The question of whether we live in a post-modern culture will be examined through an analysis of contemporary political, economic and cultural conditions in the U.S. The discussion will first begin with a description of postmodern sensibility. Key portions of this sensibility (particularly the importance of image) will then be presented, through a overview of the predominate role of television, media consultants and the relative absence of active citizens in modern political campaigns. The paper will go on to argue that the American economy itself can be classified as post-modern, characterized by flexible accumulation and personal insecurity. The analysis will conclude with a discussion of how Adorno and his supporters might respond to the claims of post-modern theory, taken the contemporary cultural, economic, and political conditions in the U.S.
Postmodernism gained currency in the 1960s with reference to certain tendencies in art and literature, but by the 1980s its meaning was expanded to describe a much more pervasive social and cultural mood within the whole of Western life. Like the modernist sensibility that preceded it, postmodernism celebrates the immediate over the distant, the new over the old, the present over the past. In these respects, at least, it seems to represent an extension--not an overcoming of modernist modes of thinking. But in other respects, the postmodern outlook seems to move beyond modernism and to produce something novel (Huyssen, 1986).
In postmodernism the world of images has been embraced more enthusiastically than before, and yet images are not perceived to be--as they often were in modernism--ciphers to some higher spiritual truth. Rather, postmodernism lays no claims to such things as "higher spiritual truths," so images refer to nothing in particular, except perhaps to themselves or to other images (Huyssen, 1986).
In the same vein, postmodernism appears to have adopted som...