Page 199 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 190

Contemporary Cultural Theory

together not by culture, understood as a normative value system,
but rather by the market.
As Jameson writes: ‘ideologies in the sense of codes and
discursive systems are no longer particularly determinant...
ideology... has ceased to be functional in perpetuating and
reproducing the system’ (Jameson, 1991, p. 398). In short, post-
modern intellectual culture is at once both peculiarly normless
and peculiarly hedonistic. The hedonism arises very directly from
out of the commodity cultures of affluence, as they impinge on
the wider society, and on the intelligentsia in particular. The
normlessness, however, might well have its origins elsewhere: on
the one hand, in a recurring apocalyptic motif within postwar
culture, which must bear some more or less direct relation to the
threat of nuclear extinction; and on the other, in the radically inter-
nationalising nature of postwar society and culture, which
progressively detached erstwhile national intelligentsias from
the national cultural ‘canons’ of which they had hitherto been the
custodians.

THE POLITICS OF POSTMODERNISM

Early in 1996 the journal Social Text published ‘Transgressing the
Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity’, by Alan Sokal, Professor of Physics at
New York University (Sokal, 1996). Supposedly a serious
contribution to a special issue on ‘Science Wars’, the article was
actually an elaborate hoax, intended to poke fun at postmodern
epistemological relativism. A brief quotation should suffice to
suggest its tone: ‘The teaching of science and mathematics must
be purged of its authoritarian and elitist characteristics, and the
content of these subjects enriched by incorporating the insights
of the feminist, queer, multiculturalist and ecological critiques’
(p. 230). Sokal later collaborated with Jean Bricmont, Professor
of Mathematics at the University of Louvain in Belgium, in a
book-length critique of what they termed ‘postmodern philos-
ophers’ abuse of science’, published in French in 1997, in English
a year later.

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