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Contemporary Cultural Theory

only in order to then reject—the commonplace conflation of post-
modernism with post-structuralism. There is, of course, a certain
‘fit’ between the kind of post-structuralist theoretical relativism
we explored in previous chapters and the kind of social and
cultural pluralism many commentators find distinctive of our
contemporary postmodern condition. But the two are by no
means synonymous. Where post-structuralism represents a
particular line of development from within semiology towards
what we have termed ‘difference theory’, postmodernism is better
understood as a much more specific attempt to define the novelty
of our contemporary cultural condition. Indeed, the major post-
structuralist thinkers were often quite uninterested in the latter
debate. In general, French post-structuralism was far too pre-
occupied with the high modernist canon to accord much serious
attention to a contemporary culture that acquired an increasingly
postmodern complexion: both Barthes’ writerly texts and
Kristeva’s poetic revolution were modernist rather than post-
modernist in character; insofar as Foucault could envisage a
‘post-modern’ episteme, it was that inaugurated by high struct-
uralism itself (Foucault, 1973a, pp. 385–6); Guattari specifically
rejected postmodernism because of its cynicism and conservatism
(Guattari, 1986).
Andreas Huyssen, Professor of German and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University, argued that ‘rather than
offering a theory of postmodernity and developing an analysis
of contemporary culture, French theory provides us primarily
with an archaeology of modernity, a theory of modernism at the
stage of its exhaustion’ (Huyssen, 1988, p. 209). Lash was surely
right, then, in his early attempts at a sociology of postmodernism,
to insist that there was no necessary parallel between post-
structuralism and postmodernism, nor, conversely, between
critical theory and anti-postmodernism (Lash, 1990, p. 153). Much
of the debate over postmodernity was in fact conducted within
an explicitly historicist theoretical framework, deriving at least
as much from German critical theory, or its emigré American sub-
variants, as from any kind of post-structuralism. This is true, for
example, of writers as diverse as Zygmunt Bauman, Daniel Bell,
Peter Bürger, Habermas, Huyssen himself, Jameson, Heller and

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