Page 183 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

postmodernism, whether celebratory or condemnatory, whether
or not themselves postmodernist, agree on the centrality of the
progressive deconstruction and dissolution of what was once,
in Bourdieu’s phrase, the ‘distinction’ between high and low
culture. Indeed, Huyssen even went so far as to locate post-
modernism quite specifically ‘after the great divide’ between
modernism and mass culture. It operates in a field of tension, he
argued, ‘between tradition and innovation, conservation and
renewal, mass culture and high art, in which the second terms
are no longer automatically privileged over the first’ (Huyssen,
1988, pp. 216–17).
A few brief examples will serve to illustrate the extent to
which this view is echoed elsewhere. For Lyotard, the post-
modern ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, or grand stories,
necessarily extended not only to the metanarratives of science
and politics, but also to that of art as enlightenment. And if art
is no longer necessarily enlightenment, then it has no special
claim to make against mere popular culture. For Baudrillard,
postmodernity is characterised by ‘the disappearance of aesthet-
ics and higher values in kitsch and hyperreality...the
disappearance of history and the real in the televisual’
(Baudrillard, 1988a, p. 101). For Bürger, postmodernism was
initiated by the failure of the historical avant-garde to subvert
from within the cultural institutions of high modernism, a failure
that resulted in the final loss of criteria for determining the
paradigmatic work of art (Bürger, 1984, p. 63) and, hence, in a
loss of criteria for distinguishing between high art and popular
non-art. For Lash, postmodernist ‘de-differentiation’ informed
the transgression ‘between literature and theory, between high
and popular culture, between what is properly cultural and
properly social’ (Lash, 1990, pp. 173–4). For Jameson, postmod-
ernism is characterised above all by ‘an effacement of the older
distinction between high and so-called mass culture’ (Jameson,
1991, p. 63). For Huyssen, postmodernism had ‘revitalized the
impetus of the historical avant-garde’, but only so as to deliver
it over to a ‘withering’ quasi-populist critique (Huyssen, 1995,
p. 17).

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