Page 174 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Postmodernism and cultural theory

what Scott Lash says of architecture is almost certainly true of
the other arts: ‘As a movement, postmodernism ...is a thing
of the past. As a presence at the end of the 1990s . . . it is ubiq-
uitous’ (Lash, 1999, p. 56).

POSTMODERNISM, POSTMODERNITY AND ‘POST-WAR’ LATE CAPITALISM

Like all blockbusters, postmodernism’s success derived in part
from its capacity to appeal to multiple markets, from high philos-
ophy in the art-house cinemas of the academy through
middlebrow multi-screen literary criticism and on to local
fleapit sociology. If not exactly meaning all things to all people,
the term obviously signified differently within different
discourses: in short, it is at least as polysemic a sign as ‘cultural
studies’ itself. But an apparently enduring postmodern trope was
that of ‘being after’. ‘Postmodernism’, wrote the late Ferenc Fehér,
‘like many of its conceptual brethren, post-revolutionary or post-
industrial society, post-structuralism and the like, understand
themselves not in terms of what they are but in terms of what
they come after’ (Fehér, 1990, p. 87). But in this instance, after
what, exactly? After modernism certainly: the earliest uses of the
term, which date from Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s,
deliberately counterposed postmodernist poetry and art, or post-
modernismo, to an earlier modernismo (Anderson, 1998, pp. 3–4).
After modernity too: the first Anglophone usages, from the 1950s,
were either socio-historical, as in Arnold Toynbee’s and C. Wright
Mills’ notions of a postmodern ‘age’, or they connected the socio-
historical to the cultural, as in Charles Olson’s sense of his own
poetry as written for a new ‘post-modern’, post-western world
(pp. 5–13).

After modernism
The shift within the ‘high cultural’ social subsector, from some-
thing recognisable as artistic ‘modernism’ to something different
from and, in a sense, coming ‘after’ it, provided the ‘postmod-
ernist’ debate with much of its initial vocabulary. The term

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