Page 153 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POSTMODERNISM

is characterized by “the disappearance of aesthetics and higher values
in kitsch and hyperreality…the disappearance of history and the real
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in the televisual”. For Burger, postmodernism is initiated essentially
by the failure of the historical avant-garde to subvert from within the
cultural institutions of high modernism, a failure which results
nonetheless in the final loss of criteria for determining the paradigmatic
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work of art and, hence, in a loss of criteria for distinguishing between
art and non-art. For Jameson, postmodernism is above all a kind of
aesthetic populism, in which pastiche eclipses parody, constituted within
a “field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm”, a
culture “fascinated by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock
and kitsch, of TV series and Readers’ Digest culture, of advertising
and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-
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called paraliterature”. For Lash, postmodernist “de-differentiation”
is present in the transgression “between literature and theory, between
high and popular culture, between what is properly cultural and properly
social”. 54
Whichever account we adopt, we should note that what is being
charted here is primarily an endogenous transformation, internal to
élite culture, rather to any wider, mass or popular culture. Post-
modernism has doubtless entered the vocabulary of popular style,
much as did French existentialism, for example, in the years immediately
after the Second World War. But such popular borrowings from
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élite, or in this case “quasi-élite”, cultures are by no means in themselves
peculiarly postmodernist: as Bakhtin reminds us, the carnivalesque is
as characteristic a feature of medieval popular culture as any. 56
Postmodernism proper is neither a popular culture, nor, in any sense
that Leavis or even Williams might have understood, a common culture:
it is post-modernist, but not necessarily post-popular. Postmodernism
may well “quote” from mass culture, but it is nonetheless not in itself
a popular culture: Campbell’s soup is indeed a mass commodity, but
Warhol prints are not. What postmodernism provides us with, then,
is an index of the range and extent of the Western intelligentsia’s own
internal crisis, that is, its collective crisis of faith in its own previously
proclaimed adversarial and redemptive functions. Historically, cultural
institutions have typically been staffed by Gramscian “traditional”
intellectuals. But their pretensions to cultural authority have also been
replicated by counter-cultural intelligentsias, such as those associated
in the early 20th century with both the literary and artistic

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