Michel Foucault Michel Foucault is often cited as an early postmodernist although he personally rejected that label. Following Nietzsche, Foucault argued that knowledge is produced through the operations of
power, and changes fundamentally in different historical periods.
Jean Baudrillard Baudrillard, known for his
simulation theory, argued that the individual's experience and perception of reality derives its basis entirely from media-propagated ideals and images. The real and fantasy become indistinguishable, leading to the emergence of a wide-spread
simulation of reality.
Jean François Lyotard The writings of Lyotard were largely concerned with the role of narrative in human culture, and particularly how that role has changed as people have left modernity and entered a "postindustrial" or
postmodern condition. He argued that modern philosophies legitimized their truth-claims not (as they themselves claimed) on logical or empirical grounds, but rather on the grounds of accepted stories (or "
metanarratives") about knowledge and the world—comparing these with Wittgenstein's concept of
language-games. He further argued that with the postmodern condition, these metanarratives no longer work to legitimize truth-claims. He suggested that in the wake of the collapse of modern metanarratives, people are developing a new "language-game"—one that does not make claims to absolute truth but rather celebrates a world of ever-changing relationships (among people and between people and the world).
Jacques Derrida Derrida, the father of
deconstruction, practiced philosophy as a form of
textual criticism. He criticized
Western philosophy as privileging the concept of
presence and
logos, as opposed to absence and markings or writings.
Gilles Deleuze on productive difference The work of
Gilles Deleuze developed a concept of as a productive mechanism, rather than as a merely negative phenomenon. He advocated for a critique of reason that emphasizes sense and affect over rational judgment. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze argued that philosophical critique is an encounter between thought and what forces it into action, and that this requires training, discipline, inventiveness, and even a certain "cruelty". He believed that thought cannot activate itself, but needs external forces to awaken and move it. Art, science, and philosophy can provide such activation through their transformative and experimental nature.
Richard Rorty In the United States, a well-known pragmatist and self-proclaimed postmodernist was
Richard Rorty. An analytic philosopher, Rorty believed that combining
Willard Van Orman Quine's criticism of the
analytic-synthetic distinction with
Wilfrid Sellars's critique of the "
Myth of the Given" allowed for an abandonment of the view of the thought or language as a mirror of a reality or an external world. Further, drawing upon
Donald Davidson's criticism of the dualism between conceptual scheme and empirical content, he challenges the sense of questioning whether people's particular concepts are related to the world in an appropriate way, whether people can justify their ways of describing the world as compared with other ways. He argued that truth was not about getting it right or representing reality, but was part of a social practice and language was what served communicative purposes in a particular time; ancient languages are sometimes untranslatable into modern ones because they possess a different vocabulary and are unuseful today. Donald Davidson is not usually considered a postmodernist, although he and Rorty have both acknowledged that there are few differences between their philosophies.
Douglas Kellner Douglas Kellner insists that the "assumptions and procedures of modern theory" must be forgotten. Kellner analyzes the terms of this theory in real-life experiences and examples. Kellner uses science and technology studies as a major part of his analysis; he urges that the theory is incomplete without it. The scale is larger than just postmodernism alone; it must be interpreted through cultural studies where science and technology studies play a large role. The reality of the
11 September attacks on the United States of America is the catalyst for his explanation. In response, Kellner continues to examine the repercussions of understanding the effects of the 11 September attacks. He questions if the attacks are only able to be understood in a limited form of postmodern theory due to the level of irony. The conclusion he depicts is simple: postmodernism, as most use it today, will decide what experiences and signs in one's reality will be one's reality as they know it. == Criticism ==