Postmodernist theorists conflate describing cultural change with celebrating it
Evidence
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 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
Related
- Postmodernist celebration masks Parisian intellectual disillusionment with American culture (similarity 0.88)
- Postmodernism’s American success is a paradox because the concept is devastating to American culture (similarity 0.86)
- So-called postmodern changes merely accentuate long-standing modern Western tendencies (similarity 0.81)
- Claims of a unified postmodern condition stem from American cultural amnesia favoring novelty (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Postmodern theorists collapsed analysis of new trends into celebration of them.
#corroborates(0.95) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 715