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My little sister, who just finished her undergrad in English at OU, has been trying to explain "post-modernism" to her theater major roommate. I think of the maxim, "Never argue with a stupid person: they'll just drag you down to their level and beat you with experience," but, at my mother's request, I left a longish answering machine message trying to explain postmodernism in a nutshell. Anyway, my sister had some more questions, and I came up with a lenghty short answer, which I decided to post below.

I wouldn't use Foucault as an exemplar of postmodernism, partly because I don't completely understand what he's up to. He's postmodern, but I'm sure he would have bristled at being called a "postmodernist." Postmodernism is a little like porn - its hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

The other thing about Postmodernism (and Modernism, to a certain extent) is that it means different things to two different people. In the humanities like English studies and Art History, its especially tricky. You have postmodern thought and you have postmodern texts. Media studies people have it a little lucky, since media practitioners don't have an institutionalized meta-discourse the way that artists, architectects, and literary writers do. But an architect will use "postmodern" to talk about a break with modernist forms and practices, while a [hip] art historian will also encounter the notion of postmodernism in late 20th century literary and social theory, which is, as you asserted, built around an understanding of subjectivity and contingency.

If you're after a school of thought you can call "postmodernism," the best fit would be post-structuralist and deconstructionist literary critics. You know, Barthes, Derrida, and the like. They were appropriating methodologies and interpretive frameworks from the structuralists, who based their theories on 'scientific' anthropology. The later critics integrated structuralism with dialectical materialism (something I understand so poorly, I won't even try to explain) and a lot of skepticism, so - voila! - a radical school of thought emerged out of modernity. For what its worth, in my department, we would call Michel Foucault a "social constructionist" if that clarifies anything. I gave mom a book called An Invitation to Social Construction, she never read it, but if you want a good overview of contemporary "theory." you should get it from her.

Posted by McChris at May 21, 2004 08:17 PM
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I first "got" postmodernism in a freshman art history class at UT 20+ years ago. The way it was explained to me, modernists rejected traditional forms and styles and attempted to create new ones based on abstraction and the inherent qualities of the media in which they worked. Postmodernists rejected the rejection, re-embracing tradition in a playful, eclectic and self-consciously ironic way.

The example that sticks in my mind was architectural. After showing us buildings with classical columns and modernist buildings which emphatically lacked them, he showed us a slide of an influential public square built in New Orleans in the 1970's. Among other features it included doric columns -- but instead of being structural they were made of made of falling water, a grand thumbing of the nose at the "form follows function" school of modernism.

For my middlebrow purposes that example works pretty well. I can see its analogies in art forms which are closer to me, like literature and music.

Some years later I got to see the square (whose name escapes both me and Google) and it revealed another feature of postmodernism: its tendency to be ephemeral. The square was crumbling, its snappy colors were fading, and the water was turned off. No one who hadn't seen the lecture would ever get the joke.

Posted by: Prentiss Riddle at May 26, 2004 11:51 AM
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