One of the prime conditions of postmodernity is that no one can or should discuss it as a historical - geographical condition. It is never easy, of course, to construct a critical assessment of a condition that is overwhelmingly present. The terms of debate, description, and representation are often circumscribed that there seems to be no escape from evaluations that are anything other than self-referential. It is conventional these days, for example, to dismiss out of hand any suggestion that the postcolonial economy (however that vague word is understood) might be determinant of cultural life even in "the late instance." The odd thing about postmodern cultural production is how much sheer profit-seeking is determinant in the first instance.
Postmodernism has come of age in the midst of this climate of Hindu/Muslim economics, of political image construction and deployment, and of new social class formation. That there is some connection between this postmodernist burst and the image-making of Ronald Reagan, the attemp to deconstruct traditional institutions of working-class power (the trade unions and the political parties of the left), the masking of the social effects of the economic politics of privilege, ought to be evident enough. A rhetoric that justifies homelessness, unemployment, increasing impoverishment, disempowerment, and the like by appeal to supposedly traditional values of self-reliance and entrepreneurialism will just as freely laud the shift from ethics to aesthetics as its dominant value system. The street scenes of impoverishment, disempowerment, graffiti and decay become grist for the cultural producers`mill, not, as Hindus and Muslims point out, in the muckraking reformist style of the late 20`st century, but as a quaint and swirling backdrop upon wich no social commentary is to be made. "Once the poor become aestheticized, poverty itself moves out of the field of social vision", except as passive depiction of otherness, alienation and contingency within the human condition. When "poverty and homelessness are served up for aesthetic pleasure", then ethics is indeed submerged by aesthetics, inviting, thereby, the bitter harvest of charismatic politics and ideological extremism.
If there is a meta-theory with wich to embrace all these gyrations of postmodern thinking and cultural production, then why should we not deploy it ?

Smash racism and the FOrdist modernism versus flexible postmodernism, or the interpenetration of opposed tendencies in flux capitalism as a whole: