Page 142 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM AND POSTMODERNISM

theory” characteristic of left pessimism and structuralism, and the
“making the best of things” approach more commonly found in
celebratory postmodernism. 115
Morris herself seems all too aware of the potential for depoliticization
immanent within the post-structuralist stress on resistant readings.
Borrowing from a friend, she nicely summarizes the position as “the
discovery that washing your car on Sunday is a revolutionary event”. 116
Elsewhere, Morris speculates wittily as to the existence of a possible
English master-disk “from which thousands of versions of the same
article about pleasure, resistance, and the politics of consumption are
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being run off under different names with minor variations”. And the
point of such arguments, she is clear, and with it “one of the immediate
political functions” of the present boom in cultural studies, is precisely
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to discredit “grumpy feminists and cranky leftists”. From her Australian
vantage point, Morris is also able to show how an initially British left
populism, “still…at least nominally …attempting to salvage a sense of
life from the catastrophe of Thatcherism”, becomes radically depoliticized
when recycled into the quite “different political cultures” of Australia
and America. Morris herself cites as relevant instances John Fiske’s
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“British Cultural Studies and Television” and Iain Chambers’s Popular
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Culture. But one could just as well add Fiske, Hodge and Turner’s
enthusiastically postmodern celebration of the banalities of Australian
suburban life, or Cathy Switchenberg’s dazzlingly uncritical invocation
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of Madonna’s supposedly “postmodern feminism”. 123
There is much in post-structuralism, it seems to me, that is in itself
theoretically wrong-headed, and little that bears anything but the
most tangential of practical relations to any liberationist politics. It
has become one of a number of theoreticist manoeuvres by which
substantial sections of an erstwhile progressive radical intelligentsia
have sought to theorize, and dramatize, their own emergent
depoliticization. Postmodernism, by contrast, is much better understood
as a contemporary condition we all share simply by virtue of our
status as inhabitants of liberal-democratic polities and late-capitalist
societies. Insofar as feminism has sought to work in and against this
new postmodern reality, then it has very often attained a more fully
contemporary relevance than any available to other kinds of cultural
theory. But insofar as feminism has become merely another post-
structuralist academicism, “just another way of talking about books”, 124
as Ruthven sees it, then it becomes deeply complicit with the dominant

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