Page 28 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

UTILITARIAN CULTURE AND CAPITALIST CIVILIZATION

much of which has been re-presented and reproduced within cultural
theory itself, attesting to the presence of at least certain recurrent
anti-utilitarian structural pressures arising from within the traditional
intelligentsia intermittently over the past two hundred years.
The possibility, however, of a disjuncture between the intellectual
culture of the present and immediate past on the one hand, and that
of the prior history of capitalism on the other, broaches the subject
matter of the book’s sixth and final chapter, that of the debate over
postmodernism (a term which, as we have seen, Bell himself actually
used). Where utilitarianism, culturalism, Marxism, structuralism and
feminism each represent a distinctive type of cultural theory, each
with its own characteristic core concepts—utility, culture, ideology,
signification and patriarchy—postmodernism, by contrast, remains
not so much a kind of theory as a particular question posed to each of
the other kinds. The question, of course, is that of whether contemporary
Western society has undergone a transformation in either its culture
or its political economy so far-reaching as to mark the end of modernity
as such, and the beginnings of something that might properly be deemed
“postmodern”. Particular though the question undoubtedly is, it
nonetheless radically reproblematizes the whole of contemporary
cultural theory, for each of these other theories is, as we have seen, a
characteristically modern cultural construct. Utilitarianism and
culturalism, Marxism and feminism, structuralism and perhaps even
poststructuralism might well prove as irrelevant to a genuinely
postmodern culture as have been Christian neo-Platonism and neo-
Aristotelianism to modern culture itself. The book will conclude, then,
with a discussion not of what cultural theory has been to date, but of
what it might need to become for the future.

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