后现代主义“终结”论:分析与理解

The“End”of Postmodernism:A Review of Different Ways to Talk about Postmodernism

长期以来,有关后现代主义的讨论制造出大量的含混和歧义。虽然很多人都在谈论后现代主义,但实际上又各有所指。当人们宣称后现代主义已经终结的时候,其所指是艺术风格还是文化范式?是理论话语还是文化政治运动?抑或是“后现代主义”这个术语所指涉的一切?这需要做具体分析。后现代主义的“开端”和“终结”一样,不过是一种人为创造的神话,只有把后现代主义狭义地理解为曾经在20世纪60至80年代盛行于美国的一种主导范式的文化现象或美学潮流,才可以说它已经随着时代的变迁而消退。但如果说它是一些美学技巧、一种文化政治冲动、一种文化逻辑或者话语方式,那么就很难说它已经终结,而只是变换了一种存在形式。

For a long time,the discussion about postmodernism has produced a lot of ambiguities and misunderstandings.Although many people talk about postmodernism,they actually use the same term to refer to different things.When people claim that postmodernism has come to its end,what do they mean by postmodernism?An artistic style,a cultural paradigm,a theoretical discourse or a cultural-political movement?Or does it refer to all these things?This question still deserves our attention.Postmodernism is still alive,and its“beginning”and“end”are just imaginations.Only when postmodernism is narrowly understood as a dominant pattern of cultural and aesthetic style that prevailed in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s,can it be declared as dead.But if we understand it as a group of aesthetic devices,a kind of cultural-political impulse,a cultural logic or a way of discourse,it is difficult to say that postmodernism has ended.It is still alive,only with a changed form of existence.