Page 207 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

‘objectivity’ the validity of which is ultimately ‘social’; in short,
that we belong to our culture very much more than it belongs to
us. The problem with any radical commodification of culture,
such as has been entailed in postmodernism, is not simply the
perennial failing of all markets—that they confer the vote not on
each person, but on each dollar, and thereby guarantee undemo-
cratic outcomes—but also a more specific failing: that the market
undermines precisely what it is that is most cultural about
culture—its sociality. The danger remains, then, that such decon-
structions of the elite/popular boundary will unwittingly
confirm the incorporative dynamics of commercial postmod-
ernism, of multinational late capitalism. Hence, Zizek’s
disturbingly astute comparison between the compulsive speech
of the obsessional neurotic and ‘all the talk about new forms of
politics’: both are ‘frantically active’, he concludes, ‘precisely in
order to ensure that something—what really matters—will not
be disturbed’. For the latter, he continues, this something is ‘the
inexorable logic of Capital’ (Zizek, 1999a, p. 354).

THE ILLUSIONS OF POSTMODERNISM

Whatever the appeal either of postmodernist sensibility in
general or of post-structuralist theory in particular, their refusal
of history remains both disabling and debilitating. For, as
Jameson quite rightly insisted, history is not a text, though it is
nonetheless inaccessible to us except in textual form (Jameson,
1981, p. 35). ‘History is what hurts’, he wrote, ‘it... sets inexorable
limits to individual as well as collective praxis . . . we may be sure
that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we
might prefer to ignore them’ (p. 102). History is also often progress,
although it is currently unfashionable to admit as much. This, too,
Jameson recognised: the mystery of the cultural past can be re-
enacted, he observed, ‘only if the human adventure is one’—only
if its apparently long-dead issues can be ‘retold within the unity
of a great collective story; only if, in however disguised and
symbolic form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental
theme... the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from

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