I still don’t know what ‘postmodernism’ is

This weeks’ reading – ‘Postmodernism and The Other Side’ by Dick Hebdige – was tough going. Again, I found myself taking relatively few points away from pages and pages of text laced with long words and even longer sentences. And my conclusion – I still don’t really understand ‘postmodernism’.

But that’s ok because neither does Hebdige – and he wrote the thing! What I did manage to siphon from the reading was that the term ‘postmodernism’ is problematic because it is ‘stretched across disciplines.’ People use it to refer to so many aspects of life such as describing the decor of a room, the design of a building or a TV commercial – so it seems very difficult to pin down exactly what it means.

Hebdige questions ‘periodisation’, saying that ‘to talk of ‘post’ is to talk of the past’, and so where exactly ‘postmodernism’ fits in our history is another puzzling debate. In our struggle to work out ‘postmodernism’, it appears we will probably never crack it because ‘modernism’ itself is undefined so how are we supposed to decipher the ‘post’ if we can’t even suss out the ‘modern?’

Three negotiations are highlighted by Hebdige in terms of distinguishing ‘postmodernism’:

• Against Totalisation
• Against Teleology
• Against Utopia
(I really don’t understand the words – they just sound important!)

My final observations of the reading lie in Marxism. It appears that Hebdige refers to many early Marxist thoughts and ideas and his own ideas on ‘postmodernism’ seem to be a continuation of some Marxist lines.

I find myself agreeing with Hebdige (on the points I understood anyway) because my lack of understanding ‘postmodernism’ clearly shows it’s such an ambiguous term and one that is hard to pin down to a simple thought. And I believe that until we can define ‘modernism’ we are unable to work out what ‘postmodernism’ is, who or what it refers to, and when exactly, in time, it took place.

Useful/interesting quotes:

A Marxism of whatever kind could never move back from or go beyond ‘modernity’ in the very terms in which it is defined...

Hegemony is a precarious, ‘moving equilibrium’ (Gramsci) achieved through the orchestration of conflicting and competing forces by more or less unstable, more or less temporary alliances of class fractions.

It becomes more and more difficult...to specify exactly what it is that ‘postmodernism’ is supposed to refer to as the term gets stretched in all directions...