Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

and more difficult to find, as Pavarotti tops the charts, Gorecki outsells most of the acts
on Top of the Pops, and Premier League football is, in many instances, as expensive as,
say, ballet or opera.
Perhaps the most significant thing about postmodernism for the student of popular
culture is the dawning recognition that there is no absolute categorical difference
between high and popular culture. This is not to say that one text or practice might not
be ‘better’ (for what / for whom, etc., must always be decided and made clear) than
another text or practice. But it is to say that there are no longer any easy reference
points, to which we can refer, and which will automatically preselect for us the good
from the bad. Some might regard such a situation (or even the description of such a
situation) with horror – the end of Standards. On the contrary, without easy recourse
to fixed categories of value, it calls for rigorous, if always contingent, standards, if our
task is to separate the good from the bad, the usable from the obsolete, the progressive
from the reactionary. As John Fekete (1987) points out,
By contrast [to modernism], postmodernism may be at last ready – or may, at least,
represent the transition to a readiness – unneurotically, to get on without the
Good-God-Gold Standards, one and all, indeed without any capitalised Standards,
while learning to be enriched by the whole inherited inventory once it is transferred
to the lower case. . . . We need to believe and enact the belief that there are
better and worse ways to live the pluralism of value. To see all cows as the same
colour would truly amount to being lost in the night. But the prospect of learning
to be at ease with limited warranties, and with the responsibility for issuing them,
without the false security of inherited guarantees, is promising for a livelier, more
colourful, more alert, and, one hopes, more tolerant culture that draws enjoyment
from the dappled relations between meaning and value (17).
Fekete’s point is not significantly different from the argument made by Susan Sontag
(1966) at the birth of the postmodern ‘new sensibility’:
The new sensibility is defiantly pluralistic; it is dedicated both to an excruciating
seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia. It is also extremely history-conscious;
and the voracity of its enthusiasms (and of the supercession of these enthusiasms)
is very high-speed and hectic. From the vantage point of this new sensibility, the
beauty of a machine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a painting
by Jasper Johns, of a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the personalities and music
of the Beatles is equally accessible (304).
The global postmodern
The global postmodern 203
One way in which the world is said to be becoming postmodern is in its increasing
globalization. Perhaps the dominant view of globalization, especially in discussions of