Page 163 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POSTMODERNISM

itself: “The nature of the process indicates a perhaps unusual
revolutionary activity: open discussion, extending relationships, the
practical shaping of institutions. But it indicates also a necessary
strength…for and with the people who in many different ways are
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keeping the revolution going”. The dismal political failings of the
British Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, and the darkly
utilitarian rationalisms of the Conservative governments that succeeded
them, would provoke in Williams, however, a growing awareness
that: “If there are no easy answers there are still available and
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discoverable hard answers”. Williams’s two major works of the
1980s, his 1983 reworking of the long revolution analysis, Towards
2000, and his last unfinished work, The Politics of Modernism, both
quite explicitly address the cultural politics of postmodernity. They
each attempt to reformulate the original culturalist project, its aspiration
to community and culture as a whole way of life, by way of a critique
both of modernism and of postmodernism, a critique which rejects,
in principle, in theory, and in practice, the antithesis between mass
civilization and minority culture, without thereby becoming trapped
in the cultural logic of commodification.
In The Long Revolution itself, as in Culture and Society, Williams
had respectfully but determinedly aired his differences with the
guardians of the old minority culture. By Towards 2000, he had become
much more dismissive: “There are very few absolute contrasts left
between a ‘minority culture’ and ‘mass communications’”; “many
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minority institutions and forms have adapted, even with enthusiasm,
to modern corporate capitalist culture”. Moreover, Williams is insistent
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that the older modernisms, which once threatened to destabilize the
certainties of bourgeois life, have become transformed into a new
“‘postmodernist’ establishment” which “takes human inadequacy…as
self-evident’; and that the deep structures thereof have already been
transferred into effectively popular cultural forms in film,TV and
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fiction. The work both of monopolizing corporations and élite
intellectuals, “these debased forms of an anguished sense of human
debasement …have become a widely distributed ‘popular’ culture
that is meant to confirm both its own and the world’s destructive
inevitabilities”. That there are resistances to this culture goes without
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saying for a thinker as fundamentally optimistic as Williams. But
these are much more obviously present in popular life itself, in the
“very general area of jokes and gossip, of everyday singing and dancing,

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