Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 9 Postmodernism
the world of the everyday to the realm of ‘affirmative’ culture. Like Marx and Engels
(1957) on religion, Marcuse (1968b) argues that culture makes an unbearable condition
bearable by soothing the pain of existence.
One of the decisive social tasks of affirmative culture is based on this contradiction
between the insufferable mutability of a bad existence and the need for happiness
in order to make such an existence bearable. Within this existence the resolution
can be only illusory. And the possibility of a solution rests precisely on the character
of artistic beauty as illusion. . . . But this illusion has a real effect, producing
satisfaction . . . [in] the service of the status quo (118–24).
Something that produces satisfaction in the service of the status quo does not sound
like something a Marxist would want to regret coming to an end. Moreover, does its
demise really block, as Jameson claims, the transition to a socialist society? It might in
fact be possible to argue just the opposite case.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001) share some of Jameson’s analysis of the
postmodern, but unlike Jameson they recognize the possibility of agency.
Today it is not only as a seller of labour-power that the individual is subordinated
to capital, but also through his or her incorporation into a multitude of other
social relations: culture, free time, illness, education, sex and even death. There is
practically no domain of individual or collective life which escapes capitalists relations.
But this ‘consumer’ society has not led to the end of ideology, as Daniel Bell
announced, nor to the creation of a one-demensional man, as Marcuse feared. On
the contrary, numerous new struggles have expressed resistance against the new
forms of subordination, and this from within the heart of the new society (161).
Laclau and Mouffe also refer to ‘the new cultural forms linked to the expansion of the
means of mass communication. These . . . make possible a new mass culture which . . .
profoundly shake[s] traditional identities. Once again, the effects here are ambiguous,
as along with the undeniable effects of massification and uniformization, this mediabased
culture also contains powerful elements for the subversion of inequalities’ (163).
This does not mean that there has necessarily been an increase in ‘material’ equality.
Nevertheless,
the cultural democratization which is the inevitable consequence of the action of
the media permit the questioning of privileges based upon older forms of status.
Interpellated as equals in their capacity as consumers, even more numerous groups
are impelled to reject the real inequalities which continue to exist. This ‘democratic
consumer culture’ has undoubtedly stimulated the emergence of new struggles
which have played an important part in the rejection of old forms of subordination,
as was the case in the United States with the struggle of the black movement
for civil rights. The phenomenon of the young is particularly interesting, and
it is no cause for wonder they should constitute a new axis for the emergence of