When it becomes possible for people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a TV commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of Baby Boomers confronting disillusioned middle age, the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for ‘images’, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/ or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a pluralism of power / discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline fo the University, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturized technologies, broad societal and economical shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on whom you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of placelessness (‘critical regionalism’) or (even) a generalized substitution of spatial for temporal co-ordinates – when it becomes possible to describe all those things as ‘postmodern’ (or even simply, using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.
– Dick Hebdige (1951-)
