Page 162 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

TOWARDS 2000

simply to caution against the dangers of a postmodernism that can
easily become properly speaking pseudo-populist, as distinct from
simply popular. There is, however, a third position which remains
both theoretically available and politically preferable: it is possible to
recognize that much of the erstwhile modernist high culture is indeed
élitist, and to recognize that much of mass culture is indeed manipulative,
and to insist nonetheless on the desirability and possibility of an as
yet to be made, democratic common culture. This was, of course, the
central politico-cultural trajectory projected in Raymond Williams’s
The Long Revolution.

Towards 2000

Whatever the possible appeal either of postmodernist sensibility in
general or of post-structuralist critical theory in particular, their refusal
of history remains both disabling and debilitating. For, as Jameson
quite rightly insists, history is not a text, though it is nonetheless
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inaccessible to us except in textual form. “History is what hurts,”
he writes, “it…sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective
praxis…we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget
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us, however much we might prefer to ignore them”. History is also
often progress, although it is currently very unfashionable to admit
as much. This too Jameson recognizes: the mystery of the cultural
past can be re-enacted, he observes, “only if the human adventure is
one”, that is, only if its apparently long dead issues can be “retold
within the unity of a great collective story; only if, in however disguised
and symbolic form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental
theme…the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a
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realm of Necessity”. Orwell’s “struggle of the gradually awakening
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common people against the lords of property” is but one local instance
of this same single human adventure. So too is Williams’s long
revolution, simultaneously an industrial revolution, a democratic
revolution, a revolution in the social relations of class, and in the
extension of culture.
In its original formulation, Williams had almost certainly erred on
the side of evolutionism, both in the sense of an excessive reliance on
the inevitability of gradualism and that of an over-confident expectation
of continuing progress. Hence, the conclusion to The Long Revolution

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