Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction

by Christopher Butler

It is the thousands of echoes and adaptations, and unsurprising misunderstandings, of their obscure writings that have made up the often confused and pretentious collective psyche of the postmodernist constituency.

There is as we shall see a deep irrationalism at the heart of postmodernism – a kind of despair about the Enlightenment-derived public functions of reason

Postmodernist analysis has turned away from such optimistically universalizable Kantian assumptions to see the self as constituted by language systems, which, although they may most obviously dominate the proletarian, the female, the black, and the colonized, have us all, more or less, in their grip.