Page 156 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

APOCALYPTIC HEDONISM

As Bauman has observed: “within the context of a consumer culture
no room has been left for the intellectual as legislator. In the market,
there is no one centre of power, nor any aspiration to create one…
There is no site from which authoritative pronouncements could be
made, and no power resources concentrated and exclusive enough to
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serve as the levers of a massive proselytizing campaign”. Nineteenth
and early 20th century conceptions, whether literary-critical,
anthropological or sociological, had almost invariably envisaged
culture, not simply as distinct from economy and polity, but also as
itself the central source of social cohesion: human society as such
appeared inconceivable without culture. But it is so now: postmodern
capitalism is held together, not by culture, understood as a normative
value system, but by the market.
As Jameson writes: “ideologies in the sense of codes and discursive
systems are no longer particularly determinant…ideology…has ceased
to be functional in perpetuating and reproducing the system”. Leavis
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and the Leavisites were mistaken, we can now recognize: there is a
substitute for culture, and it is the one that Leavis himself feared it
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might be, “More jam tomorrow”. In short, postmodern intellectual
culture is at once both peculiarly normless and peculiarly hedonistic.
The hedonism arises very directly out of the commodity cultures of
affluence, as they impinge both on the wider society and on the
intelligentsia in particular. The normlessness, however, may well have
its origins elsewhere: on the one hand, in a recurring apocalyptic
motif within post-war culture, which must surely bear some more or
less direct relation to the threat of nuclear extinction; and on the
other, in the radically internationalizing nature of post-war society
and culture, which progressively detached erstwhile national
intelligentsias from the national cultural “canons” of which they had
hitherto been the custodians.
Let us say a little more about the apocalypse. Jameson himself has
argued that Mandel’s Late Capitalism represents the “single exception”
to a general tendency within the Marxist tradition to resist with
vehemence any attempt at a theorization of the historical novelty of
post-industrial capitalism and has sought to justify his own position,
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as also that of Mandel, as replicating the method, though not the
substance, of Lenin’s earlier analysis of imperialism, by “for the first
time” theorizing “a third stage of capitalism from a usably Marxian
perspective”. This judgement on Mandel seems to me over-generous.
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