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Postmodernism and cultural theory

modernist high culture and a new mass popular culture. The new
modernism was characterised by aesthetic self-consciousness, the
new mass culture by the rapid development of a whole range of
technically novel cultural forms, each in principle near univers-
ally available (yellow journalism, penny dreadfuls and later
paperback fiction, radio, cinema, and so on). Whenever we date
the precise beginnings of modernism, there can be no doubt that
high modernism and mass culture were roughly contemporane-
ous. However we characterise the cultural avant-garde, there can
be little doubt that both modernism and the avant-garde stood
in essentially adversarial relation, to bourgeois realism, and to
mass culture.
Bürger himself argued that bourgeois art consisted of a cele-
bration in form of the liberation of art from religion, from the
court, and eventually even from the bourgeoisie (Bürger, 1984,
pp. 46–9). Modernist art thus emerged as an autonomous social
‘institution’, the preserve and prerogative of an increasingly
autonomous intellectual class, and thereby necessarily coun-
terposed to other non-autonomous arts. As the memory of
bourgeois realism receded, it was hostility to contemporary
popular culture in particular that developed into perhaps the
most characteristic of topoi, or stock themes, in twentieth-
century intellectual life. Sometimes this hostility is explicit and
overt, as in the Leavisite opposition between mass civilisation
and minority culture (of which Eliot’s modernism was a central
instance) or the Frankfurt School’s between the culture indus-
tries and autonomous art. Sometimes it is covert, as in the
structuralist distinction between readerly and writerly texts,
the text of plaisir and the text of jouissance. Whether as de-
graded culture for the conservative intelligentsia or as
manipulated culture for the radical intelligentsia, mass culture
remained the Other, or at least an Other, of modernist high
culture.

Postmodernism and popular culture
Which brings us to postmodernism. For whatever else they
might disagree about, almost all the available theorisations of

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