Page 114 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POST-STRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM

Neither position is entirely without insight: our readings both of
cultural texts and of history itself are indeed unavoidably plural and,
equally unavoidably, made in the present. But if pluralism is inescapable,
even desirable, then relativism most certainly is not. There are many
truths about any particular cultural text, from the truth of its original
inspiration to that of its most recent reception, and each such truth is
recoverable, if at all, then only as a result of systematic empirical
investigation. Such investigations require for their practical efficacy
a certain methodological pluralism; but they are predicated, as a
condition of their very possibility, on the epistemological postulate of
a past or present reality existing quite independently of any knowledge
construction we may place upon it. This was the central lesson of
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Thompson’s famous Epistle to the Althusserians, and it is one that
might equally be readdressed to the deconstructionists.
By comparison with theoretical culturalisms, whether of the left
or of the right, post-structuralism often appears both pedagogically
and politically inconsequential. Its retreat into an indefinite pluralism
that is neither historical nor properly speaking critical (since criticism
presupposes some real object external to itself) can easily entail a
kind of textual frivolity as intellectually self-indulgent as Leavisism
was intellectually censorious. Its textual erotics increasingly mimic
the licensed hedonisms of the officially established utilitarian culture
of the (post)modern Occident. The human sciences are today
increasingly threatened by the imposition of criteria of value defined
almost exclusively in terms of economic gain and supposed “national
interest”. But if the best that the radical intelligentsia can manage by
way of an alternative is state-subsidised jouissance, as a minority
privilege, then it is one that will neither succeed nor even deserve to
succeed.
The speed with which structuralist and post-structuralist discourse
has been accorded academic recognition and legitimacy powerfully
attests to the eminently co-optable nature of even the most apparently
radical of semiotic enterprises. For this was structuralism’s own hidden
secret: that, in its scientism, in its near-universal espousal of a modernist
aesthetic, in its deprecation of the possibilities for collective human
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agency, in its almost impossibly constricted sense of the scope for an
adversarial intellectual practice, it provided the intellectual class itself
with an almost ideally effective ideological legitimation for its own
peculiar position as both subordinate partner and loyal opposition to

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