ABSTRACT
The study of culture has, over the last few years, been quite dramatically transformed as questions of modernity and postmodernity have replaced the more familiar concepts of ideology and hegemony which, from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s, anchored cultural analysis firmly within the neo-Marxist field mapped out by Althusser and Gramsci. Modernity and postmodernity have also moved far beyond the academic fields of media or cultural studies. Hardly one branch of the arts, humanities or social sciences has remained untouched by the debates which have accompanied their presence. They have also found their way into the ‘quality’ press and on to TV, and of course they have entered the art school studios informing and giving shape to the way in which art practitioners including architects, painters and film-makers define and execute their work. Good or bad, to be welcomed or reviled, these terms have corresponded to some sea-change in the way in which cultural intellectuals and practitioners experience and seek to understand the world in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. So deeply interrogative has been the notion of postmodernity that it has proved not just permissible, but necessary, to bring together postmodernism as an aesthetic/cultural movement whose impetus derives from the break it marks out with modernism and the avant-garde, and whose impact lies in its turning away from linearity and teleological progress towards pastiche, quotation, parody and pluralism of style, with postmodernity as a more general condition. As Boyne and Rattansi argue:
What allows us an extension of the term postmodernism to both the fine arts and trends within the disciplines of literary theory, philosophy and the social sciences is that they share a common condition which we would characterise as a crisis in ‘representation’… in which older modes of defining…the objects of artistic…and social scientific languages are no longer credible…. It is arguable that the idea of ‘crises of representation’ can be extended to cover the crises of social class-dominated politi cal movements and discourses and some of the problems of political representation now apparent in both
liberal democratic polities and state socialist systems, thus allowing a characterisation of the ‘post-modern condition’ as one of coincidence between ‘crises of representation’ in the fine arts, philosophy, the social sciences and ‘modern’ political institutions.1
