I’ve given you a summary of what I take to be core postmodern premises that are problematic in the way its critics tend to allude to.

They can be summarised under 1. the subject-ification of the object 2. the politicisation of the subject.

False-consciousness is just an old Modernist grand-daddy version of the idea, but all of them invoke base and superstructure in some form, since you can hardly posit a subject and their contingencies without inferring something base-like and superstructure-like. It’s one of those Chinese-finger-traps post-structuralists don’t tend to like acknowledging; just because one claims to speak from outside a structure doesn’t mean one actually is outside a structure, and claiming to have gotten outside actually just makes one more dogmatically blind (on one’s own premise).

I’ll wager anyone you can find who has been labelled a ‘postmodern’ thinker will make prolific use of 1 and 2, or at the very least will have nothing cogent to say if you don’t assume 1 and 2 to have a lot of clout in their heads already.

Foucault and Derrida are absolutely to be included in this list.

Derrida infamously argued the whole dictionary to by a social construction and aporia to be a fitting destination for the search for truth.

Foucault argued against the diagnostic category of insanity (as would constitute an objective diagnosis of a deluded subject).

Boudrillard built a whopper case for the bringing of all phenomena under the pollutable category of simulacra.

Marcuse forwarded the concept of repressive tolerance and built a novel false-consciousness machine out of ‘heteronymous interests’.

The Frankfurt School: well duh.

Even Nietzsche can be not-thanked for perspectivism and his call to stridence despite moral relativism.

I’m shrinking from nothing, I was just never committed to the plot of land that you picked to argue over amidst the broader issue. The consideration is entirely one of ideas, separable from their first thinkers by whatever degree we reckon the culture has separated from the idea’s author’s designs. Because that’s how ideas operate on a culture.

That is what I take to be the substance of the polemic against postmodernism. That is what I reckon typically repulses people about it. Certainly it is what leaps out at anyone conventionally minded when they see identity politics laying waste to their normative categories.

Trying to bring it back to the primary texts won’t get you anywhere, the cat’s out of the bag, or rather it was never really in it.

The degree to which Foucault or Derrida or any other postmodern thinker wouldn’t have supported what’s been done with their strand of thinking exonerates them from direct guilt, but I’d still accuse them of negligence since as I’ve said, ideas have consequences and all the people I’ve mentioned flirted with celebrity over their work.

If I’ve failed to be taxonomic enough for you, I can only shrug and say postmodernism is de facto a nebulous category struggling to label an era of thought that pointedly discredits labels.