Histories of Postmodernism reexamines the history of the constellation of ideas and thinkers associated with postmodernism. The increasingly dominant historical narrative depicts a relatively smooth development of ideas from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, through a range of French theorists, most notably Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, to contemporary American thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Edward Said, and Judith Butler. Histories of Postmodernism challenges this narrative by highlighting the local contexts of relevant theorists and thus the crucial distinctions that divide (...) successive articulations of the themes and concepts associated with postmodernism. As postmodern ideas traveled from nineteenth-century Germany to mid-twentieth-century France and on to the contemporary United States, so the relevant theorists transformed that heritage within the context of particular intellectual traditions and specific political and aesthetic issues. (shrink)

This paper argues that the dichotomy between individuals, as bearers of unique and freely chosen identities, and the masses, as the large numbers of others who are conforming and uncritical, should be understood as a constructed dichotomy. This dichotomy is both supported and dismantled in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. Each of these thinkers reinforced the idea that there exist conforming and threatening masses from which individuals should separate themselves. And yet by theorizing the limitations (...) and contextual nature of individual identity, they have also provided the foundations for revealing the dichotomy as illusory as well as problematic for reasoned thought and politics. The significance of this argument is that the fear of sameness and conformity within modern mass society creates a serious obstacle to broad based and democratic political engagement among people. (shrink)