Best, S., and Kellner, D. (1991) Post-Modern Theory: Critical Interrogations, New York: Guilford Press.

• 'modernization' - a term denoting those processes of individualization, secularization, industrialization, cultural differentiation, commodification, urbanization, bureacratization, and rationalization which together have constituted the modern world. 3
• Postmodern theorists, however, claim that in the contemporary high tech media society, emergent processes of change and transformation are producing a new postmodern society and its advocates claim that the era of postmodernity constitutes a novel change of history and novel sociocultural formation which requires new concepts and theories. Theorists of postmodernity claim that technologies such as computers and media, new forms of knowledge, and changes in the socioeconomic system are producing a postmodern social formation. 3
• Modern theory - ranging from the philosophical project of Descartes, through the Enlightenment, to the social theory of Comte, Marx, Weber and others - is criticized for its search for a foundation of knowledge, for its universalizing and totalizing claims, for its hubris to supply apodictic truth, and for its allegedly fallacious rationalism. Defenders of modern theory, by contrast, attack postmodern relativism, irrationalism, and nihilism. 4
• postmodern theory provides a critique of representation and the modern belief that theory mirrors reality, taking instead 'perspectivist' and 'relativist' positions that theories at best provide partial perspectives on their objects... 4
• Some postmodern theory accordingly rejects the totalizing macroperspectives on society and history favored by modern theory in favor of modern theory and micropolitics. Postmodern theory also rejects modern assumptions of social coherence and notions of causality in favor of multiplicity, plurality, fragmentation, and indeterminacy. 4 In addition, postmodern theory abandons the rational and unified subject postulated by much modern theory in favor of a socially and a linguistically decentred and fragmented subject. 5
• Toynbee described the age as one of anarchy and total relativism. 6
• [For Daniel Bell] The postmodern is age is thus a product of the application of modernist revolts in everyday life, the extension and living out of a rebellious, hyperindividualistic, hedonistic lifestyle. 13
• postmodern theory appropriates the poststructuralist critique of modern theory, radicalizes it, and extends it to new theoretical fields. 26
• Foucalt's project has been to write a 'critique of our historical era' (1984:42) which problematizes modern forms of knowledge, rationality, social institutions, and subjectivity that seem given and natural but in fact are contingent sociohistorical constructs of power and domination. 35
• [Nietzche's claim] knowledge is perspectival in nature, requiring multiple viewpoints to interpret a heterogeneous reality. 35
• Foucalt attempts to detotalize history and society as unified wholes governed by a center, essence, or telos, and to decenter the subject as a constituted rather than a constituting consciousness. 39
• Perhaps the fundamental guiding motivation of Foucalt's work is to 'respect...differences' (Foucalt, 1973b: p.xii). 39
• Since the world has no single meaning, but rather countless meanings, a perspectivist seeks multiple perspectives of a phenomena and insists there is 'no limit to the ways in which the world can be interpreted' (Nietzsche 1967: 326). 39
• Following Nietzsche, Foucalt rejects the philosophical pretension to grasp systematically all of reality within one philosophical system or from one central vantage point. 39
• Foucalt seeks to destroy historical identities by pluralizing the field of discourse, to purge historical writing of humanist assumptions by decentering the subject, and to critically analyze modern reason through a history of the human sciences. 46
• Foucalt emphasizes that knowledge is dissociable from regimes of power. 51
• Foucalt defines power as 'a multiple and mobile field of force relations where far reaching, but never completely stable effects of domination are produced' (1980b: 102). 51
• 'What I am attentive to is the fact that every human relation is to some degree a power relation. We move in a world of perpetual strategic relations' (Foucalt 1988d: 168) 54
• There is no locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case' (Foucalt, 1980b: 95-6). 56
• Foucalt exposes the links between power, truth, and knowledge, and describes how liberal-humanist values are intertwined with and supports of technologies of domination. 69
• Since his emphasis is on the microlevel of resistance, Foucalt does not adequately address the problem of how to achieve alliances with local struggles or how an oppositional political movement might be developed. If indeed it is important to multiply and autotomize forms of resistance to counter the numerous tentacles of power, it is equally important to link these various struggles to avoid fragmentation. The question becomes, how can we create, in Gramsci's terms, a 'counter-hegemonic formation'. 71
• the neglect of macro theory and political economy is a recurrent lacuna of all postmodern theory.72
• we find a complex, eclectic mixture of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern elements in Foucalt, with the postmodern elements receding even further into the background of his work. 73
• their [Deleuze and Guattari] central concern is with modernity as an unparalleled historical stage of domination based on the proliferation of normalizing discourses and institutions that pervade all aspects of social existence and everyday life. 77
• There is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity, neither multiplicity nor becoming are appearances or illusion. (Deleuze 1983: 23-4). 79
• For D & G, 'power centers are defined much more by what escapes them or by their impotence than by their zone of power'. (1987:217) 102
• The macrological struggle against the state and mode of production is impossible without resisting micrological sites of domination and normalization, just like micrological struggles against the institutions of control are ultimately powerless without transforming the larger economic and political forces that shape them. 105
• [Baudrillard] If modernity is the era of production controlled by the industrial bourgeoisie, the postmodern era of simulations by contrast is an era of information and signs governed by models, codes, and cybernetics. 118
• Post-modernism is described as a response to emptiness and anguish which is oriented towards 'the restoration of a past culture'. 127
• Lyotard has emerged as the champion of difference and plurality in all theoretical realms and discourses, while energetically attacking totalizing and universalizing theories and methods. 147
• The idea is to create a mediatory concept, to construct a model which can be articulated in, and descriptive of different cultural phenomena. This unity or system is then placed in relation to the infrastructural reality of late capitalism. (Jameson 1989:43). 182
• Our central problem is to identify the discursive conditions for the emergence of a collective action, directed towards struggling against inequalities and changing relations of subordination (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:153) 192.
• [Lyotard] He calls for a further pluralization and fragmentation of knowledge and politics on the grounds that totalities, systems, and consensus produce terrorist oppression. 223
• Habermas discusses the processes whereby the state and public bureaucracies come to penetrate both the economic realm and the private realm. .... The state takes over public functions such as education, mediating in social conflicts, and providing social welfare... 235
• As Hassan puts it, postmodern theories are part of a culture of 'unmaking' whose key principles include:'decreation, disintegration, deconstruction, decenterment, displacement, difference, discontinuity, disjunction, disappearance, ecomposition, de-definition, demystification, detotalization, deligitimation.' (1987:92) 256
• social theories provide mappings of contemporary society: its organization; its constitutive social relations, practices, discourses, and institutions; its integrated and interdependent features; and its structures of power and modes of oppression and domination. Social theories analyze how these elements fit together to constitute specific societies, and how societies work or fail to function. Social theories therefore provide guides to social reality, producing models and cognitive mappings of societies, and the 'big pictures' that enable us to see, for example, how the economy, polity, social institutions, discourses, practice and culture interact to produce a social system. 260.
• And no postmodern theorist provides a theory of society as a systemic organization, as a mode of production with specific social relations, institutions, and organization. 261
• Postmodern theory wants to decenter the economy in order to focus on microphenomena... 262
• Most postmodern theories neglect political economy and fail to present adequately connections between the economic, political, social, and cultural levels of society. 263
• Dialectical analysis thus relates particular social phenomena to the constitutive forces and relations of a society, showing how, on the one hand, the structures and dynamics of capitalist society constitute specific phenomena and how their analytical dissection can shed light on broader social forces. 264
• Different subject positions therefore provide different perspectives on social and cultural phenomena and a multiplicity of positions often provides more comprehensive and illuminating analyses. Perspectives are thus specific optics informed by theoretical positions. ... we are using perspective to delineate the range of existing positions available to theory at a given moment in history. 266
• From the political standpoint, a multiperspective critical theory would involve bringing people together with various standpoints, articulating their common interests, and respecting their differences. 267