ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that postmodernism's critical dimension lies precisely in its radical questioning of those presuppositions which linked modernism and the avant-garde to the mindset of modernization. Time and again postmodernism has been denounced and ridiculed in recent debates, both by neoconservatives and the cultural Left in the United States. There are good reasons why any attempt to take the postmodern seriously on its own terms meets with so much resistance. The Richard Wagner cult may indeed be a symptom of a happy collusion between the megalomania of the postmodern and that of the premodern on the edge of modernism. In much of the postmodernism debate, a very conventional thought pattern has asserted itself. By the early 1980s the modernity/postmodernity constellation in social theory had become one of the most contested terrains in the intellectual life of Western societies. The chapter suggests that a historical distinction between the postmodernism of the 1960s and that of the 1970s and early 1980s.
