Page 144 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

Chapter 6
POSTMODERNISM

In this concluding chapter we turn to what Meaghan Morris has
described, without undue irony, as contemporary cultural theory’s
“own version of cinema’s blockbuster: the state-of-the-globe, state-
1
of-the-arts, Big Speculation”, that is to postmodernism. The five
types of cultural theory we have discussed thus far, utilitarianism,
culturalism, Marxism, structuralism and feminism, each pursue their
own kinds of strategy toward the analysis of cultural artefacts in
general. Post-modernism is not a cultural theory of this kind, indeed
it is not properly speaking a theory at all. Rather, the term denotes:
primarily, a whole set of contemporary literary and cultural movements
(for example, in painting or architecture) which self-consciously define
themselves in opposition to earlier, equally self-consciously modernist
such movements; and only secondarily, a set of efforts from within
cultural theory to define the specific nature of these movements in
relation to other equally specific aspects of contemporary society and
culture. The former is postmodernism; the latter, as it were, the
“postmodern debate”. 2

Postmodernism and Late Capitalism

Like all blockbusters, postmodernism’s success derives in part from
its capacity to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, high philosophy
in the art house cinemas of the academy and middlebrow multi-screen
literary criticism as much as local fleapit sociology. If not exactly
meaning all things to all people, the term very obviously signifies
differently within different discourses: in short, it is as polysemic a
sign as they come. An apparently enduring postmodern trope, however,
is that of “being after”. Postmodernism, Zygmunt Bauman wittily
reminds us, is the “morning after” modernism, simultaneously a

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