ABSTRACT
The success of the term postmodernism-its currency and varied use within a range of critical and descriptive discourses both within the academy and outside in the broader streams of ‘informed’ cultural commentary-has generated its own problems. It becomes more and more difficult as the 1980s wear on to specify exactly what it is that ‘postmodernism’ is supposed to refer to as the term gets stretched in all directions across different debates, different disciplinary and discursive boundaries, as different factions seek to make it their own, using it to designate a plethora of incommensurable objects, tendencies, emergencies. When it becomes possible for people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the decor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a TV 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 attentuation 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 meta-narratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a pluralism 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 miniaturized technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on whom you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of placelessness (‘critical regionalism’) or (even) a generalized substitution of spatial for temporal co-ordinates-when it becomes possible to describe
This is not to claim that because it is being used to designate so much the term is meaningless (though there is a danger that the kind of blurring of categories, objects, levels which goes on with certain kinds of ‘postmodernist’ writing will be used to license a lot of lazy thinking: many of the (contentious) orientations and assertions of the post are already becoming submerged as unexplicated, taken for granted ‘truths’ in some branches of contemporary critique). Rather I would prefer to believe, as Raymond Williams indicates in Keywords, that the more complexly and contradictorily nuanced a word is, the more likely it is to have formed the focus for historically significant debates, to have occupied a semantic ground in which something precious and important was felt to be embedded. I take then, as my (possibly ingenuous) starting-point that the degree of semantic complexity and overload surrounding the term ‘postmodernism’ at the moment signals that a significant number of people with conflicting interests and opinions feel that there is something sufficiently important at stake here to be worth struggling and arguing over.
