Page 189 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

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same book was published in Britain it appeared as Post Modern Culture
with a yellow cover consisting of a photograph of a postmodernist
‘installation’ incorporating cameras, speakers, etc., complete with comic
book sound and light rays. The ‘translation’ of postmodernism as a set
of discourses addressed in America to a demographically dispersed,
university- and gallery-centre constituency for a similar though perhaps
slightly more diverse, more geographically concentrated readership in
Britain (where cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, the appeal or otherwise
of ‘Americana’, the flattening out of aesthetic and moral standards, etc.,
are still ‘hot’ issues and where there is still—despite all the factional
disputes and fragmentations of the last twenty years—a sizeable, organized
marxist left) involved the negotiation of different cultural-semantic
background expectancies.
National differences were further highlighted during the weekend
symposium at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1985
when native speakers giving papers which stressed the enabling
potentialities of the new ‘user-friendly’ communication technologies and
the gradual deregulation of the airwaves, and which celebrated popular
culture-as-post-modern-bricolage-and-play were confronted with the Gallic
anti-populism of Lyotard who declared a marked preference for the fine
arts, idealist aesthetics and the European avant garde tradition, and
demonstrated in comments made in response to the papers in the session on
‘Popular Culture and Postmodernism’ a deep, abiding suspicion for the
blandishments and commodified simplicities of ‘mass culture’ (Lyotard,
1986c).
To introduce a further nexus of distinctions, Hal Foster (1983) in his
Preface to The Anti-Aesthetic distinguishes between neo-conservative,
antimodernist and critical postmodernisms and points out that whereas
some critics and practitioners seek to extend and revitalize the modernist
project(s), others condemn modernist objectives and set out to remedy the
imputed effects of modernism on family life, moral values, etc., whilst still
others working in a spirit of ludic and/or critical pluralism endeavour to
open up new discursive spaces and subject-positions outside the confines of
established practices, the art market and the modernist orthodoxy. In this
latter ‘critical’ alternative (the one favoured by Foster) postmodernism is
defined as a positive critical advance which fractures through negation (1)
the petrified hegemony of an earlier corpus of ‘radical aesthetic’ strategies
and proscriptions, and/or (2) the pre-Freudian unitary subject which
formed the hub of the ‘progressive’ wheel of modernization and which
functioned in the modern period as the regulated focus for a range of
scientific, literary, legal, medical and bureaucratic discourses. In this
positive ‘antiaesthetic’, the critical postmodernists are said to challenge the
validity of the kind of global, unilinear version of artistic and economic-
technological development which a term like modernism implies and to