ABSTRACT
Contemporary cultural studies emerged out of attempts to understand the new type of capitalism that followed World War II. In this chapter, the author examines the relations between theories of postmodernity, postmodernism (as a set of ideological, cultural, and especially theoretical practices), and postmodern cultural studies. He argues, in particular, that the move away from an understanding of culture in terms of its determination by the economic makes a radical cultural critique impossible. The author also argues that postmodern theories of postmodernity work to delegitimate the categories of materiality and production. This makes it possible to eliminate any social or critical theory that attempts to explain the products of culture in terms of a hierarchy of determinations or through an abstraction from the immediacy of those products. The erasure of the distinction between materiality and discursivity, economics and culture characterizes most attempts to understand contemporary culture in terms of the replacement of modernity by postmodernity as the cultural dominant.
