SOURCE: “It's Irony, Guv,” in New Statesman, February 26, 1999, pp. 55-7.

In the following excerpt, Gott discusses Jameson's analysis of postmodernity in The Cultural Turn.

Everyone now recognises that we live in a postmodern world. In architecture and design, in film and music, in art and fiction, in poetry and literary criticism, even in politics, postmodernity is everywhere on display: cynicism and levity, irony and pastiche, nostalgia coupled with historical amnesia, and decoration replacing substance. So obvious and widespread has the phenomenon become that people use this shorthand word with relaxed ease to describe the world around them.

This was not always so. Writing only ten years ago, the American critic Fredric Jameson noted that “the concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood today”. Yet so pervasive has been its influence and so rapid its popular assimilation, that Jameson’s latest book of essays has been...