Postmodern Turn Research Articles

Paul and Judaism

Over the last century, Pauline scholarship has shifted from a largely negative to a largely positive evaluation and appropriation of Judaism. This essay documents key figures who helped shape that shift and explains the diversity of ways of framing the Paul/Judaism relationship found in contemporary Pauline scholarship. Based on this shift, the question as it stands now is not whether Paul is Jewish but how Paul is Jewish. After highlighting the shift as it progressed historically, this essay then explains five key influences which spurred on this transition: (1) the Holocaust, (2) the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, (3) reaction to the outcomes of the Judaism/Hellenism divide, (4) critique of the Judaism/Hellenism divide, and (5) the postmodern turn. None of these five influences alone accounts for the wider shift, but they interact with and support one another in ways that compound the wider effects.

Recognizing postmodern intersectional identities in leadership for early childhood

Current interest in the development of leadership capacity within the early childhood profession provides an important opportunity to critically examine our field’s conceptualizations of leadership. Modernist binary leader/follower conceptions are not reflective of contemporary scholarship describing identities as multiple, dynamic, socially constituted, negotiated, complex and like the self, undergoing continuous transformation. Additionally, linear descriptions of leadership development contrast with research documenting professional growth and change as a nonlinear, cyclical, and contextually influenced process, and deny the existence of power relationships that afford and constrain the multiple and intersecting identities of practitioners in the early childhood field. Drawing on a multilevel model of intersectionality, we problematize how identities are described in discussions of early childhood leadership and propose the need to revisit, revise, and reimagine leadership concepts for our field by advancing a postmodern turn in our theorizing.

Depoliticising the Balkans? International intervention(s) and economic development in Kosovo

Slavoj Zizek and Agon Hamza From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo, Kolektivi Materializmi Dialektik: Prishtine, 2013; 103 pp.: 9789951883528 (pbk) The charge of de-politicisation has long been a staple in leftist circles. Since John Harris coined the phrase, we often hear that the World Bank has been in the business of 'depoliticising development' (Harris 2002). Neoliberalism itself is frequently chided for denying or concealing its deeply political character. (1) At times, though, the argument from depoliticisation has been stretched to absurd proportions. In much of the post-modern literature, the study of development--or of anything else, for that matter--is reduced to a study of its 'discourse'. As a result, the material dimensions of international development --how developing countries are hardly benefttting from development interventions; how international capital has an axe to grind in this global 'industry'; how development practice may be redesigned to the benefit of the global South, etc.--are simply taken for granted, or even spitefully dismissed. The post-modern critique of ideology, just like the ideology it critiques, ends up obscuring, rather than illuminating, the social world. Loosely speaking, this punchy philosophical diptych steers clear of the fallacies of the post-modern turn. As such, it artfully demonstrates how the charge of depoliticisation can resonate also with those who maintain that materiality remains an important (if not the most important) dimension of the social world. Focusing on NATO's 1999 intervention in Kosovo and the process of post-war reconstruction, this book takes aim at the 'proliferation of discourses on the ethnicisation and culturalisation of ... injustice' (p. 76)--a phenomenon that Zizek and Hamza regard as an attempt to take politics out of the picture. According to the authors, the scholarship on the Balkans is overwhelmingly written by 'essentialists or culturologists' (p. 12), who explain virtually everything --from the dissolution of Yugoslavia to persistent economic underdevelopment--as a consequence of culture. Beginning in the late 1980s, pre-modern myths and neo-tribal passions supposedly resurfaced and re-ignited a long-simmering powder keg of interethnic strife and socioeconomic impoverishment. Engulfed by an irrational fever-pitch, the cultural imaginary of the Balkans stands in contrast to the rational-objective gaze of Western commentators--the likes of Noel Malcolm and Anna di Lellio--who set out to 'demystify' the Balkan spell of tribal myths, revealing the latter for what they really are, and explaining the supposed role of these phantasms in fuelling violence, conflict and poverty. The authors do not dwell on the intellectual origins of the culturalist discourse. Rather, their response is a call for re-politicisation: demystifying the very practice of 'myth demystification' (p. 79) in which Western intellectuals have engaged since the break-up of Yugoslavia. To their credit, Zizek and Hamza do not limit themselves to a critical discourse analysis. They also preoccupy themselves with the political economy of humanitarian intervention and post-conflict state-building, dissecting and re-politicising the irreducibly material dimensions of the social phenomena that the culturalist seeks to depoliticise and obscure. In particular, the authors set out to dismantle the two most influential arguments made in response to foreign intervention(s) in Kosovo: on the one hand, the liberal view that a well-meaning West violated Yugoslavia's sovereignty benevolently and legitimately in order to protect the human rights of Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian majority; and on the other, the view defended by the likes of Michael Parenti (2002), according to whom NATO--qua military arm of Western corporate capital--launched the 1999 intervention to bring down Europe's last line of resistance to neoliberal capitalism, namely Milosevic's Yugoslavia. …

Seeking a Research Method to Study Women Who Have Recovered from Trauma and Addiction that Combines Feminist Theory, Somatic Theory, Alternative Forms of Representation, and Social Justice

The following paper attempts to find an approach to research that will best suit women who have recovered from addictions and trauma and consider themselves resilient. This approach will need to combine contemporary feminist theory, somatic theory, and alternative forms of representation/interpretation. The paper will begin by exploring the connection between postmodern feminist theory and somatic theory and what they both have to say about how we embody social conditions of gender through non-verbal interactions. Research will then be examined that captures the non-verbal aspects of being in the world and how this intersects with the postmodern turn. Finally, in combining postmodernism, embodiment, and alternative forms of representation, cutting edge research will be explored that takes embodiment to the next level: social action.

Vernacular Turns: Narrative, Local Knowledge, and the Changed Context of Folklore

(American Folklore Society Presidential Address, october 2013)NUMEROUS AFS PRESIDENTS HAVE COMMENTED OVER years on daunting nature of task that now stands before me. A presidential address is an intimidating endeavor, particularly as it signals movement toward completion of your time in office, time which inevitably comes a close in blink of an eye, before one can accomplish even tiniest of earth-changing initiatives that only yesterday seemed so achievable. The genre itself is intimidating, generally conceived of as an attempt take note of state of one's discipline-assessing field's past, considering its present, or charting its future (roberts 1999:166), all while being widely relevant and yet specific in a way that reflects our discipline's situated ethnographic focus. Perhaps most important challenge of this effort for me is conveying passion i feel for our field. Attending AFS over years has meant being continually nurtured by insight, strength, and enthusiasm of many mentors, colleagues, teachers, students, and friends who made it possible for me always feel that we were keepers of a special secret, a field of study with wisdom, heart, breadth, depth, endless inspiration, and enormous potential for facilitating social change.But, as i outline for you difficulties of this task before me, i have be honest and tell you that real problem is that on november 2, 1974, in Portland, oregon, Dell hymes gave my talk. Folklore's nature and Sun's myth (hymes 1975) was, and is, exactly talk i would want give, if only Dell had not.1 of course, there are many that Dell wrote that i wish i had written instead, but Folklore's nature and Sun's myth explored distinctive center of discipline, fundamental perspectives that identify us as folklorists. i tell my students often that special secrets are hidden there, in Dell's now almost 40-year-old words. Dell was my teacher, chair of my dissertation committee, and someone i deeply admired-so preparing write this talk, i went him for counsel. Since he is sadly no longer with us in body, i went back over his presidential address looking for wisdom and direction i so often found there. And what i found, apart from fine words and ideas i had remembered, was a place of difference. Writing of limitations on our field, Dell noted that the discipline grows where there are dedicated individuals and interests not otherwise met, but it is difficult define a general nature for folklore, such as would demand a place in any institutional or theoretical scheme of things (hymes 1975:346). to too great an extent, he wrote, is perceived as study of neglected by others, leavings of other and [a]s kroeber once observed of anthropology, a residual science cannot permanently justify itself (1975:346).Forty years ago, i think Dell would have been correct in characterizing folklore as perceived as study of neglected by others and leavings of other sciences. but we have seen a profound sea change in academy and in world around us in last 40 years, which i think we haven't paid enough attention in our discipline, and which i wish make center of my talk today. i will argue that over those 40 years, our intellectual context has pretty radically changed in light of a growing populism in intellectual, bureaucratic, and popular world around us that (for better or worse) now pays greater attention voices and knowledges2 of vernacular culture. not be naive, that move toward appreciation or at least consideration of vernacular is deeply tied theoretical and political crisis brought on by poststructural and postmodern turn away from positivist modes of inquiry and related lack of faith in grand or master cultural narratives (lyotard 1984). nevertheless, while i still continually encounter individuals who do not know or understand our discipline, my interactions with people in humanities and social sciences, medicine, and law, or at post office and corner store suggest a residual trivialization of our discipline, but a stronger appreciation of we study. …

The Real and Its Outliers (review)

Reviewed by: The Real and Its Outliers Carol Martin (bio) Performing Autobiography: Contemporary Canadian Drama. By Jenn Stephenson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013; pp. 212. Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater. By Jacqueline O’Connor. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013; pp. 226. Testimonial Plays. Edited by Alison Forsyth. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; pp. 330. Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990–2010. By Liz Tomlin. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; pp. 226. In preparation for reading Jenn Stephenson’s Performing Autobiography, I decided to engage in high-risk, twenty-first-century ways of knowing by asking my much-maligned friend Siri: “What is autobiography?” Siri responded with a yellowing image of a cover of the first English edition of Benjamin Franklin’s 1793 autobiography The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D. “originally written by Himself,” followed by an entry from her equally libeled buddy Wikipedia (as of 30 September 2014): “An autobiography is a written account of the life of a person written by that person.”1 Wikipedia subheadings for “Autobiography” include “Origin of the Term,” “Autobiography through the Ages,” “Nature of Autobiography,” and “Fictional Autobiography.” Under “Origin of the Term,” there are some factoids that may be partly or entirely wrong, but are nevertheless interesting. The word autobiography, Wikipedia says, was first used derogatorily as a “hybrid [End Page 135] term” (auto/biography?) in a 1797 issue of the English periodical Monthly Review. In 1809, the Romantic poet Robert Southey used the term in its present sense: writing based on the writer’s memory and thus closely related to memoir. The Wikipedia entry also includes mention of autobiography being related to apologia, in the sense of self-justification. Of course, St. Augustine’s Confessions makes an appearance, as does Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s similarly titled Confession. Other luminary autobiographers mentioned in the Wikipedia entry via Siri include Charles Dickens, Henry Adams, John Stuart Mill, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and finally P. T. Barnum, a man after my own heart. Today, life narratives and narratives taken from life are proliferating at an unprecedented pace. They help candidates get elected, feature on daytime television shows, are used in self-help groups and group therapy, are often employed as an element of actor training, and appear as a literary form. Digital technology is partly responsible both for the proliferation of new forms of autobiography and for the blurring of fiction and nonfiction, as print-based, private journals and diaries yield to virtual versions featuring prose and pictures on a variety of open data platforms, such as Twitter, blog sites, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and, yes, Wikipedia. Social media provide the opportunity for reimaging, rewriting, and reimagining in the form of mash-ups, wikis, folksonomies, and tag clouds. Former definitions of autobiography, as well as documentary, do not account for what is going on now. The movement away from theatre about real events as a stable enactment of offstage worlds has generated new structures and styles, especially when media are employed. The lens of the authors is as much a part of the subject of the performance as the real-world stories that are told. This postmodernist turn toward complex, multivalent, and contradictory ways of seeing informs how we experience both reality and theatre and can include a critique of postmodernism itself. Some theatre of the real is connected, at least ideologically, to the historical avant-garde, while other takes the form of orthodox contemporary realism. The articulation of a defined and knowable truth in theatre of the real has given way to works like those of Rabih Mroué, which stage a radical uncertainty about understanding and the actual occurrence of events. The only consensus about the real is that the current fascination with it is in the context of abiding simulation and the similarities and differences between fiction and nonfiction in live performance. Even as the field has shifted from assertions of stable and knowable truth, some artists and theorists continue to make claims for experiential testimony. There is a move to sort theatre of the real into a precise nomenclature of kind and type and to parse its appearance into historical...

Being mindful, heartful, and ecological in early years care and education

We have been in the postmodern turn for some time in early years care and education. As a result, much has been said and written about what policies, theories, and practices we no longer wish to see govern us. However, alternative ways of being in the world with young children still are reticent to take hold. Proposed here is a turn East, a turn inward, and a return to our roots for wisdom to guide, inspire, and challenge us. Moment to moment living and being with self, others, and the Earth in deep humility, compassion, and empathy is explored as a pedagogical alternative to the doing ways of conventional early childhood practice.

Medial 623 by Vladimir Tošić

The subject of the article is Medial 623, a piece by Vladimir Tošić, and examines the composer's "trademark" strict minimalist style in light of the "postmodernist turn".

Pentecostal Hermeneutics and the Society for Pentecostal Studies

This address engages two interrelated pentecostal hermeneutical concerns. The first section identifies an emergence of a pentecostal theological hermeneutic integrated around a holy triad—Holy Spirit, Holy Scripture, and holy community. This resulted when Pentecostals took a linguistic and postmodern turn. The second section focuses upon the significance of the Society for Pentecostal Studies (SPS) as a hermeneutical community. SPS is a unique and diverse interpretive community comprised primarily of Pentecostals and Charismatics. SPS must live in the tension of being and performing as an academic society committed to rigorous standards of research while being a diverse community of scholars who also maintain close relationships with pentecostal and charismatic denominations, educational institutions, and coalitions.

A Postmodern Turn for Social Media Research: Theory and Research Directions for Public Relations Scholarship

The public relations literature on social media has focused primarily on how social media platforms can be leveraged to the advantage of organizations for relationship building and so-called dialogue with publics. Yet most research has positioned relationships in social media merely as opportunities for information exchange, perpetuating models of public relations grounded in systems theory that ignore power imbalances. Consequently, this article offers insights from postmodernist theories to first deconstruct existing research and then offer suggestions for future social media scholarship. The article argues that social media scholars have privileged dominant rational models of social engagement. Dissensus and disorder, according to Lyotard, may be as legitimate and more liberatory states of discourse for marginalized publics. Postmodern theories of language games and differential consciousness are also positioned as ways in which social media theory and practice may be advanced. The article thus complicates how relationships are theorized in contemporary scholarship and challenges both scholars and practitioners to rethink approaches to social media practice through a postmodern lens.

Review of Clarke (2005) Situational analysis: grounded theory after postmodern turn

Review of Clarke (2005) Situational analysis: grounded theory after postmodern turn

Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class

Many of the internal changes within anthropology as a discipline—particularly the postmodern turn of the 1980s—can only be understood in the context of broader changes in the class composition of the societies in which university departments exist, and, in particular, the role of the university in the reproduction of a professional-managerial class that has come to displace any working-class elements in what pass for mainstream left political parties. Reflexivity, and what I call vulgar Foucauldianism, while dressed up as activism, seem instead to represent above all the consciousness of this class. In its place, the essay proposes a politics combining support for social movements and a prefigurative politics in the academic sphere.

Constantforce: Remembering Denis Dutton (1944–2010)

Constantforce:Remembering Denis Dutton (1944–2010)1 Wilfried Van Damme “Denis, I would like you to meet someone who actually likes your work.” This is how the aesthetician David Novitz introduced me to Denis Dutton, while we were having a tea break on the first morning of the historic Pacific Rim Conference in Transcultural Aesthetics, held at the University of Sydney in June 1997.2 Shortly before, I had told David that Denis’s anticipated presence at the conference had been for me, a European postdoc eager to explore global approaches to art and aesthetics, one of the many features that had made the prospect of participating in the Sydney conference such a thrilling affair. David, a colleague, friend, and intellectual opponent of Denis at Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand, then informed me about the many enemies Denis had made in academia after he had started organizing the Bad Writing Contest in 1995. This now well-known charge against obscurantist prose in the humanities had escaped my attention, but seemed like a welcome initiative that was fully in line with its originator’s views on scholarship. I knew Denis’s work mainly through his Bookmarks in the journal Philosophy and Literature, which he edited. I had discovered these vivid and at times hilariously debunking reviews after reading Denis’s essay “Mythologies of Tribal Art,” published in the journal African Arts in 1994. As in many of his Bookmarks, in this essay he battled against the more cantankerous variants of the postmodern turn that were making themselves increasingly felt in the anthropology of art. He exposed the ideological biases, jargonized rhetoric, willful misreadings, and lack of empirical foundation of a series of philippics in which self-righteous scholars, usually from outside the field, had started accusing previous [End Page A10] writers on “tribal art” of sinning against everything that contemporary political correctness held dear. Being well acquainted with the anthropology of art, I was all too aware of the belligerent and embarrassingly uninformed character of many of these at times vicious attacks. I had also struggled through several essays from the same postmodern/poststructural mold promising new directions informed by “critical theory.” But the increasingly predictable and one-sided perspectives of these essays had failed to enthuse me, while their often pompous prose, expressing fashionable phraseology in convoluted sentences, had made me doubt my command of English. I therefore much enjoyed the sharp-minded and down-to-earth rebuttals of a courageous and lone scholar who showed that more often than not the emperor had no clothes. Although this may come as a surprise to people who, like myself at the time, knew Denis only through his fierce criticism of what he considered trendy posturing, sloppy thinking, and mystifying gobbledygook, in person he was a most kind and generous man. This became clear to me when, later that day, I inquired whether he had had the opportunity to browse through my book Beauty in Context: Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics. Based on my Ph.D. dissertation, this work had been published a few months before, and I had made sure that the editor of Philosophy and Literature received a review copy. At the time of the Sydney conference, and inspired by the work of Ellen Dissanayake, whose book Homo Aestheticus he had praised highly in his journal, Denis was already on the road to an evolutionary approach to art and aesthetics. My book’s title must have given him the impression, not unreasonably, that it was all about cultural relativism in aesthetics and hence presented a culturalist rather than a naturalist point of view. In an amicable, nonpolemic way he replied: “You know, I’ve somewhat lost interest in the idea of beauty being socially constructed. I’m more interested in aesthetic universals these days.” To which I replied: “My book is about both!” Some time later I got the impression that the long chapter on “Universalism in Aesthetics,” for example, had indeed not escaped Denis’s attention; when I asked him about the results of his research on the aesthetic standards of Sepik sculptors in New Guinea, he replied: “Nothing that you don’t already know.” In...

THE SHAKY HIGH MORAL GROUND OF POSTMODERNIST “ETHICS”

Hölscher’s (2005) question, “Does postmodernism have a moral, ethical and values base?” appearsas something of a paradox. But, as she rightly recognises, she is not the first to ask the question. Inposing this question, Hölscher is merely following a long line of scholars, including Bauman,whose Postmodern Ethics (1993) form the theoretical backdrop to her discussion, and Foucault,whose ideas have been more influential than Bauman’s on social work thinking (Chambon, Irving& Epstein, 1999; Hugman, 2003, 2005). In the social sciences Bauman (1995), Benhabib (1992),Foucault (2000) and Young (1990) have grappled with the implications of postmodernism forethics and morality. In social work Atherton and Bollard (2003), Gray (1995), Hugman (2003,2005), Parton (1994) and Walker (2001), among others, have critically examined the ethicalimplications of the so-called “postmodern turn” in social work. In this paper the authors draw onthe work of Berman (2000) in trying to unravel the high moral ground of postmodernism; engagein a re-evaluation of the impact of key figures in modern Western philosophy such as Wittgensteinand, especially, Habermas; and consider the implications of their work for social work

Thinking postmodern and practising in the enlightenment: Managing uncertainty in the treatment of children and adolescents

In this paper, I explore how postmodern ideas about gender may impact on clinicians working with gender variant children and adolescents. The postmodern turn has built on the feminist rejection of the idea of ‘essential’ gender, to further interrogate accepted conceptions of sex and gender and the stability of all identity categories. Some queer theorists have taken a further step, viewing all gender as fictional and artificial and celebrating the subversive potential of transgender identities. However, those working clinically with trans adolescents may experience a troubling tension between, on the one hand, a view of sex and gender categorisations as undecidable and fragmented (as postmodern theory suggests), and, on the other hand, the apparent need of many for a coherent and settled sense of self. In particular, how do we justify supporting trans youngsters to move towards treatment involving irreversible physical change, while ascribing to a highly tentative and provisional account of how we come to identify and live as gendered? I conclude that the meaning of trans rests on no demonstrable foundational truths but is constantly being shaped and re-shaped in our social world. Clinicians must be accountable in this process; far from succumbing to a paralysing relativism, the task for clinicians is to be highly attuned to our young clients’ complex narratives and to question our complex investments in the positions we adopt.

Nostalgia for cult TV: repackaging the West German television movie

The discourse of ‘cult’ applied to West German made-for-television films from the 1970s as part of their DVD release after 2000 signals not only a shift in the cultural categories of assessment but also a nostalgia for television as a medium capable of assembling a mass audience around a controversial social or political issue. Based on a selective appropriation of genre markers, director's star personae, and textual eccentricities, the shift from mainstream to ‘cult’ also announces a post-modern turn in the production and consumption of contemporary television.

10.5937/kultura1442153m = Declining of political culture in Hollywood

The aim of this paper is to show a trend in which, by the 1990s, American media became more and more depoliticized. In that light, historical trend of media depolitization finds its expression in contemporary Hollywood filmmaking, as well as in other areas of cultural life. The paper states that the vast majority of studio executives, altogether with directors, want little to do with projects that might be called political. Declining of political culture has become one of the most important features of contemporary Hollywood cinema. Even films that engage in politics usually do that in unhistorical and incorrect manner, vastly using irony. The major problem is the fact that when Hollywood deals with social problems such as class struggle, racism and poverty, it perpetuates the myth that hurdles in life can be overcome by means of either luck or hard work. Hollywood cinema fails to deal responsibly with today's important social and political questions. On the other hand, we are facing the situation where most of the new films neglect political issues. Postmodern cinema represented in the works of Tarantino, Rodriguez, Coen Brothers, Stone, or many other film makers, take as their essential point the references from other films, using their images and recycling them. The images in those films function as the interchangable signs, with meanings of their own, a closed world of media-based references. The Baudrillard and Jameson theory of simulation is used to explain the process where signs lose any relationship with reality in contemporay media. Politics, if it exists in the cinema at all, becames more than ever a part of the entertainment culture, a sign with no meaning. The postmodern turn in culture enables us to encounter the spirit of antipolitics in the most developed form so far. While New Hollywood directors largely celebrated the liberal democratic legacy during the 1960s and the 1970s, postmodern pictures show tendency toward declining of political culture.

The Dark Philosopher and the postmodern turn: Heraclitus in the poetry of Seferis, Elytis and Fostieris

Σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένων ὁ κάλλιστος κόσμος. The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings. Heraclitus D.124This article examines the ways in which the perennial philosophy of Heraclitus becomes a site where the battle between modernist and postmodernist poetics unfolds. Seferis and Elytis exploit the Heraclitean doctrines of change, unity of opposites and the all-permeating logos in a manner that allows them to conceptualize and present what Lyotard calls the ‘modernist sublime’. Fostieris mobilizes the very same doctrines within his poetry, flouting the logical law of contradiction as Heraclitus did. By using and abusing the very concepts he challenges, Fostieris interrogates the modernist quest for master narratives and universal consensus, bringing forward the illusory character of such endeavours.

A Review of "Femininity, Time and Feminist Art

The role of women in making art and the agency of the overly-represented female body in artistic practices have been crucial debates in twentieth-century Western feminism and beyond. In particular, it was in the wake of the second wave of feminism, with the emergence of poststructuralism and deconstruction, and the postmodern turn that critical assessments of the arts started claiming back female spaces and voices in the midst of a still largely patriarchal artistic scene.

The post-modernist turn and spectres of criticality in post-socialist architecture: ‘one:table’ at the Venice Biennale 2012

This article examines the ‘one:table’ installation in the pavilion of Serbia at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (2012). The large empty table put on public view by its co-authorial team of ten architecture graduates is argued to be meaningful beyond its reasoning as an exhibit responding to the Biennale theme of ‘common ground’. The inquiry aims to demonstrate that this one simple object has an important critical effect in the architectural discourse of post-socialist Serbia. Its effect, it is argued, is complementary to designs for prominent buildings in Belgrade by the world-renowned architects Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Wolfgang Tschapeller and Sou Fujimoto. Conversely, its implicit criticality is compared to the method and media of an analogous case of post-modern critique in the installation ‘Table (of a Dancer, of a Marksman, of a Philosopher)’ (1982) by the architect Mustafa Musić. The aim of the article is to compare the two exhibitions where the thematic of the table as architectural exhibit opens a discussion of criticality in post-modernist and post-socialist moments. The article discusses the two table installations in terms of Jacques Derrida's thesis of ‘hauntology’, which is itself derived from the analysis of another table, that is, a ‘simple wooden table’ used by Karl Marx in his seminal section on ‘the fetishism of the commodity and its secret’.