Page 160 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE POLITICS OF POSTMODERNISM

clearly represents a triumph of civilization over culture. Let us be
clear what is at stake here. Any society will possess some institutional
arrangement or another for the regulation of symbolic artefacts and
practices; in that sense, society is indeed inconceivable without culture.
But these institutions may themselves be either “political”, that is,
based on the ultimate threat of coercion wielded by the state; or
“economic”, that is, organized through commodity exchange in a
more or less (normally less) competitive market; or “cultural”, in the
“culturalist” sense, that is, based on theoretically (though often not
actually) consensual arrangements for the generation of authoritative,
but not in fact politically coercive, judgements of value.
Soviet socialist realism provided us with an extreme instance of
the first, contemporary postmodernism the second. But most cultures,
we may agree, have been much more properly “cultural”. No doubt,
the old literary humanist “common culture” was neither common
nor consensual: most people were very effectively excluded from its
deliberations on grounds of lack of taste. But its rhetoric nonetheless
captured an important part of what many of us still experience as the
most basic of truths about our “culture’: that our art, our religion,
our morals, our knowledge, our science, are not simply matters of
private revealed preference, but rather possess an “objectivity” the
validity of which is ultimately “social’; in short, that we belong to our
culture very much more than it belongs to us. The problem with any
radical commodification of culture, such as is entailed in
postmodernism, is not simply the perennial failing of all markets,
that they confer the vote not on each person but on each dollar and
thereby guarantee undemocratic outcomes, but also the much more
specific failing that the market undermines precisely what it is that is
most cultural about culture, that is, its sociality.
George Stauth and Bryan Turner conclude an essay on
postmodernism and mass culture thus: “The cultural elite, especially
where it has some pretention to radical politics, is…caught in a constant
paradox… To embrace enthusiastically the objects of mass culture
involves the cultural elite in pseudo-populism; to reject critically the
objects of mass culture involves distinction, which in turn draws the
melancholic intellectual into nostalgic withdrawal from contemporary
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culture”. Melancholia I take to be the characteristically modernist
stance, what Lyotard berates as “the nostalgia of the whole and the
one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the

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