Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 21

Postmodernism Shanghaied

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phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very con
cepts it challenges” (A Poetics o f Postmodernism 4).
So, like an all-encompassing scientific Theory of Everything, a unified
theory of postmodernism still eludes us; it is simultaneously, paradoxically, under
and over-defined. (Remember, now, that these folks cannot even decide whether
there is a hyphen.) Perhaps, then, it would be easier to define postmodernism by
stating what it is not: There is nothing postmodern about Redbook or Tom Brokow.
There is nothing postmodern about McDonald’s or the Pottery Bam, about Tho
mas Kinkade, “Painter of Light,” or Michael Flatley, that Riverdance fellow. Nei
ther is Kevin Bacon nor Sandra Bullock postmodern, nor Vermont and Utah. Nor
is there a single thing postmodern about John Grisham, Robert James Waller, or
Nora Roberts.
In the meantime, amid academia’s incessant chatter — that postmodern
white noise — pop culture sneaked in the back door of the ivory tower and ab
sconded with the word. In the last couple of decades the term has been used to
describe not only literature but also cinema, dance, ceramics, theater, television,
music, politics, philosophy, history, theology, pedagogy, psychoanalysis, and, of
course, MTV videos. A toss of the word into any Internet search engine will draw,
quite literally, thousands of hits. (Oh, sure, you can still cruise the MLA highways
and see all the usual suspects, the standard academic use and abuse of the word;
for example, dig these over-inflated titles: Semiological Reductionism: A Critique

o f the Deconstructionist Movement in Postmodern Thought; Masculinity Meets
Postmodernism: Theorizing the “Man-Made” Man\ The Postmodernism-PostMarxism Nexus.)
Far, far more popular, however, is the rising rate of pop culture usage.
The term literally abounds. For example, fiction teems with the term postmodern
and all its variants tossed in with the aplomb that only a novelist can muster. In The
Secret History ( 1992), Donna Tartt describes “ginko trees in postmodern tubs...”
(363). In The Information (1995), Martin Amis makes reference to a “postmodern
car alarm, which trilled out a fruity compendium of all other car alarms” (350). In
Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Bones o f Time (1996), the juxtaposition of tiny symbols
on a computer screen is like “some postmodern work of art” (100). In Amsterdam
(1999), one of Ian McEwan’s characters calls sampling “postmodern quotation”
(178).
This off-the-cuff tossing of the term (like the croutons in a pretentious
salad) is even more evident in the magazine media. A quick catalog: Dance calls
Jane Comfort a “postmodern choreographer” (July 1999); The Village Voice writes
of conte