Performance and the Postmodern in Pop Music

Jean-Francois Lyotard has defined postmodern condition as incredulity towards metanarratives . . . To obsolescence of metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of university institution which in past relied on it.' The unifying, totalizing metanarratives of knowledge and interpretation have fragmented and decentered into a series of Wittgensteinian language games in which specialized areas of knowledge operate independently of one another. One of results of this process, as Frederic Jameson has pointed out, is an increasing predominance of pastiche, incorporation, and even outright plagiarism as an overriding feature of current artistic forms, supplanting notion of original author, and expressing the erosion of older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture, a development which he diagnoses as distressing ... from an academic standpoint.2 But Dick Hebdige has described as postmodernists those who, working in a spirit of ludic and/or critical pluralism, endeavour to open up new discursive spaces and subject positions outside confines of established practises, art market and modernist orthodoxy ... .3