Page 161 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POSTMODERNISM

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transparent and the communicable experience”. But it is
pseudopopulism, the more properly postmodernist stance, which most
characteristically defines the contemporary radical intellectual culture.
This is evident in the kinds of theoretical post-structuralism that have
become widely current in contemporary cultural theory: in
psychosemiotic feminism; in post-structuralist rewritings of
multiculturalism as discourse; in the new post-colonial theory’s
misrecognition of post-imperial literatures. Each of these almost
invariably endorses the cultural pluralism of the postmodern condition,
and with it the collapse of older, institutionalized claims to authoritative
cultural judgement.
Pseudo-populism is evident too in the enthusiasm of much recent
writing about popular culture itself: in Tony Bennett’s determination
to open up popular reading to a radical politics that can transcend the
élitist antinomy between fiction and Literature/Science; and in
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Meaghan Morris’s insistence that the “dead cleverness” of Crocodile
Dundee should alert radical criticism to the need not only for a cultural
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politics but for a political politics. For Bennett and for Morris, popular
culture is too important for the discard tray marked “mass civilization/
culture industry”, to which traditional intellectuals both of the left
and of the right have habitually consigned it. Their intentions are in
each case indisputably, and honourably, subversive of the cultural
pretensions of the intellectual class to which they themselves belong.
The danger remains, however, that such deconstruction of the élite/
popular boundary might unwittingly confirm the incorporative
dynamics of commercial postmodernism, that is, of multinational
late capitalism itself.
To be more specific, I do not doubt that the contempt of left-wing,
pessimistic intellectuals for mass audiences is at once both élitist and
self-interested. But it does not thereby follow that films or TV
programmes are somehow politically innocent. It is naïve in the extreme
to pretend either that such texts are themselves the products of working-
class solidarity or informality, or that they are amenable to some kind
of indefinite reappropriation by their audiences. Films and TV
programmes are manufactured either by the state or by private
capitalism in the interests either of profit or of hegemony, they are
often quite deliberately intended as manipulative, and there is no
good reason at all to suppose that such intentions are never or even
rarely satisfied. This is not to advise a return to high modernism; it is

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