Postmodernism

Defining and Writing the Postmodern

The postmodern as postmodernism is four things at the same time. First, it describes a sequence of historical [Page 582]moments from World War II to the present. These moments include the Vietnam War, the two Gulf Wars, the worldwide economic recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, the rise to power of conservative or neoliberal political regimes in Europe and America, the failure of the Left to mount an effective attack against these regimes, the collapse in the international labor movement, the emergence of a new, conservative politics of health and morality centering on sexuality and the family, totalitarian regimes in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and South Africa, the breakdown of the Cold War and the emergence of glasnost, and increased worldwide racism.

Second, the postmodern references the multinational forms of late capitalism that have introduced new cultural logics and new forms of communication and representation into the world economic and cultural systems. Third, it describes a movement in the visual arts, architecture, cinema, popular music, and social theory that goes against the grain of classic realist and modernist formations. Fourth, it references a form of theorizing and writing about the social that is antifoundational, postpositivist, interpretive, and critical.

Postmodern theorizing is preoccupied with the visual society, its representations, cultural logics, and the new types of personal troubles (AIDS, homelessness, drug addiction, family and public violence) and public problems that define the current age. At the most abstract level, the cultural logics of late capitalism define the postmodern moment (Jameson 1991).

But postmodernism is more than a series of economic formations. The postmodern society is a cinematic, dramaturgical production. Film and television have transformed American, and perhaps all other societies touched by the camera, into video, visual cultures. Representations of the real have become stand-ins for actual, lived experience. Three implications follow from the dramaturgical view of contemporary life.

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