Page 159 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POSTMODERNISM

an irredeemable élitism, its public face that of a near permanent sneer—
at “mass culture”, at women’s writing, at foreign literature, at creative
writing, at community arts. Its ideal of a common culture can best be
understood as “ideology”, in the most pejorative of senses. But this
is, nonetheless, not the whole story. European Romanticism in general
developed by way of reaction against the European Enlightenment,
British culturalism in particular by way of reaction against utilitarian
political economy. And in each case, it is not the former term but the
latter which most properly characterizes “the dominant ideology”.
The dominant classes and élites in societies such as ours are in fact
very much as Romanticism construed them: children of civilization
rather than culture, servants of utility rather than beauty, industry
rather than art. By virtue of that very organicism which seems so
reprehensibly monocultural to our contemporary post-Marxist, post-
structuralist, post-feminist, postmodernist sensibilities, Romantic and
post-Romantic conceptions of culture actually did set up deep resistances
to the driving cultural imperatives of a capitalist civilization that was
indeed, in its dominant modes, utilitarian, competitive, acquisitive
and individualistic.
The new postmodern pluralism, with its play of differences, clearly
does allow at least some of the hitherto culturally marginalized some
opportunity to assert something of their own specificity. But how has
this decentring of cultural authority actually arisen? It has certainly
not been the “new social movements” that have achieved such
decentring of the cultural authority of the traditional intelligentsia.
The achievement belongs solely to the market and to the commodity
aesthetics it enjoins. In short, the cultures of difference are sustained,
not so much by the existence of effectively organized political counter-
cultures, as by an effective monetary demand for commodifiable
counter-cultural texts. Those of us who formed part of a once highly
profitable market for Che Guevara posters will recall just how
vulnerable to fluctuations in demand such “cultures” can be.
Romantic and post-Romantic culturalisms envisaged culture, not
simply as separate from economy and polity, but also as in itself the
central source of social cohesion: society as such was inconceivable
without culture. Each also, in one way or another, counterposed the
claims of culture, understood as a repository of superior values, to
those of utilitarian capitalist civilization, understood as driven by the
dynamics of profitable exchange. But in these terms postmodernism

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