ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests answers to the following questions: how can postmodernism be expressed in so many different activities? How has it been able to affect so many different life spheres—economic, political, personal, intellectual? If theorists have been unable to determine whether postmodernism reflects the end of an epoch, they have nonetheless agreed that postmodernism has transformed action and experience in quite diverse spheres. What the "conservatives" of postmodern America have thus failed to grasp is that it is not a "decline of values" or a "failure of character" that is responsible for the cultural tendencies they so loudly condemn. By the 1950s, the work of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock was being funded by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of an official state effort to demonstrate that American artists were more "advanced," more imaginative, and more "progressive" than their Soviet counterparts.
