One lit crit movement of the modern elite/intelligensia did portend pomo’s imminent reign. The French structuralists and deconstructionists of the '70s (when modernism was on the wane) working chiefly in the realm of lit crit, began to separate the art from the artist, and the text from the writer in a dispassionate, sometimes irreverent fashion. A text might be picked apart or dissected to examine its internal contradictions or self-referents - in a kind of literary psychoanalysis of the art text itself, divorced in some part from its creator. The writer lost “ownership” of his or her work as soon as this mostly French critical coterie got a hold of it, for they could interpret a text beyond the purview of what an author had, at least consciously, intended to say.
A personal example might be relevant here. I had a very tough time “getting” structuralism and deconstruction in grad school, until I began to discover the joys of metacriticism. Not that I labeled it as such at the time, but I became fascinated with the way in which writers might refer to the act of writing itself, or unwittingly lay bare some deeply personal obsession via their novels. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of pomo, as I finally realized, was the transparency of the means of production.
Rather than being a creative mystery known only to the artist, the dawn of the pomo era allowed us to, despite what the Wizard said, “pay attention to the man behind the curtain.” and what s/he was producing and how. The magician was stripped of his trade secrets, especially in the latter decades of the last century. The artist became less of a revered “genius” and more “just us folks” with the advent of the paparazzi and reality TV shows such as the Osbournes.
Our ruthless mass media will voraciously unveil the foibles and dirty laundry of anyone in its path, from the president down to the most humbly hapless prole on Jerry Springer. And all of us in the pomo era can and do deconstruct our culture on an everyday basis with a jaundiced, ironic, dispassionate, irreverent eye. Thus even those who missed Beatlemania can now compare and contrast an early Beatles demo with the finished marketed product, just as a foodie can see exactly how their favorite chef creates their culinary masterpieces via the Food Network or the ways in which they may sink or swim via reality programs such as Bravo's Top Chef.
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