A potted guide

So the European modernist paradigm was established and the modernist discourse, claiming universalism, trampled on and excluded the non-European other, while at the same time, proclaiming contradictorily, in its most significant formulation in The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the brotherhood of man, freedom and equality.

It is against this “grand narrative”, as Lyotard calls it, that postmodernism can be defined.

Postmodernism is first of all a category to describe critiques and reactions, cultural, political and social, against the central tenets of monolithic modernism.

The word “postmodern” came into common usage relatively late in the piece, and referred to past as well as present reactions to, and critiques of, modernism from the 1960s onwards. Sometimes the term was used pejoratively, but mostly it was used as an attempt to delineate a new kind of Weltanschauung, challenging the modernist paradigm.

It then became current in the 1960s to refer to the approach in many fields of artistic endeavour. It focussed on different things in different places. In the arts, increasing and widespread self-referentiality signalled a lack of confidence in, and a refusal of, the authoritative authorial voice: the Absurdist aesthetic, the French nouveau roman in France can be grouped under the postmodern label.

The shaking of the modernist foundations of our culture and society paved the way for postmodern criticism in the arts and literature and brought into question the dichotomies of high and low culture, high and popular literature, classical and pop art.

Overall, “postmodern” is a term to describe the crisis in representation which has characterised the modern world with increasing urgency since the World War II.

The unassailability of the grand modernist narratives has been becoming increasingly untenable in a world where science and technology have led to wars of a scope unimaginable for the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers, where the dominant voice, given as a universal, comes to be recognised for what it is: the privileged voice of a white European male, affirming itself by excluding those other voices: women, non-Europeans, colonised peoples.

Another branch of the postmodern mix is that of poststructuralism. In France the structuralist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, with its strongholds in anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan) and literary criticism (A. J. Greimas, Roland Barthes) was the last gasp, as it were, of modernism.

Structuralism sought to establish these human and social sciences on a solid scientific basis originating in the linguistic analysis of the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure. Analysis of the social phenomenon, be it a South American tribe, the unconscious, or a literary text, considered the object as a structure to be studied in terms of the binary oppositions which expressed its meaning. Thus meaning was to be found in the structures of the phenomenon to be examined, rather than in the historical or social context.

Poststructuralism, reacting against the excesses and ultimate sterility of literary structuralism, with its evacuation of the author, history and context, is a particular French manifestation of the postmodern. Michel Foucault demonstrates that language is power and that it is the discursive formations that speak the subject rather than the subject controlling language.

Likewise deconstruction, associated with the names of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, acutely focusses on the crisis in representation, the loss of confidence in the triumphal Enlightment discourse. Language, rather than being referential, can be seen as an infinite regression of the sign, creating a deferral and fragmentation of meaning. Representation becomes, then, a space where other voices can be heard, the black as well as the white, the colonised as well as the coloniser, women as well as men. All languages become legitimate in this pluralised and politicised space of representation.