Page 184 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Postmodernism and cultural theory

CELEBRATING POSTMODERNISM: LYOTARD AND BAUDRILLARD

As a major academic event, postmodernism dates from the late
1970s, from the first publication of Lyotard’s La Condition post-
moderne, prepared originally for the Conseil des Universités of the
Government of Quebec (Lyotard, 1984). The concept was by no
means an original coinage, however. To the contrary, Lyotard’s
argument had been quite deliberately inserted into an already
existing North American discourse. As he explained: ‘the word
postmodern . . . is in current use on the American continent
among sociologists and critics’ (p. xxiii). The most important of
Lyotard’s American sources was Daniel Bell, then Professor
of Sociology at Harvard University, whose The Coming of Post-
Industrial Society (Bell, 1973) figured in the very first footnote. Bell
had argued that modernism represented a radically ‘adversary
culture’, opposed not merely to this particular society but to any
and all conceivable societies. According to Bell, the development
of the capitalist economic system had rendered its older Puritan
values obsolete, thereby unleashing an increasingly unrestrained
modernism, the simultaneous product of Hobbesian individual-
ism and corporate economics (Bell, 1976, pp. 80–1, 84). The
‘postmodernism’ of the 1960s—and this was the term he used—
had finally subverted all restraints: ‘It is a programme to erase
all boundaries, to obliterate any distinction between the self and
the external world, between man and woman, subject and object,
mind and body’ (Bell, 1977, p. 243). ‘In doctrine and cultural life-
style’, he concluded, ‘the anti-bourgeois has won . . . The difficulty
in the West...is that bourgeois society—which in its emphasis
on individuality and the self gave rise to modernism—is itself
culturally exhausted’ (pp. 250–2).

Periodising postmodernism: Lyotard and Baudrillard
Bell’s argument was in essence a translation into North American
idiom of the cultural pessimism of German Kulturkritik. Trans-
lated back into French, the debate soon acquired a more
optimistic tenor. For where Bell had found licence, Lyotard would
soon cry liberty, both meaning in effect transgression, in the sense

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