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9 Postmodernism

The postmodern condition

Postmodernism is a term current inside and outside the academic study of popular cul-
ture. It has entered discourses as different as pop music journalism and Marxist debates
on the cultural conditions of late or multinational capitalism. As Angela McRobbie
(1994) observes,

Postmodernism has entered into a more diverse number of vocabularies more
quickly than most other intellectual categories. It has spread outwards from the
realms of art history into political theory and onto the pages of youth culture
magazines, record sleeves, and the fashion pages of Vogue. This seems to me to
indicate something more than the mere vagaries of taste (13).

She also suggests that ‘the recent debates on postmodernism possess both a positive
attraction and a usefulness to the analyst of popular culture’ (15). What is certainly the
case is that as a concept postmodernism shows little sign of slowing down its colonial-
like expansion. Here is Dick Hebdige’s (1988) list of the ways in which the term has
been used:

When it becomes possible for people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the decor of a
room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record,
or a ‘scratch’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘inter-
textual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or crit-
ical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the
‘metaphysics of presence’, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin
and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting
disillusioned middle age, the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical
tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascina-
tion for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political, or existential frag-
mentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards
metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/
discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies,