In a recent feature in UK Prospect magazine, Edward Docx heralds the end of postmodernism, "Postmodernism Is Dead," (as evidenced by the Victoria and Albert Museum's September 2011 - January 2012 retrospective, "Postmodernism--Style and Subversion 1970-1990") presenting, along the way, a fair overview of recent trends in art history, ruminations on the significance of certain postmodern works, a stab at an explanation of what postmodernism was all about, to suggest finally that appeals to some sort of "authenticity," or the appearance thereof, are a likely feature of whatever is to follow.
Choice verbiage:
There are two important points. First, that postmodernism is really an attack not just on the dominant narrative or art forms but rather an attack on the dominant social discourse. All art is philosophy and all philosophy is political. And the epistemic confrontation of postmodernism, this idea of de-privileging any one meaning, this idea that all discourses are equally valid, has therefore lead to some real-world gains for humankind. Because once you are in the business of challenging the dominant discourse, you are also in the business of giving hitherto marginalised and subordinate groups their voice. And from here it is possible to see how postmodernism has helped western society understand the politics of difference and so redress the miserable injustices which we have hitherto either ignored or taken for granted as in some way acceptable. You would have to be from the depressingly religious right or an otherwise peculiarly recondite and inhuman school of thought not to believe, for example, that the politics of gender, race and sexuality have been immeasurably affected for the better by the assertion of their separate discourses. The transformation from an endemically and casually sexist, racist and homophobic society to one that legislates for and promotes equality is a resonantly good thing. No question.The second point is deeper still. Postmodernism aimed further than merely calling for a re-evaluation of power structures: it said that we are all in our very selves nothing more than the breathing aggregate of those structures. It contends that we cannot stand apart from the demands and identities that these structures and discourses confer upon us. Adios the Enlightenment. See you later Romanticism. Instead, it holds that we move through a series of co-ordinates on various maps—class, gender, religious, sexual, ethnic, situational—and that those co-ordinates are actually our only identity. We are entirely constructed. There is nothing else. And this, in an over-simplified nutshell, is the main challenge that postmodernism brought to the great banquet of human ideas because it changed the game from one of self-determination (Kant et al) to other-determination. I am constructed, therefore I am.
Unrelated (or, perhaps, tangentially related, depending mostly, Dear Reader, on your flexibility), two other thought-provoking writings-on-the-Internet-that-imply-more-thorough-scholarship-by-their-authors/subjects-elsewhere, which I have been meaning to remember, and track down, and post, are Loïc Wacquant's "Deadly Symbiosis" -- a beautifully-written examination of "four peculiar institutions" in an effort to comprehend "black hyperimprisonment" in the contemporary U.S. (see also "From Slavery to Mass Incarceration") -- and a Salon.com review cum interview-with-the-author-of "The History of White People," which summarizes author Nell Irvin Painter's thesis that "whiteness," as a racial identity, is merely the malleable amalgam of the social constructions of certain developing elites of European ethnicities.