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Contemporary Cultural Theory

By ‘postmodernism’, we refer to the kind of cultural theory
that has sought to represent such differences as testimony to the
peculiar novelty of a contemporary ‘postmodern condition’.
Where utilitarianism, culturalism, critical theory, semiology and
even difference theory each represent a distinctive type of cultural
theory, each with its own characteristic core concepts—utility,
culture, ideology, signification, difference—postmodernism, by
contrast, remains not so much a kind of theory as a particular
question posed to each of the other kinds. The question, of course,
is whether contemporary western society has undergone a trans-
formation in its culture and political economy so far-reaching as
to mark the end of modernity as such, and the beginning of some-
thing that might properly be deemed ‘post-modern’. Stated thus,
the postmodern question radically reproblematises the whole of
contemporary cultural theory, for each of these other traditions
is, in some significant sense, a characteristically modern cultural
construct. Utilitarianism and culturalism, Marxism and sociology,
structuralism and psychoanalysis, equality feminism and anti-
imperialist nationalism are all obviously such. And insofar as
structuralism remains implicated in post-structuralism, equality
feminism in difference feminism, anti-imperialism in postcolo-
nialism, these too might turn out to be less postmodern than they
at first appear. In chapters 6 and 7 we move to a discussion, not
simply of what cultural theory has been to date, but of what it
might need to become for the future. The book’s concluding
chapter is devoted to a particularly important aspect of this
debate: the argument over whether or not there remains a proper
place for any kind of cultural critique, as distinct from cultural
policy advice, in a society and culture increasingly saturated by
market ideologies.
The first Australian edition of Contemporary Cultural Theory
was published in 1991, a second (British) edition in 1994, a Korean
translation of the British edition in 1996. Both earlier editions were
written by Andrew Milner. This third international edition has
been fully revised and rewritten by Andrew Milner and Jeff
Browitt. Chapters 1, 5 and 7 are almost entirely new; chapters 2,
3, 4 and 6 have been very extensively revised.

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