Page 152 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM AND THE POPULAR

there can be no doubt that both stand in essentially adversarial relation
not only to bourgeois realism but also to mass culture.
Bürger himself argues that bourgeois art consists in a celebration
in form of the liberation of art from religion, from the court, and
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eventually even from the bourgeoisie. Modernist art thus emerges
as an autonomous social “institution”, the preserve and prerogative
of an increasingly autonomous intellectual class, and thereby necessarily
counterposed to other non-autonomous arts. In short, both high
modernism and the historical avant-garde ascribe some real redemptive
function to high art. And as the historical memory of bourgeois realism
recedes, it is hostility to contemporary popular culture in particular
which develops into perhaps the most characteristic topos, or stock
theme, in 20th century intellectual life—whether overt, as in the Leavisite
opposition between mass civilization and minority culture (of which
Eliot’s modernism is a central instance), or that of the Frankfurt School
between the culture industries and autonomous art; or covert, as in
the structuralist distinction between readerly and writerly texts, the
text of plaisir and the text of jouissance. Whether as degraded culture
for the conservative intelligentsia or as manipulated culture for the
radical intelligentsia, mass culture remained the Other, or at least an
Other, of modernist high culture.
Which brings us to postmodernism. For, however else we might
care to characterize the postmodern, there can be little doubt that
postmodernist art typically attempts, or at least results from, the collapse
precisely of this antithesis between high and low, élite and popular. It
is this boundary, as much as any other, that is transgressed in postmodern
culture. Almost all the available theorizations of postmodernism,
whether celebratory or condemnatory, whether or not themselves
postmodernist, agree on the centrality of this progressive deconstruction
and dissolution of what was once, in Bourdieu’s phrase, “distinction”. 48
Huyssen goes so far as to locate postmodernism quite specifically
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“after the great divide” between modernism and mass culture. But
even for Bell, postmodernism was a kind of “porno-pop” which
“overflows the vessels of art…tears down the boundaries and insists
that acting out, rather than making distinctions, is the way to gain
knowledge”. 50
For Lyotard, the postmodern incredulity towards meta-narratives
applies not only to the meta-narratives of science and politics, but
also to that of art as enlightenment. For Baudrillard, postmodernity

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