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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 193

Postmodernism and cultural theory

the postmodern, there is no doubting the critical edge to that
fascination, as registered at the very least in the distance
between the appalled theorist and the ‘extraordinarily demoral-
izing and depressing... new global space’ he sought to theorise
(Jameson, 1991, p. 49). Nor was there much doubting the critical
vantage point from which this theorising had been mounted. One
available response to the postmodernist insistence on the discon-
nectedness of social position and cultural identity is to treat it,
not as an ontological or epistemological proposition, but as
pertaining to the period culture of a specifically postmodern stage
in human history. As Huyssen has it: ‘the waning of historical
consciousness is itself a historically explainable phenomenon’
(Huyssen, 1995, p. 9).
This is exactly the view canvassed by Jameson. Hence the
paradox that the work of this apparently postmodern thinker
should have acquired an increasingly Adornian cast, as a kind
of Kulturpessimismus for the 1990s. The paradox is more apparent
than real, however, for if Jameson has been ready to concede
the theoretical value of postmodernism and post-structuralism,
it was only ever on the condition that critical theory ‘must nec-
essarily become true again when the dreary realities of
exploitation... and the resistance to it in the form of class struggle
. . . slowly reassert themselves’ (Jameson, 1988a, p. 208). In the
absence of an effective socialist movement, there was therefore
an almost inescapable logic in Jameson’s resort to Adorno and
Horkheimer ‘to restore the sense of something grim and impend-
ing within the polluted sunshine of the shopping mall’ (Jameson,
1990, p. 248). This seems to us at least as honourably political a
response to the postmodern condition as anything in Sokal and
Bricmont.

The twin faces of postmodernism
Which takes us to the more general question of the politics of post-
modernism. Bauman observes that the postmodern condition has
two faces. This sense of Janus as the presiding god of post-
modernity has been widespread in the postmodern debate,
especially in discussions of cultural politics. Huyssen, for

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