Postmodern theory is a multidisciplinary approach that moves away from modernism and studies postmodern society, culture, economy, and politics. It started in the 1960is and most of the first theorists were French.                       

                                       Jean Baudrillard

French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard is one of the main representatives of the postmodern and poststructural upturn in France. Baudrillard abandoned Marxist theory and celebrates postmodernity as a signal of a decisive break with modernity itself. In his early works The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970), he criticizes Marxism from a structuralist and semiological perspective. He denies the crucial role that the “base” has in Marxism and the reduction of the superstructure to a mere reflection of material infrastructure. Modern society is increasingly structured with signs and symbols. All objects can be analyzed in the context of binary oppositions that reveal the rules and internal relationships that structure objects. Marxism overlooked that goods are a sign that gives individuals a cultural identity. The sign constitutes a special material reality that is used for prestige, status, and thus for social differentiation. In premodern (symbolic) societies, social relations are organized around symbolic exchanges at festivals, rites, and rituals that strengthen the social order. Here the sign had a purely reference function.

Industrial societies have a fixed and stable hierarchy of the sign that clearly distinguishes the real from the unreal, so the sign and reality are truly equivalent, and goods reflect social statuses. Culture is organized around a social world in which words, sounds, and images have a direct relationship with object and reality: code produces coherent meanings and provokes precisely defined answers.

With the emergence of postmodern culture, the sign and its code become autonomous, producing their own inner meanings without reference to objective reality. The reference value is destroyed and replaced with total relativity, combinations, and simulation so that the signs are exchanged with other signs, rather than with the real things. The sign becomes liberated from the archaic obligation to mean something and finally becomes free, indifferent, and indefinite, in a structural and combinatorial game that overcomes the rule of a certain equivalence. In the new "semiurgical" society, the code functions as an organizational principle that creates new forms of communication and social order.

In his later works Simulacra and Simulation (1981) and Fatal Strategies (1983), Baudrillard describes the social world as dominated by the media and the explosion of the image. In modernity, copies or models represented real objects or events, while in the postmodern era, that is, in the era of "simulacrum", copy or simulacrum produces reality, objects, and events. The performance of the representation is abandoned. Television and marketing are invading all the intimate processes of our social life, while reality collapses into hyperreality. "Dedifferentiation" means that there is no difference between news and entertainment, marketing and culture. Society consists of a large, phantasmagoric superstructure of signs and images with which the individual has neither an objective nor an alienated relationship.

                                        Michel Foucault

French philosopher, historian, and sociologist Michel Foucault is classified as postmodernist, structuralist, or poststructuralist, while he called his method the archeology of knowledge (in the first period of his work) and the genealogy of knowledge (in the later period). Foucault's second book, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1965, in French 1961), is an abridged version of his doctoral dissertation. In this book, he described the history of the social attitudes towards madness, from the end of the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. At the end of the Middle Ages, people who were seen as insane were a part of everyday life and walked the streets freely. In the nineteenth century, attitudes toward insanity changed completely, and "insane people" began to be seen as a threat, and mental hospitals were built to separate insane people from the normal population.

In his next book, The Birth of the Clinic (1973, in French 1963), Foucault documents how the French Revolution and the ideas of rationality and enlightenment transformed medicine into a precise and empirical science. After the Revolution, the body was anatomically mapped, and diseases were classified. All these changes have affected our understanding of health, disease, life, and death. Foucault believes that the structure of medical knowledge continues to be regulated in a similar, arbitrary way.

In both aforementioned books, Foucault presents his "archaeological" method, which is based on the ideas of French structuralism by Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. Archeology, as an epistemological approach and an empirical and theoretical method, seeks to unravel the history of discourse that is institutionalized and that organizes knowledge. The goal is to discover the hidden structures and rules that organize discourse and knowledge. The archeology of knowledge seeks to rediscover the micro elements of discontinuous and disqualified knowledge. Modernity produces societies based on discipline, oversight, and normalization of practice through discourse. Discourse is spread and controlled by institutions and their specialists, teachers, judges, and psychiatrists. Discourse is analyzed as historical and specific to a particular social group and its practice. In addition, Foucault seeks to discover how these discursive formations, over time, come to be seen as natural and common sense.

Foucault expanded his field of research and further developed his structuralist-inspired method in The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1970, in French 1966). Foucault's goal is to discover the structural codes of knowledge that govern various scientific fields - biology, philology, political economy, etc. He seeks to show how classification systems in different cultures and different historical periods are equally arbitrary and strange. Western culture has gone through three distinct historical periods: the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and Modernity. Each epoch is governed by a unique "episteme" - an implicit internal structure that structures the way people think. Epistemes organize knowledge, not in relation to some objective and rational criteria, but in relation to the arbitrary structural codes of knowledge.

Foucault seeks to unravel discursive knowledge that regulates the way of thinking and speaking, that gives rules of what is right and what is not, and what is generally considered to be knowledge. The key to the production of epistemes are the actions of institutions because they produce and control access to knowledge. This kind of discourse is fluid, but still stable enough during one epoch that it can be viewed as a structure. Foucault does not want to use the archaeological method to determine some "quasi-continuity" between different epochs but to reveal how each epoch, in its own way, organizes knowledge and turns human subjects into objects of knowledge.

In the book Archeology of Knowledge (1971, in French 1969), Foucault, to a large extent, breaks with his earlier method, as well as with structuralism in general. While he used to view discourse and episteme as autonomous areas, he now closely connects discourse with the relations of power and domination. This theoretical and epistemological change was influenced by real-life events and processes, primarily the failure of the 1968 student movements, as well as the rise of new social movements - feminist, environmental, and other minority rights movements.                              

The book Discipline and Punish (1977, in French 1975) brings into full light an elaboration of Foucault's new approach. He now calls his approach "genealogy" and takes the term from Friedrich Nietzsche's book Genealogy of Morals (1887). In Discipline and Punish Foucault shows how there transpires a huge change in the way society monitors and punishes criminals. While, until the end of the eighteenth century, the punishment of criminals was public and very brutal - public torture, humiliation, and the death penalty using the cruelest methods - in the nineteenth century the element of the public spectacle of punishing criminals disappeared. Instead, states started building prisons in which, far away from the eyes of the public, criminals are locked and isolated. The expression of social (state) power is no longer done through a direct and open spectacle of punishing criminals, but power start being expressed through strict supervision and isolation of criminals.

Jeremy Bentham's proposal to build a perfect prison, which Bentham called a "panopticon", is, for Foucault, the best example of such a change concerning punishing criminals. In the panopticon, the surveillance of criminals was supposed to be constant and total. Although imprisoning criminals is considered a more rational and humane procedure today, Foucault believes that both ways of treating criminals are arbitrary and cruel, and are not proof of any progress. The key change that has taken place is in the techniques that the state uses to express and consolidate its power. Instead of spreading the public message with brutal public punishment, the state now emphasizes surveilling and disciplining citizens.

Foucault continues to deal with the relationship between power and knowledge in the multi-volume book The History of Sexuality, 4 vols (1978-2021, in French 1976-2018). He believes that the Victorian period was not marked by the repression of any conversation about sex and sexuality. On the contrary, in that period, medicine and psychiatry began to deal intensively with sexuality. Since then, the trend of increasing scientific classification of sexuality has continued, and this contributes to the increase of social control over that sphere. Another type of social control and expression of power in the sphere of sexuality was in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church used confessions in front of a priest to encourage people to talk about sex and thus gain control over sexual behavior. He believes that every society, as well as those who dominate it, strives to gain control over sexual behavior. However, this control cannot be based only on punishment, but also requires the active cooperation of ordinary subjects. Popular psychology and psychotherapy are the main ways of taking control over the discourse on sexuality in the twentieth century.

Foucault's view of the manifestation of power, control, and domination is a serious critique of the Marxist view of power. While for Marx power serves to achieve the class domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, to achieve economic exploitation, Foucault believes that power functions in different ways in different fields and in different types of relations. Foucault studies how power manifests itself on a micro level and in everyday practices and comes to the conclusion that power is localized and fragmented. Foucault believes that society does not have a center, but multi-layered microcosms. Society represents a large impersonal system of monitoring, mobility, and diffusion, which operates through circulation chains. Discourse is never strictly divided between dominant and dominated, and accepted and excluded discourses. Instead, discourse goes through complex and unstable processes and can be an instrument, and also a consequence of power, as well as a point of resistance around which the opposition strategy can be built.

                                 Jean-François Lyotard

French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in the books Discourse, Figure (2011, in French 1971), Libidinal Economy (1993, in French 1974), and The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988, in French 1983), explored the themes of avant-garde art, literature, psychoanalysis, and structural linguistics. In the book Discourse, Figure  Lyotard argues that avant-garde art and literature are not features of any particular era, but that they have the potential to be present in every era because they bring revolutionary feelings by changing the existing structure and bringing new, strong, and transformative ideas and desires. In Libidinal Economy, he examines how sexual desires and feelings affect economic relationships, while in the book The Differend: Phrases in Dispute he explores the relationship between the unconscious and what he calls "language games." The term language games denotes the multiplicity meaning, endless separate systems in which meanings are produced and where rules for their circulation are created.

Lyotard's greatest contribution to sociology is the book The Postmodern Condition (1984, in French 1979). He believes that in pre-modern societies, the narrative was, above all, preserved with the help of those who told stories, where tradition and customs strengthened the sense of social unity. In modern times, science, which has received legitimacy from the state and other institutions, has led to the creation of metanarratives that have replaced storytelling, customs, and traditions. This development represents the realization of the ideals of the Enlightenment, that is, faith in human reason and progress that will enable the emergence of objective and positive science. Metanarratives control how knowledge is created, evaluated, and organized.

Examples of metanarratives are Enlightenment rationalism or the Marxist belief in the replacement of capitalism by the dictatorship of the proletariat. These metanarratives are based on the nostalgic need for the organic unity of society. Postmodernism has led to the rejection of metanarratives as totalizing knowledge that imposes absolute truths. Instead, postmodernism brings many paths to truth and the creation of new narratives that will resist metanarratives. Relativity and uncertainty are accepted, and knowledge is always seen as incomplete. Universal standards and criteria are rejected, and multiple paradigms are introduced. Knowledge is becoming decentralized because the fight against metanarratives and bureaucratized science and technology is being waged at the micro level. In addition, there is resistance to the centralized power of the modern state and the dominance of multinational companies.

                                             Paul Virilio

French theorist of culture and urbanist Paul Virilio in the book Speed ​​and Politics: An Essays on Dromology (1977), introduces the term "dromology" which refers to the forced logic of speed behind the development of technology. In his research on war, Virilio studied World War II, the Gulf War, and the war in Kosovo. He believes that military projects and military technology have a key impact on the course of history. At the end of the twentieth century, war ceases to be territorial and industrial and becomes extraterritorial, and post-industrial - information warfare takes place in real time. In modern society, there is an increasing spread of surveillance, but also global terrorism. Temporal and spatial disintegration, which occurs due to the rise of mass media and information technologies, makes it impossible to effectively review strategic political and military decisions and prevents any ethical and diplomatic solutions to world problems.

                        Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze criticized essentialism and rationalism in philosophy and significantly contributed to the development of poststructuralism and postmodernism. He is best known for two books, Anti-Oedipus: (1977, in French 1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987, in French 1980), which he co-wrote with Felix Guattari, and which share a common subtitle - Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In these two books, the authors reject the idea of ​​the unconscious as a "theater", a place of implanted but repressed desires, as Sigmund Freud saw it. For them, the unconscious is a "factory" that produces desires. The authors thus reject what they call "Freudian Marxism" and claim that the unconscious is essentially connected with socio-geographical, historical, and collective factors.

                                    Frederick Jameson

American political and literary theorist Frederick Jameson, after studying Jean-Paul Sartre and French literary criticism, as well as the idea of ​​the New Left, developed his own neo-Marxist version of literary criticism. The influences of structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis are visible in his books. The basis of his theoretical approach is the dual hermeneutics of ideology and utopia based on Marxism. With the help of this dual hermeneutics, he criticizes the existing society and ideological components of cultural texts and creates a basis for the development of utopian thought and a vision of a better society. Jameson always places the categories and phenomena he explores in the historical context in which they arose. In addition to historical analysis of phenomena, he uses utopian thinking to find hope for a better future in literature, philosophy, and other texts with cultural content. The third analytical method he uses totalizing (synthesizing) approach that represents a systematic framework for the dialectical and critical study of cultural studies and theories of history.

Jameson is best known for his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), in which he explores how postmodern culture is linked to the advanced stage of capitalism. He observes the development of capitalism through three phases: market capitalism, monopoly capitalism, and multinational capitalism. Each of these phases of capitalism was marked by different cultural forms: realism, modernism, and postmodernism. After 1945, the period of late capitalism begins and it represents the purest form of capitalism. The expansion of multinational capital leads to the penetration of culture into all areas of society. Thus postmodern cultural production penetrates all areas of late-capitalist society, erasing the boundaries between different structures. Postmodernism is based on reducing the differences between all social areas that become accultured and prevent the emergence of independent forms. Postmodernism is a cultural field of force where coexisting and diverse elements are brought together in structural unity. There is totalizing and pervasive acculturation at work that assimilates and integrates all different cultural forms.

                                            David Harvey

British social geographer David Harvey's most famous and influential book is The Condition of Postmodernity (1989). In this book, he explores the consequences of the development of postfordism and new information technologies on the economy and culture. Postfordism has led to the flexibility of work, which is characterized by lower employment permanence, an increase in temporary and part-time jobs, a reduction in labor rights and benefits, and a reduction in the chances of obtaining pension and health insurance. Labor flexibility is associated with flexible accumulation - high structural unemployment, a large service sector, halting wage growth, and declining size and union influence.

Flexible accumulation has led to what Harvey calls "space-time compression". This phrase signifies the change made possible by new communication and information technologies. Postfordist labor relations and new technologies have enabled capital to make and implement investment and business decisions around the planet in a very short time. Capital can now produce specific products, coordinate diversified investments, reduce production and delivery times, and employ workers in flexible positions in the short term and globally. The computerization of financial markets and businesses, and the increased flow of information, money, goods, and people at the transnational level, are creating a global market for money, goods, and labor. In addition, industrial plants are moving to underdeveloped countries where all factors of production - land, raw materials, taxes, and labor - are more favorable for making more profit. Former farmers from underdeveloped countries are becoming industrial workers and consumers of capitalist goods.

Postmodern culture is also a consequence of these changes and it expresses the "cultural logic of late capitalism" (Jameson). The global increase in the availability and consumption of television, film, and other media content spreads the capitalist culture of consumerism to the entire planet. The global culture of consumerism creates new social identities and consumer styles that transcend national borders, but also class affiliation. The new global consumerist culture emphasizes the production of events and spectacles, in relation to the production of physical goods. Postmodernism celebrates ephemerality, spectacles, and the commodification of cultural forms.

                                      Zygmunt Bauman

Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman In the late 1980s, made a postmodern turn that is visible in the books Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Postmodernity, and Intellectuals (1987), Freedom (1988), and Intimations of Postmodernity (1992). As specific features of postmodernity, he singles out: the huge growth and expansion of mass media, new information technologies, an increase in transnational migrations, the post-industrial economy, the growth of the ideology of consumerism, the commodification of culture, etc. Large metanarratives and a strong state, which dominated modernity, have been replaced by a state of consumerism that is subject to the will of multinational corporations. Bauman believes that in such a society, it is necessary for intellectuals, as well as other people, to take a critical stance, build their sense of moral correctness, and take responsibility for their own lives.

He continues to deal with similar topics in the book Postmodernity and Its Discontents (1997), named after Sigmund Freud's famous book Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Bauman believes that postmodernism has led to many key and irreversible changes in society. Collective restrictions of modernity were abolished, and absolute primacy began to be given to freedom of expression of individual desires. The idea that modernity brought - that a good society should be planned and implemented by the state, which was the ideal of the welfare state - that idea was destroyed by postmodernism. Processes of increasing individualization, an unprecedented speed of change in all spheres, criminalization, and exclusion of those who lost the market competition, all led to an increase in the state of general insecurity, doubt, and fear.                                        

At the beginning of the 21st century, Bauman replaces the paradigm of postmodernity with the paradigm of liquid modernity. In the books Liquid Modernity (2000); Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Life (2005), and Liquid Fear (2006) he examines various aspects of this liquid modernity. This condition is characterized by extreme individualization and severance of many social and personal ties. The uncertainty and instability of connections replace the number of connections, but that quantity of connections is realized, above all, through modern means of communication, and not personally. Instead of strong and long-lasting relationships, more and more people have unstable and short-term relationships and networks.

Bauman describes modernity as solid, condensed, and systemic. The system sought complete control, stability, and predictability. In contrast, the new form of modernity (liquid modernity) is characterized by fluidity, diffusion, and networking. While in early modernity the ruling system sought to suppress any call for change or reform, in liquid modernity there is constant change and "creative destruction." New modernity should not be understood as a given and stable state, but as a constant and unstoppable process - compulsive modernization. Patterns of communication and coordination are changing because people are less dependent on collective political actions and projects. However, this newly created freedom is an illusion because individuals are left with only the freedom to choose their own way to fit, like conformists, into society and the economy.

To explain this illusion of freedom, Bauman emphasizes the difference between "subjective" and "objective" freedom. Subjective freedom and the related "need for liberation" are thwarted by the "reality principle", while our actions are limited by rational action while achieving some goals. Objective freedom, on the other hand, cannot be achieved because manipulations and "brainwashing" obscure true intentions and ambitions. In the age of liquid modernity, the power of normative regulation is becoming weaker, individuals remain left to doubt and fear, so they begin a "permanently searching for certainty" in their lives. The new age has no idea of ​​a possible alternative, so society ceases to question itself and stops justifying the assumptions of its own existence and actions. Instead of interacting with close reference groups comes the age of "universal comparison", where individuals compare themselves to everyone and build themselves as individuals in a liquid moral system.

While early modernity hampered every form of criticism, liquid modernity encourages criticism, but a whole new form of criticism. Instead of a substantial political and economic transformation, the liquid state encourages an individualistic form of criticism. Instead of calling for a "just society", there is an insistence on the realization of individual "human rights", so the discourse focuses on the right of individuals to be different and to have the unrestricted right to choose their lifestyle. Individuals in the new modernity cease to be "citizens", they cease to fight, together with others, for collective well-being, and they only become consumers whose only interest is self-affirmation. The consumer society needs a multiplicity of lifestyles and choices because that means that a larger quantity and more diverse goods can be placed on the market. The new age is so liquid that the very meaning of "individualization" is constantly changing because new rules and new roles are constantly being introduced. Individuals are even forced to play a game of constant individualization. "Private" colonized "public" and the public interest is reduced to a spectacle of observing the private lives of celebrities. Bauman believes that the true emancipation of both individuals and society requires the strengthening of the public sphere and its liberation from the private sphere.

In that postmodern habitat, specific archetypes emerged: tourists and vagabonds, consumers and unsuccessful consumers, and rich and poor. These archetypes function as abstract personifications of different individual perspectives and strategies in postmodernity. Consumers, drawn into ubiquitous consumerism, buy pre-packaged solutions, goods, and services, as short-term compensation for their dissatisfaction and fears. Unsuccessful consumers are those who fail in the market to provide themselves with those products that the consumer culture tells them they should have. "Tourists" and "vagabonds" represent specific archetypes. Tourists travel because they want to because tourism is a key part of postmodern consumer culture. On the other hand, vagabonds are those who are forced to travel, that is, to emigrate, to solve their economic existence.

The political sphere in the liquid age is best explained by "public choice theory". This political theory views citizens not as voters, but as consumers, while it views politicians as businessmen who strive to sell their products to as large a share of consumers as possible. Rational choice is based on striving to meet needs and is free from worrying about the consequences of choice. Universal flexibility penetrates into all spheres of individual life - employment, romantic relationships, cultural identities, the way of presenting oneself in public, ethical values, etc. Progress in private life is no longer shaped by the continuity of personal improvement, but life is composed of many isolated episodes, so life strategies and plans are only short-term. The mobility and extraterritoriality of global capital makes ordinary voters inferior and doomed to deal only with local issues. The inferior and helpless position of ordinary individuals in relation to global capital leads to the loss of the ability to make transformational projections of the future, which further leads to the collapse of trust and weakening of the will for collective action and political engagement.

                                       Douglas Kellner

American sociologist. Douglas Kellner teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. In his theoretical works, he combines the theory of postmodernism, critical theory (Frankfurt School), and the approach to cultural studies (Birmingham School). He studies the relationship between politics, media, and cultural history, and is an advocate of alter-globalization. His studies of mass media, art, and literature are focused on issues of alienation, domination, commodification, and dehumanization in modern society. In his book Media Culture (1995), Kellner explores how film influences the construction of ideology and identity, especially concerning issues of race, ethnicity, and sexuality. He also looks at the tragic events, the war in Iraq in 1991 and the terrorist attack on the United States in September 2001, in the context of the media spectacle that these events caused.

Books:

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects (2020, in French 1968);

     -     The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (2016, in French 1970);

     -     For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (2019, in French 1972);

     -     The Mirror of Production (1975, in French 1973);

     -     Symbolic Exchange and Death (2016, in French 1976);

     -     Simulacra and Simulation (1983, in French 1981);

     -     Fatal Strategies (1990, in French 1983);

Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity (1992);

     -     Postmodernity and Its Discontents (1997);

     -     Liquid Modernity (2000);

     -     Liquid Love (2003);

     -     Identity (2004);

     -     Liquid Life (2005);

     -     Liquid Fear (2006);

Deleuze, Gilles. Anti-Oedipus (1977, in French 1968);

     -     A Thousand Plateaus (1987);

Foucault, Michael. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1988, in French 1961);

     -     The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973, in French 1963);

     -     The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970, in French 1966);

     -     Archaeology of Knowledge (1982, in French 1969);         

     -     Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977, in French 1975);

     -     The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (1990, in French 1976);

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity (1989)

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991);

Kellner, Douglas. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (1991);

     -     Media Culture (1995);

     -     The Postmodern Turn (1997);

Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy (1993, in French 1974);

     -     The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984, in French 1979);

     -     The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988, in French 1983);

Virilio, Paul. Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy (2005);

     -     The Information Bomb (2006, in French 1998b);

     -     The Original Accident (2006);

     -     Speed and Politics (2006).