Page 205 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 196

Contemporary Cultural Theory

commodification and post-structuralists difference, we find
both, connected to each other not by any positive content, such
as the beneficence of the market, but by a negativity, that of the
prior collapse of the high culture of the traditional intelligentsia.
In itself this can easily be welcomed: neither traditional minority
culture nor avant-garde modernism is in any obvious sense
compatible with cultural democracy. But it remains an absence,
or perhaps an opening, a space in which new options might be
explored, others foreclosed, a problem rather than its resolution.
When academic cultural theory bought into structuralism and
post-structuralism, and into radically ‘structuralist’ versions of
Marxism, it effectively gave up on its more traditionally ‘cultur-
alist’ function of policing the boundaries of cultural authority.
The relatively arcane language by which the manoeuvre was
effected obscured its culturally populist import. But the import
was real enough: the only boundaries academics tend to police
these days are those of critical rigour itself, their only sacred texts
theoretical ones.
At one level, all of this seems absolutely welcome. The older
literary humanism had, by the time of its demise, ossified into
an irredeemable elitism, its public face that of a near permanent
sneer—at ‘mass culture’, at women’s writing, at foreign literature,
at creative writing, at community arts. Its version of a common
culture can best be understood as an ‘ideology’, in the most pejo-
rative of senses. But this is not the whole story. European
Romanticism in general had developed by way of reaction against
the European Enlightenment, British culturalism by way of
reaction against utilitarian political economy. And in each case,
it is the latter, rather than the former, that most properly
characterises ‘the dominant ideology’. The dominant classes and
elites in societies like ours are still very much as Romanticism
construed them: children of civilisation rather than culture,
servants of utility rather than beauty, industry rather than art. By
virtue of that very organicism that seems so reprehensibly mono-
cultural to contemporary post-Marxist, post-structuralist,
post-feminist, postmodernist sensibilities, these Romantic and
post-Romantic conceptions of culture actually did set up deep
resistances to the driving imperatives of a capitalist civilisation

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