It has been suggested that the term
"postmodernism" is a mere buzzword that means nothing. For example,
Dick Hebdige, in "Hiding in the Light," writes:
When it becomes possible for a people to describe as
‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a
film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television
commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between
them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an
anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics
of presence’, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid
projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned
middle-age, the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a
proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination
for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential
fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity
towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality
of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of
cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear
self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of
the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a
‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you
read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of placelessness (‘critical
regionalism’) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal
coordinates - when it becomes possible to describe all these things as
‘Postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very
post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.
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