Page 176 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 167

Postmodernism and cultural theory

1976). As such, they were fated to become direct casualties of the
twin totalitarianisms of Nazism and Stalinism, both of which
subscribed to a determinedly—not to say lethally—anti-
modernist cultural politics. Driven into exile in the United States,
what survived in New York was an increasingly successful
commodification of avant-garde style, increasingly bereft of
avant-garde social purpose. This was ‘post-modernism’ in the
most obvious of senses, that of the ‘high’ culture that survived
after modernism, a culture clearly dating from the 1940s. Re-
located geographically from Europe to America and sociologically
from the avant-garde to the mainstream, this was modernism as
a commercial enterprise.
‘Post-modernism’ in this sense is grudgingly acknowledged
even by those most hostile to the term’s more generalising imp-
lications: Alex Callinicos, for example, agreed that the ‘postwar
stabilization of capitalism left the few still committed to avant-
garde objectives beached’ (Callinicos, 1989, p. 60); Perry Anderson
that ‘the Second World War... cut off the vitality of modernism’
(Anderson, 1992, p. 37). As Fredric Jameson nicely observed
of an earlier version of this last essay: ‘whatever... Anderson
. . . thinks of the utility of the period term—postmodernism—his
paper demonstrates that . . . the conditions of existence of
modernism were no longer present. So we are in something else’
(Jameson, 1988, p. 359). As Anderson would later concede, this
something else is postmodernism. As such, it is best understood
neither as a distinctive style nor as a distinctive set of themes, but
rather as a distinctive social relation between art and capitalism.
In short, postmodernism is modernism stripped of its avant-garde
redemptive functions. As we shall see, this change also implied
a radical transformation in the relationship between modernism
and what was variously described as the mass media, mass
civilisation or popular culture.

After modernity
What, then, of postmodernity as distinct from postmodernism?
Crucially, ‘postmodern’ meant after the Second World War: the
generations that attempted to theorise these many and varied

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