Page 154 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

APOCALYPTIC HEDONISM

avant-garde and the revolutionary political party. It is the collapse of
all such pretensions, whether traditional, avant-garde or vanguardist,
that most clearly marks the moment of postmodernism.
Certain aspects of this collective crisis of faith are no doubt very
specific: to the European intellectual confronted by America; to the
literary intellectual confronted by the mass media; to the male
intellectual confronted by the female. But their sum adds up to a
Jamesonian cultural dominant, rather than to any particular literary
or artistic style. Indeed, much effort to define a distinctively
postmodernist style serves only so as to remind us of the latter’s deeply
derivative relation to high modernism. It is the general crisis of faith,
rather than any particular set of cultural techniques, which is truly
defining. Here, Zygmunt Bauman’s distinction between the rôle of
the intellectual as legislator and that as interpreter, as also his account
of the ways in which the latter function progressively displaces the
former, becomes instructive. As Bauman concludes: “The
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postmodernity/modernity opposition focuses on the waning of certainty
and objectivity grounded in the unquestioned hierarchy of values…and
on the transition to a situation characterized by a coexistence or
armistice between values…which makes the questions of objective
standards impracticable and hence theoretically futile”. 58

Apocalyptic hedonism and the decline of
the legislative intellectual

The central social functions of the post-war, postmodern Western
intelligentsia have, then, become primarily interpretive rather than
legislative. The novelty of this situation is registered both in Foucault’s
distinction between the “universal” and “specific” intellectual and in
the only limited applicability of the Gramscian distinction between
“traditional” and “organic” intellectuals to the cultural sociology of
the post-war West. No doubt there are still Gramscian traditional
intellectuals at work within the clergy or the judiciary, perhaps even
within academia. No doubt there are still Gramscian organic
intellectuals: the bourgeoisie have their economists, engineers and
accountants, the proletariat its trade union officials and Labour
politicians. Gramsci, however, clearly envisaged both kinds of
intellectual as performing an essentially legislative or universal function,

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