Page 209 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 200

Contemporary Cultural Theory

a new ‘“post-modernist” establishment’ which ‘takes human
inadequacy...as self-evident’; and that its deep structures had
already been transferred into effectively popular cultural forms
in film, TV and fiction (p. 141). The work of monopolising both
corporations and elite intellectuals, ‘these debased forms of
an anguished sense of human debasement... have become a
widely distributed “popular” culture that is meant to confirm
both its own and the world’s destructive inevitabilities’
(pp. 141–2). That there are resistances to this culture went without
saying for a thinker as fundamentally optimistic as Williams. But
these are more obviously present in popular life itself, in the ‘very
general area of jokes and gossip, of everyday singing and dancing,
of occasional dressing-up and extravagant outbursts of colour’
(p. 146), than in the mass media.
A second site of cultural resistance was, of course, the radical
intelligentsia. But as early as 1983, Williams was already deeply
sceptical of the type of ‘pseudo-radical’ intellectual practice in
which a nominally revolutionary radicalism is turned back into
the confusions of ‘bourgeois subjectivism’ by ‘the negative struc-
tures of post-modernist art’ (p. 145). In The Politics of Modernism
he would state the case much more forcefully:

Are we now informed enough, hard enough, to look for our
own double edges? Should we not look, implacably, at those
many formations, their works and their theories, which are
based practically only on their negations and forms of
enclosure against an undifferentiated culture and society
beyond them?... Can theory not help in its refusal of the
rationalizations which sustain the negations, and in its
determination to probe actual forms, actual structures of
feeling, actually lived and desired relationships, beyond the
easy labels of radicalism which even the dominant institutions
now incorporate or impose? (Williams, 1989, pp. 175–6).

To affirm as much, it is clear, would be to break decisively with
the predominantly postmodernist cultural forms, and their vari-
ously post-structuralist and post-Marxist theoretical legitimations,
which still construct much of the radical intelligentsia in the
image of Williams’ ‘New Conformists’.

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