Page 21 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

contrary. Like the modernism which preceded it, postmodernism is not a
simple affirmation of the consumerist plenitude or flexible production
systems of contemporary capitalism. It in fact represents a deep alienation
from capitalism (not to mention socialism) which seems to this form of
consciousness to have lost all logic and purpose – flexible or otherwise –
and to have become a vale of meaningless confusion and vacuous sub-
jectivities. The root of this anti-capitalist alienation – frequently echoed in
both postmodernism and contemporary Marxism and especially prevalent
in anthropology – goes back to early nineteenth-century Europe, especially
to late-developing Germany. It represents a yearning, bizarre or parodic,
sentimental or menacing, farcical or tragic, for a pre-capitalist past – a
sense, often vaguely felt even among the beneficiaries of capitalism – that
the capitalist trajectory is somehow deeply inimical to their existence and
personal well-being.
Specific forms of popular and academic consciousness are not to be
linked in a mechanistic fashion to or explained by specific features of the
economy. The relationship is at one and the same time broader and more
profound. Consciousness responds spontaneously (with greater or lesser
insight) to the whole range of economic, social, political and cultural
experience (a whole way of life as a historical process) – more or less the
surface of life. The cultural, artistic and psychological edifice of modern
life is a different thing from the economic foundation on which it is
built. The economic activities and relationships which underlie these
experiences are often confined to a hidden abode. The journey from the
one to the other is circuitous and arduous. Consciousness often leaps
ahead of current experience – via imagination and foresight. The con-
voluted and complex nature of economic and social reality often leads
consciousness astray – to draw the opposite conclusions from what
really is the case. And this ‘leading astray’ is not an intellectual failure
but a result of what, shamelessly borrowing from Hegel, I call the ‘cun-
ning of reality’. The distinctive feature of consciousness remains the
capacity to see beneath surfaces, to see beyond the current and to detect
relationships and processes not immediately and spontaneously appar-
ent at first glance. But in so doing it has to outwit reality at its own game
of deception.
A classic example of this issue of the relationship of social conscious-
ness to social being is the growing individuation and emphasis on the self
in the modern Western world. A central tenet of both neo-liberalism and
risk society theory is precisely the claim that a defining feature of the
modern or postmodern West (but perhaps not modern Asia) is an enhance-
ment of individuality and reflexivity. A central characteristic of popular

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