THE IDEA OF THE POSTMODERN (A history)

If you've ever nodded along to 'postmodern' without knowing what you agreed to, this is your antidote. Bertens shows the word has meant opposite things to different people at different times — celebratory, damning, political, aesthetic. Students of literature, architecture, and theory get a map; skeptics get ammunition; and everyone learns why the debates about truth, identity, and power still sound like this.

1. 1Chapter 1

   A word born as an insult

   The term starts quietly: in 1934, Federico de Onís uses 'postmodernismo' in his anthology of Spanish and Spanish-American poetry to describe a conservative reaction within Spanish-language poetry (within modernism). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, American critics Irving Howe and Harry Levin use 'postmodern' negatively to describe a new, disquieting literature that lacked the coherence of high modernism. Then the mood flips. Ihab Hassan's 'The Dismemberment of Orpheus' (1970/1971) uses 'postmodernism' to describe a literary tradition of silence, rupture, anti-form, and play, linking it to authors like Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, and Jorge Luis Borges. Leslie Fiedler's 1969 essay 'Cross the Border—Close the Gap' is discussed as a celebratory turning point, where Fiedler called for a postmodern literature that would cross the border between elite and popular culture.

   The idea

   Bertens's first lesson is that words in criticism carry the politics of whoever wields them. 'Postmodern' began as a complaint about decline — critics mourning the loss of modernist seriousness — and became, within a decade, a celebration of energy and mixture. Hassan and Fiedler didn't discover a new literature; they renamed an existing one and changed its value. The surprise is how fast a term of disapproval turned into a program.

   Try this: Next time you hear a new cultural label, ask who coined it and whether they meant it as praise or complaint — then watch the meaning flip.

2. 2Chapter 2

   Modern architecture dies at 3:32 p.m.

   St. Louis, July 15, 1972: the Pruitt-Igoe housing project comes down, and Charles Jencks famously cites this event as the death of modern architecture, declaring: 'Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 p.m.' The demolition gives the 1970s debate its most quotable scene, and Jencks's 'The Language of Post-Modern Architecture' (1977) plays a key role in the debate. Behind him stand the foundational postmodern architecture texts: Robert Venturi's 'Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture' (1966) and Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour's 'Learning from Las Vegas' (1972), which celebrated the 'decorated shed' and commercial strip over modernist purity. Venturi's famous dictum 'Less is a bore' is quoted as a direct riposte to Mies van der Rohe's 'Less is more.'

   The idea

   Architecture did what literary criticism couldn't: it gave postmodernism a date of death for its predecessor, a set of buildings, and a slogan. Jencks's theatrical precision — down to the minute — is a rhetorical move, not a coroner's report, but it worked because Pruitt-Igoe's failure was real and visible. The deeper point is that postmodernism here means something concrete: ornament back, history back, the strip mall taken seriously as a text.

   Try this: Look at a glass-box office building near you, then at anything with ornament or historical quotation — you're now reading the argument Venturi started.

3. 3Chapter 2

   Lists of opposites, and a journal of rupture

   Ihab Hassan attempts to define postmodernism through lists of oppositions between Modernism and Postmodernism (e.g., purpose vs. play, hierarchy vs. anarchy, presence vs. absence, centering). Meanwhile William Spanos's journal 'boundary 2' (founded 1972) is discussed as an important forum for postmodern theory in the 1970s. Spanos used the term 'postmodernism' to describe a literature of 'dis-closure' and 'destruction' of the Western metaphysical tradition, drawing on Martin Heidegger, promoting a postmodern 'ontological' perspective. Underneath it all, Bertens discusses the distinction, prominent in the 1970s debates, between a postmodernism of resistance (linked to the counterculture-garde) and a postmodernism of reaction (linked to neoconservative aesthetics pastiche).

   The idea

   The 1970s produce two incompatible postmodernisms wearing one name. Hassan's binary lists make the term look systematic, but the lists themselves are the symptom: nobody can define it positively, only by contrast. Spanos's Heideggerian version pulls the word toward philosophy and ontology, away from Fiedler's pop celebration. Bertens's resistance distinction is the book's recurring diagnostic — the same word can name radical critique or glossy complicity, and you must always ask which.

   Try this: When someone invokes postmodernism, ask which one: the resistant critique of foundations or the commercial play of surfaces. The answer changes everything.

4. 4Chapter 2

   John Barth runs out of literature — then restocks it

   The chapter discusses John Barth's 1967 essay 'The Literature of Exhaustion,' which argued that the novel's traditional forms were used up, requiring new, reflexive strategies. Barth's 1979 follow-up 'The Literature of Replenishment' served as a corrective, in which Barth called for a 'synthesis' of modernist and pre-modernist techniques, citing Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino as models.

   The idea

   Barth's two essays show the debate's rhythm: dramatic declaration, then retreat into nuance-free synthesis. 'Exhaustion' gave the postmodern moment its most quotable anxiety — the forms are finished — while 'Replenishment' quietly admitted that the tradition could be remixed rather than abandoned. That movement from crisis to synthesis mirrors the larger arc Bertens traces: postmodernism starts as rupture talk and ends as a way of combining what came before.

   Try this: Take a form you think is played out — the essay, the sitcom, the album — and list one pre-digital technique that could refresh it.

5. 5Chapter 3

   Incredulity toward metanarratives

   Jean-François Lyotard's 'The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge' (1979) is presented as a pivotal text. The book was originally a report commissioned by the government of Quebec's Conseil des universités, and it focused on the status of knowledge in advanced capitalist societies. The book quotes Lyotard's exact phrase: 'Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.' Lyotard argued that science legitimates itself through narrative, not pure logic. Bertens presents the book as a pivotal text that redefined the postmodern as a general condition of knowledge.

   The idea

   The irony is structural: a commissioned report for a university council produces the defining attack on grand narratives. Lyotard's definition is deliberately minimal — not a style, not a canon, but an attitude toward the big explanatory stories of progress, emancipation, and truth. Once postmodernism means a condition of knowledge rather than a kind of fiction, every discipline can claim it, and every discipline can be accused of it. That expansion is the word's power and its doom.

   Try this: Name the grand narrative you most rely on — progress, merit, science — and ask what evidence would make you drop it.

6. 6Chapter 3

   The truth that conceals there is none

   Bertens discusses Jean Baudrillard's theories of simulacra and simulation, in which the postmodern world is one in which signs no longer refer to any reality outside themselves. Baudrillard's famous line is quoted: 'The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.'

   The idea

   Baudrillard's claim is easy to parody and hard to dismiss once you've watched news, advertising, and politics circulate images of images. His move is to reverse the usual suspicion: we hunt for the hidden truth behind appearances, but for him the hunt is the trap — the appearance is all there is, and it hides its own emptiness. This is the most radical version of the postmodern condition, and the one most often blamed for 'post-truth' politics, fairly or not.

   Try this: Pick one image that shaped your view of an event you never witnessed, and trace how many copies stand between you and it.

7. 7Chapter 3

   Late capitalism gets a cultural logic — and a hotel

   Fredric Jameson's 1984 essay 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' is discussed, analyzing postmodernism as the cultural expression of a new stage of capitalism (late capitalism), with features such as pastiche and the waning of affect. Jameson's analysis of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles (by John Portman, opened 1976) is discussed as an example of postmodern spatial experience that exceeds the individual body's capacity to orient itself. Its confusing, mirrored spaces disorient the subject. It exemplifies the 'hyperspace' of late capitalism that resists cognitive mapping. Bertens quotes Jameson's claim that postmodernism is 'the cultural logic of late capitalism' itself.

   The idea

   Jameson does what Lyotard and Baudrillard don't: he keeps a political economy. The disorientation you feel in a mirrored lobby isn't a personal failing or an aesthetic thrill — it's what it feels like to live inside a system too large to picture. His demand for 'cognitive mapping' turns postmodern architecture into a diagnosis of capital itself. The surprise is that the most vivid evidence for an abstract theory of capitalism is a hotel you can't find the exit of.

   Try this: Next time a space — a mall, an airport, an app — makes you lose your bearings, ask what system that disorientation is designed to serve.

8. 8Chapter 3

   History fights back: historiographic metafiction

   Linda Hutcheon's concept of 'historiographic metafiction' is discussed as a way of understanding postmodern fiction that both uses and questions the conventions of historical fiction. She coined the term in her 1988 book 'A Poetics of Postmodernism' to describe novels like Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' (1981) and E.L. Doctorow's 'Ragtime' (1975), which self-consciously mix historical fact with fiction.

   The idea

   Hutcheon's term is the best answer to the charge that postmodernism is frivolous or ahistorical. A novel like 'Ragtime' doesn't erase the difference between fact and fiction; it stages that difference, making you aware of how every history is narrated by someone. That's not relativism — it's a critique of authority over the past. Bertens gives her position real weight because it shows postmodern fiction doing political work through, not despite, its self-consciousness.

   Try this: Read a historical novel and mark one scene where it reminds you it's invented — ask whose version of that history you'd get without the reminder.

9. 9Chapter 3

   Habermas refuses to let modernity die

   Bertens discusses the debate between Jürgen Habermas and postmodernists, including Habermas's 1980 Adorno Prize speech 'Modernity — An Incomplete Project,' which accused postmodernists of neoconservatism. Habermas is presented as defender of the 'unfinished project' of modernity, in heated debate with postmodern thinkers like Lyotard.

   The idea

   Habermas's charge cuts both ways and still stings. If you give up universal reason, what stops your critique from becoming just another voice — or, worse, a fashionable conservatism in radical dress? The postmodern reply is that the universal has historically excluded most people. Bertens's framing shows this isn't a misunderstanding that could be cleared up; it's a genuine fork about whether modernity's crimes are bugs or features.

   Try this: Write down one Enlightenment promise you still believe in and one you don't — then ask whether you can keep the first without the second's machinery.

10. 10Chapter 3

    Feminism meets the dissolving subject

    Bertens discusses the feminist critique of postmodernism, including concerns that postmodernism's dissolution of the subject undermines feminist politics. Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, in their 1988 essay 'Social Criticism without Philosophy,' argued that postmodernism's critique of universalism could be useful for feminism, but only if it retained a commitment to social criticism and political engagement. Jane Flax, in her 1990 book 'Thinking Fragments,' argued that postmodernism and feminism share a critique of Enlightenment reason, but that postmodernism's relativism risks undermining feminist claims to truth and justice.

    The idea

    This is where postmodern theory meets its hardest test: a politics that needs a subject meets a philosophy that dissolves subjects. Fraser and Nicholson's compromise — use the critique of universals, keep the politics — becomes the template for later attempts. Flax's worry is the honest one: relativism is a luxury the oppressed can't afford when their claims to justice need to be true. Bertens treats this not as a footnote but as a defining confrontation.

    Try this: Ask of any theory you like: does it leave a place for the group it claims to help to name itself and demand things?

11. 11Chapter 4

    The French arrive in Baltimore

    The chapter's anchor is the reception of French poststructuralism in the American academy, particularly the 1966 Johns Hopkins University conference 'The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,' where Jacques Derrida delivered his lecture 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,' which Bertens describes as a watershed moment for the introduction of deconstruction to the United States. Bertens discusses the work of Jacques Derrida, whose deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence is presented as foundational for postmodern thought, particularly his critique of the 'transcendental signified.' A key Derrida quote included is: 'Il n'y a pas de hors-texte' ('There is nothing outside the text').

    The idea

    One lecture at one conference reshapes two generations of American criticism, which tells you how hungry the academy was for a new foundation — or a new anti-foundation. Derrida's 'nothing outside the text' is the most misquoted line in the whole story; it targets the idea of a meaning fixed outside language, not the existence of reality. Bertens's point is about reception: what deconstruction meant in Paris and what it meant in an American seminar room were different things, and the difference drove the culture wars to come.

    Try this: Find the most misused academic phrase in your feed and read its original context — the gap is usually the whole story.

12. 12Chapter 4

    Foucault builds the machinery of power

    Bertens discusses the work of Michel Foucault, whose theories of power and discourse are presented as foundational for postmodern thought. His analysis of the shift from sovereign power to disciplinary power is central to postmodern critiques of institutions and truth.

    The idea

    Foucault's insight is that power and knowledge aren't opposites — knowledge is one of power's forms. That's why 'truth' under postmodernism becomes an object of suspicion rather than a goal: every truth regime has an institution behind it. The disciplinary-power story explains why modern life feels watched and managed without any visible tyrant. It's the single most exportable idea in the whole postmodern inventory, and Bertens shows it powering critiques far beyond philosophy.

    Try this: Pick one rule you obey without thinking — at work, at school, at the gym — and ask what knowledge about you it produces and who uses it.

13. 13Chapter 4

    Pynchon: paranoia as a way of reading

    Bertens discusses the work of Thomas Pynchon, whose novels 'Gravity's Rainbow' (1973) and 'The Crying of Lot 49' (1966) are presented as paradigmatic postmodern fictions characterized by paranoia, entropy, and the proliferation of meaning. 'Gravity's Rainbow' is noted for its encyclopedic scope, paranoia, and refusal of narrative closure, and Bertens quotes Pynchon's line from the novel: 'A screaming comes across the sky.'

    The idea

    Pynchon's novels do what Hassan's lists and Lyotard's definitions only describe: they make suspicion pleasurable and endless. Paranoia in Pynchon isn't a delusion to be cured but a structure of feeling appropriate to systems too vast to verify — which is exactly Jameson's hyperspace rendered as plot. The refusal of closure is the ethical position: any ending would be a false totality. That's why these books keep getting assigned as postmodernism's proof texts.

    Try this: Read the opening page of 'Gravity's Rainbow' and notice how fast it withholds explanation — that withholding is the method.

14. 14Chapter 4

    Rorty quits the foundation business

    Bertens discusses the work of Richard Rorty, whose 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' (1979) and later work presented a pragmatist, post-philosophical position that rejects the idea of philosophy as a foundation for knowledge. In his 1989 book 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,' Rorty argued for a 'liberal ironist' who accepts the contingency of all beliefs. Bertens quotes Rorty's definition: 'The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe.'

    The idea

    Rorty is the friendliest postmodern: no epistemological panic, just a shrug at foundations and a turn toward solidarity without certainty. His ironist lives with the permanent worry that her whole vocabulary — her tribe's — is arbitrary, yet keeps her liberal loyalties anyway. That's the wager Bertens highlights: you can drop the mirror of nature and still care about cruelty. Critics call it incoherent; Rorty calls it growing up. Either way, it's postmodernism's most livable version.

    Try this: Name one belief you'd keep even if you admitted you couldn't prove it — that's your liberal ironism starting.

15. 15Chapter 4

    Can the subaltern speak? Postcolonialism answers

    Bertens discusses the work of Edward Said ('Orientalism', 1978) as a precursor to postcolonial theory that shares some postmodern concerns with representation and power. Said argued that Western scholarship on the 'Orient' was a form of colonial power, and Bertens notes that Said was skeptical of postmodernism's relativism, fearing it would erase the reality of colonial oppression. Bertens discusses the work of Gayatri Spivak, including her 1988 essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?,' where she argued that the subaltern (the colonized, marginalized subject) cannot speak within Western discourse. Bertens quotes Spivak's famous conclusion: 'The subaltern cannot speak.' Bertens discusses the emergence of postcolonial theory and its complex relationship with postmodernism, including the work of Homi Bhabha, particularly his 1994 book 'The Location of Culture,' where Bhabha introduced concepts like 'hybridity,' 'mimicry,' and 'third space.'

    The idea

    The postcolonial relationship to postmodernism is a test of the resistance split. Said and Spivak use the critique of representation to expose how empire speaks for its subjects — but both refuse the slide into 'it's all text,' because colonialism's violence is brutally factual. Bhabha's hybridity turns the weakness of the colonized into a site of production: mimicry mocks, the third space creates. Bertens shows a field that borrows postmodernism's methods while rejecting its most comfortable conclusions.

    Try this: When you read an account of another country written by an outsider, list what the people being described never get to say in their own words.

16. 16Chapter 4

    bell hooks and Stuart Hall make postmodernism fight

    Bertens discusses the work of bell hooks, who argued for a postmodernism of resistance that could serve the interests of marginalized peoples, critiquing that postmodern theory often ignored the voices of marginalized people. Bertens discusses the work of Stuart Hall on cultural identity and postmodernism, particularly his argument that identity is a matter of 'becoming' as well as 'being.' Hall argued in the 1980s that postmodernism could be a site of resistance, particularly through the politics of identity and difference, though Bertens notes Hall's caution about its commodification.

    The idea

    hooks's charge is the one postmodernism never fully answers: a theory celebrated in seminars can be silent about the people it claims to speak for. Hall's 'becoming' reframes identity as process rather than essence, which makes room for politics without freezing people into categories — but his own caution about commodification admits the danger: resistance gets sold back to you as style. Bertens presents these two as the debate's most productive tension, not its resolution.

    Try this: Check whether the theory you cite includes the voices of the people it describes — if not, find one of those voices this week.

17. 17Chapter 4

    Feminism returns: the category of 'woman' on trial

    Bertens discusses debates about postmodernism and feminism in the 1990s, including the work of critics such as Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (in 'Feminist Contentions', 1995). The chapter explores the initial feminist suspicion of postmodernism's relativism, which could undermine the political category of 'woman'. Jane Flax's 'Thinking Fragments' (1990) is cited, where Flax argued that postmodernism could help deconstruct patriarchal foundations of knowledge, and that postmodernism and feminism share a critique of Enlightenment reason, but that postmodernism's relativism risks undermining feminist claims to truth and justice.

    The idea

    What changes by the 1990s is the tone: suspicion becomes negotiation. Butler's side argues that 'woman' was never a stable category anyway, and that denaturalizing it is feminism's work, not its enemy; Benhabib's side worries that without a subject there's no one to emancipate. Flax holds both truths at once, which is why Bertens returns to her. The unresolved question — can you deconstruct your foundations and still stand on them? — is postmodernism's legacy problem in miniature.

    Try this: Write one sentence starting 'Women deserve...' and notice whether you needed a stable definition of 'woman' to write it — then decide if that bothers you.

18. 18Chapter 4

    A physicist plants a bomb in 'Social Text'

    Bertens discusses the 'science wars' of the 1990s, including the Sokal affair of 1996, in which physicist Alan Sokal submitted a hoax article titled 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' to the postmodern journal 'Social Text,' which published it. The article cited Derrida, Lyotard, and Irigaray in a parody of postmodern science criticism. The hoax was designed to test whether a postmodern cultural studies journal would publish nonsense if it flattered the editors' ideological assumptions. Sokal revealed the hoax in 'Lingua Franca' magazine.

    The idea

    The Sokal affair worked because it exploited the worst version of the resistance split: a discourse so committed to questioning truth-claims that it stopped evaluating them. Sokal's test was crude — flattery plus jargon equals publication — but the embarrassment was real, and it gave postmodernism's critics their single most quotable victory. Bertens includes it as the moment the academic debate went mainstream and turned personal. Whatever you think of the hoax's fairness, it changed who was willing to say 'postmodern' with a straight face.

    Try this: Before sharing a passage that sounds profound, ask whether it would still sound profound if it claimed the opposite — if yes, it may be jargon.

19. 19Chapter 9

    The Gulf War that didn't take place

    Baudrillard's analysis of the Gulf War as a 'hyperreal' media event, not a traditional war, is summarized. Baudrillard wrote a series of essays (later collected as 'The Gulf War Did Not Take Place') arguing that the war was a media simulation. Bertens quotes Baudrillard's claim: 'The Gulf War did not take place.' The claim sits on his larger theory from 'Simulacra and Simulation' (1981), where Baudrillard argued that in postmodern culture, representations have replaced reality. Bertens quotes Baudrillard's famous line: 'The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.'

    The idea

    Baudrillard's sentence is not a denial that people died; it's a claim about where the war existed — in a flow of images, smart-bomb footage, and managed narration that replaced any direct experience. Whether that's brilliant or obscene depends on your tolerance for provocation as analysis. Bertens's placement matters: decades after the term's literary birth, the hyperreal is where postmodernism proves it still describes the world — screens first, events second. The Gulf War made the theory feel uncomfortably current.

    Try this: Watch one hour of conflict coverage and count how much of it is footage you could not independently verify — then ask what you actually know.

Students and teachers of literature, architecture, and theory who need the postmodernism wars finally untangled. Also anyone who suspects the word is used as a fog machine and wants the receipts.

FAQ