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Contemporary Cultural Theory

postmodern conditions had grown up in a world that considered
itself quite decisively ‘postwar’. When Morris remarked that ‘the
postmodern era could be said to begin in 1945, at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki’ (Morris, 1988, p. 186), she unwittingly echoed Olson’s
own insistence that this act of nuclear terror had ended the
modern age (Anderson, 1998, p. 7n). Such datings are by no
means uncontroversial: the focus has sometimes fallen on the late
1950s and the early 1960s, as in Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson, 1991), or the 1970s and
1980s, as in the analyses of ‘New Times’ developed by Hall and
such collaborators as Martin Jacques (Hall, 1996a; Hall &
Jacques, 1989). These and other even later periodisations call
attention to significant changes within postwar society and
culture, such as the rise of the ‘new social movements’ or the
development of new ‘post-industrial’ technologies. But the more
fundamental shift is that registered by Morris and Olson, to a
distinctively postwar world, the more general characteristics of
which continue to structure our contemporary reality.
The historical fate of the avant-garde aside, at least four other
features of contemporary politico-economic postmodernity date
from the 1940s. The first is a prodigiously consumerist economy
of affluence, initially confined to the United States, but later
dispersed throughout the western world. The second is the
increased centrality, within these consumerist economies, of
the culture industries themselves, again initially in the United
States, but later also more generally. At the international level, a
third key structural novelty is provided by the rapid collapse of
the older European empires and the development of new trans-
national cultural and economic forms. All three of these were in
turn overshadowed and underpinned, at a fourth level, by a
dynamically expansionist global hypermilitarism, most visibly
represented in nuclear weapons systems, but also seen in the
more general growth of high-tech military and industrial capac-
ities. This, then, is our starting point: a distinction between
postmodernism as culture and postmodernity as political
economy, a definition of postmodernism as the successor culture
to a chronologically prior modernism, and a periodisation that
specifies the postmodern era as coextensive with the postwar era.

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