Page 148 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

TRANSGRESSION, MARGINALITY...

derived from the Enlightenment. These meta-narrative paradigms
had run aground, he argued, in the period since the Second World
War: “In contemporary society and culture—postindustrial society,
postmodern culture—the…grand narrative has lost its credibility,
regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether
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it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation”. The
postmodern condition’s “incredulity towards meta-narratives”,
whether in aesthetics or science or politics, is for Lyotard in part a
consequence of the internal logic of the meta-narratives themselves,
which proceed from scepticism to pluralism, in part also a correlate
of post-industrialism, in which knowledge itself becomes a principal
form of production, thereby shifting emphasis “from the ends of
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action to its means”. Lyotard’s slightly later “What is
Postmodernism?”, first published in 1982, recapitulates much of the
earlier analysis, despite its, in my view very unhelpful, retreat from
the initial attempt at cultural periodization. Here, the postmodern
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continues to be understood as that which “denies itself the solace of
good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to
share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which
searches for new representations…in order to impart a strong sense
of the unpresentable”. The postmodern, Lyotard tells us, will
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“wage a war on totality”, that “transcendental illusion” of the
nineteenth century, the full price of which has proved to be
“terror”. 23
The term “postmodern” was by no means an original coinage,
however. To the contrary, Lyotard’s initial argument is quite deliberately
inserted into an already existing North American discourse: as he
explained, “the word postmodern…is in current use on the American
continent among sociologists and critics”. One of Lyotard’s North
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American sources was Daniel Bell, whose The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society figures in the text’s very first footnote. Curiously, Lyotard
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makes no reference to Bell’s more specific attempts at a cultural
sociology of postmodernism per se, especially The Cultural
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Contradictions of Capitalism, which had been published only three
years previously, and the even more recent essay, “Beyond Modernism,
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Beyond Self”. For Bell, following Lionel Trilling, modernism
represented a radically “adversary culture”, opposed not merely to
this society but to any and all conceivable societies. As the capitalist
economic system had developed, he argued, it had rendered the older

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