindustrializing in the Western countries so as to escape union
protection of workers, government regulation, and progressive taxation. "Post-industrialism" really
means the internationalization of the capitalist class, who are de-industrializing so as to crush the
'advanced' (First World) proletariat and moving their factories so as to exploit the Third World
peasantry. These economic changes - less and less real goods produced, more and more promises made
through increasingly sophisticated advertising - and the dying gasps of capitalism are the 'real' roots of
postmodernism and its attendant ideas, suggest the Marxist econohistorians.
Unfortunately, there is more to postindustrialism than just that. Key ideas in the postindustrial
constellation are 'workplace democracy,' 'etherialization,' 'Green economics,' and 'reconceptualizing
vocation.' In the postmodern/postindustrialism's furthest vision, economics itself- the existence of
scarcity and the need for calculi of allocation - may cease to exist. 'Workplace democracy' doesn't mean
that the State controls the factories - rather, that workers' councils meet to coordinate with management
production, labor conditions, and wages, and that these councils have the same decision-making power
as management. 'Etherialization' is an extrapolation from the history of miniaturization, but the key
idea is that with technology, more and more will be accomplished with less and less, so that the
material side of production will continue to diminish. 'Green economics' is a burgeoning field that
seeks to rethink concepts of prosperity, wealth, risks & benefits, property, and prices in ecological
terms. 'Reconceptualizing vocation' is an idea from Marilyn Ferguson - that vocation be made less of a
label and a trap and more of a growth experience, by increasing the flexibility, diversity, and autonomy
of work.
There have been many schemes associated with the 'third force' movement to have an economy of
relative equality that does not restrict freedom, opportunity, or diversity. In the early 20th century, there
were the schemes of Social Credit, and Henry George's plan to eliminate building taxes and tax only
land, which Karl Marx called "the last stand of the capitalists," but the landlords and rent collectors
hated George more than Marx. And there was the Owenite 'communitarian' movement, which focused
on creating voluntary collective ventures. The most recent effort has been Schumacher and Hazel
Henderson's New Economics, based on the principle of 'small is beautiful.' Schumacher's economics "as if people mattered" - is based on the idea that the scale of production may be more important than
who owns it. As Schumacher saw it, the diminishing quality of production and labor autonomy was in
direct relation to the scale of production. Fordism and mass-assembly-line production was the problem,
but Schumacher's critics saw his solution as romantic or even reactionary - returning to small-scale
ventures like the old craft guilds where workers once had control over their own labor. Such things
might work in the Third World, they said, but in the West, that meant an abandonment of industrial
'progress'.
Postliberalism in politics: the radical 'center'
Postmodernist politicians (more properly, politically conscious postmoderns) claim they hold the
coveted Third Way of politics - a way out of the conventional divisions of Left and Right that polarize
political thinking. The key terms for postmodern politics are 'participatory democracy,'

(grassroots/electronic), 'decentralization,' and 'communitarian individualism.' Its key slogan - familiar

to most advocates - is 'think globally, act locally.' Many of the 'postmodernists' in politics describe
themselves as 'postliberals,' meaning that they often came to the movement from 60s modernist
liberalism after seeing some of its inherent limitations. Others describe this as 'postliberalism' because
it is a transcendence (not a rejection) of liberal democracy itself and its limitations. As they see it, it is
the 'radical center' position because it is neither Left nor Right, but threatening to the powers that be on
both sides, commisars & bureaucrats and capitalists & fat cats.
The advocates of 'participatory democracy' see it as a step beyond pale representative democracy - as a
return to the old town meetings of New England where everybody could have their say. Skeptics scoff
at this, declaring it impossible to do in a country of 200 million people, but the postmodernists say it
could be done through an 'electronic plebiscite.' Many of the mainstream politicians are turning on to
this idea, especially former computer man Ross Perot, who wanted to stage 'electronic town hall
meetings' on issues all over the country through sattelite hookups. The postmodernists say that what we
have now is 'spectacle democracy' - we elect people and then watch passively for four years the
dreadful result. 'Participatory democracy' means grassroots citizen activism - that every citizen take an
active involvement in the direction of governance - and the making of decisions by consensus (mutual
agreement) rather than voting, where the people in the minority feel bullied and overpowered by the
majority. Consensus means compromise, but it creates workable solutions.
"Decentralization" just means that power should be dispersed as far and wide as possible - that the less
power is held in the center, the more people on the periphery are empowered to change their lives.
Decentralists suggest that an important part of this is the growth of NGOs (Non-governmental
organizations) which hold governments accountable for their actions, like Amnesty International. Also
important are strategies of civil disobedience, as described by Gene Sharp in his Politics of Nonviolent
Action , to keep governments responsible and responsive. Decentralists feel that centralized
governments of either stripe - Left or Right - rely too much on coercive power, whether that be brute
force (military, torture, etc.) or more subtle means (propaganda, imprisonment, etc.) To have a truly
nonviolent, participatory society, the power of the centralized government must be reduced and shared
with governance at all levels. The centralized government cannot be 'seized' and used for beneficial
ends - the centralized State, as Max Weber understood, is primarily an instrument for the
monopolization of violence and coercion, and can be nothing but that.
Being the libertarian socialists that they are, most postmodernists support 'communitarian
individualism' - the creation of communes or schemes whereby people who want to live cooperatively
can, sort of like the kibbutzim of Israel. They support various ways of encouraging community and
collective action and concern, as long as they are on a voluntary basis. But many feel taking wealth and
redistributing it without asking merely creates resentment against the poor. Many feel the answer to
poverty is a full-employment economy, which in their revisionary economics they say is quite possible,
and can pay everybody good wages to boot! In any case, they support various forms of rotationary
governance, so that everybody in the community gets a shot at running things, for a short while, at the
local level. This 'rethinking' of politics by the postmoderns is often seen as idealistic by their critics,
'wooly-headed' at best but 'foolish' at worst, because "it denies human nature..."
Postlogocentrism in philosophy
Most postmodern philosophers entered this terrain through speculations about language, truth, and
logic. That is certainly how Derrida, Foucault, and Rorty arrived there. But the roots of postmodern
philosophy lie in Nietzsche, Heidegger, the Existentialists, the Situationists, Wittgenstein, and perhaps
the theological "Death of G-d" school which created so much attention in 1968. The central project of

postmodern philosophy is to challenge the notion of philosophy itself - i.e. the rationalistic ideal of
discovering truth through pure reason. Deconstruction, for Derrida, is a radical challenge to the three
thousand year history of Western metaphysics and ontology; a gauntlet thrown at the 'logocentrism'
which Lacan sees identical with 'phallocentrism' and the 'symbolic order' itself. Most importantly, the
postmodernists challenge any philosophy of totalization - one that creates a closure around itself and
claims a preeminence in access to universal principles and timeless truths. This is the basis of their
critique of Marxism, which they feel contains an (erroneous) metaphysics, eschatology, anthropology
(description of man), and notion of reason.
Many philosophers feel uneasy about postlogocentric philosophy because it questions reason and logic
itself. Some are put off by its relativism and its willingness to question the notion of truth or meaning
itself. As Rorty sees it, in direct defiance of the analytic philosphers, there are no statements which
make purely abstract truth-claims, only statements which make references to a type of truth, whether
that be scientific truth, metaphoric truth, mythic truth, or humanistic truth. Many postmodern
philosophers lean to an epistemology of constructivism - that reality is created through our categories
of understanding and our modes of organizing perception- and to a denial of ontology itself, that there
are somehow things 'out there' which 'exist'. Others see the root of the problem in Aristotelian logical
binarism, as Korzybski did, which could not see that there might be things which are partially true or
partially false, and that in every case to say that X 'is' Y 'is' a partial lie.
Mainly, the key element of postmodern philosophy is the 'linguistic turn.' Like Wittgenstein, the
postmodernists see the root of many philosophical problems in the use (and misuse) of language.
Derrida sees the root of much of philosophical binarism in the (arbitrary) division and prioritization of
writing and speech. Many take the insight of Whorf and Sapir and the sociolinguists - that how we
speak about the world shapes our experience of it. If one understands fully Derrida's explorations of
'play' in language and the 'referent problem,' then they may realize that any statement may contain an
inexhuastible number of meanings. Like this one. Or this one. And based on that fact, there are
therefore a multiple number of ways of viewing the world and experiencing it. Some cultural relativists
take this understanding to mean that the ontologies of other cultures are no less valid than that of
Western society, even if Westerners cannot experience them or understand them. In any case, as
postmodernists see it, any semiotic system can have the 'reference' problem, because the signifier is
always 'slipping' toward another signified.
Some in this school of thought, like Jakobson or Lacan, see the origins of consciousness and human
identity in language itself. Many postmodernists feel that this is taking things too far, that subjectivity
has deeper origins than just in the use of interchangeable pronouns or terms of possession. Lacan
himself borrows from many of Freud's early writings on the "Freudian slip" to suggest that the origins
of the unconscious are in language itself - that the unconscious precisely is the inability of the mind to
grasp unintended meanings in language. In any case, the postmodernists who are followers of Foucault
believe that the key factor in shaping human experience is 'discourse' - the setting of boundaries for
which statements are meaningful and which are not. As Foucault sees it, discourses are not wholly
arbitrary, but they can have a 'geneaology' which is often quite unexpected and not according to some
rationalistic evolution. Foucault looks at the geneaology of 'justice,' for example, and he takes to task
rationalist philosophers who see nothing but increasing precision, logic, and civility in its evolution of
the concept and its usage.
Postpatriarchalism in society
Feminist postmodernists feel that postmodernity, most importantly, represents an end to patriarchy and
to the masculine hierarchical/vertical principle. For Kristeva and some other postmoderns, that means

an end as well to history, to gender, and perhaps even to the subject (i.e. the Self, itself.) Some feminist
postmoderns are less extreme, but they do feel that the divisions of gender binarism - like other
metaphysical dualities in Western thought - may be put under 'erasure' once problems of language are
grasped: such as why the gender-neutral pronouns are all really masculine. For others, it is the
dominance of 'logocentrism' - which is really the reign of the phallus - that has cut us off from authentic
existence. The 'phallocentric' world we inhabit denies and represses somatic experience, emphasizes the
distance of vision over the closeness of other senses, attaches to the universal/general/abstract rather
than the particular/singular/concrete, and as a result represses femininity and opresses women. In
particular, they resent the 'modernist' feminists who felt that all that was needed for female equality was
the vote, corporate careers, and the ERA.
There are other femininists who balk at this type of talk, because it sounds a lot like the 'essentialism'
that patriarchy used to enslave women - they are too 'emotional', 'passive', 'dependent', etc. to succeed
in a man's world. But the postmodern feminists insist: why make wom(y)n fit into a man's world?
Rather to remake the world! Some feel that science, business, and governance would have been vastly
different enterprises if women has been present and had a greater voice at their inception. Other more
extreme postmodern feminists see all three as hierarchical, and that in a postpatriarchal society there
would be entirely new forms of knowledge generation, economic organization, etc, which will not
resemble at all what we have now. Riane Eisler describes this alternative model as a 'partnership
society,' which she contrasts with our existing 'dominator society.'
Many postmodernists do not resist the charge of 'essentialism,' as long as it is understood from a
nominalist perspective! As they see it, women are fundamentally less violent, power-hungry, and - as
Carol Gilligan argues - amoral - than men. This has nothing to do with biology or evolution as the
sociobiologists explain it. Rather, this is a consequence of their position in the symbolic and social
order and thousands of years of socialization. Instead of denying this fact or accepting it as a weakness,
the postmodernist feminists want to begin with it as a cornerstone of bringing feminine values
(nurturance, etc.) to overthrow masculinist values (violence, etc.) Some postmodern feminists feel the
beginning point for postpatriarchy is undoing the symbolic order itself. Whether this means an end to
language, or simply its complete remaking, is not clear. What is clear is that postmodern feminists do
not want to replace patriarchy with matriarchy - taking the same hierarchical model and putting women
at the top. Rather, the whole social order will have to be undone to ensure true female equality.
Many of the postmodern feminists take Eisler's theory to be true - that at some point in the past, men
and women did live as equals, and that patriarchy and history began at the agricultural revolution, with
its attendant division of labor. Marija Gimbutas argues that in Europe's prehistory, its settled Chthonic
societies were Earth goddess-worshipping and mostly egalitarian. Then the Kurgan nomads of the
Asian steppes brought warfare, the horse, and a series of male sky, thunder, and sun-gods. That was the
beginning of patriarchy and all the known historical civilizations - Greece, Rome, Babylon, etc. Some
postmodern feminists feel that patriarchy is a rude 7000 year intrusion into aeons of equality. By
overthrowing patriarchy, then, the human race can get back into where it should be going. Of course,
the critics of this belief do point out that those 7000 years of oppression followed aeons of very slow
social and technological change and even stagnation... and feel that the feminists want to return us to
that round-of-being cosmology where nothing moves forward because nothing can.
Conclusions: problems of postmodernity
There are many problems in postmodernism. At various turns, it has been accused of being romantic,
idealistic, unrealistic, wooly-headed, and so forth. But there are those who feel it is truly dangerous. Do
the postmoderns mean to put an end to progress itself, to consign us all to a steady-state Utopia where

all needs may be provided for but there is no room for growth, change, or movement? Some buckle at
such an existence. Is it merely a step backwards, to chucking all our agricultural, scientific, and
industrial revolutions aside, and going back to swinging in the trees? The postmoderns say no, they
want to move forward in a way that utilizes the insights of the past but is not identical to it. Their
struggle is to fight the vast totalizing schemes, like Comtean positivist history, which have been
imposed on our historical existence and command our destiny. Postmodernism is at once a rejection of
teleology, yet it contains in itself some teleological notions of "where things are going." A bundle of
contradictions, an enigma within an enigma, it may be impossible to ever grasp Lyotard's "postmodern
mood" and hold it up to the light.
Is it really possible to see the origins of the postmodern ideology in the changing social and economic
structures of our time? Is it all basically the ruling idea of a new ruling class - the information czars and
advertising moguls of America's Sunbelt overthrowing the industrial barons of the North, as some have
argued? Why is it, then, that the key ideas of postmodernism seem to be coming from Europe and being
imported to America wholesale, via Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault, et al.?