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postmodernity, given its kinship to a paradox that has caused some leftist critics to reject the positions of such contemporary philosophers as Michel Foucault for what they see as his pessimism about the possibility of revolution. Vincent Leitch provides a poignant example of this reaction:
Leitch’s point is that if Foucault is right, then the power/knowledge cycle is so pervasive that emancipatory progress is impossible. This is the plight that a reader of Foucault faces, as each epistemological level that we traverse brings us no closer to a way out of the power/knowledge cycle, since whatever knowledge we happen to gain along the way always and already serves the status quo in our oppression.
This sort of self-consciousness about the futility of postmodern attitudes becomes especially apparent in Leslie A. Wade’s and William C. Boles’ essays on Ravenhill and Penhall respectively, as each play suggests that the socialist (Ravenhill) and/or feminist (Penhall) politics that often accompanied postmodern forms (think of Bertolt Brecht and also of traditional readings of Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, and even Harold Pinter) had become their own cultural dominant. In his discussion of Ravenhill, Wade begins by explaining that Ravenhill’s plays
As it turns out, Wade’s essay raises a number of difficulties for pinpointing the postmodern in late-twentieth-century theatre, given how