Page 192 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 183

Postmodernism and cultural theory

in relation to the pluralisation of values. More recently, however,
he has tended to gloss this pluralism as freedom. Postmodern
men and women, he argues, have:
exchanged a portion of their possibilities of security for a portion of
happiness. The discontents of modernity arose from a kind of
security which tolerated too little freedom in the pursuit of
individual happiness. The discontents of postmodernity arise
from a kind of freedom of pleasure-seeking which tolerates too
little individual security (Bauman, 1997, p. 3).

That a Jewish exile from Communist Poland should read total-
itarianism as ‘thoroughly modern’ (p. 12) is barely surprising
(cf. Bauman, 1989). But, as with Adorno and Foucault, this under-
standing of modernity radically underestimates the difference
between modern liberal democracies, no matter how flawed, and
their totalitarian adversaries.
That Bauman should then read postmodernity as an ethical
opportunity is similarly unsurprising. He is, of course, right to
insist that ‘postmodernity is the moral person’s bane and chance at the
same time’; that ‘which of the two faces of the postmodern condition
will turn out to be its lasting likeness, is itself a moral question’
(Bauman, 1995, p. 8). But this was also true of modernity, and in
both instances the question might be construed with equal plau-
sibility to be political, rather than moral. The difference between
modernity and postmodernity surely cannot be read as that
between the differential availabilities either of moral choice or,
still less, freedom and security. For security is a kind of freedom
and freedom a kind of security. What changed was not so much
the mix between the one and the other, but rather the social distri-
bution of both, globally and nationally. At one level, Bauman
knows this: he writes wisely that, as ‘flawed consumers’, the poor
‘are the new “impure”...redundant—“truly objects out of
place”’ (Bauman, 1997, p. 14). But he prefers to think in terms of
patterns of individual choice, rather than in terms of the social
structures that determine those patterns.
At this structural level, the crucial issues are surely global-
isation, on the one hand, and universal commodification, on the
other. The fate of the avant-garde, and the concomitant shift from

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