Page 190 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 181

Postmodernism and cultural theory

Bauman concluded: ‘The postmodernity/modernity opposition
focuses on the waning of certainty...grounded in the unques-
tioned hierarchy of values . . . and on the transition to a situation
characterized by a coexistence or armistice between values’
(p. 24).
The central social functions of the postwar, postmodern
western intelligentsia have, then, become primarily interpretive
rather than legislative. The novelty of this situation was registered
both in Foucault’s distinction between the ‘universal’ and
‘specific’ intellectual and in the only limited applicability of the
Gramscian distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ intel-
lectuals to the cultural sociology of the postwar West. No doubt,
there are still Gramscian traditional intellectuals at work within
the clergy or the judiciary, perhaps even within academia. No
doubt there are still Gramscian organic intellectuals: the bour-
geoisie have their economists, engineers and accountants, the
proletariat its trade union officials and labour politicians.
Gramsci, however, clearly envisaged both kinds of intellectual as
performing an essentially legislative or universal function,
whereas the dominant role of each has become primarily inter-
pretive and specific. If the changing role and self-perception of
the western intelligentsia is indeed central to this postmodernist
reorientation of cultural discourse, as Bauman argued, then the
very generality of that reorientation suggests the possibility that
postmodernist culture might have deep structural roots in some
distinctively postmodern socio-political reality.

The sociological debate: postmodernism or late modernity?
In the dominant sociological theorisations of these deep structural
roots there has been a tendency to subsume the rupture between
modernism and postmodernism into some more gradual process
by which an earlier modernity evolved into a later. Different
variants of this formulation can be observed in the work of: Ulrich
Beck, Professor of Sociology at the University of Munich;
Anthony Giddens, Director of the London School of Economics;
and Scott Lash, Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at
Goldsmiths College, London. For Beck, this latest stage is the ‘risk

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