Page 145 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ON POSTMODERNISM AND ARTICULATION 133

epoch but rather the accentuation of certain important tendencies in the
culture of the overdeveloped ‘West’ which, if we under stand the complex
histories of modernism properly, have been in play in a highly uneven way
since modernism emerged.
Now we come to postmodernism and what I want to know is: is
postmodernism a global or a ‘western’ phenomenon? Is postmodernism the
word we give to the rearrangement, the new configuration, which many of
the elements that went into the modernist project have now assumed? Or is
it, as I think the postmodernist theorists want to suggest, a new kind of
absolute rupture with the past, the beginning of a new global epoch
altogether? This is not merely a formal question, of where to place the
break. If you are within the same epoch—the one which opens with the age
of imperialism, mass democracy, mass consumption and mass culture from
about 1880–1920—you have to expect that there will be continuities and
transformations as well as ruptures and breaks.
Let’s take the postmodernist argument about the so-called collapse or
implosion of ‘the real’. Three-quarters of the human race have not yet
entered the era of what we are pleased to call ‘the real’. Furthermore, even
within the West, ever since the development of modern mass media, and
their introduction on a mass scale into cultural production, and their
impact on the audiences for cultural products, we have witnessed the
undermining of the absolutism of ‘the real’ of the great discourses of
realism, and the familiar realist and rationalist guarantees, the dominance
of certain types of representational form, etc. I don’t mean to argue that
the new discourses and relationships between these things, which is in
essence what we called ‘modernism’, are the same in 1980 as they were in
1900. But I don’t know that with ‘postmodernism’ we are dealing with
something totally and fundamentally different from that break at the turn
of the century. I don’t mean to deny that we’ve gone through profound
qualitative changes between then and now. There are, therefore, now some
very perplexing features to contemporary culture that certainly tend to
outrun the critical and theoretical concepts generated in the early
modernist period. We have, in that sense, to constantly update our theories
and to be dealing with new experiences. I also accept that these changes
may constitute new subject-positions and social identities for people. But I
don’t think there is any such absolutely novel and unified thing as the
postmodern condition. It’s another version of that historical amnesia
characteristic of American culture—the tyranny of the New.
I recognize, experientially or ideologically, what people mean when they
point to this ‘condition’. But I see it much more as one emergent trend or
tendency amongst others—and still not fully crystallized out. For example,
there is a very interesting film called Wetherby, written by the English
playwright, David Hare, which is, formally, a very conventional film about
a middle-aged woman (played by Vanessa Redgrave) who teaches in a