Dear Jean,

Thanks for your note on postmodernism last week. Last Saturday, I
noted I would wait to respond while waiting for responses on list
tone. This is one of a few overdue responses to good questions. This
is a brief comment on three chronological issues.

You wrote that Anglophones came to postmodernism (1) later than the
French, (2) in a different context, and (3) that they had no access
to basic documents.

You write, "A little chronology might help: Most of Foucault's
seminal work is from the late 50's and 60's, idem for Lacan, Lyotard
essential writings are from the late 60's and cover the 70's (La
condition postmoderne was published in 73, if I remember well),
Deleuze fundamental "postmodern contribution" is from the 70's
whereas the word postmodernism appears in architecture and design, in
the States, in the late 70's. A- Much later, B- in another cultural
context, C- and the seminal texts weren't translated into English at
that time."

If you push the chronology back to the 1930s, a different view emerges.

The term postmodernism entered the English language in 1949. One of
the first major books on the postmodern condition was Peter Drucker's
1959 Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New "Post Modern" World.

In the 1930s, long before he began using the term "postmodernism,"
Drucker wrote about the underlying factors of the postmodern
condition. Other Anglophone economists, sociologists, historians, and
philosophers did so as well. They wrote on the very issues you
describe: relationships among social and economic factors, social and
cultural conditions, and knowledge.

Colin Clark, Harold Innis, and Fritz Machlup were among the first to
describe the causes and effects of the postmodern condition in
relation to the condition of knowledge. Daniel Bell, Philip Slater,
William Irwin Thompson, and others followed.

Others addressed relations between economic systems, social
structures, means of production, and the ways we represent and think
about ideas. Consider Ronald Coase, the British-born Nobel laureate
in economics. In 1937, Coase explained information and knowledge as
central factors in the cost efficiencies of any firm. Coase's model
explains why we have business firms at all, rather than doing all our
business in open markets. (Even earlier examples exist of writers in
several languages who address this range of issues.)

Clark, Innis, and Coase precede Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida by
decades. Their work is different, but they focus on many of the same
themes. The Anglophones explicitly wrote about the "postmodern world"
30 years before Lyotard published his 1979 book, La Condition
postmoderne.

I understand the importance of the French writers, but I would not
say they are more important than Anglophone writers whose work dates
back to 1949 and earlier. I would say they are different, and I view
their work with interest and with skepticism.

Anglophone writers described the postmodern condition using the term
"postmodern" long before the writers whom you cite. They discussed
these issues in social, philosophical, and economic terms.
Anglophones were reading the French literature in English by the
1970s, but many read the French originals when they were first
published.

The title of my post was no mistake. A header on "the grand narrative
of disruption" was a deliberate play on Lyotard. I met the
Continental work in the 1970s. I preferred the philosophy of William
Irwin Thompson, the sociology of Daniel Bell, and multi-layered
analysis of Peter Drucker.

If the condition and meaning of knowledge under large-scale social
and economic change are the central themes of postmodernism, Drucker
has more to say than Derrida.

Best regards,

Ken