stylistic:tone
The influence of poststructuralism

In the 1970s, postmodern criticism increasingly came to incorporate poststructuralist theory, particularly the deconstructive approach to texts most strongly associated with Jacques Derrida. Derrida attempted to demonstrate that the whole foundationalist approach to language and knowledge was untenable and misguided. He was also critical of what he claimed to expose as the artificial binary oppositions (e.g., subject/object, speech/writing) that he claims are at the heart of Western culture and philosophy. It is during this period that postmodernism comes to be particularly equated with a kind of anti-representational self-reflexivity.

In the 1980s, some critics begin to take an interest in the work of Michel Foucault. This introduces a political concern about social power-relations into discussions about postmodernism. Much of Foucault's project is, against the Enlightenment tradition, to expose modern social institutions and forms of knowledge as historically contingent forces of domination. He aims detotalize or decenter historical narratives to display modern consciousness as it is constituted by specific discourses and institutions that shape individuals into the docile subjects of social systems.

This is also the beginning of the affiliation of postmodernism with feminism and multiculturalism. The art critic Craig Owens, in particular, not only made the connection to feminism explicit, but went so far as to claim feminism for postmodernism wholesale, a broad claim resisted by even many sympathetic feminists such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson.