1. Against Post-Modernism
   A Marxist Critique
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1982
   Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernist leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
2. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
   The Experience of Modernity
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1988
   Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and clutures in the modern world, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.
   
3. An Annotated Bibliography of Nonsense
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   Published: 1998
   Academic critics today not only question the impact of science upon society, but they also question the very idea of scientific rationality.
4. The Common Good
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1998
   Interviews with Noam Chomsky on the U.S. and the world.
5. Communication for and Against Democracy
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1989
   
6. Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1988
   
7. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1982
   
8. Descent into Discourse
   The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1990
   Critique of postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches in history.
9. Dialogues on Cultural Studies
   Interviews with Contemporary Critics
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 2002
   Thirty-three questions were asked (but not necessarily answered) of each participant, dealing with cultural studies, modernity, postmodernism, referentiality, ideology and history, post-colonialism, neo-orientalism, revolution and tragedy, intellectuals and universities, gender, Marxism, new communications technology.
10. Down To Earth People
    Beyond Class Reductionism and Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1999
    Working class women and men offer their analysis of the world today and its multi-dimensional inequalities.
    
11. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1998
    The authors criticize postmodernism in academia for its misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics: (1) The incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals; (2) the problems of cognitive relativism, the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others". The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general...[but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism," and in particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing." The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who are considered by some to be leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.
    Published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles and in the United Kingdom as Intellectual Impostures.
12. For Lust of Knowing
    The Orientalists and their enemies
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2006
    A rebuttal of Edward Said which examines who the Orientalists were, how historically they advanced their disciplines, and what their achievements have been. Irwin calls Said's book "a work of malignant charlatanry."
13. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1994
    Describes attacks on science, and on concepts of truth and rationality, in areas of the humanities.
14. The Illusions of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1996
    Eagleton explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all, he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.
15. In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1984
    
16. Logics of Disintegration
    Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1987
    Essays summarizing and critiquing post-structuralism. According to Dews, #for all its posture of radicality, post-structuralist thought is itself bound to certain vulnerable assumptions.# According to Dews, the fatal philosophical fault of post-structuralism is its failure to preserve the proper dialectical distinction between the subject and the object.
17. Multiculturalism or World Culture?
    On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 2000
    Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
18. The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye's Demolition of Derrida
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 1993
    A review of Jean-Pierre Faye's book 'La raison narrative', which traces the Nazi origins of deconstructionist and post-modernist concepts and terminology. Faye shows, for example, that the concept of 'deconstruction' was introduced in a Nazi journal edited by M.H. Goering, and he shows how theorists who based themselves on Heidegger's writings, such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Lacoue-Labarthe, whitewashed Heidegger's Nazism, treating it as a mere 'detail'.
19. News & Letters: Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2006 - 2007
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 2006
    We aim to help fill the void on the question of "what happens after" by creatively rethinking and restating his concept of "revolution in permanence" for today.
20. Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1992
    An explanation of the foundation of recent post-modern theory which also criticises the misogynist and patriarchal work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
21. Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social
    Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 2001
    We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
    
22. The Origins of Post-Modernity
    Resource Type: Book
    Perry Anderson's book outlines the cultural changes that have accompanied the victory of global capitalism.
23. Postmodern Disrobed
    Review of Intellectual Impostures
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 1998
    An admirable job of exposing the daffy absurdity of postmodernism intellectuals.
24. Postmodernism and the Left
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 1997
    Barabara Epstein provides an overview of the approach and subculture of postmodernism and how they relate to, or conflict with, leftwing ideas.
25. Rationality/Science
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 1995
    Chomsky writes: "It strikes me as remarkable that the left today should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of emancipation, informing us that the "project of the Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the "illusions" of science and rationality--a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use."
26. Said, Edward, Critical Notes on
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 2005
    Edward Said was admired by the anti-imperialist left for his courageous defence of Palestinian rights. However, Irfan Habib argues that unfortunately Said's scholarly work, notably his major work 'Orientalism,' was confused and sloppy to be point of being unethical.
    
27. Strange Fruit
    Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2008
    Malik makes the case that most anti-racists accept the belief, also held by racialists and outright racists, that differences between groups are of great importance. While racialists attribute the differences to biology, anti-racists attribute them to deep-rooted cultural traditions which are typically seen as inherent in the group. Malik argues that these positions are actually quite similar, and makes the case that racism and racial inequality are best combatted by focusing not on our differences but on what unites us. Malik also strongly criticizes the cultural relativism of many anti-racists, and their increasing tendency to reject science as some kind of western imperialist conspiracy to oppress the rest of the world.
28. Telling the Truth
    Socialist Register 2006
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2005
    A collection of essays that examines the difficulties of illuminating the degenerative and secretive nature of public life.
29. Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 1996
    Alan Sokal submitted this parody of postmodernism, poststructuralist theory, deconstruction, and political moralism to the journal Social Text. The editors failed to spot the hoax and published it as a serious article. The hoax caused a fierce debate between the postmodernists and those who consider postmodernism reactionary nonsense.
30. Vanguard of Retrogression
    "Postmodern" Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2001
    When one probes the terms of the debate, what is truly amazing is that the ostensibly anti-Eurocentric multiculturalists are, without knowing it, purveying a remarkably Eurocentric version of what the Western tradition really is. The ultimate theoretical sources of today's multiculturalism are two very white and very dead European males, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
31. Where Do Postmodernists Come From?
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 1995
    Eagleton argues that left intellectuals have adopted postmodernism out of a sense of having been badly defeated, a belief that the left as a political tendency has little future. Culturalism, he argues, involves an extreme subjectivism combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth the effort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance, because they can't be changed anyway.

Experts on Post-Modernism in the Sources Directory

1. MoMA Museum of Modern Art
2. Radical Digressions