Page 198 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 189

Postmodernism and cultural theory

critical theory as aligned with a proletarian opposition to
fascism. But from the Dialectic of Enlightenment, at least, such
emancipatory potential inhered in the immanent logic of critical
theory itself. As Jameson noted, this eventually led Adorno to a
kind of ‘temperamental and cantankerous quietism’ that proved
a disabling liability at moments of popular politicisation
(Jameson, 1990, p. 249). For Jameson himself, the 1960s had been
‘the most politicized era in modern American social history’
(Jameson, 1994, p. 68). But by the 1990s, Adorno ‘in the post-
modern’ had become ‘a joyous counter-poison and a corrosive
solvent to apply to the surface of “what is”’ (Jameson, 1990,
p. 249). Like Adorno’s, Jameson’s critical theory functions by way
of a great refusal, both of the increasingly totalised late-capital-
ist system and of the postmodernist ideologies that legitimate it.
There is thus a certain grandeur to this intransigent resistance to
the lures of commodity culture. And unlike Adorno, Jameson still
clings to the formal certainty of an eventual return to class politics.
In the meantime, however, class consciousness can exist only as
cognitive mapping; that is, only in theory.
Jameson’s central insight is contained in his dual emphasis on
globalisation and commodification. Here he captured much of
what is truly distinctive about contemporary culture. The more
commodified that culture has become, the less plausible the
intelligentsia’s erstwhile pretensions to legislative cultural
authority have appeared, both to themselves and to their
prospective audiences. As Bauman observed: ‘within the context
of a consumer culture no room has been left for the intellectual
as legislator. In the market, there is no one centre of power, nor
any aspiration to create one... There is no site from which
authoritative pronouncements could be made, and no power
resources concentrated and exclusive enough to serve as the
levers of a massive proselytizing campaign’ (Bauman, 1987,
p. 167). Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions,
whether literary-critical, anthropological or sociological, had
almost invariably envisaged culture not simply as distinct from
economy and polity, but also as itself the central source of social
cohesion: human society as such appeared inconceivable without
culture. But it is so now: postmodern late capitalism is held

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