In the presentation of the book The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, the editor Hal Foster (1983) explains the use of the concept of “anti-aesthetic” for the collection of essays that, in 1984, opened the discussion on the postmodern, with contributions that encompassed differences that ranged from Jürgen Habermas to Jean Baudrillard, passing through Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson and Edward Saïd, among others. All of these critics, Foster says, agree on the observation that we are never outside of “representation,” or rather, we never avoid its politics. Thus, the “anti-aesthetic” does not indicate the modern and transgressive nihilism whose rupture with the law and language only serves to affirm them. On the contrary, the anti-aesthetic should be understood as a “critique which destructures the order of representations in order to reinscribe them” (Foster 1983, xv). At the same time, the title evidently questions the notion of aesthetic, or the idea that the aesthetic experience exists in autonomy, without purpose, or outside of history. It is the demand for an art capable of affecting the world, an art which is simultaneously “(inter) subjective, concrete and universal— a symbolic totality” (Foster 1983). Besides the questioning of traditional aesthetic categories, the anti-aesthetic signals, from the perspective of the postmodern, a transdisciplinary practice that interacts with politically committed cultural forms by rejecting the idea of a privileged aesthetic sphere. For Foster, the aesthetic should be considered another of the grand narratives of modernity, beginning with idealist autonomy and ending with its status of a necessarily critical category. Such a critique is directed at the instrumental world, as in the work of Adorno, in which the aesthetic has the critical potency of a negative and subversive intervention in the face of capitalism and its alienated consumer culture.

When Foster's collection was published, the more politicized postmodern was interpreted as an antidote against the similar modern confidence in the negative power of art. The implicit demand was for it to be substituted by notions of interference and resistance, within a critical recognition of the limitations of the actual domain of the aesthetic.