Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 9 Postmodernism
very act of moving up and down the televisual scale of the cable box. While watching
Twin Peaks, viewers may be overtly encouraged to move in and out of an ironic
position, but watching other television soap operas (nighttime or daytime)
involves for many viewers a similar process of oscillation in which emotional
involvement alternates with ironic detachment. Viewing perspectives are no longer
mutually exclusive, but set in perpetual alternation (347–8).
Oscillation in discursive register and generic conventions is a primary factor in many
recent television programmes. Again, the obvious examples are Desperate Housewives,
Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, and The Sopranos. The key point to understand with
regard to Twin Peaks and postmodernism is that what makes the programme different
from other television programmes is not that it produces shifting viewing positions,
but that it ‘explicitly acknowledges this oscillation and the suspended nature of television
viewing. . . . [It] doesn’t just acknowledge the multiple subject positions that
television generates; it recognises that one of the great pleasures of the televisual text is
that very suspension and exploits it for its own sake’ (348).
Umberto Eco (1984) has identified a postmodern sensibility exhibited in an awareness
of what he calls the ‘already said’. He gives the example of a lover who cannot tell
his lover ‘I love you madly’, and says instead: ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love
you madly’ (39). Given that we now live in an increasingly media-saturated world, the
‘already said’ is, as Collins (1992) observes, ‘still being said’ (348). For example, we can
identify this in the way that television, in a effort to fill the space opened up by the
growth in satellite and cable channels, recycles its own accumulated past, and that of
cinema, and broadcasts these alongside what is new in both media. 44 This does not
mean that we must despair in the face of Jameson’s postmodern ‘structure’; rather we
should think in terms of both ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ – which ultimately is always a
question of ‘articulation’ (see Chapter 4). Collins provides this example of different
strategies of articulation:
The Christian Broadcasting Network and Nickelodeon both broadcast series from
the late fifties and early sixties, but whereas the former presents these series as a
model for family entertainment the way it used to be, the latter offers them as fun
for the contemporary family, ‘camped up’ with parodic voice-overs, supergraphics,
reediting designed to deride their quaint vision of American family life, which we
all know never really existed even ‘back then’ (334).
There can be little doubt that similar things are happening in, for example, music,
cinema, advertising, fashion, and in the different lived cultures of everyday life. It is not
a sign that there has been a general collapse of the distinctions people make between,
say, high culture / low culture, past/present, history/nostalgia, fiction/reality; but it is a
sign that such distinctions (first noticed in the 1960s, and gradually more so ever since)
are becoming increasingly less important, less obvious, less taken for granted. But this
does not of course mean that such distinctions cannot be, and are not being, articulated
and mobilized for particular strategies of social distinction. But above all, we