Logic of Postmodern

Postmodernism is something I have been studying all semester. Sitting in class week after week, taking notes, reading books by Michel Foucalt, Jacques Derrida, Louis Marin, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze, and after reading this article, I still cannot completely understand what the postmodern is about. I know that citationality is a common feature of postmodernism. This can be seen in many postmodern buldings by architects that consider themselves postmodernists. Even the fact that the postmodern is in relation to the modern is citationality in itself. From what I was told, you can’t talk about the modern without the postmodern. The postmodern in fact comes before the modern. Because the modern will always take on the form of the new. What is modern today will not be modern even a year from now. The refrigerator you buy today will be replaced by a modern refrigerator in the year 2012. But getting back to the postmodern, it is defined in many ways that I don’t quite understand. He gives a definition of the postmodern on page six by saying, “ the postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses- what Raymond Williams has usefully termed “residual” and “emergent” forms of cultural production-must make their own way.” That seems like a very general statement, the force field in which different kinds of cultural impulses make their way is just like saying that every art movement is just a way a group of artists express themselves. This is not his only point but if I’m looking for the meaning of postmodernism, I couldn’t hinge my idea of it on this. Also brought up in this article is the Van Gogh, “Pair of Boots” which Heidegger created a whole discussion about. Creating a backstory of how it belonged to a woman and made assumptions of the nature of the work that she did while wearing the boots. However, there was an idea that it wasn’t even a pair of boots, that the boots were two different shoes of two different pairs and that they were Van Gogh’s himself. The struggle between the sex of the shoes gave into Freudian psychoanalysis and this all somehow relates to postmodernism. This is what I can’t quite understand, what is the postmodern?