Idees Recues: The Role of Theory in the Formation of Postmodernism in the United States, 1965-1985

Theories of postmodernism gained currency in American art and criticism in the early 1980s, becoming the prevalent model of vanguard art by the mid-'80s. Two ideas dominated such theories; the redundancy of Greenbergian modernism, and the equivalence of postmodernism with "French theory" (variously identified as poststructuralism, semiotics, structuralism, or deconstruction). Consequently, both the history of postmodernism and the role of theory were reduced to an opposition between formalism and poststructuralism. This thesis will argue that the development of this limited definition of postmodernism was the result of circumstances specific to the United States; in particular, the anti-formalist rhetoric of vanguard art and criticism in the 1960s and '70s. This tendency bracketed the definition of postmodernism as a revisionist reading of non-formalist modernisms. In the late 1960s, a vanguard grouping of minimal, conceptual, and earthworks artists drew broadly on theory, using literature, literary criticism, the philosophy of language, phenomenology, and countercultural ideologies to contest the hegemony of formalist criticism. Such artists defined themselves as postmodernists in anti-formalist, rather than poststructuralist terms. Following the lead of artists, disaffected formalist critics explored new theoretical models in their defence of the post-formalist avant-garde. The circulation of poststructuralist theory increased through the 1970s, but the pluralist character of the decade, founded on anti-formalism, exacerbated the tendency to define postmodernism in binary opposition to formalism. This led to the dominance of notions of rupture and redundancy, closing off the possibility of revisionist readings of modernism. At the same time, pluralism created a demand for the nomination of a new mainstream, resulting in definitions of postmodernism produced by adversarial and territorial ambitions rather than theory as such. In the 1980s, the rise of neo-conservatism further exaggerated the division of criticism into radicals and opportunists. Read through such territorial divisions, poststructuralist theory had an instrumental value, being used to establish the succession of postmodernism over modernism, or to defend a '60s-derived radicalism against '80s conservatism. At the same time, the narrow, binary definition of postmodernism made it vulnerable to appropriation and commodification in a boom market. This commodification of theory returned proponents of poststructuralism back to the revisionist impulse of the early 1970s, but only after a decade-long diversion.