Page 186 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

Chapter 8
Postmodernism and ‘the other side’

Dick Hebdige

The success of the term postmodernism—its currency and varied use within
a range of critical and descriptive discourses both within the academy and
outside in the broader streams of ‘informed’ cultural commentary—has
generated its own problems. It becomes more and more difficult as the
1980s wear on to specify exactly what it is that ‘postmodernism’ is
supposed to refer to as the term gets stretched in all directions across
different debates, different disciplinary and discursive boundaries, as
different factions seek to make it their own, using it to designate a plethora
of incommensurable objects, tendencies, emergencies. 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 TV commercial, or an arts documentary, or the
‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion
magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within
epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a general
attentuation 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 fascination
for ‘images’, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential
fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity
towards meta-narratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a
pluralism of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the
collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of
nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and
effects of the new miniaturized technologies, broad societal and economic
shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense
(depending on whom you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of
placelessness (‘critical regionalism’) or (even) a generalized substitution of
spatial for temporal co-ordinates—when it becomes possible to describe

Reprinted from Journal of Communication Inquiry (1986), 10(2), 78–98.