This post picks up from an earlier one here.
The post is a question: Could not the oppositional independent film scene in Australia during the 1980s be an example of an avant garde that has taken a path that has lead to a deadend. It did so through a resistance to being coopted into the mainstream mass market. It became a narrow enclave market that resists the mainstream film industry's preoccupation with audiences as box office dollars. The rise of economic rationalism results in a pressure to press a critical film culture into a commercial straitjacket.
Okay. So what happens then? We get 1980s style postmodernism with its central dynamic of the breakdown of the modernist divide between high art and low mass culture. This new discourse is structured around depthlessness, the simulacrum, the death of the subject, and the non-differentiation of "art" and popular culture. This breaks down the old modernist divide between film culture and film industry.
This is the new mode of critical thinking. It quickly enters the class room in this form:
"Postmodernism is about language. About how it controls, how it determines meaning, and how we try to exert control through language. About how language restricts, closes down, insists that it stands for some thing. Postmodernism is about how 'we' are defined within that language, and within specific historical, social, cultural matrices. It's about race, class, gender, erotic identity and practice, nationality, age, ethnicity. It's about difference. It's about power and powerlessness, about empowerment, and about all the stages in between and beyond and unthought of.... It's about those threads that we trace, and trace, and trace. But not to a conclusion. To increased knowledge, yes. But never to innocent knowledge. To better understanding, yes. But never to pure insight. Postmodernism is about history. But not the kind of 'History' that lets us think we can know the past.... It's about chance. It's about power. It's about information. And more information. And more. And. And that's just a little bit of what postmodernism [is]."
Brenda K. Marshall', Teaching the Postmodern, (Routledge, 1992, p. 4)