Page 145 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POSTMODERNISM

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“sobering up and a headache”. “Post modernism,” Ferenc Fehér
writes, “like many of its conceptual brethren, post-revolutionary or
post-industrial society, post-structuralism and the like, understand
themselves not in terms of what they are but in terms of what they
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come after”. But after what? After modernism certainly, after modernity
perhaps, and crucially also after “the War”. For the generations that
would eventually attempt to theorize these many and varied post-
modern conditions had grown up in a world that considered itself
quite decisively “post-War”.
Here, surely, is the trope in initio: to quote Meaghan Morris yet
again, “the postmodern era could be said to begin in 1945, at Hiroshima
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and Nagasaki”. Such early datings of the beginnings of
“postmodernity” are by no means uncontroversial: the more typical
focus in recent cultural theory has fallen on the supposedly more
radical transformations of the late 1950s and the early 1960s, as in
Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
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Capitalism, or even those of the 1970s and 1980s, as in the analyses
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of “New Times” developed by the journal Marxism Today. These
later datings often call attention to quite significant changes within
post-war society and culture, for example the rise of the “new social
movements” or the development of new “post-industrial” technologies.
But the more fundamental shift is that registered by Morris, that to a
distinctively post-war world, the more general characteristics of which
continue to structure our contemporary reality.
That shift is peculiarly visible in precisely the “high cultural” social
sub-sector from which the “postmodernist” debate derives much of
its vocabulary. Both modernist high culture in general and the cultural
avant-garde in particular were the creations of the great cities of
continental Europe—Berlin and Vienna, Moscow and St Petersburg,
above all Paris —and as such, they were fated to become direct casualties
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of the twin totalitarianisms of Nazism and Stalinism. What survived
into post-war New York was an increasingly commodified imitation
of avant-garde style, increasingly bereft of avant-garde social purpose.
This is post-modernism in the most obvious of senses, that of the
“high” culture that survived after modernism, and it is a culture which
clearly dates from the 1940s. This is a “post-modernism” grudgingly
acknowledged by even those most hostile to the notion itself: Alex
Callinicos, for example, agrees that the “postwar stabilization of
capitalism left the few still committed to avant-garde objectives

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