Page 216 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

204 IAIN CHAMBERS

blocked our passage to the recognition of other realities. At this point the
‘collapse of the real’ need not necessarily cast us into a mournful solipism,
for it can also lead us out of the hall of mirrors peopled with Eurocentric
reflections towards the disruption of previous enclosures and the reception
of a wider horizon.
The idea of a neat (epistemological) break between modernism and
postmodernism is, of course, the figment of an apocalyptic imagination.
Many tendencies that today are nominated in the postmodern condition—
from the languages of pastiche and collage to the interruption and
aesthetics of shock and alterity—were clearly also central to modernism.
To argue in this manner, with a commitment to a linear perception of
change and ‘progress’ would surely be at odds with a postmodernist critique.
It might be better to think rather in terms of a shift in the constellation.
The same languages, the same tendencies and techniques, acquire a different
configuration when viewed from another perspective. The stars do not
disappear, but the constellation changes shape. The power of illumination
cast by individual planets and suns sometimes wanes, elsewhere increases.
They remain, the universe is there, but the knowledge we have of it is
neither obvious nor merely accumulative.
To search for a precise ‘break’ is futile. Nevertheless, among the
preliminary moments that undoubtedly made a major internal contribution
to shifting the axes of the critical constellation that we in the West have
inherited are the decades around 1900. That is when in Europe the naive
factuality of realism was deliberately sabotaged as language and
representation broke down and the avant-gardes emerged to tour their ruins:
in the visual arts, in writing, in music, in theatre. The discourse on and of
psychoanalysis that emerged in those years was perhaps the sharpest
recognition of a reality in which the apparent and rationally received is
always shadowed by an ‘other’, by an unconscious that haunts the
etymological marriage of criticism with crisis, with semantic breakdown
and the limits of meaning. To this disruptive process is to be added the
growing intrusion of the previously ignored pleasures, possibilities and
provocation of urban popular culture as the present century advances: ‘the
advent of that new era designated in Finnegans Wake by the letters HCE:
Here Comes Everybody’. 5
Until quite recently popular culture has lacked a ‘serious’ discourse. It
was invariably disassociated from intellectual life, usually considered its
demonic antithesis, and so was completely underrepresented in theory,
except by negation; in other words, it was not ‘culture’. But the experiences
of the modern city and the languages of popular music, cinema and
television, together with the metropolitan cycles of fashion and style,
produced subjects who appropriated and transformed the world they
inhabited without the approval of institutional mandarins. This divided
sense of culture—as a minimum, ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’—deepened to the point