Bell explains postmodernism as modernism exhausted by institutionalized cultural workers.

Evidence

Daniel Bell (1978, 20), for example, depicts postmodernism as the exhaustion of modernism through the institutionalization of creative and rebellious impulses by what he calls ‘the cultural mass’ (the millions of people working in broadcast media, films, theatre, universities, publishing houses, advertising and communications industries, etc. who process and influence the reception of serious cultural products and produce the popular materials for the wider mass-culture audience). The degeneration of high-brow authority over cultural taste in the 1960s, and its replacement by pop art, pop culture, ephemeral fashion, and mass taste is seen as a sign of the mindless hedonism of capitalist consumerism. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 405

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Bell’s rival explanation of postmodernism via the ‘cultural mass’ — a key alternative to Harvey’s economic-periodization model.
• XREF: Bell’s account is precisely the rival culturalist explanation the reader wants to contrast against Harvey’s flexible-accumulation periodization. — connects to: Postmodernism elevates modernist aberrations into its dominant cultural logic — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 216

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism elevates modernist aberrations into its dominant cultural logic #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 216