Page 206 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 197

Postmodernism and cultural theory

that was, in its dominant modes, utilitarian, competitive, acquis-
itive and individualistic.

Culture, economics and politics
Romantic and post-Romantic culturalisms envisaged culture not
simply as separate from economy and polity, but also as in itself
the central source of social cohesion: society was inconceivable
without culture. They also, in one way or another, counterposed
the claims of culture, understood as a repository of superior
values, to utilitarian capitalist civilisation, understood as driven
by the dynamics of profitable exchange. In these terms, post-
modernism represents a triumph of civilisation over culture even
in its utopian aspects. For it has been the commodity cultures of
the market, rather than the alternative communities of the new
social movements that have sustained the most explicitly
commercial of postmodernisms and the radicalised cultures of
difference. Let us be clear what is at stake here. Any society will
possess some institutional arrangement or another for the regu-
lation of symbolic artefacts and practices; in this sense, society is
inconceivable without culture. But these institutions might
themselves be either ‘political’, based on the ultimate threat of
coercion wielded by the state; or ‘economic’, organised through
commodity exchange in a more or less (normally less) competi-
tive market; or ‘cultural’, in the ‘culturalist’ sense, based on
theoretically (though often not actually) consensual arrangements
for the generation of authoritative, but not in fact politically
coercive, judgements of value.
Official Communist aesthetics provided us with an extreme
instance of the first, contemporary postmodernism the second.
But most cultures have been much more properly ‘cultural’. The
old literary humanist common culture was neither common nor
consensual: most people were very effectively excluded from its
deliberations on grounds of lack of taste. But its rhetoric did
capture an important part of what many of us still experience as
the most basic of truths about our culture: that our art, our
religion, our morals, our knowledge, our science, are not simply
matters of private revealed preference, but rather possess an

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