To investigate this process is not to fall for the banality that postmodernism
is a social construction, or a deliberate and conscious power-move
in the prestige economy of cultural specialists, or cultural intermediaries
and entrepreneurs in the middle classes. Such interpretations have the
danger of reducing postmodernism to strategic action and miss the ways
in which it offers and acts as relevant means of orientation for particular
cultural specialists (artists, intellectuals, academics) and their various