Page 150 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM AND THE POPULAR

Modernism, postmodernism and the popular

Discounting Lyotard’s conceit that postmodernism is “modernism…
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in the nascent state”, we need to define postmodernism in terms of
its own difference from a modernism to which it is, if not chronologically
then at least logically, subsequent. High modernism can, in turn, best
be characterized substantially in terms of its own antithetical
relationship not only to bourgeois realism, the predecessor culture,
but also to contemporary “mass”, that is, popular, culture. Relatively
distinct élite and popular cultures are, of course, an almost invariable
accompaniment to the socio-cultural combination of structured social
inequality with the cultural technology of writing. It is only in relatively
classless, tribal societies that one finds relatively unitary, oral cultures
(and even these are internally differentiated by age and gender). Once
writing becomes technically available, cultural differentiation becomes
virtually unavoidable, since writing is, as Williams observes, “wholly
dependent on forms of specialized training, not only…for producers
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but also, and crucially, for receivers”. The historical and
anthropological record in fact provides us with very little warrant for
any understanding of traditional, pre-modern, literate cultures as
generally unitary. And yet, this was a recurrent theme, not only in
Hegel and (sometimes) in Marx, but also in much of both German
sociology, where it appeared as the distinction between Gemeinschaft
and Gesellschaft, and French anthropology, where it appeared as
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that between mechanical and organic solidarity. 35
In English studies, the opposition was troped as that between Eliot’s
medieval common culture or the Leavises’ pre-industrial organic
community, on the one hand, and the dissociated sensibilities of
industrialized mass civilization, on the other. As history, this was
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very obvious nonsense: Wat Tyler and John Ball would hardly have
led a popular revolt against any truly common culture; and John
Bunyan, F.R. Leavis’s own preferred instance of the unity of élite and
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popular cultures, was also, and by no means coincidentally, a soldier
in the armies of the English Revolution. The literary canon handed
down by “English” was in reality the product and the possession of
an extremely small and socially exclusive cultural élite. As late as
1839, only 58.4 per cent of those married during that year in Great
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Britain were able to sign the marriage register: it seems unlikely that
very many of the illiterate majority can have had much of a taste for

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