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Postmodernism and cultural theory

the representable’ (p. 211). It goes without saying that we are all,
Baudrillard included, a part of the masses (p. 212).
By and large, contemporary cultural criticism has found
Lyotard’s celebration of postmodernity much more interesting
than Bell’s indictment. But note their common origins in a North
American, rather than European, perception of the postmodern
as at once uniquely contemporary and uniquely transgressive.
Lyotard’s various accounts of the postmodern were stories told
by a Frenchman, it is true, but told in the first place to Canadi-
ans. These American connotations have persisted, most obviously
in the sense of the American present as an anticipation of Europe’s
near future. So, for Baudrillard, the Americans ‘were a marginal
transcendence of that Old World’, but ‘are today its new, eccen-
tric centre . . . It will do us no good to worry our poor heads over
this. In Los Angeles, Europe has disappeared’ (Baudrillard, 1988a,
p. 81). Which suggests that no matter how French its theoretical
accents, postmodernism remains peculiarly visible from a New
World, extra-European vantage point. Lyotard’s tales were also,
however, grand narratives of dissolution, bespeaking a political
and cultural history more fraught than those endured by the
European colonies of settlement in the Americas and Australa-
sia. Modernity was thus quite specifically European, its
transcendental illusions explicitly those of Hegel and Marx, its
terrors those of Stalin and Hitler. Postmodernity is thus to moder-
nity as the New World is to the Old, as California is to France,
but also as the Californianisation of France and the Disneyfication
of Paris.

POSTMODERNISM AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA

Whichever account of postmodernism we adopt, we should note
that what is being charted is primarily an endogenous trans-
formation, internal to post-elite culture itself, rather than to any
wider, mass or popular culture. Postmodernism has doubtless
entered the vocabulary of popular style, much as did French exis-
tentialism, for example, in the years immediately after the Second
World War (Heller, 1990). But such popular borrowings from elite

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