Postmodernism’s American success is a paradox because the concept is devastating to American culture

Evidence

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

First I am fascinated by the degree to which postmodernism has taken off in America—its immediate success as a concept, compared with either post-Marxism or poststructuralism. “Postmodernism” is the biggest success story going. And since it is, in essence, such a devastating story—precisely about American culture, it seems a funny thing to be so popular. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 714 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

I think Lyotard, and Baudrillard in his celebratory mode, really have gone right through the sound barrier. They involved, not simply in identifying new trends or tendencies, new cultural configurations, but in learning to love them. I think they collapse these two steps—analysis and prescription—into one. It’s a bit like that precursor-prophet of postmodernism, Marshall McLuhan. When Marshall McLuhan first began to write about the media, he had come down from Cambridge as a committed Leavisite critic. His first book, The Mechanical Bride , was highly critical of the new technologies. In fact, he referred to this book as “a civil defense against mass media fallout.” But the disillusionment soon turned into its opposite—celebration, and in his later work, he took a very different position, just lying back and letting the media roll over him; he celebrated the very things he had most bitterly attacked. I think something like that has happened among the postmodern ideologues. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 715 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

Related

• Postmodernist theorists conflate describing cultural change with celebrating it (similarity 0.86)
• Postmodernist celebration masks Parisian intellectual disillusionment with American culture (similarity 0.85)
• Claims of a unified postmodern condition stem from American cultural amnesia favoring novelty (similarity 0.85)
• So-called postmodern changes merely accentuate long-standing modern Western tendencies (similarity 0.82)
• Postmodernism is a tendency within late modernism, not its successor (similarity 0.81)
• Postmodernists borrow modernism’s features to claim a false novelty (similarity 0.80)
• Belief in a ‘postmodern condition’ is American historical amnesia. (similarity 0.79)
• Postmodernism’s supposed novelties stem from longer trends and the 1980s conjuncture (similarity 0.79)
• Postmodernism’s self-definition depends on an inadequate account of what it opposes. (similarity 0.79)
• The Postmodern Condition grew from far older aesthetic-political commitments (similarity 0.79)
• High modernism’s subversive power is situation-specific and ungeneralizable across nations. (similarity 0.79)
• Postmodernism is best treated as a historical condition, not an ideas set. (similarity 0.78)
• Postmodernism’s popularity stems partly from its definitional obscurity (similarity 0.78)
• Postmodernism’s pessimism was a local European crisis wrongly universalized (similarity 0.78)
• Postmodern manifestos secretly still depend on the modernist tropes they reject (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Belief in a ‘postmodern condition’ is American historical amnesia. #corroborates (0.65) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 718
• Postmodernism triumphed as a concept in America more than rival critical theories. #corroborates (0.60) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 714
• Postmodern theorists collapsed analysis of new trends into celebration of them. #complicates (0.60) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 715
• Postmodernism carries essentialist and Western-centric assumptions in its American form. #expands (0.55) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 715
• Postmodern theory’s claims of abandoned meaning serve an ideological role masking its own dominance #complicates (0.55) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 305