postmodernism

a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age

Postmodernism is

"the décor of a room"

"the design of a building"

"the diegesis of a film"

"the construction of a record, a television 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 collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age"

"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 plurality 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 of the university"

"broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase"

"a sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of ‘placelessness’ (critical regionalism) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates"

...when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘postmodern’ (or more simply ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.