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182 Chapter 9 Postmodernism

the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the
university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad
societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a
sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of
placelessness (‘critical regionalism’) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial
for temporal coordinates – when it becomes possible to describe all these things as
‘postmodern’ ...then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword (2009: 429).

For the purposes of this discussion I will, with the exception of some necessary the-
oretical exposition, consider postmodernism only as it relates to the study of popular
culture. To facilitate this I will focus on the development of postmodern theory from
its beginnings in the United States and Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
through its theorization in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and
Fredric Jameson. This will be followed by a discussion of two examples of postmodern
culture: pop music and television. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of three
more general aspects of postmodernism: the collapse of absolute standards of value,
the culture of globalization, and convergence culture.

Postmodernism in the 1960s

Although the term ‘postmodern’ had been in cultural circulation since the 1870s (Best
and Kellner, 1991), it is only in the late 1950s and 1960s that we see the beginnings of
what is now understood as postmodernism. In the work of Susan Sontag (1966) and
Leslie Fiedler (1971) we encounter the celebration of what Sontag calls a ‘new sensi-
bility’ (1966: 296). It is in part a sensibility in revolt against the canonization of mod-
ernism’s avant-garde revolution; it attacks modernism’s official status, its canonization
in the museum and the academy, as the high culture of the modern capitalist world. It
laments the passing of the scandalous and bohemian power of modernism, its ability
to shock and disgust the middle class. Instead of outraging from the critical margins of
bourgeois society, the work of Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf,
Bertolt Brecht, Igor Stravinsky and others, had not only lost the ability to shock and
disturb, but also become central, classical: in a word – canonized. Modernist culture
has become bourgeois culture. Its subversive power has been drained by the academy
and the museum. It is now the canon against which an avant-garde must struggle. As
Fredric Jameson (1984) points out,

This is surely one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of post-
modernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the
formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which ‘weigh
like a nightmare on the brains of the living’, as Marx [1977] once said in a differ-
ent context (56).