Page 189 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

or, in this case, ‘quasi-elite’ cultures are by no means in themselves
peculiarly postmodernist: as we have seen, parodic borrowings
from elite culture were a characteristic feature of the medieval
‘carnivalesque’ (Bakhtin, 1965). Postmodernism proper is neither
a popular culture nor, in any sense that Leavis or even Williams
might have understood, a common culture. Postmodernism
might well ‘quote’ from mass culture, but it is not in itself a
popular culture: Campbell’s soup is indeed a mass commodity,
but Andy Warhol’s famous oil and silk-screen prints of
Campbell’s soup cans are not. What postmodernism provides
us with, then, is an index of the range and extent of the western
intelligentsia’s own internal crisis, its collective crisis of faith in
its own previously proclaimed redemptive functions, whether
conservative or adversarial.

The social functions of intellectuals
Historically, most cultural institutions have been staffed by
Gramscian ‘traditional’ intellectuals. But their pretensions to
cultural authority have also been replicated by counter-cultural
intelligentsias, such as those associated in the early twentieth
century with both the literary and artistic avant-garde and the
revolutionary political party. It is the collapse of such pretensions,
whether traditional, avant-garde or vanguardist, that most
clearly marks the moment of postmodernism. Certain aspects of
this collective crisis of faith were no doubt very specific: to the
European intellectual confronted by America; to the literary intel-
lectual confronted by the mass media; to the male intellectual
confronted by the rise of feminism. But their sum added up to a
Jamesonian ‘cultural dominant’, rather than to any particular
literary or artistic style. Indeed, the effort to define a distinctively
postmodernist style serves only to remind us of the latter’s deeply
derivative relationship to high modernism. It is the general crisis
of faith, rather than any particular set of cultural techniques,
that is truly defining. Here, Zygmunt Bauman’s distinction
between the role of the intellectual as legislator and as interpreter,
and his account of how the latter function progressively displaces
the former, becomes instructive (Bauman, 1992, pp. 1–24). As

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