Page 146 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POSTMODERNISM AND LATE CAPITALISM

9
beached”; Perry Anderson that “the Second World War …cut off the
10
vitality of modernism”. And as Jameson nicely observes of the latter,
“whatever Perry Anderson…thinks of the utility of the period term—
postmodernism—his paper demonstrates that …the conditions of
existence of modernism were no longer present. So we are in something
else”. This something else is postmodernism.
11
The historical fate of the avant-garde aside, at least three other
characteristic features of contemporary politico-economic “post-
modernity” also date from the 1940s: a prodigiously consumerist
economy of affluence, initially confined to the United States, later
dispersed throughout the West; the rapid collapse of the older European
imperialisms and the development of new transnational cultural and
economic forms; and a dynamically expansionist global hyper-militarism,
very visibly represented in nuclear weapons systems, but also in the
more general growth of high-tech military capacities. This, then, is our
starting point: a distinction between post-modernism as culture and
postmodernity as political economy, a definition of postmodernism as
the successor culture to a chronologically prior modernism, and a
periodization which specifies the postmodern era as co-extensive with
the post-war. We might add that, although this periodization is not
always that preferred by Jameson himself, it is the one most obviously
implied in his reliance on Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism, for which
12
late capitalism is precisely post-war capitalism.
If postmodernism is not in this account a specific type of cultural
theory, in the sense of post-structuralism or neo-Marxist critical theory,
then nor is it a specific type of politics, in the sense of feminism or
socialism. It is, rather, a particular cultural space available for analysis
to many different kinds of contemporary cultural theory and for
intervention to many different kinds of contemporary cultural politics.
As Michèle Barrett has observed: “postmodernism is not something
that you can be for or against: the reiteration of old knowledges will
not make it vanish…it is a cultural climate as well as an intellectual
position, a political reality as well as an academic fashion”. The
13
term is best understood, then, as denoting a “cultural dominant”, in
Jameson’s phrase, or even, in Williams’s terms, a “structure of feeling”.
At this most general of levels, it is quite simply the dominant culture
of the post-war West. In this sense, Habermas’s sustained polemic
against the implied neo-conservatism of French post-structuralism 14
can be read as an intervention within postmodernism as much as an

137