Page 158 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE POLITICS OF POSTMODERNISM

parochially American concerns, to the near exclusion of an equivalent
consideration of the wider international system. A parallel weakness
informs much of Baudrillard’s more naive enthusiasm for America:
at the very moment when radical revisions of the European political
map seem likely to effect an equally radical, and almost certainly
irreversible, decentring of the political economy of the West away
from the United States and towards a much more genuinely
transnational homelessness, it seems utterly absurd (but also somehow
utterly characteristic of much recent French thought) to declaim that
“all the myths of modernity are American”. 75

The politics of postmodernism

As we noted in Chapter 5, postmodernist culture is at once both
incorporated and oppositional, commodified and subversive,
commercial and utopian. The coexistence of these twin faces of
postmodernism is not so much a feature of the sixties in particular as
of the post-war period in general. It arises, moreover, not so much as
the effect of a presence as that of an absence. Where Marxists have
detected commodification and post-structuralists difference, we actually
find both, connected to each other not by any positive content, such
as the beneficence of the market, but by a negativity, that of the prior
collapse of the high culture of the traditional intelligentsia. In itself
this can easily be welcomed: neither traditional minority culture nor
avant-garde modernism are in any obvious sense at all compatible
with cultural democracy. But it remains an absence, or perhaps an
opening, a space in which new options might be explored, others
foreclosed, a problem rather than its resolution.
When academic cultural theory bought into structuralism and post-
structuralism, and into the radically “theoreticist” version of Marxism
represented by Althusserianism, it effectively relinquished its more
traditionally “culturalist” function of policing the boundaries of cultural
authority. True, the relatively arcane language by which the manoeuvre
was effected somewhat obscured its culturally populist import. But
the import was real enough: the only boundaries academics police
these days are those of critical rigour itself, their only sacred texts
theoretical ones. At one level, all of this seems absolutely welcome.
The old literary humanism had, by the time of its demise, ossified into

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