Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, religion, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism.

In architecture, art, music and literature, postmodernism is a name for many stylistic reactions to, and developments from, modernism. Postmodern style is often characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche, and irony. Some artistic movements commonly called postmodern are pop art, architectural deconstructivism, magical realism in literature, maximalism, and neo-romanticism. Postmodern theorists see postmodern art as a conflation or reversal of well-established modernist systems, such as the roles of artist versus audience, seriousness versus play, or high culture versus kitsch.

In sociology, postmodernism is described as the result of economic, cultural, and demographic changes. These changes include the rise of the service economy, the importance of the mass media, and the rise of an increasingly interdependent world economy. Related terms in this context include post-industrial society, late capitalism, information age, globalization, and global village. (See also Postmodern and Media theory).

As a cultural movement, postmodernism is an aspect of postmodernity, which is broadly defined as the condition of Western society after modernity. The adjective postmodern can refer to aspects of either postmodernism or postmodernity. According to postmodern theorist Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernity is characterized as an "incredulity toward metanarratives", meaning that in the era of postmodern culture, people have rejected the grand, supposedly universal stories and paradigms such as religion, conventional philosophy, capitalism and gender that have defined culture and behavior in the past, and have instead begun to organize their cultural life around a variety of more local and subcultural ideologies, myths and stories. Furthermore, it promotes the idea that all such metanarratives and paradigms are stable only while they fit the available evidence, and can potentially be overturned when phenomena occur that the paradigm cannot account for, and a better explanatory model (itself subject to the same fate) is found. See La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) in 1979, and the results of acceptance of postmodernism is the view that different realms of discourse are incomensurable and incapable of judging the results of other discourse, a conclusion he drew in La Differend (1983).

In philosophy, where the term is extensively used, it applies to movements that include post-structuralism, deconstruction, multiculturalism, gender studies and literary theory, sometimes called simply "theory". It emerged beginning in the 1950s as a critique of doctrines such as positivism and emphasizes the importance of power relationships, personalization and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. In this context it has been used by many critical theorists to assert that postmodernism is a break with the artistic and philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, which they characterize as a quest for an ever-grander and more universal system of aesthetics, ethics, and knowledge. They present postmodernism as a radical criticism of Western philosophy. Postmodern philosophy draws on a number of approaches to criticize Western thought, including historicism, and psychoanalytic theory.

The term postmodernism is also used in a broader pejorative sense to describe attitudes, sometimes part of the general culture, and sometimes specifically aimed at postmodern critical theory, perceived as relativist, nihilist, counter-Enlightenment or antimodern, particularly in relationship to critiques of rationalism, universalism, or science. It is also sometimes used to describe social changes which are held to be antithetical to traditional systems of morality, particularly by evangelical Christians.

The role, proper usage, and meaning of postmodernism are matters of intense debate and vary widely with context.

The development of postmodernism

Features of postmodern culture begin to arise in the 1920s with the emergence of the dada movement, which featured collage and a focus on the framing of objects and discourse as being as important, or more important, than the work itself. Another strand which would have tremendous impact on post-modernism would be the existentialists, who placed the centrality of the individual narrative as being the source of morals and understanding. Einstein's theories and the rise of quantum physics began undermining the view of science as objective truth and lent scientific support to postmodern notions of subjective truth. However, it is with the end of the Second World War that recognizably post-modernist attitudes begin to emerge.

Central to these is the focusing on the problems of any knowledge which is founded on anything external to an individual. Post-modernism, while widely diverse in its forms, almost invariably begins from the problem of knowledge which is broadly disseminated in its form, but not limited in its interpretation. Post-modernism rapidly developed a vocabulary of anti-enlightenment rhetoric, used to argue that rationality was neither as sure or as clear as rationalists supposed, and that knowledge was inherently linked to time, place, social position and other factors from which an individual constructs their view of knowledge. To escape from constructed knowledge, it then becomes necessary to critique it, and thus deconstruct the asserted knowledge. Jacques Derrida argued that to defend against the inevitable self-deconstruction of knowledge, systems of power, called hegemony would have to postulate an original utterance, the logos. This "privileging" of an original utterance is called "logocentrism". Instead of rooting knowledge in particular utterances, or "texts", the basis of knowledge was seen to be in the free play of discourse itself, an idea rooted in Wittgenstein's idea of a language game. This emphasis on the allowability of free play within the context of conversation and discourse leads postmodernism to adopt the stance of irony, paradox, textual manipulation, reference and tropes.

Armed with this process of questioning the social basis of assertions, postmodernist philosophers began to attack unities of modernism, and particularly unities seen as being rooted in the Enlightenment. Since Modernism had made the Enlightenment a central source of its superiority over the Victorian and Romantic periods, this attack amounted to an indirect attack on the establishment of modernism itself. Perhaps the most striking examples of this skepticism are to be found in the works of French cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard. In his book Simulacra and Simulation, he contends that social 'reality' no longer exists in the conventional sense, but has been supplanted by an endless procession of simulacra. The mass media, and other forms of mass cultural production, generate constant re-appropriation and re-contextualisation of familiar cultural symbols and images, fundamentally shifting our experience away from 'reality', to 'hyperreality'.

Postmodernism therefore has an obvious distrust toward claims about truth, ethics, or beauty being rooted in anything other than individual perception and group construction. Utopian ideals of universally applicable truths or aesthetics give way to provisional, decentered, local petit recits which, rather than referencing an underlying universal truth or aesthetic, point only to other ideas and cultural artifacts, themselves subject to interpretation and re-interpretation. The "truth", since it can only be understood by all of its connections is perpetually "deferred", never reaching a point of fixed knowledge which can be called "the truth."

Postmodernism is often used in a larger sense, meaning the entire trend of thought in the late 20th century, and the social and philosophical realities of that period. Marxist critics argue that post-modernism is symptomatic of "late capitalism" and the decline of institutions, particularly the nation-state. Other thinkers assert that post-modernity is the natural reaction to mass broadcasting and a society conditioned to mass production and mass political decision making. The ability of knowledge to be endlessly copied defeats attempts to constrain interpretation, or to set "originality" by simple means such as the production of a work. From this perspective, the schools of thought labelled "postmodern" are not as widely at odds with their time period as the polemics and arguments appear, pointing, for example, to the shift of the basis of scientific knowledge to a provisional consensus of scientists, as posited by Thomas Kuhn. Post-modernism is seen, in this view, as being conscious of the nature of the discontinuity between modern and post-modern periods which is generally present.

Postmodernism has manifestations in many modern academic and non-academic disciplines: philosophy, theology, art, architecture, film, television, music, theatre, sociology, fashion, technology, literature, and communications are all heavily influenced by postmodern trends and ideas, and are thoroughly scrutinised from postmodern perspectives. Crucial to these are the denial of customary expectations, the use of non-orthogonal angles in buildings such as the work of Frank Gehry, and the shift in arts exemplified by the rise of minimalism in art and music. Post-modern philosophy often labels itself as critical theory and grounds the construction of identity in the mass media.

Postmodernism was first identified as a theoretical discipline in the 1980s, but as a cultural movement it predates them by many years. Exactly when modernism began to give way to postmodernism is difficult to pinpoint, if not simply impossible. Some theorists reject that such a distinction even exists, viewing postmodernism, for all its claims of fragmentation and plurality, as still existing within a larger 'modernist' framework. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas is a strong proponent of this view, which has aspects of a lumpers/splitters problem: is the entire 20th century one period, or two distinct periods?

The theory gained some of its strongest ground early on in French academia. In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard wrote a short but influential work The Postmodern Condition : a report on knowledge. Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes (in his more post-structural work) are also strongly influential in postmodern theory. Postmodernism is closely allied with several contemporary academic disciplines, most notably those connected with sociology. Many of its assumptions are integral to feminist and post-colonial theory.

Some identify the burgeoning anti-establishment movements of the 1960s as the earliest trend out of cultural modernity toward postmodernism.

Tracing it further back, some identify its roots in the breakdown of Hegelian idealism, and the impact of both World Wars (perhaps even the concept of a World War). Heidegger and Derrida were influential in re-examining the fundamentals of knowledge, together with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his philosophy of action, Soren Kierkegaard's and Karl Barth's important fideist approach to theology, and even the nihilism of Nietzsche's philosophy. Michel Foucault's application of Hegel to thinking about the body is also identified as an important landmark. While it is rare to pin down the specific origins of any large cultural shift, it is fair to assume that postmodernism represents an accumulated disillusionment with the promises of the Enlightenment project and its progress of science, so central to modern thinking.

The movement has had diverse political ramifications: its anti-ideological insights appear conducive to, and strongly associated with, the feminist movement, racial equality movements, gay rights movements, most forms of late 20th century anarchism, even the peace movement and various hybrids of these in the current anti-globalization movement. Unsurprisingly, none of these institutions entirely embraces all aspects of the postmodern movement, but reflect or, in true postmodern style, borrow from some of its core ideas.

Also, many cite Charles Jencks' 1977 "The Language of Postmodern Architecture" among the earliest works which shaped the use of the term today.

Postmodernism in language

Postmodern philosophers are often regarded as difficult to read, and the critical theory that has sprung up in the wake of postmodernism has often been ridiculed for its stilted syntax and attempts to combine polemical tone and a vast array of new coinages. However, similar charges could be levelled at the works of previous eras, such as the works of Immanuel Kant, as well as at the entire tradition of Greek thought in antiquity.

More important to postmodernism's role in language is the focus on the implied meaning of words and forms, the power structures that are accepted as part of the way words are used, from the use of the word "Man" with a capital "M" to refer to the collective humanity, to the default of the word "he" in English as a pronoun for a person of gender unknown to the speaker, or as a casual replacement for the word "one". This, however, is merely the most obvious example of the changing relationship between diction and discourse which postmodernism presents.

An important concept in postmodernism's view of language is the idea of "play". In the context of postmodernism, play means changing the framework which connects ideas, and thus allows the troping, or turning, of a metaphor or word from one context to another, or from one frame of reference to another. Since, in postmodern thought, the "text" is a series of "markings" whose meaning is imputed by the reader, and not by the author, this play is the means by which the reader constructs or interprets the text, and the means by which the author gains a presence in the reader's mind. Play then involves invoking words in a manner which undermines their authority, by mocking their assumptions or style, or by layers of misdirection as to the intention of the author.  This view of writing is not without harsh detractors, who regard it as needlessly difficult and obscure.

Postmodernism in art

Where modernists hoped to unearth universals or the fundamentals of art, postmodernism aims to unseat them, to embrace diversity and contradiction. A postmodern approach to art thus rejects the distinction between low and high art forms. It rejects rigid genre boundaries and favors eclecticism, the mixing of ideas and forms. Partly due to this rejection, it promotes parody, irony, and playfulness, commonly referred to as jouissance by postmodern theorists. Unlike modern art, postmodern art does not approach this fragmentation as somehow faulty or undesirable, but rather celebrates it. As the gravity of the search for underlying truth is relieved, it is replaced with 'play'. As postmodern icon David Byrne, and his band Talking Heads said: 'Stop making sense'.

Post-modernity, in attacking the perceived elitist approach of Modernism, sought greater connection with broader audiences. This is often labelled 'accessibility' and is a central point of dispute in the question of the value of postmodern art. It has also embraced the mixing of words with art, collage and other movements in modernity, in an attempt to create more multiplicity of medium and message. Much of this centers on a shift of basic subject matter: postmodern artists regard the mass media as a fundamental subject for art, and use forms, tropes, and materials - such as banks of video monitors, found art, and depictions of media objects - as focal points for their art. Andy Warhol is an early example of postmodern art in action, with his appropriation of common popular symbols and "ready-made" cultural artifacts, bringing the previously mundane or trivial onto the previously hallowed ground of high art.

Postmodernism's critical stance is interlinked with presenting new appraisals of previous works. As implied above the works of the "Dada" movement received greater attention, as did collagists such as Robert Rauschenberg, whose works were initially considered unimportant in the context of the modernism of the 1950s, but who, by the 1980s, began to be seen as seminal. Post-modernism also elevated the importance of cinema in artistic discussions, placing it on a peer level with the other fine arts. This is both because of the blurring of distinctions between "high" and "low" forms, and because of the recognition that cinema represented the creation of simulacra which was later duplicated in the other arts.

Postmodernism in literature

Main article Postmodern literature

Postmodern literature argues for expansion, the return of reference, the celebration of fragmentation rather than the fear of it, and the role of reference itself in literature. While drawing on the experimental tendencies of authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf in English, and Borges in Spanish, who were taken as influences by American postmodern works by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Don Delillo, David Foster Wallace and Paul Auster, the advocates of post-modern literature argue that the present is fundamentally different from the modern period, and therefore requires a new literary sensibility.

Deconstruction

Main article: Deconstruction

Deconstruction is an important textual "occurrence" described and analyzed by many postmodern authors and philosophers, beginning with Jacques Derrida, who coined the term. Deconstruction has to do with the way in which the "deeper" substance of text opposes the text's more "superficial" form. As a result of deconstruction, according to Derrida, texts have multiple meanings, and the "violence" between the different meanings of text may be elucidated by close textual analysis.

Popularly, close textual analyses describing deconstruction within a text are often themselves called deconstructions; as envisioned by Derrida, however, deconstruction was not a method or a tool, but an occurrence within the text itself. Writings about deconstruction are perhaps more aptly referred to as deconstructive readings.

Deconstruction is far more important to postmodernism than its seemingly narrow focus on text might imply. According to Derrida, one consequence of deconstruction is that text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words, but the entire spectrum of symbols and phenomena within Western thought. To Derrida, a result of deconstruction is that no Western philosopher has been able to successfully escape from this large web of text and reach the purely text-free "signified" which they imagined to exist "just beyond" the text.

Postmodernism in philosophy

Main article: Postmodern philosophy

Many figures in the 20th century philosophy of mathematics are identified as "postmodern" due to their rejection of mathematics as a strictly neutral point of view. Some figures in the philosophy of science, especially Thomas Samuel Kuhn and David Bohm, are also so viewed. Some see the ultimate expression of postmodernism in science and mathematics in the cognitive science of mathematics, which seeks to characterize the habit of mathematics itself as strictly human, and based in human cognitive bias.

The term "Neo-liberalism" has been used in a theological sense (http://www.adrian.warnock.info/2004/12/why-neo-liberal.htm,) as a drive to deliberately modify the beliefs and practices of the church (especially evangelical) to conform to post-modernism

Postmodernism and post-structuralism

In terms of frequently cited works, postmodernism and post-structuralism overlap quite significantly. Some philosophers, such as Francois Lyotard, can legitimately be classified into both groups. This is partly due to the fact that both modernism and structuralism owe much to the Enlightenment project.

Structuralism has a strong tendency to be scientific in seeking out stable patterns in observed phenomena - an epistemological attitude which is quite compatible with Enlightenment thinking, and incompatible with postmodernists. At the same time, findings from structuralist analysis carried a somewhat anti-Enlightenment message, revealing that rationality can be found in the minds of 'savage' people, just in forms differing from those that people from 'civilized' societies are used to seeing. Implicit here is a critique of the practice of colonialism, which was partly justified as a 'civilizing' process by which wealthier societies bring knowledge, manners, and reason to less 'civilized' ones.

Post-structuralism, emerging as a response to the structuralists' scientific orientation, has kept the cultural relativism in structuralism, while discarding the scientific orientations.

One clear difference between postmodernism and poststructuralism is found in their respective attitudes towards the demise of the project of the Enlightenment: post-structuralism is fundamentally ambivalent, while postmodernism is decidedly celebratory.

Another difference is the nature of the two positions. While post-structuralism is a position in philosophy, encompassing views on human beings, language, body, society, and many other issues, it is not a name of an era. Post-modernism, on the other hand, is closely associated with "post-modern" era, a period in the history coming after the modern age.

Postmodernity and digital communications

Technological utopianism is a common trait in Western history - from the 1700s when Adam Smith essentially labelled technological progress as the source of the Wealth of Nations, through the novels of Jules Verne in the late 1800s, through Winston Churchill's belief that there was little an inventor could not achieve. Its manifestation in the post-modernity was first through the explosion of analog mass broadcasting of television. Strongly associated with the work of Marshall McLuhan who argued that "the medium is the message", the ability of mass broadcasting to create visual symbols and mass action was seen as a liberating force in human affairs, even at the same time others were calling television "a vast wasteland".

The second wave of technological utopianism associated with post-modern thought came with the introduction of digital internetworking, and became identified with Esther Dyson and such popular outlets as Wired Magazine. According to this view digital communications makes the fragmentation of modern society a positive feature, since individuals can seek out those artistic, cultural and community experiences which they regard as being correct for themselves.

The common thread is that the fragmentation of society and communication gives the individual more autonomy to create their own environment and narrative. This links into the post-modern novel, which deals with the experience of structuring "truth" from fragments.

Postmodernism and its critics

The term postmodernism is often used pejoratively to describe tendencies perceived of as Relativist, Counter-enlightenment or antimodern. Particularly in relationship to critiques of Rationalism, Universalism or Science. Sometimes used to describe tendencies in the society which are held to be antithetical to traditional systems of morality, particularly by Evangelical Christians.

Charles Murray, a strong critic of postmodernism, defines the term:

"By contemporary intellectual fashion, I am referring to the constellation of views that come to mind when one hears the words multicultural, gender, deconstruct, politically correct, and Dead White Males. In a broader sense, contemporary intellectual fashion encompasses as well the widespread disdain in certain circles for technology and the scientific method. Embedded in this mind-set is hostility to the idea that discriminating judgments are appropriate in assessing art and literature, to the idea that hierarchies of value exist, hostility to the idea that an objective truth exists. Postmodernism is the overarching label that is attached to this perspective." [1]

Though Murray's arguments against postmodernism are far from facile, critics have cautioned that Murray's own work in The Bell Curve arrives at racially-charged conclusions through research and argumentation that may not live up to the standards he defends.

One example is the figure of Harold Bloom, who has simultaneously been hailed as being against multiculturalism and contemporary "fads" in literature, and also placed as an important figure in postmodernism. If even the critics cannot keep score as to which side of a supposedly clear line figures stand on, the best conclusion that can be drawn is that conclusions about membership in the post-modern club are provisional.

Central to the debate is the role of the concept of "objectivity" and what it means. In the broadest sense, denial of objectivity is held to be the post-modern position, and a hostility towards claims advanced on the basis of objectivity its defining feature. It is this underlying hostility toward the concept of objectivity, evident in many contemporary critical theorists, that is the common point of attack for critics of postmodernism. Many critics characterise postmodernism as an ephemeral phenomenon that cannot be adequately defined simply because, as a philosophy at least, it represents nothing more substantial than a series of disparate conjectures allied only in their distrust of modernism.

This antipathy of postmodernists towards modernism, and their consequent tendency to define themselves against it, has also attracted criticism. It has been argued that modernity was not actually a lumbering, totalizing monolith at all, but in fact was itself dynamic and ever-changing; the evolution, therefore, between 'modern' and 'postmodern' should be seen as one of degree, rather than of kind - a continuation rather than a 'break'. One theorist who takes this view is Marshall Berman, whose book All That is Solid Melts into Air (a quote from Marx) reflects in its title the fluid nature of 'the experience of modernity'.

As noted above (see History of postmodernism), some theorists such as Habermas even argue that the supposed distinction between the 'modern' and the 'postmodern' does not exist at all, but that the latter is really no more than a development within a larger, still-current, 'modern' framework. Many who make this argument are left academics with Marxist leanings, such as Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and David Harvey (social geographer), who are concerned that postmodernism's undermining of Enlightenment values makes a progressive cultural politics difficult, if not impossible. How can we effect any change in people's poor living conditions, in inequality and injustice, if we don't accept the validity of underlying universals such as the 'real world' and 'justice' in the first place? How is any progress to be made through a philosophy so profoundly skeptical of the very notion of progress, and of unified perspectives? The critics charge that the postmodern vision of a tolerant, pluralist society in which every political ideology is perceived to be as valid, or as redundant, as the other; may ultimately encourage individuals to lead lives of a rather disastrous apathetic quietism. This reasoning leads Habermas to compare postmodernism with conservatism and the preservation of the status quo.

Such critics often argue that, in actual fact, such postmodern premises are rarely, if ever, actually embraced — that if they were, we would be left with nothing more than a crippling radical subjectivism. That the projects of the Enlightenment and modernity are alive and well can be seen in the justice system, in science, in political rights movements, in the very idea of universities; and so on.

To some critics, there seems, indeed, to be a glaring contradiction in maintaining the death of objectivity and privileged position on one hand, while the scientific community continues a project of unprecedented scope to unify various scientific disciplines into a theory of everything, on the other. Hostility toward hierarchies of value and objectivity becomes similarly problematic when postmodernity itself attempts to analyse such hierarchies with, apparently, some measure of objectivity and make categorical statements concerning them.

Such critics see postmodernism as, essentially, a kind of semantic gamesmanship, more sophistry than substance. Postmodernism's proponents are often criticised for a tendency to indulge in exhausting, verbose stretches of rhetorical gymnastics, which critics feel sound important but are ultimately meaningless. (Some postmodernists may argue that this is precisely the point.) In the Sokal Affair, Alan Sokal, a physicist, wrote a deliberately nonsensical article purportedly about interpreting physics and mathematics in terms of postmodern theory, which was nevertheless published by the Left-leaning Social Text, a journal which he and most of the scientific community considered as postmodernist. Notable among Sokal's false arguments published in Social Text was that the value of p changed over time and that the strength of Earth's gravity was relative to the observer. Sokal claimed this highlighted the postmodern tendency to value rhetoric and verbal gamesmanship over serious meaning. Sokal also co-wrote Fashionable Nonsense, which criticizes the inaccurate use of scientific terminology in intellectual writing and finishes with a critique of some forms of postmodernism. Ironically, postmodern literature often self-consciously plays on the format and structure of scientific writing, emphasizing the distinction between the complex content of the world and its understanding in written form. To borrow a phrase from René Magritte, some postmodern literature and art says "This is not a pipe", pointing out that the form of technical writing is not necessarily connected to its content. The Sokal affair also generated political controversy, with conservative pundits parading it as proof of the irrelevance of the academic left, while leftists criticized Sokal of serving a conservative agenda. Sokal, meanwhile, identified himself as an "unabashed Old Leftist."

Some critics feel that postmodernism is so strongly linked to politics that it does not qualify as a philosophy. These critics claim that, inasmuch as many postmodernist arguments rely on charges of racism and ethnocentrism in traditional Western science, it is little more than an out.   (excerpt from <http: Postmodernism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia>

Foucault rejected the concept of 'Context' generally, and biographical context in particular. He hoped to replace these outdated notions with a description of discourse that did not depend on a psychologized author, and hoped to replace 'context' (the set of factors that 'motivate' or cause a statement) with a much more detailed account of how specific statements become possible. But this drive away from authorial context, this drive toward discourse as an anonymous process, is itself one of the most interesting things about Foucault as a writer. He concludes the Introduction to Archaeology of Knowledge with this rather intense caveat: 'I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.  To ask who Foucault was, then, we generally have to ignore his own method, which demands that authors disappear forever in the vagaries of their discourse. Nonetheless, some biographical context might be helpful. Foucault was born in 1926 in Poitiers, France, the son of a wealthy surgeon. His early years passed by in a fairly conservative religious environment, as Foucault attended Catholic camp, served as a choirboy, and studied for his baccalaurèat at a Jesuit college (Collège Saint-Stanislas). By this time (1943), France was in the full turmoil of World War II, and discussions of history as either a progress of reason or a chaos of suffering were prevalent. Foucault was taught briefly by the Hegelian philosopher and historian Jean Hyppolite, to whom these historical issues were central.

Foucault entered the Ècole Normale Supèrieure in 1946. He had some episodes of mental illness (not to mention a mostly miserable experience), but also began building a social life as a young gay man. At the Ècole, the historian of ideas Georges Canguilhem had a deep influence on Foucault, and Foucault's early 'archaeological' work began to take shape in this context. He also engaged with the turbulent political scene in Paris, participating (though somewhat ambivalently) in the French Communist Party in the early 1950's.

Foucault took early degrees in philosophy and psychology, and received a diploma in psychopathology in 1952. From this point until the publication of his first major work (Madness and Civilization, in 1964), Foucault occupied a number of academic and cultural posts, first at the University of Uppsala in Sweden and then at the Centre Français in Warsaw. His personal life during this period was marked by intense love affairs (including one with the critic Roland Barthes) and occasional scandals stemming from the clash of Foucault's sex life with various administrative restrictions. The significance of being constantly watched was not lost on Foucault, and he would later address this issue directly in his works on sexuality and power.

Foucault's career was launched with the publication of Madness and Civilization, and greatly bolstered by The Order of Things a few years later. Foucault was active in French intellectual life, maintaining conversations and debates with Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Rene Magritte, and many other crucial figures of the day.

In 1966, Foucault took a post at the University of Tunis, lecturing on philosophy, literature, and art. He also situated himself deep within the contemporary life of Tunis, eventually becoming involved with an Arab student uprising. He continued to lecture in France on occasion. The Archeology of Knowledge came out in 1969, after Foucault had returned to Paris in the midst of the student-driven uprisings of 1968. He had taken a job teaching philosophy at the ultra-radical University of Vincennes, and then filled the late Jean Hyppolite's chair in philosophy at the Collège de France.

Foucault's work changed direction in the early 1970's, as he turned his attention to issues surrounding authority and power in the context of imprisonment. He founded an activist group called the Groupe d'information sur les prisons, and visited penal institutions in France and the U.S. Foucault continued to participate in demonstrations and riots in support of the rights of prisoners, the poor, immigrants, and gays. Much of this activity influenced the work that would become Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, published in 1975.

Foucault's late life was marked by unending work on his multi-volume History of Sexuality, and also by his illness with AIDS (which he neither publicized nor denied). In the late 1970's and early 1980's, he spent time lecturing in California (at Berkeley and then Stanford), where he also explored a wide range of drugs and reveled in the gay bath-house scene. He had become a cult figure even in the U.S., and his name was everywhere, attached to a great variety of political causes (from American feminism to the Iranian revolution). As he worked on the History of Sexuality, he continued to debate with intellectuals like Jean Baudrillard and Jürgen Habermas.

Foucault died of AIDS in Paris in 1984.

Foucault's early work took shape in a philosophical atmosphere charged with radical newness. Phenomenology, a new philosophical method which set out to study only experience itself, had a strong effect on Foucault during his college days; he initially conceived of his historical project as a kind of history of experience. Heideggerian phenomenology, which sought to describe Being itself rather than mere subjective experience, had a particular impact on Foucault at this stage, pushing him toward a phenomenological psychology that set the tone for his early work on the history of psychology.

But the most profound intellectual influences on the young Foucault came from the newly charged debates on the study of history. Hegelian thought, which approaches history through the lens of rational metaphysics, was enjoying a resurgence (in connection with Marxism), and the traumas of the two World Wars had lent a good deal of urgency to the question of whether history was chaotic or meaningfully ordered. Foucault studied briefly under Jean Hyppolite, a Hegelian who showed Foucault the closeness of philosophy and history. Foucault also studied under the historian of science Georges Canguilhem, whose work revealed the conditions and structures which sciences like psychology depend on but take for granted. Foucault would base his own work on this approach, attempting to reveal the 'conditions of possibility' of scientific discourses which had previously been taken as transparently true. But he would also spend a great deal of time attempting to demonstrate the distinctness of his work from that of philosophers of ideas like Canguilhem (as he does in Part IV of the Archaeology).

Madness and Civilization dived simultaneously into the debates over phenomenology and the debates over the history of ideas. Foucault's 'history of experience' brought history and metaphysics together in an explosive mix that sought to trace the history of madness not as a clearly extant thing, but as an 'experience' that is constituted as a thing by certain forms of discourse. Birth of the Clinic took a similar approach, this time with less of a phenomenological tone. Foucault was beginning to practice what he called 'archeology,' uncovering the conditions of clinical knowledge as those conditions take shape in discourse. These books were popular and controversial, and they made Foucault quasi-famous. It was at this point that some critics began to formulate the most long-lived (and perhaps easiest) critique of Foucault: he shows knowledge (in this case psychiatric knowledge) to be contingent, but he doesn't take the contingency of his own theories into account.

The Order of Things was even more successful, largely because many took it to be a tour de force for the new method of structuralism (whose chief exponent was the anthropologist Claude Lèvi-Strauss). But Foucault himself never accepted this label. Although The Order of Things seemed structuralist in its attempt to show the dependence of forms of knowledge on various prior factors (discourses and institutions), Foucault never claimed that these factors represented some kind of universal, 'truer' structure. Rather, his method sought to describe the full range of contingency and variation in the history of the knowledge of words and things. Foucault devotes part of the Conclusion to the Archaeology to refuting claims that he is a structuralist.

Foucault's later career saw him adjusting his historical project from considerations of discourse and knowledge to the more specific realm of the self as it is policed under the interdependent systems of knowledge and power. He marked this shift with the respective terms 'archeology' and 'genealogy.' Genealogy seeks, like archeology, to produce a history of discourse, but it also returns Foucault to his original field of interest: the human subject. Genealogy specifically seeks to describe discourses of knowledge in their emergence as systems of authority and constraint, and seeks to describe the set of intersecting but fractured identities that such systems formulate. This is the method that gave rise to Foucault's later works on penality and sexuality. Foucault is probably best known for this later work. Although Foucault's oeuvre (a term he rejected) is not really generalizable to a single project, the successive stages of his work do depend to some extent on each other. Thus, his late work on sexuality and the self (in the two published volumes of The History of Sexuality) emerges from his mid-career considerations of the relationship between power and knowledge, which in turn work off of his early 'archaeologies' and their revision of knowledge as something enabled by discourse.

Jeanette Winterson was born on August 27, 1959 in Manchester, England. John and Constance Winterson adopted Jeanette in her infancy and raised her in Accrington, Lancashire. Her adoptive parents belonged to a Pentecostal Evangelical congregation. Winterson lived a very sheltered early life reading the few books found in her house, which included the Bible, Jane Eyre and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Winterson trained to be a preacher at a young age and always desired to be a missionary. When she reached her teenage years, she found a Saturday job at the local library and started reading voraciously. Around the same time, her increasing romantic preference for members of her own sex caused conflicts within her congregation. Winterson's lesbianism led to an exorcism performed by church officials. Soon after, Winterson broke off her connection to her family and her church. She left home at the age of sixteen and began working in various temporary jobs, such as an ice cream truck driver, a makeup artist in a funeral parlor, and at a mental home. 

Jeanette Winterson's work fits firmly in the postmodern tradition as her techniques reflect the ideas of such theorists as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Jean Lacan. Unlike the modernist period before it, postmodern art attempts to step beyond the mere presentation of a narrative in order to question the ability for a narrative to stand separate from reality at all. In many ways, Oranges appears to be an autobiography and it could also be considered a classic novel about growing up, or bildungsroman. However, Winterson refutes the idea that the novel is simply an autobiography by placing not just stories about her narrator in her novel, but stories about other myths (some taken from Malory's Morte D'Arthur) and made up fables that range from meaningful to highly comic. Winterson's placement of these stories in her novel creates a "metafiction," or a fictional novel that attempts to question the nature of fiction instead of just recounting a simple plot. By forcing her readers to question the nature of storytelling, Winterson pushes them toward another post-modern idea, which concerns the questioning of "objective reality." Since many of the stories in the novel are blatantly mythical and even farcical, the reader cannot accept any portion of the story as true, even those elements that appear to be Winterson's autobiography. As such, Winterson supports the post-modern idea that no truth can be true since the truth, our reality, can only exist in the way that we represent it—which will always be subjective.

***End of Educ 8XX***

Some Thoughts on the Big Picture