Claims of a unified postmodern condition stem from American cultural amnesia favoring novelty

Evidence

I don’t mean to deny that we’ve gone through profound qualitative changes between then and now. There are, therefore, now some very perplexing features to contemporary culture that certainly tend to outrun the critical and theoretical concepts generated in the early modernist period. We have, in that sense, to constantly update our theories and to be dealing with new experiences. I also accept that these changes may constitute new subject-positions and social identities for people. But I don’t think there is any such absolutely novel and unified thing as the postmodern condition. It’s another version of that historical amnesia characteristic of American culture—the tyranny of the New. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 718

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘tyranny of the New’ as analytic lens for why media cycles declare paradigm shifts—an essay angle on tech marketing and ‘era’ rhetoric.
• XREF: ‘Historical amnesia’ connects to Hall’s recurrent critique of presentism elsewhere in his work and to Hobsbawm’s invented traditions. — connects to: Postmodernists borrow modernism’s features to claim a false novelty — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 128; Postmodern subjectivity loses active historical consciousness and lives in a perpetual present. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 152; Postmodern culture mirrors anterograde amnesia, clinging to old certainties while newness stays unnavigable — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 122 (+4 more)