What is PoMo?

Postmodernism, Postmodernity, PostModern Philosophy

The instability of your question leaves me with several contradictorily layered responses whose
interconnectivity cannot express the logocentric coherency you seek. I can only say that reality
is more uneven and its (mis)representations more untrustworthy than we have time here to
explore.

Schematic Differences between

Modernism and Postmodernism

Modernism Postmodernism

romanticism/symbolism paraphysics/Dadaism

design chance

hierarchy anarchy

matery, logos exhaustion, silence

art object, finished word process, performance

creation, totalization deconstruction

synthesis antithesis

presence absence

centering dispersal

semantics rhetoric

paradigm syntagm

metaphor metonymy

selection combination

depth surface

interpretation against interpretation

genital, phallic polymorphous

paranoia schizophrenia

origin, cause difference-difference

God the Father The Holy Ghost

determinacy indeterminacy

transcendence immanence

(SOURCE: Hassan "The Culture of Postmodernism" Theory, Culture, and Society, V 2 1985, 123-4.)
PostModern Philosophy is practically the game of negating all the philosophies which originated before it (classical, romantic, modern). This
movement began through Nietzche, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, who implanted the ideas of the separation between the “I” and that which
exists. All becomes perception and everything is a mis-reading. In postmodernism, hyperreality is the result of the technological
mediation of experience, where what passes for reality is a network of images and signs without an external referent,
such that what is represented is representation itself. (Standform Encyclepedia).
What is Man? Self-Philosophy modern trend of idealism (the view that boils down to
maintaining that whatever the mind knows of what it knows, the
mind itself constructs)
Political Philosophy “Nietzsche and Heidegger both understood the relationship between their thought about
Being and the enduring questions of political life, and each of them, inaction if not in thought,
was committed to definite political aspirations. (Murr, Derrida and Post-Modern, p. 2)

Following Nietzsche, Foucault argued that knowledge is

produced through the operations of power, and changes
fundamentally in different historical periods.
Baudrillard (1975) argues that Marxism, first, does not adequately illuminate
premodern societies that were organized around religion, mythology, and
tribal organization and not production. He also argues that Marxism does not
provide a sufficiently radical critique of capitalist societies and alternative
critical discourses and perspectives. At this stage, Baudrillard turns to
anthropological perspectives on premodern societies for hints of more
emancipatory alternatives. Yet it is important to note that this critique of
Marxism was taken from the Left, arguing that Marxism did not provide a
radical enough critique of, or alternative to, contemporary capitalist and
communist societies organized around production. Baudrillard concluded that
French communist failure to support the May 68 movements was rooted in
part in a conservatism that had roots in Marxism itself. Hence, Baudrillard and
others of his generation began searching for alternative critical positions.
Lyotard takes up the question of justice in Just Gaming (see Lyotard 1985) and
The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (see Lyotard 1988), where he combines the
model of language games with Kant's division of the faculties (understanding,
imagination, reason) and types of judgment (theoretical, practical, aesthetic)
in order to explore the problem of justice set out in The Postmodern Condition.
Without the formal unity of the subject, the faculties are set free to operate on
their own. Where Kant insists that reason must assign domains and limits to
the other faculties, its dependence upon the unity of the subject for the
identity of concepts as laws or rules de-legitimizes its juridical authority in the
postmodern age. Instead, because we are faced with an irreducible plurality of
judgments and “phrase regimes,” the faculty of judgment itself is brought to
the fore. Kant's third Critique therefore provides the conceptual materials for
Lyotard's analysis, especially the analytic of aesthetic judgment (see Kant
1987).

Philosophy of Art "in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all
that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks
and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum"
(Jameson).

Art works are likewise caught up in the problem of

representation and mediation--of what, for whom, from what
ideological point of view? (Georgetown)

Realism, whose only definition is that it intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in
that of art, always stands somewhere between academicism and kitsch. When power assumes
the name of a party, realism and its neoclassical complement triumph over the experimental
avant-garde by slandering-and banning it — that is, provided the "correct" images, the
"correct" narratives, the "correct" forms which the party requests, selects, and propagates
can find a public to desire them as the appropriate remedy for the anxiety and depression that
public experiences. The demand for reality — that is, for unity, simplicity, communicability,
etc. — did not have the same intensity nor the same continuity in German society between the
two world wars and in Russian society after the Revolution: this provides a basis for a
 distinction between Nazi and Stalinist realism. (Lyotard)

Major Players

Jacque Derrida He is most often connected to the idea of deconstructionism, which main goal is to reduce an
object’s meaning to the least common denominator. However, this poses extreme linguistic
issues especially regarding context and bias (of the deconstructionist). “Specifically, texts
require a double mode of reading, which is to say that one must read texts with two intentions.
First, one must endeavour to understandthe text as it has come to us in the history of Western
thought, while at the same time,endeavouring to discern the negation of this understanding
which is integral to the text,and thereby requires us to allow the text to deconstruct itself.”
In his works, he attacks the general narrative (“Grand Narrative”) by stating that there is no
true consensus on anything, especially literature. He says that there is no “encompassing
literature” (www.as,ua.edu).
“According to Derridian deconstruction, the fundamental category of humanthought
isdifferance, which is understood as the origin of difference originating withinlanguage and the
indeterminacy of meaning. It is not metaphysical because it is nota concept or entity, but rather
exists within language between any word or concept and its opposite comprising a distinction.”
(Muir)
Derrida advocated for complexity and plurality in his works. According to Derrida,
“recentphilosophy, especially within the universities, has focussed so intently on questions
ofepistemology or methodology that it has forgotten the troublingquestionsof its ownmotives
and value, particularly before a citizenry and governing class which areincreasingly sceptical, if
not derisive, about any philosophy. The future of philosophydepends to some extent less on
how we approach questions of truth than on how weapproach questions of value.”

Jean-Francois Another literary critic of modernism and previous philosophies, is the Parisian Lyotard. On
Lyotard Lyotard's account, the computer age has transformed knowledge into information, that is,
coded messages within a system of transmission and communication. Analysis of this
knowledge calls for a pragmatics of communication insofar as the phrasing of messages, their
transmission and reception, must follow rules in order to be accepted by those who judge them.
However, as Lyotard points out, the position of judge or legislator is also a position within a
language game, and this raises the question of legitimation. As he insists, “there is a strict
interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics”
(Lyotard 1984, 8)

Michel Foucault This philosophical milieu provided materials for the critique of subjectivity and the corresponding
“archaeological” and “genealogical” methods of writing history that inform Foucault's projects of historical
critique.
In short, Foucault argued that what was presented as an objective, incontrovertible scientific discovery (that madness is
mental illness) was in fact the product of eminently questionable social and ethical commitments.
he sees representation as at the heart of the question of knowledge
How, on the Classical view, do we know that an idea is a representation of an object—and an adequate
representation? Not, Foucault argues, by comparing the idea with the object as it is apart from its
representation. This is impossible, since it would require knowing the object without a representation (when,
for Classical thought, to know is to represent).

Jean Baudrillard Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic who is best known for his analyses of the modes of
mediation and of technological communication.
That is, the terrorists in Baudrillard's reading used airplanes, computer networks, and the media
associated with Western societies to produce a spectacle of terror. The attacks evoked a global
specter of terror that the very system of globalization and Western capitalism and culture were
under assault by “the spirit of terrorism” and potential terrorist attacks anytime and anywhere.
 In the final analysis, Baudrillard is perhaps more useful as a provocateur who challenges and
puts in question the tradition of classical philosophy and social theory than as someone who
provides concepts and methods that can be applied in philosophical, social or cultural analysis.
He claims that the object of classical social theory — modernity — has been surpassed by a new
postmodernity and that therefore alternative theoretical strategies, modes of writing, and forms
of theory are necessary. While his work on simulation and the postmodern break from the mid-
1970s into the 1980s provides a paradigmatic postmodern theory and analysis of
postmodernity that has been highly influential, and that despite its exaggerations continues to
be of use in interpreting present social trends, his later work is arguably of more literary
interest. Baudrillard thus ultimately goes beyond social theory altogether into a new sphere and
mode of writing that provides occasional insights into contemporary social phenomena and
provocative critiques of contemporary and classical philosophy and social theory, but does not
really provide an adequate theory of the present age.