Culture Eating its Own Children, or Paradigms of Cultural Theory from the 1960’s Until Nowadays

The main concern of this paper is to find the roots of those opinions and attitudes that we most often hear today about contemporary, postmodern cultures. One of my theses is that we can find such origins in the evaluations and interpretations of postmodern cultures that came into existence at the same time as that culture came into being. I focus on the work of Susan Sontag, with a detailed analysis of the process during which she changed her critical and theoretical view concerning contemporary cultures from labeling them ”subversive” in the early 1960s through calling them ”conventional” not much later, to just plainly describing them in the second half of the 1990s as ”barbaric.” Apart from Sontag, I also look at the work of other authors (e.g., Bull, Földényi, Lash and Lury, McLuhan, and Szeman), and by way of conclusion I offer the reader an overview of the methodology and critical stance of contemporary Cultural Studies.