Page 208 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 199

Postmodernism and cultural theory

a realm of Necessity’ (p. 19). Orwell’s ‘struggle of the gradually
awakening common people against the lords of property’ (Orwell,
1970, p. 305) is but one local instance of this same single human
adventure. So too was Williams’ long revolution, simultaneously
an industrial revolution, a democratic revolution, a revolution in
the social relations of class, and in the extension of culture.

Williams on postmodernism
In his original formulations, Williams almost certainly erred on
the side of evolutionism, in the sense of both an excessive reliance
on the inevitability of gradualism and an over-confident expec-
tation of continuing progress. But the dismal political failings of
the British Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, and the
darkly utilitarian rationalisms of the Conservative governments
that succeeded them, provoked a growing awareness that: ‘If
there are no easy answers there are still available and discover-
able hard answers’ (Williams, 1983, pp. 268–9). Williams’ two
major works of the 1980s, his 1983 reworking of the long revo-
lution analysis, Towards 2000, and his last unfinished work, The
Politics of Modernism, both quite explicitly addressed the cultural
politics of postmodernity. They both attempted to reformulate the
original culturalist project, its aspiration to community and
culture as a whole way of life, by way of a critique both of
modernism and of postmodernism, a critique that rejected—in
principle, in theory and in practice—the antithesis between mass
civilisation and minority culture without becoming trapped in the
cultural logic of commodification.
In The Long Revolution itself, as in Culture and Society, Williams
had respectfully but determinedly aired his differences with the
guardians of the old minority culture. By Towards 2000, he
had become much more dismissive: ‘There are very few absolute
contrasts left between a “minority culture” and “mass com-
munications”’; ‘many minority institutions and forms have
adapted, even with enthusiasm, to modern corporate capitalist
culture’ (pp. 134, 140). Moreover, Williams was insistent that
the older modernisms, which once threatened to destabilise
the certainties of bourgeois life, had become transformed into

199