The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

186 Postmodernism
championed an artistic freedom that
allowed the celebration of non-literary
media derived particularly from popular
culture within the text. The modernist
notion of the artist alienated from the
mundane irrelevances of daily life forging
an ethereal connection with an other
world of art was gradually being replaced
by an artist that revelled in the visceral
contemporaneity of the everyday, moulding
out of the maelstrom of mass culture
an aesthetics of ephemerality.
The second key feature of postmodernism
is its deeply ambiguous political
character. Where modernist art scorned
the insubstantiality of the political realm,
claiming that it reflected only a temporary
and localized example of human praxis,
postmodern culture centred itself on the
inherently political qualities of art. From
this can be inferred the strong links
between postmodernism and Marxism, a
legacy deriving in no small measure from
the Leftist political persuasions of many
of the academic proponents of the field.
The rise of postmodernism as a philosophical
discourse during the 1960s and
1970s was matched by the emergence of
literary theory, and in particular linguistic
and discourse analysis. The work of
Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault and Julia Kristeva quickly
became associated with the theoretical
principles underpinning postmodernism
and whilst they tacitly acknowledged the
economic enchainment of the work of art,
they moved the agenda of the Left onto
fresh territory by insisting that all cultural
practices were imbued with oppressive
undertones and therefore offered sites of
productive political struggle. That any
communicational act was conceived,
made and interpreted within ideology and
thereby excluded competing ideological
formations became a defining intellectual
reference point for postmodernism and,
allied to significant socio-economic shifts
in the Western world, encouraged the
formation of emancipatory movements
dedicated to the vocalization of previously
marginalized politics. Tied to this vision
of an ideological equivalence is the third
principal arena of postmodernism’s
impact.
In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard
published The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge. In it he argued that
the postmodern condition was characterized
by a deeply felt scepticism towards
metanarratives (discursive formations
promising a totalized account of knowledge).
For Lyotard the traditional pivots
of human belief (whether they be religion,
philosophy or science) could no longer be
sustained for each reveals its domineering
ideological insistence in its intolerance
of competing voices. The totalizing
imperative of the metanarrative obscures
and denigrates the claims of Others
and, in so doing, according to Lyotard, it
invalidates itself. The freedom that this
anti-establishmentarianism extended was
grasped by a host of liberation movements
(such as feminism, gay rights and the
racially and religiously dispossessed) as a
vindication of their rights. Not all critics
agreed with Lyotard’s egalitarianism:
Jürgen Habermas and Fredric Jameson in
particular attacked the lack of distinction
between an ideological free-for-all and the
monolithic state bureaucracies that hold
sway in the West. The dominance of latecapitalism
means, for Jameson, that there is
no distance between postmodern art and
the society that created it, thereby rendering
the act of critical judgement impractical –
one is ultimately always judging postmodernism
from within postmodernism and
therefore merely ordering a procession of
self-referential landmarks.
The 1980s saw attempts to formalize
postmodernism’s stylistic characteristics