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Contemporary Cultural Theory

example, argued that postmodernist culture was at once both
incorporated and oppositional, commodified and subversive, and
concluded by invoking a ‘postmodernism of resistance’ against
the ‘postmodernism of the “anything goes” variety’ (Huyssen,
1988, p. 220). Interestingly, he also noted how high modernism
had established itself through an opposition to mass culture,
which coded the latter ‘as feminine and inferior’ (p. 62). Hence
feminism’s contribution to an emergently postmodern ‘prob-
lematic of “otherness”’ (p. 219). Writing from a more explicitly
feminist perspective, Ann Kaplan described these twin faces of
postmodernism as, respectively, the ‘commercial’ and the
‘utopian’ (Kaplan, 1988, p. 4). In the first, the capitalist mass
market deconstructed the binary opposition between elite and
popular cultures; in the second, postmodern feminism that
between masculinity and femininity. These vastly differing
conceptions of the postmodern had coexisted in a single cultural
space, she argued, because both responded to the cultural situ-
ation of the 1960s (p. 5).

Postmodernism and posthumanism
The Janus trope is evident, too, in the debates over posthuman-
ism. For Lash is by no means alone in imagining the global
information culture as potentially ‘posthuman’. During the
second half of the twentieth century, structuralist and post-
structuralist semiologies and a range of new technologies for
re-embodiment and dis-embodiment combined so as to radically
decentre earlier humanist notions of the human. As Ihab Hassan
observed a quarter of a century ago: ‘five hundred years of
humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms
itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism’
(Hassan, 1977, p. 212). This has become an increasingly pressing
theme in recent speculation located in the various theoretical
spaces between cyberpunk and cyborgs, virtual reality and the
Internet. The best-known of these is still Simians, Cyborgs and
Women by Donna Haraway, Professor of History of Conscious-
ness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Claiming that
we already live in a posthuman era, where machine and

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