ABSTRACT
Postmodernism has entered discourses as different as pop music journalism and Marxist debates on the cultural conditions of late or multinational capitalism. 'Postmodern' had been in cultural circulation since the 1870s, it is only in the 1960s that we see the beginnings of what is now understood as postmodernism. For Jean-Francois Lyotard the postmodern condition is marked by a crisis in the status of knowledge in Western societies. Jean Baudrillard argues, by the fact that there has been a historical shift in the West, from a society based on the production of things to one based on the production of information. According to Fredric Jameson, when compared to 'the Utopian "high seriousness" of the great modernisms', postmodern culture is marked by an 'essential triviality'. The chapter concludes with a discussion of three more general aspects of postmodernism: the collapse of absolute standards of value, the culture of globalization and convergence culture.
