Page 135 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

as a result of coercion and/or ideology? And why is the ‘fascism
in our heads’ better explained by deformed desire than by the
notions of ideology and rationalisation used in critical theory?
Again, the answer seems to be that we should take it on trust.
As it turned out, this was a trust that Deleuze and Guattari would
breach in their own last collaboration, an oddly aestheticist
celebration of the western philosophical canon, rewritten as
‘geophilosophy’ rather than historicism, and pitted against both
science and art (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). The ‘young con-
servatism’ Habermas claimed to detect in Foucault and Derrida
(Habermas, 1985, p. 14), is as apparent here, in the not-so-young
Deleuze and Guattari, as anywhere in post-structuralism. For it
finally becomes clear that the ‘universal capitalism’ Deleuze and
Guattari abhor is actually modernity itself.
The transition from structuralism to post-structuralism
entailed a retreat both from ‘macropolitics’ of the kind once
familiar to both Left and Right, and from the historical ‘grand
narratives’ that tended to accompany them. Indeed, the attempt
to undermine the epistemological and political status of histori-
cal knowledge is characteristic of the entire semiological
enterprise: structuralism was profoundly anti-historicist; post-
structuralism further radicalised this anti-historicism by
deconstructing the notion of structure itself. In its place we find
a rejection of the truth both of science and of theory, in favour of
the infinitely plural pleasures of a textuality possessed of no deter-
minate relation either to the signified or to the referent, and a
stress on the radical contemporaneity and radical indeterminacy,
in short the radical textuality, of our current constructions of the
past. Neither position is entirely without insight. But in com-
parison with either critical theory or theoretical culturalisms,
whether of the Left or the Right, post-structuralism often seems
both pedagogically and politically inconsequential.
Its retreat into an indefinite pluralism, which was neither
historical nor properly speaking critical (since criticism presup-
poses some real object external to itself), easily entailed a kind of
textual frivolity as intellectually self-indulgent as Leavis or
Adorno had been intellectually censorious. Bourdieu once
observed of Derrida that: ‘Because he never withdraws from the

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