Page 164 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

TOWARDS 2000

of occasional dressing-up and extravagant outbursts of colour”, 90
than in the mass media.
A second site of cultural resistance is, of course, that provided by
the radical intelligentsia. But, as early as 1983, Williams was already
deeply sceptical of the type of “pseudo-radical” intellectual practice
in which a nominally revolutionary radicalism is turned back into the
confusions of “bourgeois subjectivism” by “the negative structures
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of post-modernist art”. In The Politics of Modernism he would state
the case much more forcefully:

Are we now informed enough, hard enough, to look for our
own double edges? Should we not look, implacably, at those
many formations, their works and their theories, which are based
practically only on their negations and forms of enclosure, against
an undifferentiated culture and society beyond them?… Are we
not obliged to distinguish these reductive and contemptuous
forms, these assayers of ugliness and violence, which in the very
sweep of their negations can pass as radical art, from…very
different forms of relating or common exploration, articulation,
discovery of identities, in…consciously extending and affiliating
groups…? Can theory not help in its refusal of the rationalizations
which sustain the negations, and in its determination to probe
actual forms, actual structures of feeling, actually lived and desired
relationships, beyond the easy labels of radicalism which even
the dominant institutions now incorporate or impose? 92

To affirm as much, it is clear, would be to break decisively with the
predominantly modernist and postmodernist cultural forms, and their
variously structuralist, post-structuralist, post-Marxist, and post-
structuralist feminist theoretical legitimations, which currently construct
so much of the radical intelligentsia in the image of Williams’s “New
Conformists”. 93
To speak or to write of actually lived and desired relationships
amongst real human beings, as distinct from amongst the rationally
maximizing monads of utilitarian fantasy (whether it be in the guise
of economics or of semiotics), is to invoke immediately that “solidarity
effect” to which I referred in Chapter 4. For, even in the midst of
alienation, the vast majority of human beings still live out considerable
portions at least of their lives through face to face networks of kinship

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