ABSTRACT
Of all the terms bandied about in both current cultural theory and contemporary writing on the arts, postmodernism must be the most overand under-defined. It is usually accompanied by a grand flourish of negativized rhetoric: we hear of discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentring, indeterminacy, and antitotalization. What all of these words literally do (precisely by their disavowing prefixes-dis, de, in, anti) is incorporate that which they aim to contest-as does, I suppose, the term postmodernism itself. I point to this simple verbal fact in order to begin “theorizing” the cultural enterprise to which we seem to have given such a provocative label. Given all the confusion and vagueness associated with the term itself (see Paterson 1986), I would like to begin by arguing that, for me, postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges-be it in architecture, literature, painting, sculpture, film, video, dance, TV, music, philosophy, aesthetic theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, or historiography. These are some of the realms from which my “theorizing” will proceed, and my examples will always be specific, because what I want to avoid are those polemical generalizations-often by those inimical to postmodernism: Jameson (1984a), Eagleton (1985), Newman (1985)—that leave us guessing about just what it is that is being called postmodernist, though never in doubt as to its undesirability. Some assume a generally accepted “tacit definition” (Caramello 1983); others locate the beast by temporal (after 1945? 1968? 1970? 1980?) or economic signposting (late capitalism). But in as pluralist and fragmented a culture as that of the western world today,
such designations are not terribly useful if they intend to generalize about all the vagaries of our culture. After all, what does television’s “Dallas” have in common with the architecture of Ricardo Bofill? What does John Cage’s music share with a play (or film) like Amadeus?
