The Postmodern Image

Abstract

“It becomes more and more difficult […] to specify exactly what it is that ‘postmodernism’ is supposed to refer to as the term gets stretched in all directions across different debates, different disciplinary and discursive boundaries, as different factions seek to make it their own, using it to designate a plethora of incommensurable objects, tendencies, emergencies” (Hebdige 1998, 181). Dick Hebdige’s remarks about the slipperiness of the term postmodernism (which continues with an endless list of things that can be associated to it) are neither the first—even if we are “just” in 1988—nor, obviously, the last problematization of this sort. More concisely, in 2009, in an article for the New Yorker centered on the work of Donald Barthelme, Louis Menand has described postmodernism as “the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts”, and at that moment the definition sounds particularly true, if we think that post-9/11 a wide international debate on the end of the postmodernism has been going on, fatally adding definitions over definitions, while trying to understand what would have replaced it, if something has (Brooks Toth 2007; Toth 2010; Faye 2012; Rudrum and Stavris 2015).