Page 149 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POSTMODERNISM

Puritan values progressively obsolescent, thereby unleashing an
increasingly unrestrained modernism, the simultaneous product of
Hobbesian individualism on the one hand, corporate capitalism on
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the other. The “postmodernism” of the 1960s—and this is the term
Bell actually uses—finally subverts all restraints: “It is a programme
to erase all boundaries, to obliterate any distinction between the self
and the external world, between man and woman, subject and object,
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mind and body”. “In doctrine and cultural life-style,” he concludes,
“the anti-bourgeois has won… The difficulty in the West…is that
bourgeois society—which in its emphasis on individuality and the
self gave rise to modernism—is itself culturally exhausted”. 31
By and large, contemporary cultural criticism has found Lyotard’s
celebration of the postmodern much more interesting than Bell’s
indictment. But note their common origins in a specifically North
American, rather than European, perception of the postmodern as at
once uniquely contemporary and uniquely transgressive. Where Lyotard
cries liberty and Bell finds licence, both mean transgression, in the
sense of the continuous disturbance and subversion of pre-existing
cultural norms. Which leads us to the proposition, first, that
postmodernism is above all a culture of transgression; and secondly
that, whatever the current fashion for French theory, this is a culture
which remains peculiarly visible from a New World, extra-European
vantage point. Lyotard’s various accounts of the postmodern are stories
told by a Frenchman, it is true, but they are told in the first place to
Canadians nonetheless. They are also, no doubt, in themselves grand
narratives of dissolution, which bespeak a political and cultural history
at once much richer and much more fraught than any endured to date
by the European colonies of settlement in North America or Australasia.
For Lyotard, modernity is quite specifically European, its transcendental
illusion explicitly that of Hegel and Marx, its terror that of Stalin and
Hitler. Doubtless, the settler colonies have had their own philosophers
and their own terrors: yet theirs has been a different experience from
the European, provincial in origin rather than metropolitan, often
suburban rather than urban, civilizing rather than cultured, terrorizing
rather than terrorized. This too is a postmodern condition, perhaps
the paradigmatically postmodern condition which provides both Bell
and Lyotard with their original empirical datum. It is one often named
as “post-colonialism”, but better understood, I suspect, as “post-
imperialism”.

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