Page 213 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

Chapter 9
Waiting on the end of the world?

Iain Chambers

If the 1960s can be characterized as being the decade of ‘pop’, with the
theoretical recognition of pop art, pop music and popular culture, then the
1980s might be considered the decade of ‘Post’: postmodernism, post-
structuralism, post-marxism, post-feminism. Read in this key, pop was
among the final gestures of modernism. As the closing curtain-call of the
attempt to transform the icons and tastes of popular culture into art, to
close the gap and æstheticize the everyday, it effectively signalled the
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termination of a lengthy European debate on ‘culture and society’. By the
1960s the once religious distinction between these categories was being
continually breached by the speed and success of such secular, cheap,
commercial cultural languages as cinema, television, pop music, fashion
and associated urban styles. ‘It’s not really pop art. It’s just regular…it’s
the way we are …pop life’, said Kenny Scharf. Of course, in moving from
that moment to this, from pop to post, it is easy to exaggerate and inflate
change and become a ventriloquist of stylistic circumstances; but there is,
nevertheless, a complex shift in gravity, a decidedly altered state and feel to
the present that was neither felt nor anticipated twenty or thirty years ago.
The overall constellation of thought, critical work, artistic production and
everyday life has decisively shifted and acquired new bearings in the
universe of our histories.
In a readily caricatured distinction, postmodernism apparently takes us
through pop to a beyond in which the media-induced sign invasion of the
world now spells the death of the referent. Modernism, meanwhile,
continues to stand for the epistemological wager that a sign can be
exchanged for meaning, that the image is only ‘reality’ at one remove. The
point, however, may well be not to resolve this question philosophically
but rather to explore the different possibilities that it brings together. In
other words, rather than come down on the side of the ‘real’ or the
‘simulacrum’, it might be better to force these respective concerns into a
fruitful friction and there to work the crisis that their meeting elicits.
So, I have no intention of defending some hypothetical
postmodernist project—surely far too strong and homogeneous an idea to
be ‘postmodernist’?—but prefer instead to circulate among the perspectives,