Postmodernism fuses changes in the arts with poststructuralist philosophy
Evidence
Nevertheless, it gradually became clear that postmodernism represented the convergence of three distinct cultural trends. The first involved certain changes in the arts over the previous couple of decades - in particular, the reaction against the International Style in architecture associated with such names as Robert Venturi and James Sterling which first brought the term ‘Postmodern’ into popular usage. … Secondly, however, a certain current in philosophy was thought to be giving conceptual expression to the themes explored by contemporary artists. This was a group of French theorists who came in the 1970s to be known in the English-speaking world by the shared label of ‘poststructuralism’ - in particular, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Despite their many disagreements, all three stressed the fragmentary, heterogeneous and plural character of reality, denied human thought the ability to arrive at any objective account of that reality and reduced the bearer of this thought, the subject, to an incoherent welter of suband trans individual drives and desires. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 27
Categorization
- DEFINE: The author’s key definitional move: postmodernism as convergence of three trends — art, poststructuralist philosophy, and social-structural change — which structures the whole book’s critique.
- XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s engagement with Jameson’s postmodernism thesis, which claims a similar epochal cultural logic, giving a comparative frame. — connects to: The shift from Symbol to allegory marks the modernism-to-postmodernism break — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 391; Poststructuralism is essentially a discourse of modernism, not postmodernism — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 285; Both poststructuralist strands derive their core from Nietzsche (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Poststructuralism is essentially a discourse of modernism, not postmodernism
#contradicts(0.85) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 285 - The shift from Symbol to allegory marks the modernism-to-postmodernism break
#expands(0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 391