Page 165 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POSTMODERNISM

and community, identity and obligation, friendship and love. Indeed,
this is what most of us mean by “life”. The ideal of a common culture
which Williams here invokes is, in my view, neither inherently
reactionary nor inherently utopian. Quite the contrary, it represents
the only possible alternative, within the space of postmodernity, to a
radical commodification which will eventually entail the effective
absorption of the cultural into the economic. At one level, it registers
little more than the truth of an already existing commonality, evident
in language and in the most fundamental of moral proscriptions. At
another, it registers the “ideals” of community and solidarity, as
standards against which to measure the actual deficiencies of our
culture and our society. A democratic common culture cannot be
made from within the intellectual class itself, but only from within
those exploited and oppressed classes and groups the cultural lives of
which have proved, by turn, the objects of realist neglect, modernist
disdain and postmodernist pastiche. Doubtless, both international
communism, as represented in the late, unlamented barracks socialism
of Eastern Europe, and international socialism, as in the pernicious
pragmatism of the modern Labour Party, have each proved false starts
in the politics of the long revolution. But history is a long time; and it
is not over yet. As Williams himself concludes: “If we are to break out
of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism, then we must search
out and counterpose an alternative tradition…which may address
itself…to a modern future in which community can be imagined
again”. 94

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