Three Approaches to Interpreting the Concept of "Postmodern" (using the works of W. Welsch, H. Foster and A. Huyssen as examples)

The article examines three different approaches or three relatively early attempts to clarify the concept of "postmodern" undertaken by Wolfgang Welsch, Hal Foster and Andreas Huyssen in the 1980s, after the term "postmodern" entered the philosophical discourse thanks to the work of J.-F. Lyotard "The Postmodern Condition" published in 1979. Each of the authors "deals" with such a "controversial", according to W. Welsch, concept in his own way, using a different strategy. W. Welsch tries to cover different groups of researchers in order to highlight the main features of postmodernity. A. Foster gives other authors a chance to speak, collecting them under one cover in a collection of essays "The Anti-aesthetics", providing his own preface. He contrasts "postmodernism of resistance" with "postmodernism of reaction" or neoconservatism. A. Huyssen tries to find out how the concepts of postmodernism, avant-garde, poststructuralism, and neoconservatism are related. This study uses comparative analysis as the main method used to identify the features of the author's interpretations of the concept of "postmodern". Comparison of these three attempts allows us to better understand both the scheme of perception of "postmodern" characteristic of Russian humanitarian science, and the alternatives that could make significant adjustments if they were more influential. The debates about the content of the concept of "postmodern" were missed by Russian scientists, as a result of which a kind of consensus was formed in the Russian social sciences, which was then institutionalized. One of the features of the Russian perception of postmodernism is the recognition of French poststructuralists as the philosophical basis of postmodernism, regardless of whether they worked with this concept, what their personal attitude to postmodernism was, etc. Another marker is the depoliticization of debates about postmodernism.