At 12:19 6/09/99 -0400, Doug wrote:
>All you folks saying "postmodernist!" and "no I'm not!" at each
>other: what's a postmodernist? Aren't we all in part "postmodernists"
>just by drawing breath in 1999?
>
I suppose I ought to respond as I've certainly said 'I'm not a postmodernist'. So, reluctantly...
A postmodernist, employing the term as a generic description, is someone who produces cultural forms within a field of conventions (or, better, group of fields) which have been identified and debated as postmodernism by many people. I always like the Hal Foster collection, _The Anti-Aesthetic_ despite the fact that it's somewhat dated.
Postmodernism is also (and I would stress differently) used to describe a loose collation of cultural theories which are seen to resemble the above forms of cultural production in some highly debatable and only loosely specified ways. These theories are thought, in general, to destabilise a coherence of perspective and position (which the above forms did in their mostly media-specific ways). This seems to me to be a pretty useless concept because it overly simplifies many of those theories and overly valorises others (just because they seem to 'explain' a postmodernism which other writers are only dragged in to and were never then seeking to explain at all). I think it is important to retain a number of significant distinctions between the theories which are so grouped together.
Post-structuralism seems to me to be a term with some useful meaning, as is deconstruction (and I would consider deconstruction to be a mode or development of post-structuralism but not the only one and I would not consider it to be 'postmodern'). 'Postmodernism' used in this way tries to drag post-structuralism and many other positions into useless association. If there are 'postmodern' theories then they are theories of postmodernism defined the other, generic, way -- such as Jameson's book etc., and (just so this is not a list of things I don't reject) the egregious Baudrillard.
I'm behind sorry (and dropping the subject now),
Catherine