post structuralism / post modernism

[Red And Black Sabot]

So, a lot of the anarchist theory I've been agreeing with lately comes from the post-anarchist camp. Unlike post-left, post-anarchism doesn't mean a departure from anarchism but rather anarchists that take a post-structuralist and post modernist approach.
I've been reading a lot of zines, articles and ideas from that camp as of late that I agree a great deal with but I still have no idea what those two schools of thought are or how to define them.
Can anyone fill me in on what exactly post structuralism and post modernism are?
Is there a simple definition?
Practical applications?

Are there any easy to read primers out there?

I've also heard that I should read Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze. Can anyone recommend anything by them?

[Apoi_Viitor]

This does a pretty good idea at explaining post-structuralism.

http://webs.wofford.edu/whisnantcj/his389/differences_struct_poststruct.pdf

Anyways, the only "post" theorist I ever cared for was Foucault. Personally I recommend the Foucault Reader by Rabinow, or even just any author who puts Foucault's ideas in their own words, because Foucault's writing style is incredibly obscurist. Anyways, I have that book, plus all of Foucault's works, and shit ton of Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Baudrillard, so if you want any just pm me.

Although, here's a list of some of the best articles on Foucault in my bookmarks:

http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/books/Chp1.html
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_being.html
http://www.ohio.edu/people/mckerrow/foucault.pdf
http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze
http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/foucault.htm

[blake 3:17]

I'd recommend looking at some interviews. Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze are way easier to understand in their interviews.

This is an ABC with Deleuze described into English: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~wrankin/deleuzeABC.html

I think it is a lot of fun & quite exciting. The format's a bit weird.

Deleuze and Guattari were quite hard on postmodernism. Baudrillard and friends are dull whiners.

[Sasha]

If you find it possible to read check out the stuff tiqqun published, semiotext(e) translated some of their stuff to english.
Also check autonomist marxist writers like negri and contemporary anarchist insurrectionists like bonanno

[Sasha]

"at daggers drawn with the existent" is another must read insurrectionairy text that's I think pretty heavy indebted to post-modernism: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Anonymous__At_Daggers_Drawn_with_the_Existent__its _Defenders_and_its_False_Critics.html

[Lucretia]

Structuralism was a school of thought rooted in the work of De Saussure, the semotics researcher, who professed that meanings of words are relational. That is, words have somewhat stable and coherent meanings, but those meaning are determined not by relationship to the outside world, but rather by relationship to other words.

Post-structuralism was a critique of structuralism, and it attacks the idea that words even have stable or coherent meanings at all. The idea that there was a system of words, each of which had a relatively consistent relationship to other words and therefore could be thought to have some consistently stable relationship to the outside world, came in for criticism. The meanings of words is unstable, post-structuralists argue, because their meaning is constantly deferred by reference to other words ad infinitum.

[khlib]

I think that the best introduction to postmodernism is the first chapter of Fredric Jameson's book "Postmodernism."