Putting the Pop Back into Postmodernism

Discussions of postmodernism increasingly dominate writings in cultural theory and criticism, and they are already entering into more popular discourses of and about popular culture. But the term postmodernism is beguiling, not only because it appears to place us outside history, or, at least, already within the future, but also because it is such a readerly term; it leaves so much to the imagination of the reader. Although everyone seems to agree that significant changes have occurred in almost all the domains of our lives, and that new cultural, social, and historical elements and configurations are active in the contemporary world, there is little agreement about how to interpret these changes, or even where to begin the diagnosis of the postmodern. As with other terms of periodization, the issue is not its origins but its resonances and the particular ways in which it has slid from one discourse into another. Its embrace of multiple codings and rejection of hierarchies have defined a radical antiessentialism that has rapidly spread into the arts and art criticism, popular culture, and finally, in the inevitable return of the repressed, to a description of new forms of historical existence and social experience.