Page 177 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

HISTORY, POLITICS AND POSTMODERNISM 165

historical differences that constitute everyday life in the contemporary
world, and too often ignore the taunting playfulness and affective
extremism (terrorism?) of postmodernists, while postmodernists are often
too willing to retreat from the theoretical and critical ground that marxism
has won with notions of articulation, hegemony and struggle. Let me try,
however briefly, to map some of the frontiers and struggles, and perhaps,
to make some suggestions about where the victories and defeats may lie. To
begin with, we need to distinguish three discursive domains which are all,
too commonly, named with the single master signifier—the post-modern:
culture, theory and history. Failing to recognize the difference has allowed
some authors to slide from one domain to the other, as if one could
confidently assume equivalences or correspondences. Of course, the
distinction itself is strategic: one also needs to theorize the relations
amongst three domains.
The most commonly discussed, if also the least interesting of these three
domains of inquiry is that of cultural practice, for in fact, it takes us no
further in our attempt to understand the contemporary social formation.
Postmodern cultural texts (whether in architecture, literature, art or film)
claim to be and in some respects, are significantly different from previous
aesthetic and communicative formations. 3 Many critics assert that such
practices entail new cutural configurations, not only within particular texts
but also across different intertextual fields. The question is, of course, how
one describes that formal difference and locates its effects. In that
sense, beginning with postmodern cultural texts seems to lead us right back
into many of the undecidable theoretical problematics of cultural studies.
For example, can we assume that a text’s ‘postmodernism’ is inscribed
upon or encoded within it? What is its relation to its social and historical
context? What are its politics? How is it inserted into and articulated with
the everyday lives of those living within its cultural spaces, however one
draws the boundaries? What is obvious is that such cultural practices are
often defined by their quite explicit opposition to particular
institutionalized definitions of modernism. Moreover, they wear their
opposition on their surfaces, letting it play with if not define their identity.
They construct themselves out of the detritus of the past—not only of pre-
modernist culture but of modernism as well—and the ‘ruins’ of
contemporary commercial culture. Does such a strategy represent a radical
break in either culture or history. I think it unlikely (and certainly too easy
a conclusion) but its powerful presence and popularity do suggest a series of
questions that must be addressed about the possibilities of communication,
opposition, elitism and self-definition.
The second site at which cultural studies and postmodernism clash is
that of theory itself, but the distance between the positions is not as great
as it appears. They share a number of fundamental commitments. Both are
antiessentialist; that is, they accept that there are no guarantees of identity