Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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run the centre. Planchon’s plays (more suc-

cessful with the critics than the public), many

of them staged in Villeurbanne, were noted

for their combination of historical background

and individual experience or real event, usu-

ally set in a provincial, peasant community

and using a rich mix of emotion, imagery and

epic range.

In 1962, Planchon staged his renowned

Tartuffe in Villeurbanne, revived for five sea-

sons running, and went on to direct a series of

classics throughout the 1960s, including

Troilus and Cressida, Richard III and Racine’s

Bérénice, confirming his status as a major di-

rector. In 1973, winning his theatre the title of

Théâtre National Populaire, the third national

theatre, Planchon took on the young Patrice

Chéreau as artistic director. Chéreau worked

with him until 1981, and was followed by

Georges Lavaudant from 1986 to 1990.

Throughout the 1970s, Planchon continued to

direct plays by authors such as Vinaver and

Pinter, as well as much of his own work. He

also acted in films, and made his own, new

version of Dandin, and encouraged regional

dramatic centres to involve themselves with

multimedia, creating in 1990 the European

Cinematographic Centre in the Rhône-Alpes.

ANNIE SPARKS

Further reading

Estrin, S. and Holmes, P. (1983) French Plan-

ning in Theory and Practice, London: Allen

and Unwin (a detailed analysis of the

‘golden age’ of French economic planning

and the subsequent crisis).

Machin, H. (1989) ‘Economic Planning: Policy-

Making or Policy Preparation?’, in P. Golt

(ed.) Policy-Making in France from de Gaulle

to Mitterrand, London: Pinter (a shorter,

broader account of the evolution of planning

within the context of policy-making).

poetry

French poetry of the 1945–60 period remained

largely dominated, on the one hand, by a

number of poets emerging from the interwo-

ven if divergent traditions of late nineteenth-

century symbolism (Mallarmé, Rimbaud and

Laforgue), Surrealism, Cubism, the absurd

and existentialism, whose careers were just

reaching their peak—poets such as Pierre

Reverdy, André Breton, Pierre-Jean Jouve,

Paul Éluard, Jacques Prévert, Saint-John Perse

and Raymond Queneau. On the other hand, a

number of poets whose work received signifi-

cant acclaim during this period—René Char,

Francis Ponge, Henri Michaux, André

Frénaud, Eugène Guillevic, Edmond Jabès,

Aimé Césaire—continued to publish well into

the 1980s and beyond. The 1960–95 period

planning system

429

saw the further emergence of powerful new

poetic voices whose work also draws consid-

erable international critical attention—poets

such as Yves Bonnefoy, André du Bouchet,

Philippe Jaccottet, Édouard Glissant, Salah

Stétié, Bernard Noël, Michel Deguy, Lorand

Gaspar and Jacques Réda. The same period,

however, witnessed the increasing critical rec-

ognition given to women poets more fre-

quently supported by important smaller pub-

lishing houses (Folle Avoine, Rougerie,

Belfond, Des Femmes, Obsidiane, Ulysse Fin

de Siècle)—poets such as Andrée Chedid,

Marie-Claire Bancquart, Jeanne Hyvrard,

Anne-Marie Albiach, Joyce Mansour, Marie

Étienne, Jacqueline Risset, Anne Teyssiéras,

Denise Le Dantec, Esther Tellermann, Céline

Zins and others. Other younger voices, mean-

while, continued to impose their wide-rang-

ing and everrenewed modes and tonalities:

Richard Rognet, Emmanuel Hocquard, Benoit

Conort, Jean-Claude Pinson, Yves Leclair,

Jean-Claude Schneider, François Boddaert,

Yves Di Manno, Jean-Charles Vegliante, Pas-

cal Boulanger, Jean-Louis Chrétien.

The fifteen or so years following World

War II allowed for a final flowering of the

work of many great poets of modernity. Pierre

Reverdy’s Le Chant des marts (The Song of

the Dead), or his 1966 posthumously pub-

lished Sable mouvant (Shifting Sands), illus-

trated by Picasso, revealed the paradox of the

mind’s search for a transmutation of the chaos

of the real into a harmonious ‘anti-nature’ that

still allows for the fullest sense of our being.

Paul Éluard’s poems manifest his Surrealist be-

ginnings, the power of desire, love and sense

of ‘fraternity’, yet in an often more discreetly,

yet lyrically distilled manner. The leading ex-

ponent of Surrealism, André Breton, published

collections such as Les États généraux (Estates

General), Ode à Charles Fourier and Constel-

lations, and various volumes gathered and ex-

panded his earlier poetry in the years preced-

ing his death in 1966. His work, like Éluard’s,

Perse’s, Prévert’s and Queneau’s, is now avail-

able in the prestigious Pléiade editions and elo-

quently reveals the intensity of his explora-

tion of ‘the real functioning of the mind’ in

pursuit of ‘a certain point in the mind from

where life and death, the real and the

imaginary,…cease to be perceived in contra-

diction’. Tristan Tzara, too, pushed his poetic

output to fresh limits, beyond Dada’s explo-

sive revolt and the Surrealist mode of the beau-

tiful 1931 Approximate Man (L’Homme

approximatif) over twenty collections ap-

peared from 1946 on, including the 1955 A

haute flamme (Full Heat), the 1958 La Rose

et le chien (The Rose and the Dog) and, in the

year of Tzara’s death (1963), his Lampisteries/

Sept manifestes Dada, where the full weight

of his early refusals and his sense of some

‘moral absolute’ can be meditated in the light

of a need for sociopolitical action. Pierre-Jean

Jouve’s work, which goes back as far as 1909,

was radically rethought from 1924 on, after

his spiritual crisis and conversion to Catholi-

cism. His postwar publications include Hymne

(Hymn), Diadème (Diadem) and Ténèbre

(Darkness) and Mercure de France gathered

together in the 1960s all of a considerable

poetic output in which Eros and Thanatos’s

struggle for supremacy, and guilt and suffer-

ing, define a tragic human condition. Saint-

John Perse published major volumes in the

thirty years preceding his death in 1975:

Winds (Vents), Seamarks (Amers), Chronicle

(Chronique) and Birds (Oiseaux). The supple

rhythms of his long, atemporal yet sensually

attuned, life-affirming, ‘heroic’ poems earned

him the Nobel prize for literature. 1945 was

the year when Jacques Prévert—the sales of

whose poetry are second only to Victor

Hugo’s—burst upon the literary scene with

Words (Paroles) and a voice at once satirical

and tender, polemical and rejoicing in the mar-

vels of the humdrum. The taut yet oddly

easeful manner of Prévert, his theatre and film

involvements, led to his work’s being inter-

preted by musicians and singers such as Yves

Montand and Juliette Gréco. The postwar

production of Raymond Queneau blossomed

with volumes such as Petite Cosmogonie

portative (Little Portable Cosmogony), Cent

mille milliards de poèmes (One Hundred

Thousand Billion Poems) and Morale

élémentaire. (Elementary Morals). Both ludic

poetry

430

and serious, Queneau’s lyricism of language,

rather than of sentiment, offers an at once

gentle and tongue-in-cheek response to the

absurd and affiliated him to the OuLiPo

group. Other poets of considerable force and

great modal variance, such as Jules

Supervielle, Marie Noël and Jean Cocteau,

also deserve attention in this postwar period.

René Char, Francis Ponge and Henri

Michaux already had recognized poetic status

by the end of World War II. In the forty years

that followed, all three, along with André

Frénaud and Edmond Jabès, both deceased in

the early 1990s, and Aimé Césaire and Eugène

Guillevic, established oeuvres of great range,

depth and pertinence. Char, in both prose and

verse poetry of exceptionally intense meta-

phoric and aphoristic density, maintains great

aesthetic power while never yielding up ethi-

cal, philosophical or, indeed, simple quotidian

urgency. Volumes such as the 1955 Recherche

de la base et du sommet (Search for Top and

Bottom), the 1975 Aromates Chasseurs (Hunt-

ing Aromatics) and the 1988 Éloge d’une

Soupçonnée (In Praise of her Suspected) dem-

onstrate unusual creative vision caught between

‘fury and mystery’. Ponge, in collections such

as the 1952 Expressive Rage (La Rage de

l’expression), the 1967 Soap (Le Savon) and

the 1977 How a Fig of Words and Why (Com-

ment une figue de paroles et pourquoi), be-

comes the lifelong meditator of the logic of lan-

guage’s relation to things. Praised by Sartre,

Robbe-Grillet and Sollers, Ponge exceeds such

affinities in his poetics of objeu and objoie, and

in his shifting from an aesthetics of closure and

textual ‘infallibility’ to one of osmosis,

unfinishedness and simple parole. Henri

Michaux, a painter as well as a poet, gives us

an oeuvre of great modal range: personal travel,

fantastic imaginary journeying, exploration of

the psyche’s shifting states (often via halluci-

nogens), serene meditative texts where the cor-

poreal and the near-mystic pulse in union,

Épreuves, exorcismes (Trials, Exorcisms),

L’Infini turbulent (Infinite Turbulence),

Chemins cherchés, chemins perdus (Sought

Paths, Lost Paths) and many other texts reveal

a poet of rare self-penetration. Césaire’s work,

from the 1946 Les Armes miraculeuses (Mi-

raculous Weapons) to the 1994 Poetry (La

Poésie), bears the mark of his long sociopoliti-

cal struggles, yet leaps clear of any reductive

tendentiousness in its espousal of cosmic free-

dom, spurting ‘presence’, ‘communication via

a hiccuping of essentialness’. The extensive

writings of Edmond Jabès include the trilogies

The Book of Questions (Le Livre des ques-

tions), The Book of Margins (Le Livre des

marges) and Threshold; Sand (Le Seuil; le sa-

ble). His is a work of ontological and textual

exile, a work of nomadic errancy of mind and

body, soul and expression. His books are filled

with questions, elliptical dialogues, enigmas,

mutating aphorisms, yet it is via such

unsettledness, such endless mental drift, that

some possible self-coincidence may be sought.

André Frénaud—from Les Roi Mages (The

Magi Kings) and Il n’y a pas de paradis (There

Is no Paradise) to the 1982 Haeres and the 1986

Nul ne s’égare (No One Goes Astray)—offers

a poetry at once of stridency and contempla-

tion, of stark lucidity tipping into irony and

derision, and of the ardour of ‘visitation’, in-

tuition and glimpsed ecstasy. The dialectics of

‘quest’ and ‘question’ obtains synthesis only

via sheer persistence. Eugène Guillevic’s po-

etry, from the 1942 Terraqué on, has become

progressively distilled and transparent and, in

the mid-1990s, his relatively prolific work has

reached a considerable public. Volumes such

as Avec (With), Du domaine (Of the Domain),

Le Chant (Song), Maintenant (Now) and

Possibles Futurs (Possible Futures) display a

continued fascination with the way things, con-

sciousness and speech interconnect. The self-

reflexive gaze of the poet is far from idly nar-

cissistic and, indeed, the work of the 1980s

and 1990s is increasingly centred upon princi-

ples of love, reconciliation and unity-in-differ-

ence.

Other contemporary poetic voices have

reached maturity and received wide critical ac-

claim in the 1975–95 period. Yves Bonnefoy is

the author of collections such as On the Mo-

tion and Immobility of Douve (Du mouvement

et de l’immobilité de Douve) and In the Lure of

the Threshold (Dans le leurre du seuil), has

poetry

431

written brilliantly on modern poetry and art,

and is a major translator of Shakespeare and

Yeats. André du Bouchet has also translated

Shakespeare and Joyce, has given us penetrat-

ing criticism and has created an exemplary po-

etic oeuvre in which the influences of

Mallarmé, Reverdy and various poets of

L’Éphémère are absorbed, meditated and sur-

passed. Philippe Jaccottet, too, translates—

Rilke, Höderlin, Musil, Gongora, Homer—

and offers us reflections, diaries, chronicles in

addition to a sober yet exquisitely transparent

and sensitive poetic oeuvre. Jacques Dupin has

written widely on modern art (on Giacometti,

Miró, Riopelle, Tàpies) and his powerful, ve-

hement and thickly metaphoric poetry reveals

the tensions of the visceral and the mental, pul-

sion and meditation. Andrée Chedid’s work—

poetic, dramatic and novelistic—is attuned

both ethically and ontologically. Her 1995 Be-

yond Words (Par delà les mots) confirms her

preferred unaestheticizing alertness to factors

of love and compassion, humanity and heal-

ing, in the face of existential difficulty and di-

lemma. Michel Deguy, a poet-philosopher, has

generated an abundant and much-admired

oeuvre centred upon a meditation on figura-

tion, metaphor, representation, our being as

être-comme, as poiein—much of this in rela-

tion to other writers and artists such as

Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mann, Du Bellay or

Marivaux. Salah Stétié’s considerable and at

once concretely and spiritually powerful work

is coloured by his Lebanese origins and his im-

mense knowledge of both Western and Eastern

literature. In his writing, a great aesthetic sensi-

bility is counterpoised by an urgent ethico-on-

tological vision. Other postwar poets who

merit the considerable reputation and recogni-

tion accorded them include Bernard Noël, with

a vast oeuvre of at once personal and sociopo-

litical richness; Édouard Glissant, with his

teeming Antillean sensitivities; Jacques Réda

and his remarkable poetry of Paris and beyond;

Jude Stéfan, with his flashing provocations;

and Lorand Gaspar, with his serene modula-

tions of bareness and plenitude.

Only since the 1990s has the poetry of many

more women been increasingly accessible to a

larger public. Some works are manifestly philo-

sophical or socioethical in orientation (includ-

ing those of Céline Zins, Marie Étienne,

Françoise Hàn and Jeanne Hyvrard), while

others veer towards a certain formalism or

dense self-reflexiveness (see the earlier writings

of Jacqueline Risset, and the work of Anne-

Marie Albiach); yet others draw more mani-

festly on lived experience, and are marked by

a contemplated concreteness (see the work of

Jeannine Baude, Heather Dohollau, Marie-

Claire Bancquart, Anne Teyssiéras, Denise le

Dantec, Esther Tellermann). Poets as distinct

as Richard Rognet, Yves Leclair, Jean-Claude

Pinson, François Boddaert and Yves Di Manno

have also come to the fore in the 1980s and

1990s. As with their sister poets, their preoc-

cupations and their manners create a rich and

dynamic young mosaic.

MICHAEL BISHOP

Further reading

Bishop, M. (1985) The Contemporary Poetry

of France, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi

(eight studies of poets from Frénaud to

Bonnefoy).

——(1995) Contemporary French Women

Poets, 2 vols, Amsterdam and Atlanta:

Rodopi (sixteen individual studies and glo-

bal assessments).

Cardinal, R. (ed.) (1977) Sensibility and Crea-

tion, London and New York: Croom Helm/

Barnes and Noble (twelve studies from

Valéry to Dupin, plus an introduction).

Caws, M.A. (ed.) (1974) About French Po-

etry from Dada to ‘Tel Quel’, Detroit:

Wayne State University Press (seventeen

critical essays).

Leuwers, D. (1990) Introduction à la Poésie

moderne et contemporaine, Paris: Bordas (this

offers a good general contextualization).

Richard, J.-P. (1964) Onze études sur la poésie

moderne, Paris: Éditions du Seuil (seminal

critical assessments).

Stamelman, R. (1990) Lost Beyond Telling,

Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University

poetry

432

Press (an analysis of the poetics of death and

absence, from Baudelaire to Jabès).

Point Le

Magazine

A weekly current affairs magazine founded in

1972 by breakaway journalists from

L’Express. Foremost among these was Claude

Imbert, who has remained at Le Point. His

outspoken editorials, rich in cultural allusions,

focusing on moral and philosophical issues, are

central to the publication’s identity. Faithful

to the American news magazine tradition, Le

Point offers a clear synthesis of the week’s

events. Serious (even austere), conservative (but

independent), it appeals to middle and senior

managers and professionals. Since 1992 it has

collaborated with L’Express for commercial,

technical and administrative purposes, while

retaining a distinct identity. Circulation in the

1990s is around 300,000 copies per week.

PAM MOORES

Further reading

Muron, L. (1994) Pompidou: le président

oublié, Paris: Flammarion (a re-examina-

tion of Pompidou’s record).

Rials, S. (1977) Les Idées politiques du

Président Georges Pompidou, Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France (an analysis of the

political ideas underlying Pompidou’s poli-

cies ).

Roussel, E. (1984) Georges Pompidou, Paris:

Lattès (a biography based on extensive

documentation and interviews with two

hundred personalities).

Pompidou Centre and the

Forum des Halles

Instigated by the president in 1969, this was

the realization of Pompidou’s long-held private

ambition, encouraged by Le Corbusier and

Malraux, to build a museum of modern art in

the centre of Paris. Architects Renzo Piano and

Richard Rogers were selected not by monarchi-

cal fiat but by France’s first international archi-

tectural competition. The site on the plateau

Beaubourg was chosen in the context of the

plans to develop the area of Les Halles after the

destruction of the Pavilions Baltard. This de-

velopment project caused great conflict between

central and local authorities, but agreement was

finally reached on plans for the Forum des

Halles after the reform which gave Paris an

elected mayor. It was completed in 1988.

SUSAN COLLARD

See also: architecture; art galleries/museums

Ponge, Francis

b. 1899, Montpellier;

d. 1988, Bar-sur-le-Loup, Alpes

Maritimes

Poet and theorist

Ponge was for a brief while close to the Surreal-

ists, and all his life close to painters (such as

Braque and Fautrier). He found his poetic voice

early, as well as his subject matter. The focus of

all his poetry is things: the title of his first major

collection (1942), The Nature of Things (Le

Parti pris des choses), could easily be a general

title for all his prose poems (which he called

proèmes). His originality lies in a ‘materialistic’

lyricism: it is the creative task of human beings

to provide a voice for the mute things that sur-

round them. This quest is bound up with 1952’s

Expressive Rage (La Rage de l’expression), in

which Ponge allows the reader to observe the

making of poems—close, patient observation,

precise articulation, with the help of Littré’s ety-

mological dictionary, which Ponge uses with

great verbal ingenuity and a playful wit. In

1961’s Le Grand Recueil (The Great Collec-

tion)—in three volumes: Lyres, Méthodes and

Pièces—these notions are more fully deployed

and elaborated; and this is followed by a simi-

lar volume, Nouveau Recueil (New Collections),

in 1967. There are also long poems on soap,

meadows and figs—1967’s Soap (Le Savon);

The Making of the ‘Pré’ (La Fabrique du pré)

from 1971; and How a Fig of Words and Why

(Comment une figue de paroles et pourquoi)

from 1977—which, among other volumes, give

ample evidence of Ponge’s originality and in-

ventiveness and his contagious humour. His

motto is ‘l’objet c’est la poétique’ (the object is

poetics, poetics is the object), and the objective

is to create objeux (object-games).

WALTER A.STRAUSS

Pompidou Centre and the Forum des Halles

435

Further reading

Faligot, R. and Kauffer, R. (1987) Porno Busi-

ness, Paris: Fayard (a history of the indus-

try with a degree of sociological analysis).

postmodernism

Postmodernism is an intellectual phenomenon

which, in France, must be considered in a

postmodernism

436

cultural and a philosophical sense. As Jean-

Philippe Mathy points out in his recent study,

French Intellectuals and America,

postmodernism has arguably become for

French intellectuals a way of talking about, or

even a synonym for, America, and in particu-

lar the relationship between French and Ameri-

can culture. In terms of general journalistic and

cultural debate, discussions of postmodernism

can also be considered as the latest version of

debates on mass cultural forms in France.

These forms can sometimes be directly linked

to the USA. An obvious example would be the

building of the Disneyland theme park in

Marne-la-Vallée near Paris. Disneyland’s

‘postmodern’ celebration of surface,

inauthenticity and artifice represents for many

critics the unacceptable face of corporate cul-

tural imperialism. However, it might even be

argued that Paris intra muros has itself become

a postmodern city which acts as a museum and

tourist theme park.

One explanation of the vibrancy of these

types of debate in France may indeed be the

tension between the Republican tradition of

Enlightenment values and an enthusiastically

modernizing postwar France. The question of

education in both an institutional and a

broadly cultural sense is extremely important.

For example, in La Défaite de la pensée Alain

Finkielkraut talks of le postmoderne as a gen-

eral blurring of the boundaries between high

and low cultural genres, a vague, eclectic, self-

service, ‘anything-goes’ attitude which contra-

dicts the Enlightenment project of Republican

education. Gilles Lipovetsky, on the other

hand, celebrates consumerism, advertising and

fashion as a way of democratizing access to

information and education.

The question of postmodernism has also

appeared in the domain of philosophy and

theory. In this realm, the two main thinkers of

postmodernity in France are Jean-François

Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. In The

Postmodern Condition (La Condition

postmoderne), Lyotard rejects the notion of

society as a totality, a form of ‘unicity’. He also

rejects Habermas’s commitment to the Enlight-

enment as an ‘unfinished project’ of commu-

nication, education and consensus. In The

Postmodern Explained (Le Postmoderne

expliqué aux enfants) he goes further, declar-

ing war on the notion of totality, citing the

horror of Auschwitz as the crime which opens

the era of postmodernity. Lyotard argues that

the Enlightenment consciously thinks of itself

as inaugurating a project, which, as far as edu-

cation is concerned, draws inspiration and le-

gitimation from two major ‘metanarratives’.

First, the conviction that knowledge is the right

of the people in their quest for education and

emancipation. The educational policy of the

Third Republic, for example, finds its legiti-

mation in this particular narrative. Second, the

idea that the subject of knowledge is the ab-

stract system of ‘l’esprit spéculatif. Lyotard

rejects as antiquated the notion of education

as the process by which knowledge is trans-

mitted to an elite which will in turn be capable

of leading society towards emancipation. He

claims that in a post-industrial, postmodern

society these ‘metanarratives’ can no longer be

a source of legitimation. Rather than relying

upon metanarratives, contemporary legitima-

tion should rely on a subtler agonistic world

of ‘language games’. To illustrate this idea,

Lyotard borrows an image from Wittgenstein

of language as an old city, a labyrinth of alleys

and small squares. Lyotard believes that the

decline of metanarratives will lead to new ‘lan-

guages’ being added, like suburbs, to the old

city. This commitment to new language games

may now appear to be overly optimistic. He

has also been accused of promoting this ‘per-

formative’ notion of language as a form of free-

market politics. In general terms, it should be

noted that Lyotard’s notion of the postmodern

condition has much in common with the re-

jection of the perceived constraints of moder-

nity and Enlightenment thinking evinced by

almost an entire generation of French postwar

thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Lacan.

These thinkers have tended to consider mo-

dernity as being dominated by too stable a

notion of the subject. In this way, Lyotard links

the postmodern ‘moment’ to the Kantian no-

tion of the sublime. In the same way that the

later Kant acknowledges the possibility that

postmodernism

437

there might be productive conflict between the

faculties, so Lyotard asserts that we should not

expect a straightforward reconciliation be-

tween language games.

Baudrillard is often identified with

postmodernism, although when questioned

about his ‘postmodern’ credentials he is eva-

sive, admitting only to being anti-modernist. He

argues that the contemporary era tends towards

the ‘hyperreal’. The distinction between the real

and the virtual has been lost, and we now live

in a world of simulation. In effect, Baudrillard

portrays Europe and America as two very dif-

ferent types of ‘modernity’. European moder-

nity is rooted in a sense of history and of the

dialectic, whereas the American version of mo-

dernity entails a utopian break with history.

Baudrillard’s mode of writing may justifiably

be described as ‘postmodern’, in that he has

largely rejected the possibility of representation.

Writing should be a way of transforming and

inventing reality, a ‘fatal strategy’ which seeks

to push things to their limit. He has therefore

gradually refined a style of fiction-theory, which

owes much to science fiction, especially

J.G.Ballard. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

(La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu) is an ex-

ample of this fiction-theory which caused great

controversy and crystallized some elements of

the debate on postmodernism. In a series of

newspaper articles, Baudrillard argued intially

that the Gulf War would not take place, and

subsequently that it did not take place. In sim-

ple terms, he argues that the Gulf war is only

the latest in a series of media events. Reporting

on the event becomes inextricably linked with

the event itself, leading to a circular process of

reporting on reporting. In short, Baudrillard ar-

gues that the Gulf war did not achieve reality

for the viewing masses in the United States and

Europe. His point is therefore partly moral.

How will we recognize a real war when it comes

along? Reporting on the Gulf war is absorbed

into the hyperreal flow of news events for which,

as McLuhan argued in the 1960s, the medium

has become the message. Critics have rejected

Baudrillard’s stance as exaggerated and defeat-

ist, an example of the way in which

postmodernism leads to a dangerous relativism.

Postmodernism in the hands of Baudrillard

and Lyotard is intimately related to the notion

of poststructuralism. Both styles of thought

employ metaphors and strategies of flatness

and dispersion. They are both, in this sense,

pluralistic and ‘horizontal’ forms of thought

which seek to question the ‘vertical’ assump-

tions of hierarchy, history and established

principles of identity.

JOHN MARKS

Further reading

Baudrillard, J. (1991) La Guerre du Golfe n’a

pas eu lieu, Paris: Galilée. Translated with

an introduction P.Patton (1995) The Gulf

War Did Not Take Place, Bloomington and

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Lipovetsky, G. (1983) L’Ère du vide: essais sur

l’individualisme contemporain, Paris:

Gallimard (eulogy of the consumerist indi-

vidual).

Lyotard, J.-F. (1979) La Condition

postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Paris:

Éditions de Minuit. Translated

G.Bennington (1984) The Postmodern

Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Man-

chester: Manchester University Press.

——(1986) Le Postmoderne expliqué aux en-

fants: correspondence 1982–1985, Paris:

Galilée. Translated and edited J.Pefanis and

M.Thomas (1993) The Postmodern Ex-

plained: Correspondence, 1982–1985,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mathy, J.-P. (1993) Extrême Occident: French

Intellectuals and America, Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press.

poststructuralism

Poststructuralism is a movement which may

be defined by its emphasis on the heterogene-

ity and instability of language, discourse and

subjectivity found in the writings of a number

of prominent French theorists. It came to the

poststructuralism