Chart for Marxism and Postmodernism

Marxism and Postmodernism Socialism 2011 Dana Cloud

Postmodernism defined: “the contemporary movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism is skeptical of truth, unity, and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends toward cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity” (Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 13). Postmodernism sees the “world as contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of skepticism about the objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of natures and the coherence of identities” (Eagleton, Illusions of Postmodernism, vii).

François Lyotard: “incredulity toward metanarratives”

Baudrillard: simulacra, hyper-reality

Origins (understood in materialist terms): post-WWII capitalism, history of Stalinism, 1968, history of defeats

Camp	Thinker	Key concepts	Implications
Poststructuralism	Foucault	Discourse, governmentality, biopower, biopolitics	Anti-humanism Relativism Idealism No explanatory theory
Micropolitics	Deleuze	Difference, lines of flight, deterritorialization, capitalism as set of “axioms”	Freedom is matter of thinking differently. Resignation to status quo
Post-Marxism	Laclau and Mouffe	Hegemony, populism	No fundamental class interests; relativism
Autonomism	Negri	Empire, Multitude, cognitive capitalism, immaterial labor	Celebration of disorganization, refusal of grounded militancy
Queer theory	Butler	Performativity of gender, abjection	Rejection of rights language and organizing around identities

Published by Dana Cloud