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Postmodernism and cultural theory

In this chapter we turn to what Meaghan Morris, Professor of
Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, once
described as contemporary cultural theory’s ‘own version of
cinema’s blockbuster: the state-of-the-globe, state-of-the-arts, Big
Speculation’ (Morris, 1988, p. 242); that is, to postmodernism.
The types of cultural theory we have discussed thus far—cultur-
alism and cultural materialism, critical theory, structuralist and
post-structuralist semiology, difference theory—all pursued
their own kinds of strategy towards the analysis of cultural
artefacts in general. Postmodernism is not a cultural theory of
this kind, however; indeed it is not, properly speaking, a theory
at all. Rather, the term refers, in the first instance, primarily to
a whole set of artistic movements, in literature, painting and
architecture for example, dating mainly from the second half
of the twentieth century, which self-consciously defined them-
selves in opposition to earlier, equally self-consciously
modernist movements. It is only in a secondary sense that the
term also refers to 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 is what Morris
termed the ‘postmodern debate’. These self-consciously post-
modernist movements were, for the main part, a product of the
1960s, 1970s and 1980s, rather than of the past ten years. But

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