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Postmodern theory: Critical interrogations
The authors systematically interrogate postmodern theory to evaluate its relevance for critical social theory and radical politics today. The book contains an introduction and critique to the work of Foucault, Delueze and Guattari and an introduction to postmodern feminist theory.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1991
32 people are currently reading
526 people want to read
About the author
Steven Best
20 books43 followersSteven Best is an American animal rights advocate, author, and associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. A writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education described him in 2005 as "one of the leading scholarly voices on animal rights."
Best is co-founder of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS), formerly known as the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs (CALA). His academic interests are continental philosophy, postmodernism, and environmental philosophy. He is known for his post-structuralist notions of revolution, based equally in animal rights and sexual liberation. He is the editor, with Anthony J. Nocella, of Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (2004), which has a foreword by Ward Churchill, and the companion volume on revolutionary environmentalism, Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (2006).
In December 2004, Best co-founded the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, which acts as a media office for a number of animal rights groups, including the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), though he has said that he is not himself an ALF activist. He came to public attention in 2005, when the British Home Office told him it intended to use counter-terrorist measures adopted in light of the July 2005 London bombings to prevent him from addressing an animal rights rally in the UK. Best responded by alleging that Britain was becoming a police state.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
Best is co-founder of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS), formerly known as the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs (CALA). His academic interests are continental philosophy, postmodernism, and environmental philosophy. He is known for his post-structuralist notions of revolution, based equally in animal rights and sexual liberation. He is the editor, with Anthony J. Nocella, of Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (2004), which has a foreword by Ward Churchill, and the companion volume on revolutionary environmentalism, Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (2006).
In December 2004, Best co-founded the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, which acts as a media office for a number of animal rights groups, including the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), though he has said that he is not himself an ALF activist. He came to public attention in 2005, when the British Home Office told him it intended to use counter-terrorist measures adopted in light of the July 2005 London bombings to prevent him from addressing an animal rights rally in the UK. Best responded by alleging that Britain was becoming a police state.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
March 30, 2010
This was an accessible survey of a handful of the leading theorists associated with postmodernism. Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, Baudrillard, and Lyotard each get a chapter. Kellner's dedication to radical politics, especially in the tradition of the Frankfurt school (see his previous book: Critical Theory Marxism and Modernity), comes through clearly, making this an ideal introduction for anyone with similar political interests. Providing a detailed and informative, yet jargon-free analysis of theoretical literature infamous for impenetrable jargon, the authors spare no criticism of these postmodern writers for their proclivities for sloganeering, idealism, and "fetishism of difference." They are most concerned that the defeatism present in much postmodern theory is debilitating for any effective movement for political change, but they also identify important contributions that postmodern theory could make to a renewal of the left which, at the time of the book's publication, had reached a nadir in the decade of Reagan and Bush.
April 7, 2015
A well written, albeit biased, overview of postmodern theorists. The author seems to be coming from a neo-marxist viewpoint.
August 6, 2021
Reading this book 30 years after its publication, it’s rather amazing how silly and arbitrary all of this cultural criticism created by the postmoderns is. They are theories that are superficial and lacking in any actual scientific backing. It’s rather like reading tea leaves or some other occult practice.
My review below is an assembly of key ideas in the book and some commentary by me. It is comforting to see that postmodernism was finally critiqued. That was not the case when I was in graduate school in the 1980s. We read each thinker in their turn and did not criticize them or compare them to other thinkers in the field.
They were all leftists or Marxists. The authors repeatedly mention how disappointed and disillusioned these thinkers were after 1968.
They offer their own position at the end, a kind of syncretic system of the best of critical and postmodern theory.
Early on they say modern theory “is criticized for its search for a foundation of knowledge, for its universalizing and totalizing claims, force hubris to supply apodictic truth and for its allegedly fallacious rationalism.”
They say that postmodern theory is “taking instead perspectivist and relativist positions that theories at best provide partial perspectives on their objects, and that all cognitive representations of the world are historically and linguistically mediated.”
They then take a look at the history of the postmodern position and the use of the word prior to the late 1980s and the formal beginning of the movement itself. This is a very interesting section.
They point out that in the late 1980s there were some who took the position that postmodernism was predominantly positive while there were others who took it as predominantly negative. They believe that the positive discourse helped prepare the way for the reception of the discourse of the postmodern in the 1980s. However the negative cultural discourse would also prepare the way for neoconservative attacks in the late 80s. They do have to label their opposition, just as the postmoderns did.
At the very end of chapter 1, the authors say “A postmodernist describes and usually champions imputed breaks in knowledge, culture, and society, frequently attacking the modern while identifying with what they tout as new and “radical“ postmodern discourses and practices.“ This seems to be a rather benign sort of definition of postmodernism. From it, one could imagine postmodernism existing in medieval times or in North Korea. The rates of change in these places might not have been great but there was change nevertheless.
Yet a short while later, they say “Our task will be to assess the extent to which postmodern theories contribute to the project of developing a critical theory and radical politics for the present age.”
Chapter 2 focusses on Michel Foucault. They pay particular attention to the fact that Foucault changed at least three times in his life. At first, he was interested in what he called the archaeological move, then the genealogical move and then finally technologies of the self.
He seems to have taken an interest in ancient Greek and Roman ethics later in life.
“The subject is still discursively and socially conditioned for Foucault, and still theorized as situated within power relations; the difference yet is that he now sees that individuals also have the power to define their own identity, to master their bodies and desires and to forge a practice of freedom through techniques of the self.“
“In his later work he states that “what interest me is much more morals and politics or, in any case, politics as an ethics.“
Best and Kellner criticize Foucault for being inconsistent with his strident attacks on the “tyranny of globalizing discourses.“ “Foucault fails to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate kinds of totalities and macro theories…“
Chapter 3 focuses on Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. “… They are exemplary representatives of postmodern positions in their thoroughgoing efforts to dismantle modern beliefs in unity, hierarchy, identity, foundations, subjectivity and representation, while celebrating counter principles of difference and multiplicity in theory, politics, and everyday life.
“Their most influential book to date, Anti-Oedipus, is a provocative critique of modernity’s discourses and institutions which repress desire and proliferate fascist subjectivities that haunt even revolutionary movements.”
They are political militant proponents of “micro politics of desire that seeks to precipitate radical change through a liberation of desire.
“Power is epiphenomenal to the flow of desire.“ “… Desire is purely affirmative, and not a desire to resist another force“.
“For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is neither inherently good nor bad, only dynamic and productive.”
“Throughout their work, Deleuze and Guattari exhibit a paranoid phobia of signification and rationality in order to celebrate the a-signifying, nomadic existence of desiring flows.”
Chapter 4 Baudrillard
To Marx’s distinctions between use value and exchange value, Baudrillard adds an analysis of sign value, whereby commodities are valued by the way that they confer prestige and signify social status and power.”
“Baudrillard seems to be arguing that by engaging in symbolic exchange which is caught up neither in use values nor exchange values, one escapes domination by the logic of political economy and is able to subvert the logic of a system which demands that all activity have specific uses values and purposes.“ This seems a bit incoherent to me. The symbolic exchange is an exchange of symbolic values. Who assigned the value? How does one recognize the value? I’m not sure there can be some thing that isn’t a use value. And, of course, why would one spend a great deal of time on activities that have no use value, given that we live finite lives?
“Thus his micro politics are rather vague and empty.“
“Thus, the only practice that he can really recommend is total refusal, total negativity, and the utopia of radical otherness.“
“…Baudrillard claims that in the postmodern world the boundary between image or simulation and reality implodes, and with it the very experience and ground of the real disappears“.
“Hyperreality thus points to a blurring of distinctions between the real and the unreal in which the prefix hyper signifies more real than real whereby the real is produced according to a model.“
“Baudrillard argues that the masses become bored and resentful of their constant bombardment with messages and the constant attempts to solicit them to buy, consume, work, vote, register an opinion, or participate in social life.” Had he only known about social media.
“Baudrillard interprets Foucault as a theorist who could not take the postmodern term and remained within the classical formula of sex and power.”
According to the Wikipedia entry for him, the producers of the movie The Matrix were influenced by Baudrillard.
“Baudrillard’s universe is ruled by surprise, reversal, blasphemy, obscenity, and its desire to shock and outrage.“ “… He proposes that we become more like things, like objects, and divest ourselves of the illusion and hubris of subjectivity.“
“Baudrillard’s evisceration of the subject precludes analysis of the responsibility and ability of subject to collectively transform the present social structures and relations of production.“
“… Baudrillard‘s analysis operates on an excessively high level of abstraction.“ He fails to make key distinctions and engages in misplaced abstraction.“
“…Baudrillard‘s current positions are profoundly superficial and are characterized by sloppy generalizations, extreme abstraction, semiological idealism and often repeated banalities, such as: we are in a post orgy condition of simulations, entropy, fractal subjects, indifference, transvestism, and so on ad nauseum.“
Chapter 5 Jean François Lyotard
“Like DeLeuze and Guattari, Lyotard presents an affirmative philosophy of desire which celebrates the circulation, flows, intensities and energetics of desire.“
“Like D and G, leotard claims that desire is bound and fixed into oppressive forms through the family, workplace, economy, and state.“
“Theory itself binds desire by congealing it into fixed categories, values, and modes of thought and behavior.“
“Libidinal economy that offers a new type of theory and practice that is purely affirmative, but attempts to provide the outlines of a new anti-theoretics and politics of desire.”
Moving onto the book the postmodern condition, “in fact, Lyotard is the only theorist we are examining who fails to produce critical perspectives and modernity as a Socioeconomic phenomenon.”
“Thus modernity for Lyotard is modern reason, enlightenment, totalizing thought, and philosophies of history.“
“For leotard, there are three conditions for modern knowledge: the appeal to metanarratives to legitimate foundationalist claims; the inevitable outgrowth of legitimation, delegitimization, and exclusion; and a desire for homogeneous epistemological and moral prescriptions.“
“Knowledge is produced, in Lyotard’s view, by dissent, by putting into question existing paradigms, by inventing new ones, rather than assenting to universal truth or agreeing to a consensus.“
“His earlier work championed the body, desire, and intensities over language. In his later work, however, he privileges language and philosophy.“
“Presumably it is the differend itself which is the principle of an honorable postmodernity: as distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a case of conflict, between at least two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.“
“Lyotard’s philosophy of the differend would articulate differences, giving voice to minority discourses and would thus preserve rather than suppress differences.“
He goes further than these theorists, however, by positing and ineluctable heterogeneity in discourse, assuming that there will be always be differences which cannot be assimilated to universal or general criteria.“
“After Auschwitz, he argues, there can be no more pretense that humanity is one, that universality is the human condition.“ But it is upon that actual fact that we can be shocked and horrified and make judgment against the Nazis.”
Chapter 6
“society is constituted as a complex field of multiple forms of power, subordination, and antagonisms that are irreducible to a single site or fundamental contradiction.“ Since society is something built by people why would they consent to live in such a place?
It seems that many of these theorists have extraordinarily soft political programs which seem to result from their very perspectivism and relativism. They can’t get anything concrete off the ground.
“While Marx dismissed moral language as bourgeois ideology or superfluous for a communist society that theoretically will eliminate what Hume has called the circumstances of justice L and M rightly see that liberal democratic discourse is necessary for radical politics in so far as it provides a language which can articulate and defend the needs and political demands of individuals and groups.”
Whose struggle matters most? Whose struggle is to be counted first? How would we even decide this? Is there something essential about all the struggles which gives them a kind of value number?
At the end of chapter 6 Best and Kellner say “we find pure postmodern theory without a strong dose of feminism or Marxism to be incapable of addressing concrete political problems. Postmodern theory in its more extreme forms tends to be exactly what it accuses modern theory of being: one-sided, reductionist, essentializing, excessively prohibitive, and politically disabling.”
I can’t quite agree with the first sentence but I can definitely agree with the second sentence.
Chapter 7
In this chapter the authors look at critical theory and postmodern theory. They point out that both carry out sharp critiques of modernity and its forms of social domination and rationalization.
“On the whole, postmodern theorists want to go much further than critical theorists in overthrowing traditional philosophy and social theory and in beginning anew with novel theoretical and political perspectives.“
The critical theorists “distinctive contribution resides in their analysis of the transition from market, entrepreneurial, 19th century competitive capitalism to the forms of organized state and monopoly capitalism characteristic of the 20th century.“ “They saw domination in spheres such as mass culture where capitalism’s apologist saw merely entertainment…” “For the Institute, capitalist modernity threatens to bring the end of the individual.” “… The critical theorists rejected the claims that our technologically advanced society automatically embodied freedom and progress.“
“Most postmodern theorists tend to throw out the very concept of social system and society for more fragmentary analysis, for micro analysis of discreet institutions, discourses, or practices.“
“With their emphasis on difference, fragmentation, plurality, and heterogeneity, postmodernists tend to reject concepts of rationality, totality, consensus, and social system as intrinsically repressive.“
“… We would argue that a dialectical social theory such as one finds in the best of critical theory provides the most adequate models and methods to analyze the multi dimensional processes toward both fragmentation and unification, implosion and differentiation, and plurality and homogenization and contemporary techno capitalist societies.“
“Against postmodern theories, Habermas defended modernity as an unfinished project which contained unfulfilled emancipatory potential.“
“Habermas finds a valuable legacy in modernity worth preserving and revitalizing.
“Our position, in contrast to both neighbor mods and his postmodern critics, is that in some situations it is best to engage in dissensus, to challenge hegemonic views, enter preserve differences, while in other contexts it is necessary to reach consensus to promote certain political or ethical goals.“ Page 241.
“… We believe that a genuine dialogue between postmodern theory and critical theory could be productive for contemporary philosophy and social theory.“
“Both Habermas and Lyotard share a ‘critique of functional reason,’ whereby reason is reduced to an instrument of social reproduction, judged solely by the effectiveness of its performances.“
“… Both defend the sort of Kantian cultural differentiation in which each sphere of judgment has its own criteria and validity claims.”
Chapter 8
“We therefore believe that a critical tradition of modern theory continues to provide perspectives, methods and concepts useful for social theory today and that it is a mistake to totally reject this tradition.” “We therefore call for critical articulation of modern and postmodern theory which map the broader features of social organization and conflicts, as well as features of fragmentation and various micro domains.”
“Our position is that while it is impossible to produce a fixed an exhaustive knowledge of a constantly changing complex social processes, it is possible to map the fundamental domains, structures, practices, and discourses of a society, and how they are constituted and interact.”
“We shall argue for supra disciplinary social theories and a combination of micro and macro analysis.”
“Postmodern politics rejects all ideals and models exterior to the existing system and that’s all utopian alternatives.”
“In our view, no postmodern theorist has formulated an adequate political response to the degraded contemporary conditions they described.” “… Postmodern discourse offered solace for isolated and embittered intellectuals who gave up hope for social change and retired from social involvement to retreat to the Academy and in some cases to the stylized hedonism of the ‘new-intellectuals’.”
Epistemologically, postmodernists refuse the modern belief that we have unmediated access to reality.“ “… Postmodernists argue that the mind is constitutive, rather than reflective, of reality.“
“… We see that postmodern theory has crippling political implications.“
“Against the postmodern politics of subjectivity and tendencies to aestheticizing politics, we would advocate a politics of alliances, a cultural politics, and a strategic politics which combined micro and macro perspectives and retain a salient place for critical rationality.”
“The evolution of capitalism, therefore, is a political objective relevant to all oppressed groups, but it is only one step in the creation of a free and democratic society.“
All of these thinkers hated various features of life under semi-capitalism. They blamed it all on the economic system, never the participants in that very system. People like what they like and the producers were more than happy to give it to them. Who has time in any corporation to get the public to like something that will have no value to the consumer at all? People like flowers and sunsets and beaches and puppies. They did before capitalism and will after.
Postmodern theory was the fashionable thing, the “in” thing when I was in graduate school. There was very little well, actually no critical assessment of anybody’s thought at the time. Best and Kellner’s book at least offers some critical analysis, some of which is quite good.
My review below is an assembly of key ideas in the book and some commentary by me. It is comforting to see that postmodernism was finally critiqued. That was not the case when I was in graduate school in the 1980s. We read each thinker in their turn and did not criticize them or compare them to other thinkers in the field.
They were all leftists or Marxists. The authors repeatedly mention how disappointed and disillusioned these thinkers were after 1968.
They offer their own position at the end, a kind of syncretic system of the best of critical and postmodern theory.
Early on they say modern theory “is criticized for its search for a foundation of knowledge, for its universalizing and totalizing claims, force hubris to supply apodictic truth and for its allegedly fallacious rationalism.”
They say that postmodern theory is “taking instead perspectivist and relativist positions that theories at best provide partial perspectives on their objects, and that all cognitive representations of the world are historically and linguistically mediated.”
They then take a look at the history of the postmodern position and the use of the word prior to the late 1980s and the formal beginning of the movement itself. This is a very interesting section.
They point out that in the late 1980s there were some who took the position that postmodernism was predominantly positive while there were others who took it as predominantly negative. They believe that the positive discourse helped prepare the way for the reception of the discourse of the postmodern in the 1980s. However the negative cultural discourse would also prepare the way for neoconservative attacks in the late 80s. They do have to label their opposition, just as the postmoderns did.
At the very end of chapter 1, the authors say “A postmodernist describes and usually champions imputed breaks in knowledge, culture, and society, frequently attacking the modern while identifying with what they tout as new and “radical“ postmodern discourses and practices.“ This seems to be a rather benign sort of definition of postmodernism. From it, one could imagine postmodernism existing in medieval times or in North Korea. The rates of change in these places might not have been great but there was change nevertheless.
Yet a short while later, they say “Our task will be to assess the extent to which postmodern theories contribute to the project of developing a critical theory and radical politics for the present age.”
Chapter 2 focusses on Michel Foucault. They pay particular attention to the fact that Foucault changed at least three times in his life. At first, he was interested in what he called the archaeological move, then the genealogical move and then finally technologies of the self.
He seems to have taken an interest in ancient Greek and Roman ethics later in life.
“The subject is still discursively and socially conditioned for Foucault, and still theorized as situated within power relations; the difference yet is that he now sees that individuals also have the power to define their own identity, to master their bodies and desires and to forge a practice of freedom through techniques of the self.“
“In his later work he states that “what interest me is much more morals and politics or, in any case, politics as an ethics.“
Best and Kellner criticize Foucault for being inconsistent with his strident attacks on the “tyranny of globalizing discourses.“ “Foucault fails to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate kinds of totalities and macro theories…“
Chapter 3 focuses on Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. “… They are exemplary representatives of postmodern positions in their thoroughgoing efforts to dismantle modern beliefs in unity, hierarchy, identity, foundations, subjectivity and representation, while celebrating counter principles of difference and multiplicity in theory, politics, and everyday life.
“Their most influential book to date, Anti-Oedipus, is a provocative critique of modernity’s discourses and institutions which repress desire and proliferate fascist subjectivities that haunt even revolutionary movements.”
They are political militant proponents of “micro politics of desire that seeks to precipitate radical change through a liberation of desire.
“Power is epiphenomenal to the flow of desire.“ “… Desire is purely affirmative, and not a desire to resist another force“.
“For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is neither inherently good nor bad, only dynamic and productive.”
“Throughout their work, Deleuze and Guattari exhibit a paranoid phobia of signification and rationality in order to celebrate the a-signifying, nomadic existence of desiring flows.”
Chapter 4 Baudrillard
To Marx’s distinctions between use value and exchange value, Baudrillard adds an analysis of sign value, whereby commodities are valued by the way that they confer prestige and signify social status and power.”
“Baudrillard seems to be arguing that by engaging in symbolic exchange which is caught up neither in use values nor exchange values, one escapes domination by the logic of political economy and is able to subvert the logic of a system which demands that all activity have specific uses values and purposes.“ This seems a bit incoherent to me. The symbolic exchange is an exchange of symbolic values. Who assigned the value? How does one recognize the value? I’m not sure there can be some thing that isn’t a use value. And, of course, why would one spend a great deal of time on activities that have no use value, given that we live finite lives?
“Thus his micro politics are rather vague and empty.“
“Thus, the only practice that he can really recommend is total refusal, total negativity, and the utopia of radical otherness.“
“…Baudrillard claims that in the postmodern world the boundary between image or simulation and reality implodes, and with it the very experience and ground of the real disappears“.
“Hyperreality thus points to a blurring of distinctions between the real and the unreal in which the prefix hyper signifies more real than real whereby the real is produced according to a model.“
“Baudrillard argues that the masses become bored and resentful of their constant bombardment with messages and the constant attempts to solicit them to buy, consume, work, vote, register an opinion, or participate in social life.” Had he only known about social media.
“Baudrillard interprets Foucault as a theorist who could not take the postmodern term and remained within the classical formula of sex and power.”
According to the Wikipedia entry for him, the producers of the movie The Matrix were influenced by Baudrillard.
“Baudrillard’s universe is ruled by surprise, reversal, blasphemy, obscenity, and its desire to shock and outrage.“ “… He proposes that we become more like things, like objects, and divest ourselves of the illusion and hubris of subjectivity.“
“Baudrillard’s evisceration of the subject precludes analysis of the responsibility and ability of subject to collectively transform the present social structures and relations of production.“
“… Baudrillard‘s analysis operates on an excessively high level of abstraction.“ He fails to make key distinctions and engages in misplaced abstraction.“
“…Baudrillard‘s current positions are profoundly superficial and are characterized by sloppy generalizations, extreme abstraction, semiological idealism and often repeated banalities, such as: we are in a post orgy condition of simulations, entropy, fractal subjects, indifference, transvestism, and so on ad nauseum.“
Chapter 5 Jean François Lyotard
“Like DeLeuze and Guattari, Lyotard presents an affirmative philosophy of desire which celebrates the circulation, flows, intensities and energetics of desire.“
“Like D and G, leotard claims that desire is bound and fixed into oppressive forms through the family, workplace, economy, and state.“
“Theory itself binds desire by congealing it into fixed categories, values, and modes of thought and behavior.“
“Libidinal economy that offers a new type of theory and practice that is purely affirmative, but attempts to provide the outlines of a new anti-theoretics and politics of desire.”
Moving onto the book the postmodern condition, “in fact, Lyotard is the only theorist we are examining who fails to produce critical perspectives and modernity as a Socioeconomic phenomenon.”
“Thus modernity for Lyotard is modern reason, enlightenment, totalizing thought, and philosophies of history.“
“For leotard, there are three conditions for modern knowledge: the appeal to metanarratives to legitimate foundationalist claims; the inevitable outgrowth of legitimation, delegitimization, and exclusion; and a desire for homogeneous epistemological and moral prescriptions.“
“Knowledge is produced, in Lyotard’s view, by dissent, by putting into question existing paradigms, by inventing new ones, rather than assenting to universal truth or agreeing to a consensus.“
“His earlier work championed the body, desire, and intensities over language. In his later work, however, he privileges language and philosophy.“
“Presumably it is the differend itself which is the principle of an honorable postmodernity: as distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a case of conflict, between at least two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.“
“Lyotard’s philosophy of the differend would articulate differences, giving voice to minority discourses and would thus preserve rather than suppress differences.“
He goes further than these theorists, however, by positing and ineluctable heterogeneity in discourse, assuming that there will be always be differences which cannot be assimilated to universal or general criteria.“
“After Auschwitz, he argues, there can be no more pretense that humanity is one, that universality is the human condition.“ But it is upon that actual fact that we can be shocked and horrified and make judgment against the Nazis.”
Chapter 6
“society is constituted as a complex field of multiple forms of power, subordination, and antagonisms that are irreducible to a single site or fundamental contradiction.“ Since society is something built by people why would they consent to live in such a place?
It seems that many of these theorists have extraordinarily soft political programs which seem to result from their very perspectivism and relativism. They can’t get anything concrete off the ground.
“While Marx dismissed moral language as bourgeois ideology or superfluous for a communist society that theoretically will eliminate what Hume has called the circumstances of justice L and M rightly see that liberal democratic discourse is necessary for radical politics in so far as it provides a language which can articulate and defend the needs and political demands of individuals and groups.”
Whose struggle matters most? Whose struggle is to be counted first? How would we even decide this? Is there something essential about all the struggles which gives them a kind of value number?
At the end of chapter 6 Best and Kellner say “we find pure postmodern theory without a strong dose of feminism or Marxism to be incapable of addressing concrete political problems. Postmodern theory in its more extreme forms tends to be exactly what it accuses modern theory of being: one-sided, reductionist, essentializing, excessively prohibitive, and politically disabling.”
I can’t quite agree with the first sentence but I can definitely agree with the second sentence.
Chapter 7
In this chapter the authors look at critical theory and postmodern theory. They point out that both carry out sharp critiques of modernity and its forms of social domination and rationalization.
“On the whole, postmodern theorists want to go much further than critical theorists in overthrowing traditional philosophy and social theory and in beginning anew with novel theoretical and political perspectives.“
The critical theorists “distinctive contribution resides in their analysis of the transition from market, entrepreneurial, 19th century competitive capitalism to the forms of organized state and monopoly capitalism characteristic of the 20th century.“ “They saw domination in spheres such as mass culture where capitalism’s apologist saw merely entertainment…” “For the Institute, capitalist modernity threatens to bring the end of the individual.” “… The critical theorists rejected the claims that our technologically advanced society automatically embodied freedom and progress.“
“Most postmodern theorists tend to throw out the very concept of social system and society for more fragmentary analysis, for micro analysis of discreet institutions, discourses, or practices.“
“With their emphasis on difference, fragmentation, plurality, and heterogeneity, postmodernists tend to reject concepts of rationality, totality, consensus, and social system as intrinsically repressive.“
“… We would argue that a dialectical social theory such as one finds in the best of critical theory provides the most adequate models and methods to analyze the multi dimensional processes toward both fragmentation and unification, implosion and differentiation, and plurality and homogenization and contemporary techno capitalist societies.“
“Against postmodern theories, Habermas defended modernity as an unfinished project which contained unfulfilled emancipatory potential.“
“Habermas finds a valuable legacy in modernity worth preserving and revitalizing.
“Our position, in contrast to both neighbor mods and his postmodern critics, is that in some situations it is best to engage in dissensus, to challenge hegemonic views, enter preserve differences, while in other contexts it is necessary to reach consensus to promote certain political or ethical goals.“ Page 241.
“… We believe that a genuine dialogue between postmodern theory and critical theory could be productive for contemporary philosophy and social theory.“
“Both Habermas and Lyotard share a ‘critique of functional reason,’ whereby reason is reduced to an instrument of social reproduction, judged solely by the effectiveness of its performances.“
“… Both defend the sort of Kantian cultural differentiation in which each sphere of judgment has its own criteria and validity claims.”
Chapter 8
“We therefore believe that a critical tradition of modern theory continues to provide perspectives, methods and concepts useful for social theory today and that it is a mistake to totally reject this tradition.” “We therefore call for critical articulation of modern and postmodern theory which map the broader features of social organization and conflicts, as well as features of fragmentation and various micro domains.”
“Our position is that while it is impossible to produce a fixed an exhaustive knowledge of a constantly changing complex social processes, it is possible to map the fundamental domains, structures, practices, and discourses of a society, and how they are constituted and interact.”
“We shall argue for supra disciplinary social theories and a combination of micro and macro analysis.”
“Postmodern politics rejects all ideals and models exterior to the existing system and that’s all utopian alternatives.”
“In our view, no postmodern theorist has formulated an adequate political response to the degraded contemporary conditions they described.” “… Postmodern discourse offered solace for isolated and embittered intellectuals who gave up hope for social change and retired from social involvement to retreat to the Academy and in some cases to the stylized hedonism of the ‘new-intellectuals’.”
Epistemologically, postmodernists refuse the modern belief that we have unmediated access to reality.“ “… Postmodernists argue that the mind is constitutive, rather than reflective, of reality.“
“… We see that postmodern theory has crippling political implications.“
“Against the postmodern politics of subjectivity and tendencies to aestheticizing politics, we would advocate a politics of alliances, a cultural politics, and a strategic politics which combined micro and macro perspectives and retain a salient place for critical rationality.”
“The evolution of capitalism, therefore, is a political objective relevant to all oppressed groups, but it is only one step in the creation of a free and democratic society.“
All of these thinkers hated various features of life under semi-capitalism. They blamed it all on the economic system, never the participants in that very system. People like what they like and the producers were more than happy to give it to them. Who has time in any corporation to get the public to like something that will have no value to the consumer at all? People like flowers and sunsets and beaches and puppies. They did before capitalism and will after.
Postmodern theory was the fashionable thing, the “in” thing when I was in graduate school. There was very little well, actually no critical assessment of anybody’s thought at the time. Best and Kellner’s book at least offers some critical analysis, some of which is quite good.
January 18, 2024
This is a really great intro for those looking to take a deep dive into the deep dark end of the pool which is postmodern theory. Best and Kellner are able to take the dense, jargon filled work of the pomo heavy hitters and explicate it very clearly and concisely.
My only complaints are quite trivial. For one I would have liked to have seen a bit more on some of the pomo adjacent thinkers such as Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan etc. I assume that for the sake of time/complexity/length they wanted to keep the text more focused, and they do explicitly state in the book that they wanted to address the thinkers who identified as being postmodern or dealt with the term or concept more directly. Also towards the end of the book it does become a bit tedious and tautalogical with regards to describing pomo thinkers rejection of totalizing metanarratives and systems, rejection of macropolitical theories, or embracing difference and heterogeneity etc.
Those quibbles aside I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in postmodern theory. Also it would be helpful for those who have been presented with a uninformed caricature of postmodern theory in dispelling some of the more ridiculous unfair readings of them spread by certain "intellectuals" online (Jordan Peterson namely).
My only complaints are quite trivial. For one I would have liked to have seen a bit more on some of the pomo adjacent thinkers such as Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan etc. I assume that for the sake of time/complexity/length they wanted to keep the text more focused, and they do explicitly state in the book that they wanted to address the thinkers who identified as being postmodern or dealt with the term or concept more directly. Also towards the end of the book it does become a bit tedious and tautalogical with regards to describing pomo thinkers rejection of totalizing metanarratives and systems, rejection of macropolitical theories, or embracing difference and heterogeneity etc.
Those quibbles aside I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in postmodern theory. Also it would be helpful for those who have been presented with a uninformed caricature of postmodern theory in dispelling some of the more ridiculous unfair readings of them spread by certain "intellectuals" online (Jordan Peterson namely).
September 27, 2022
An excellent primer and elucidation of Postmodern theorists, and, as a secondary text, a great entry point to reading not just the important works of Postmodernism, but important detractors from critical theory. In addition, Best and Kellner, offer an examination of the weaknesses of Postmodernist thought.
It is interesting to note, the presence of this work in showing both the ways in which Postmodernism can neuter political movements in favor of the status quo because of their distrust of macropolitics, lack of social theory or political economy, the pessimism endemic in progressivism that would infect the left in the 90s, but also how this work predicted, because of the postmodernist "micropolitics of difference," showed the irreducibility of sex, gender and racial politics to class in the ways that Marxists are wont to do.
I have no doubt that I will be using this book as a reference book for reading more Postmodernists, as well as Critical Theorists, works.
It is interesting to note, the presence of this work in showing both the ways in which Postmodernism can neuter political movements in favor of the status quo because of their distrust of macropolitics, lack of social theory or political economy, the pessimism endemic in progressivism that would infect the left in the 90s, but also how this work predicted, because of the postmodernist "micropolitics of difference," showed the irreducibility of sex, gender and racial politics to class in the ways that Marxists are wont to do.
I have no doubt that I will be using this book as a reference book for reading more Postmodernists, as well as Critical Theorists, works.
July 26, 2018
A great overview, but diminishes the contribution of "extreme postmodernists" like Lyotard and Baudrillard in their understanding of media and the desires of technology itself. These ideas have become more prescient today than when the book was published in 1991.
November 27, 2020
Postmodernizm ve postmodern teori konusunda önde gelen düşünürler ve onların eserleri, görüşleri üzerinden derlenen çok etkili bir kitap. Postmodernizme farklı alanlardan ve farklı boyutlardan yaklaşan birçok düşünürü tek bir eserde görebilme fırsatı sunuyor. Konu ile ilgilenenler okumalı.
October 24, 2024
this was cool but I wish the authors provided more insight into the discography of CharliXCX and Lebron’s legacy. Really no sense in discussing Foucault without at least giving Charli a little shoutout. Just my 2 sense
Want to read
June 6, 2019Recommended by Hiram Diaz
June 26, 2019
Very difficult to read at times, but very rewarding if you can get through it.
Read
November 12, 2023Anlamış gibi yaptım… Özür dilerim acelem vardı… Geri döneceğim…
November 12, 2012
a great tasting platter of some theorist who operate, claimed or not, under the postmodern header. The treatment is of course more focused on breadth but you still get a sense of each person and, more importantly, get a sense for which parts of their work you agree with or enjoy (for example, Baudrillard's stuff on simulation I found highly interesting, while some of his other stuff I found to be of such theoretical convolution as to be non-sensical). Another interesting component of the book is that the writers themselves deliver their own critiques and opinions about the work of the theorists, both praising/validating genius and taking a really critical, scrutinizing eye to their stuff, which i found highly useful in figuring out my own opinions about particular works. Overall, a great way to get your feet wet in postmodern waters and not recoil from what most usually find to be a frightening amount of intimidation.
March 13, 2014
The most accessible survey of the leading postmodern theorist of the 21st century that i have ever encountered so far. The topics range from discussing Foucault,Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard,Habermas,Althusser.Laclau and many more.
The author successfully presented the overview of the argument from each theorist without putting it into too much simplicity.
The author successfully presented the overview of the argument from each theorist without putting it into too much simplicity.
January 24, 2013
I really didn't enjoy this book because the writer clouded the significance of Post-Modernity with a lot of empty, garbage-like verbiage terms that were not relevent to the subject matter.
The book could have been written with less than twenty or so pages and gotten the point across.
The book could have been written with less than twenty or so pages and gotten the point across.
January 21, 2014
Best and Kellner's reading other post-modern theorists is awesome. It's rather comprehensible and maybe the best beginning book for the topic. But it remains a question after they offer their critical social critique: Can such a theory exist by just criticizing other similar theories?
December 22, 2010
Read many many years ago in the Left Hand Books study group.
August 19, 2016
probably the best introductory tip to slip in, just for a moment, just to see how it feels, regarding basic postmodernist theory.
January 11, 2013
Insightful and educational.
January 28, 2015
Really good overview of postmodern theory imo
May 28, 2015
Handy text for those looking to get a foot in the door.
July 7, 2015
Very useful. Very informative.
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