Page 180 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Postmodernism and cultural theory

Fehér. It is even true, albeit to a lesser extent, of the two most
famously postmodernist of cultural theorists: the late Jean-
François Lyotard (1924–98), Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Paris, Vincennes, and later of French at the Univer-
sity of California, Irvine, and, by turn, at Emory University; and
Jean Baudrillard, for many years Professor of Sociology at Paris,
Nanterre. We turn to their work very shortly. In the meantime,
however, let us briefly explore the vexed question of the relation-
ship between modernism, postmodernism and popular culture.

MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM AND THE POPULAR

Thus far we have characterised modernism—and by extension
postmodernism—primarily by way of their antithetical relation-
ship to a predecessor culture of bourgeois realism. But we should
note that modernism also stood in a similarly antagonistic relation
to contemporary ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ culture. This is especially
significant to our understanding of postmodernism, for however
else we might care to characterise postmodernity, there is little
doubt that postmodernist art typically attempted, or at least
resulted from, precisely the collapse of this antithesis between
high and low, elite and popular. This boundary, as much as any
other, is what is transgressed in postmodern culture.

Elite and popular culture in pre-modern and early-modern societies
Relatively distinct elite and popular cultures almost invariably
arise from the combination of structured social inequality and the
cultural technology of writing. It is only in relatively classless,
tribal societies that one finds relatively unitary oral cultures
(and even these are internally differentiated by age and gender).
Once writing becomes available, cultural differentiation becomes
virtually unavoidable, since writing is, as Williams observed,
‘wholly dependent on forms of specialized training, not only
. . . for producers but also, and crucially, for receivers’ (Williams,
1981, p. 93). Despite much literary-humanist and sociological
speculation to the contrary, the historical and anthropological

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