Teach Yourself Postmodernism
by Glenn Ward
NTC Publishing Group 1997

'Postmodernism' is a term used to refer to the observations and interpretive theories of several authors, who, although they disagree among themselves in detail, agree that as the 20th Century has progressed, there has been a significant and radical shift in the way people experience and interpret their lives. This purported shift in our experience and self-understanding is called by these authors "the Postmodern Condition". They believe this condition is expressed or evident in several areas of contemporary societies and cultures. From these observations, a number of interpretative theories have arisen and been filed under the name 'Postmodernism'. This book is about the various agreements and disagreements among some of these theorists.

Perhaps paradoxically, one of the beliefs these authors seem to share is that comprehensive (true) theories of human nature, science, or anything else are humanly, if not logically, impossible. In this sense, postmodernist theories, which by their own internal logic must be incomplete, are related to some very old philosophical enquiries into human knowledge that set forth skeptical arguments against the discovery or possible existence of truth. A postmodernist would not, like some philosophical skeptics, doubt your or my existence — they don't seem to go so far as to question the reality of physical things — but they would doubt our sense of self, that sense we have of being an ongoing essence that acquires knowledge, feels emotion or harbors thoughts. The postmodernist posits that there is no essence, either psychological or of any other kind, around or within which this life of yours or mine moves. You and I cannot know ourselves because there is in fact no coherent, humanly (or presumably non-humanly) cognizable self to know. We are simply a collection of ever-changing, impermanent, jumbled up, socially manipulated roles. Style is our content. There is no "you" that decides to do this or that. The doing is the deciding and no one at all has made the choice. In this sense at least, you and I don't exist. Our language has misled us, even though there is apparently no one to mislead.

Because postmodernist thinkers disagree in their interpretations of what it is they think they observe, there is no single school of thought on what this apparent shift in contemporary human kind and human culture is or means; and so there is no way to talk about Postmodernism apart from talking about individual authors.

This book introduces us to the postmodernist architects Charles Jencks and Robert Venturi; the pre-postmodernist (i.e. Modernist) art critic Clement Greenberg, against whom postmodernist theorists would argue; the iconoclast Andy Warhol; the postmodernist interpretation of television; the theories of Jean Baudrillard and his precursors Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and Marshall McLuhan; the structuralist viewpoint, the poststructuralist viewpoint, and the Deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida; the views of Douglas Kellner on our sense of identity; the observations on "lifestyle shopping" by Mike Featherstone; the cyborg; Madonna (the singer), Cindy Sherman (photographer of self-portraits) and gender representation; Erving Goffman's theories on "presentation of self"; Michel Foucault on discourse and sex; Jacques Lacan's linguistic re-interpretation of Sigmund Freud; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's arguments against Freud and Karl Marx; James Glass's criticism of Postmodernism; Roland Barthes and the "death of the author"; Jean-Francois Lyotard's relativisation of science; Jurgen Habermas against Postmodernism; and the Marxist critic of Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson.

The book is not as difficult as it may sound. It is clearly written and does not proselytize for any particular viewpoint. Being part of the Teach Yourself series, the chapters have several subsections which allow for "rest stops" along the way. And once you've read it, it's easy to find your way back through the book looking for a theorist or idea you'd like to read up on again. It's a good first book on Postmodernism because it gives a quick and comprehensible (while certainly not comprehensive) lay of the postmodern land.