X - Thompson - Social Pluralism and Post-Modernity

Thompson, Kenneth. 1992. “Social Pluralism and Postmodernity.
” Pp221–255 in Modernity and Its

Futures, edited by S. Hall, D. Held, and T. McGrew. UK: Polity Press.
SOCIAL PLURALISM AND

POST-MODERNITY
Kenneth Thompson
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 222
2 POST-MODERNISM ------------------------------
226
�
3 POST-MODERNISM AS THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE

CAPITALISM 231
3. 1 Culture and economy 231

3.2 Culture and politics 235
4 REJECTIONS OF POST-MODERNISM 237
5 RECONSTRUCTIONS IN POST-MODERNITY OR NEW TIMES 239
6 POST-MODERNITY: CONSUMPTION AND APPEARANCES 243
7 NEW CONNECTIONS OF CONSTRUCTIVE

POST-MODERNISM 247
8 CONCLUSION 252
REFERENCES 254
READING
Reading A: The condition of postmodernity 256

222 MODERNITY AND ITS FUTURES
1 INTRODUCTION
The first half of the twentieth century was dominated by

Modernism - a movement that rejected the legacy of the past, that
was caught up in the early enthusiasm for technological progress,
and that sought to create the world anew. It accompanied and may
even be seen as the cultural equivalent of the Russian Revolution.
Rejecting tradition, it was the culture of innovation and change ...
Fifty years later, however, by the second half of the century, this
dramatic, daring and innovative trend had become the cultural
norm accepted by Western Establishments ... The revolutionary
impulses that had once galvanized politics and culture had clearly
become sclerotic. The Brave New World was in retreat. In its plact
has emerged a new movement that seeks to recover tradition, a
world that seems to prefer stability to change. Just as the whole
socialist idea has gone into retreat, so too the great Modernist
project has been largely abandoned. Into this vacuum steps
Postmodernism, an eclectic movement of parody and pastiche that
fits happily into a world where conservation has become the rage,
where new pubs can be built with Victorian fittings, where
Modernist tower blocks are replaced with 'vernacular' retreats
the archaic ... Postmodernism, of course, can also be portrayed in
progressive light. Some advocates of the Postmodern believe
Modernism to have been a phallocentric, imperialist affair. In this
light, Postmodernism appears as a form of liberation, a rraJ�memell
movement in which a hundred flowers may bloom. Such people
might also argue that while Modernism was the product of a
particular Western culture, Postmodernism heralds the rec:ogn�n01
of a plurality of cultures.
(Richard Gott, 1986)
The above quotation is from Richard Gott's article 'The crisis of

contemporary culture', which introduced The Guardian's three-day
major series Modernism and Post-modernism in December, 1986.
Clearly this newspaper thought the subject of an alleged cultural shift
from modernism to post-modernism sufficiently important for it to
devote many pages and several issues to the subject. The reason it
considered important is indicated by the sub-heading: 'Why did the
revolutionary movement that lit up the early decades of the century
fizzle out? In a major series, Guardian critics analyse late twentieth
century malaise' (Gott, 1986, p.10). The subsequent articles made it
even clearer that the cultural 'malaise' represented by the shift from
modernism to post-modernism was regarded as symptomatic of a
social and political malaise.
If post-modernism had simply been about a change in cultural styles

architecture, films, painting and novels, it is unlikely that it would
merited such attention. But, as Gott suggests, most of those who write
about the culture of post-modernism believe that, for good or ill, it is
related in some way to the emergence of a new social epoch of post·
CHAPTER 5 SOCIAL PLURALISM AND POST-MODERNITY 223
modernity. Some of the related social developments have already been

discussed in previous chapters: the collapse of communism and the loss
of confidence, not only in revolutionary Marxism, but also in social
planning as epitomized by post-war housing estates and tower blocks;
the alleged economic changes from mass production to flexible
specialization, and from mass consumption patterns to lifestyle niches
in the marketplace, with a consequent fragmentation of social classes;
the perception that the modernist ideas of technological progress and
economic growth may be the cause of problems of pollution, waste and
wars, rather than the solutions; the decline of the politics of party,
parliament and trades unions, and the growth of 'micropolitics' marked
by struggles over power at the institutional and local levels, or over
single issues.
Demolition of post-war residential tower blocks in Hackney, London
To these possibly epochal changes might be added one that is

particularly relevant to the cultural sphere, although it is also involved
in the economic, political and social changes, and that is the
astonishing growth and pervasiveness of the mass media of
communication, particularly the visual (or figural) media of film,
television and graphic design. If we are entering a post-modern age,
then one of its most distinctive characteristics is a loss of rational and
social coherence in favour of cultural images and social forms and
identities marked by fragmentation, multiplicity, plurality and
indeterminacy.
Do we need post-modern social theories to evaluate these changes, or is

there nothing happening that could not be encompassed by theories
developed to explain the formations of modernity? (The issue of
whether post-modernism marks the end of the 'Enlightenment project'

is discussed further in Chapter 7 of this book.) As we will see, the
theorists to be discussed take different positions on this question. In the
end, the neo-Marxists, Harvey and Jameson, believe that post-modernist
developments can be incorporated into a renovated Marxist framework.
In contrast, Foucault and Baudrillard eventually proclaimed that all
encompassing theories such as Marxism were incapable of explaining
current developments, although both were uncomfortable with the label
'post-modernist' to describe their positions (perhaps in keeping with the
fragmentation and diversity of post-modern culture). This chapter will
focus on four issues:
1 Is there a distinctive cultural trend towards post-modernism?

2 Is post-modernism related to economic developments? For example,
can post-modernity be explained as the latest stage in the
development of capitalism?
3 What are the political implications of post-modernism? Does it mark
the end of class-based politics and the emergence of a new kind of
politics?
4 Is post-modernism the cultural expression of an increasing social
pluralism that warrants its description as 'post-modernity'- a new
social epoch?
The discussion of these issues is structured as follows:
Section 2 considers David Harvey's description (Reading A) of the

culture of post-modernism and his account of the ways in which
various theorists have attempted to relate it to economic, political and
social processes. Harvey's own position is that of a neo-Marxist who
accepts that certain cultural trends have gathered pace to such an exteut
that they merit the label 'post-modernist', but believes these can
ultimately be explained as the result of developments within the
capitalist economic system.
Section 3 examines one of the most influential attempts to relate post·

modernist culture to political, economic and social developments, that
of another nee-Marxist, Frederic Jameson, and his thesis of 'post
modernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism'. Jameson maintains t
that there is a distinctive culture of post-modernism, but that it is a
nothing more than the cultural logic of the latest stage of capitalism. n
admits that the cultural logic of post-modernism may be difficult to aJ
on to the structural developments of capitalism, but he still belie\res ir.
will be possible once Marxism has assimilated some of the wcu1"'"""" ar
insightS generated by CUltural analyStS and the neW SOcial mi"'UAnll�ftb Ul
such as feminism. For him, post-modern culture does not necessltn.IJ' in,
herald a new epoch:
Se
po
The post-modern may well in that sense be little more than a
of
transitional period between two stages of capitalism, in
anc
earlier forms of the economic are in the process of being
wn
restructured on a global scale, including the older forms of
the
and its traditional organizational institutions and concepts. That a

new international proletariat (taking forms we cannot yet imagine)
will re-emerge from this convulsive upheaval it needs no prophet
to predict; we ourselves are still in the trough, however, and no
one can say how long we will stay there.
(Jameson, 1991, p.417)
In the end, therefore, despite his acknowledgement that there is a

culture of post-modernism and his appreciation of the perspectives
brought by new political movements and a plurality of social groups, it
appears that he still believes in the subordination of these to the Marxist
categories of class analysis. Despite this, as discussed in Section 4, he is
criticized by a more orthodox Marxist such as Callinicos for conceding
too much to those who maintain that we are entering a new cultural and
social epoch, and who claim that overarching theories (or
metanarratives) such as Marxism cannot do justice to the diversity and
fragmentation of post-modernity.
Section 5 considers the case for a constructive view of post-modern

politics as 'New Times'. It focuses on the argument of Hebdige, who,
along with others, such as Laclau and Mouffe, claims that the new
social movements point to the complexity of the contemporary social
field and the range of identities on offer, which are irreducible to class
positions and the logic of production.
Section 6 looks at Baudrillard's account of the distinctive culture of the

present era, which seems to support the case for seeing post-modernity
as a new epoch, even though he rejects the post-modernist culture. He
emphasizes the impact of the mass media in producing a culture based
on images or copies (simulations) in which it is no longer possible to
distinguish the 'real' from the copy that 'improves on the real' (the
'byperreal'). Having begun by criticizing the consumer economy from a
Marxist perspective, Baudrillard has rapidly lost faith in such attempts
to penetrate beneath the cultural surface to find the causal explanation
in an economic base. Indeed, he seems to have come to the conclusion
that it is impossible to develop general theories or political strategies in
the new epoch. This is a more extreme position than that of Foucault,
another theorist who has also been singled out as a source of post
modernist theory. Foucault rejected totalizing theories such as Marxism
and psychoanalysis as reductionist and coercive in their practical
implications, prefering microanalyses of the many different discourses
and institutional practices through which power was exercised. But,
unlike Baudrillard, he continued to believe that such analyses could
inform positive political strategies of resistance to power.
Section 7 turns to a selection of more positive or constructive views of

post-modernism and post-modernity. As Richard Gott noted, advocates
of the post-modern believe that modernism tended towards intellectual
and political domination, often in the name of science and progress,
whereas post-modernism can appear as a form of liberation, in which
the fragmentation and plurality of cultures and social groups allow a
hundred flowers to bloom. The perspectives of minority groups- for

example, ethnic groups, feminists, gays, sects and cults- are tolerated,
and post-modernism may even give rise to unexpected combinations
and pastiches of cultural codes and djscourses that modernism would
have rusmissed as 'irrational', 'mindless eclecticism' , or 'politically
unsound'. (Modernist critics of post-modernism believe that those
charges are still justified.) Some examples of these post-modern social
forms and perspectives are examined: Judith Stacey's study of post
modern family regimes in California; 'New Age' religions and other
efforts to forge new individual and group identities by combining
seemingly disparate discourses.
These rufferent figures are therefore taken as representing different

facets of the debate on post-modernism and adopt different positions
towards it. Both Harvey and Jameson, who prov ide vivid descriptive
accounts of the phenomenon, in the end, wish to retain a neo-Marxist
accotmt of developments in 'late capitalism' as providing the best
explanatory key to what they acknowledge are the significant cultural
trends which post-modernism has set in motion.
Callinicos offers a 'root and branch' rebuttal of post modernism's

-
claims, and reaffirms the primacy of class politics from a classical

Marxist position. Bauruillard believes post-modernism signals the
'death of meaning' in modern culture but, though he is deeply
pessimistic about it, he argues that there is no alternative and delights
in offering an 'extreme' account of post-modern culture. Hebruge,
Laclau, Mouffe and the New Times theorists take a more positive view
of the social and cultural pluralism and political poss ibilities which
post-modernism opens up. And the 'New Age' movements examined at
the end of the chapter inhabit the post-modern break-up of modem
culture but are seeking new, 'post-modern' forms of community and
belief to put in the place of 'the end of the grand narratives'.
My own position in these debates is one which welcomes the opening

created by the concept of post-modernity, because it allows us to focus
on some of the diverse and contradictory trends which were glossed
over by sociological theories of modernity and modernization and by
orthodox Marxist theories that stressed economic determinism and class
polarization. This position does not prejudge the issues to be I,Ul.L�Ju''"""'
here of whether post-modernity is a distinct period and cultural
configu ration, and exactly how it is related to economic and political
developments.
2 POST-MODERNISM
There are many ways of trying to describe what is meant by post

modernism. Post-modernism is the very loose term used to describe
new aesthetic cultural and intellectual forms and practices which are
emerging in the 1 980s and 1 990s. As the word suggests, 'post-
CHAPTER 5 SOCIAL PLURALISM ANO POST-MODERNITY 227
modernism' follows, and is rapidly replacing, modernism, the term used

to describe the cultural styles and movements of the first half of the
twentieth century. Modernism- including the practices of abstraction,
non-representational art in painting, the high-tee functionalism of
modern architecture, avant-garde experiments with form in literature
and so on - set out in the early years of the twentieth century to
challenge nineteenth century realism and to 'shock' bourgeois tastes
with its experimental and avant-garde techniques. But, post-modernists
argue, eventually it was 'tamed', becoming institutionalized as the
International Style, dominating the skylines of every modern city, the
'monuments' of corporate capitalism, the fashionable museums and art
galleries and the international art market. Now a new, more populist
culture is emerging, closer to everyday life, to the market place, to
consumption and to the new popular culture of the media -a culture
which renounces purity, mastery of form and elitism, and is more
playful, ironic, and eclectic in style.
One of the clearest summaries of some of the issues is provided by

David Harvey in his book The Condition ofPostmodemity (1989), and I
would like you to read the lengthy extract from that book. However,
before you do this, I would like to make the following points that you
should bear in mind:
1 Our main interest in this discussion of the culture of post

modernism is how it relates to social, economic and political processes,
rather than in post-modernism as a set of stylistic movements in the
arts. Harvey's s ummary provides a useful overview of the ramifications
of the debates about post-modernism in different fields. However, it is
not important to understand all the references to post-modernism as a
movement in painting, literature and film (architecture is given more
attention because of its links to social planning and economic changes).
Similarly, we will not pursue questions about changes in philosophy,
such as those raised by his references to American pragmatism, post
structuralism and deconstructionism.
2 Concentrate on grasping the general characteristics of post
modernism as a cultural trend involving a multiplicity and mixing of
styles and codes, forsaking modernism's attempts to impose a unifying
Ol' overarching (meta-) theory or metanarrative. Likewise, in post
modern social theory, the tendency is to follow social analysts like
Foucault, who insisted on the plurality of 'power-discourse' formations.
It is opposed to all forms of metanarratives (including Marxism,
Freudianism, and various totalizing metatheories of history or scientific
progress stemming from the Enlightenment), whilst paying close
attention to 'other worlds' and 'other voices' (women, gays, blacks,
colonized peoples with their own histories).
3 Do post-modernist cultural trends correspond to fundamental trends
in social, economic and political processes, which might constitute a
-
Other voices: the post-modern feminist art of Barbara Kruger
new social epoch of post-modernity- a pluralistic, post-industrial,

post-class society of multiple lifestyles and also multiple power
discourses? Or do they merely follow the 'cultural logic of late
capitalism', as Frederic Jameson proposes?
4 What are the political implications of post-modernism? Is it neo
conservative, liberating, or simply another form of revolt against
established orthodoxies?
ACTIVITY 1 You should now read Reading A, 'The condition of postmodernity'. b\

David Harvey. ·which you will find at the end of this chapter. Make a
summary list of the main ideas that you find useful or interesting. Yo
might then like to compare your list \vith the one hclow.
\Vhl!re do you think Harvey stands in terms of Gott's contrast behH'

those who see post-modernism as symptomatic of social 'malaise
those who belieYe it heralds the recognition ot a plurality of cui t
a
1 In architecture, post-modernism prefers the popular and vernacular

styles, symbolized by Las Vegas, rather than the modernist 'soulless'
buildings like the Manhattan skyscrapers or the residential tower blocks
of post-war urban planning.
2 In philosophy, various schools of thought have intermingled in a
wave of reaction against the Enlightenment legacy and its faith in the
powers of technology, science and reason. Harvey mentions American
Pragmatism, post-Marxist and post-structuralist thought, in this
connection. At the same time, in religious thought, there have been
attempts to develop a post-modern theology which reaffirms spiritual
and moral bases of action neglected by secular modernism, whilst not
abandoning the powers of reason. (Sometimes this takes the form of a
pastiche of religious ideas and selected elements of science and secular
reason as in New Age religion, which we will consider later.)
3 Post-modernism seems to revel in fragmentation, ephemerality and
discontinuity, preferring difference over uniformity.
4 Post-modernist thinkers, such as Foucault and Lyotard, attack any
notion that there might be a metalanguage, metanarrative or metatheory
through which all things can be connected, represented, or explained.
5 There is an emphasis on looking for 'local' factors or partial
explanations, such as the micro-politics of power relations in different
social contexts and in relation to specific discourses, language games or
interpretative communities.
6 Politically, post-modernism entails engaging in multiple, local
autonomous struggles for liberation, rejecting the imperialism of an
enlightened modernity that presumed to speak for others (colonized
peoples, blacks and ethnic groups, religious minorities, women, and the
working class) with a unified voice.
7 Post-modernists have a different view of language and
communication to that held by modernists. Modernists presupposed a
tight and identifiable relation between what was said (the signified or
'message') and how it was being said (the signifier or 'medium'),
whereas post-structuralists see these as continually breaking apart and
re-attaching in new combinations. 'Deconstructionism' (associated with
the work of the Fren,ch philosopher, Derrida) views cultural life as
intersecting 'texts'; deconstructive cultural analysis is concerned with
'reading' texts by deconstructing them or breaking-down the narrative to
show how it is composed of different textual elements and fragments.
8 Post-modernism's preoccupation with the fragmentation and
instability of language carries over into a conception of the post-modern
personality as 'schizophrenic' (not in the clinical sense, but in relation
to a fragmented sense of identity). Words gain their meaning from being
part of a sequential chain of linked 'signifiers' in a sentence. If the links
become unstable and the sequence disjointed, then there will be a
fragmentation of meaning, manifested in an inability to think things
through- including an inability to think through one's own biography
and to unify the past, present and future in one's psychic life.
Experience is reduced to a 'series of pure and unrelated presences in

time' and the experiences of the present become overwhelmingly vivid
as they are communicated by mass media images and sensational
spectacles (not just in entertainment, but also political, military and
scientific). The immediacy of events and the sensationalism of the
spectacle become the stuff of which consciousness is forged.
9 The other side of loss of linear or sequential ideas of time and the
search for instantaneous impact is a parallel loss of depth. Jameson
emphasizes the 'depthlessness' and concern for surface appearance of
contemporary culture.
10 High-brow authority over cultural taste collapses and is replaced by
popular culture and consumerism.
11 Some social and cultural analysts of post-modernism take a positive
and constructive view, insisting that various groups, such as youth and
ethnic groups, develop their own sub-cultures by using consumer
culture and fashion to construct a sense of their own public identities.
12 Finally, some Marxists, such as Jameson, maintain that post
modernism is simply the cultural logic of late capitalism.
Harvey's own view on the links between the economy and post
modernity is that there is a close relationship, although he admits it
may be difficult to prove that it is a causal relationship. He sees links
between Fordism (e.g. assembly-line mass production) and modernism,
as the dominant economic and cultural trends in the period up to 1970,
and a similar association between post-Fordism (e.g. flexible
accumulation in which international financial markets come to
dominate the economic order and Japanese productive organization the
industrial) and post-modernism in the subsequent period. (Debates
about the extent of such trends in the economic sphere were discussed
in Chapter 4.) Speed-up of communication, transport, fashion cycles,
commodity life-spans, and the associated shrinking of distances and
spaces - what he calls 'time-space compression' - has radically
affected the codes of transmission of social values and meanings. He
gives a good example in the case of food: supermarkets and restaurants
in cities such as London or Los Angeles now offer foods from all over
the world. The cuisines of the world are now assembled in one place in
the same way that the world's geographical complexity is reduced to a
series of images on a television screen each evening. On television, as in
Disneyland, it is now possible to experience the world's geography
vicariously through images or 'simulacra'. In some cases these
reproductions may fit the stereotype even better than the original (just
as Indian curries in a British supermarket may come closer to our ideal
than those served in Bombay!): they are 'hyperreal'.
Harvey does not insist on a distinct break between modernity and post
modernity. He agrees that the conditions of post-modern time-space
compression exaggerate tendencies that have been present in capitalist
modernization in the past, generated by successive waves of
compression arising from the pressures of capital accumulation, with its

perpetual search to annihilate space through time and reduce turnover
time. However, Harvey tends towards the view that there has been a
change in the 'mode of regulation' of capitalist economies as a result of
the first major post-war slump in 1973. (This view was discussed in
Chapter 4.) That slump inaugurated a period of extremely rapid change,
flux and uncertainty. However, he is cautious about reaching a final
judgement on whether or not the new systems of production and
marketing, characterized by more flexible labour processes and markets,
of geographical mobility and rapid shifts in consumption patterns,
warrant the title of a new regime of accumulation, and whether the
revival of entrepreneurialism and neo-conservatism, coupled with the
cultural turn of post-modernism, w arrant the title of a new mode of
regulation. He notes many signs of continuity rather than rupture with
the Fordist era (Harvey, 1989, p.170) and even concedes that the
cultural traits of modernism and post-modernism may simply represent
opposing dynamic tendencies that have always existed within
capitalism, which would explain why similar cultural forces were
described in the previous fin de siecle in cities such as Vienna. As the
sociologist Simmel remarked, it is in such places and at such times of
fragmentation and economic insecurity that the desire for stable values
leads to a heightened desire for charismatic authority and sacred
attachments through family, religion and state (Simmel. 1900). Harvey
remarks that there is abundant evidence of a revival of support for such
institutions and values throughout the western world since about 1970.
The resulting cultural configuration or pastiche of novel and nostalgic
elements is what gives post-modernity its paradoxical and intriguing
character.
3 POST-MODERNISM AS THE CULTURAL

LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM
3.1 CULTURE AND ECONOMY
In his essay, 'Post-modernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism'

(1984), Jameson presents the thesis that post-modern culture logically
corresponds to a stage in the development of capitalism. He rejects the
idea of the conservative sociologist Daniel Bell that we are living in a
post-industrial society (Bell, 1973). or that class conflict has ended.
Adapting the ideas of the Marxist economist, Ernest Mandel, Jameson
distinguishes three periods in the development of capitalism: market
capitalism, characterized by the growth of industrial capital in largely
national markets (from about 1700 to 1850); monopoly capitalism in the
age of imperialism, when European nation-states developed
international markets, exploiting the raw materials and cheap labour of
their colonial territories; and, most recently (Mandel dates it from 1945,
Jameson from the 1960s), the phase of late capitalism, of multinational

corporations with global markets and mass consumption. Furthermore,
in Jameson's account of late capitalism, increasingly it is culture itself
that is 'commodified' and consumed:
Where an older Marxist social theory saw cultural forms as part of

the ideological veil or distorting mirror preventing the real
economic relations in a society from being seen, this theory sees
the production, exchange, marketing and consumption of cultural
forms - considered in their widest sense and therefore including
advertising, TV and the mass media generally - as a central focus
and expression of economic activity. Here, images, styles and
representations are not the promotional accessories to economic
products, they are the products themselves. In a similar way, the
explosion of information technology makes information not merely
a lubricant of the cycles of exchange and profit, but itself the most
important of commodities. If it is possible to imagine this
nostalgically as a final greedy swallowing-up of culture by the
forces of commodity capitalism then this is in itself to reproduce a
notion of the autonomy or separateness of culture which, Jameson
wants us to believe, is itself out of date.
(Connor, 1989, p.46)
According to Jameson, a better way of modelling this situation is as 'an
explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social

realm, to the point at which everything in our social life - from
economic value and state power to practices and the very structure of
the psyche itself- can be said to have become "cultural"' ljameson,
1984, p.87). His key point about the post-modern economic phase is
that culture has become integrated into commodity production and this
makes it different from modernism in the earlier stages of capitalism.
What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become

integrated into commodity production generally, the frantic
economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel
seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of
turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function
and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.
(Jameson, 1984, p.56)
Whereas modernist culture could be judged against certain dominant

standards (hence the distinction between high culture and low or
popular culture), and might even be oppositional or shocking, post
modernist culture is totally commodified and tends to be judged in
terms of what gives immediate pleasure and makes money. Indeed,
Jameson admits that his ideas about post-modernism emerged in
response to architectural debates where, more decisively than in the
other arts or media, post-modernist positions occupied the space left as
a result of the criticisms of high modernism, which was credited with
CHAPTER 5 SOCIAL PLURALISM AND POST·MODERNITY 233
the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and older

neighbourhoods. Hence, his references to Robert Venturi's influential
manifesto Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi et al., 1977), which pointed
out the popular success of buildings which purists would regard as
'fake' and 'tacky'. He notes that post-modernists have been fascinated by
the whole 'degraded' landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and
Readers' Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the television late
show and the grade B Hollywood films, of so-called 'para-literature'
with its airport paperback categories of the Gothic and the romance, the
popular biography, the murder mystery and science fiction or fantasy
novel Uameson, pp.54-5).
Excalibur Castle Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada
The constitutive stylistic features of post-modernist culture for Jameson

are: a fondness for pastiche; the 'flat' multiplication and collage of
styles, as opposed to the 'deep' expressive aesthetics of unique style
characteristic of modernism; retreat from the idea of the unified
personality to the 'schizoid' experience of the loss of self in
undifferentiated time. He gives a good example from mass culture:
nostalgia films (what the French callla mode retro- retrospective
styling), such as American Graffiti, which in 1973 set out to recapture
the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of the 1950s United States of
the Eisenhower era, as does Polanski's film, Chinatown, for the 1930s.
They are not the same as the older historical novel or film, which
sought to represent historical events, but rather they approach the past
through stylistic connotation, conveying 'pastness' by the glossy
qualities of the image and fashion. Pastiche does not set out to interpret
the past or to judge it against some standard, but simply plays images
off against each other to achieve its effects and with no clear reference
to an external or 'deeper' reality. This superficial pastiche of images
('signifiers') with no referent except other signifiers, also has a kind of

'schizophrenic' character because the individual loses all sense of time
as the experiences of the present are overwhelmingly vivid.
Not only does post-modern culture disrupt our sense of time and
historical distancing, post-modern architecture also produces
'something like a mutation in built space itself', which leaves us
disoriented because 'we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to
match this new hyperspace' ijameson, 1984, p.80). Jameson's famous
example is that of the Bonaventure Hotel, built in the new Los Angeles
downtown by the architect and developer John Portman. Although some
architectural experts describe it as 'late-modernist', Jameson calls it
post-modernist because it meets his criteria of being populist and it
produces a disorienting sense of 'decentred hyperspace': there is no
single, focal point to give one a sense of direction, just as there is no
sense of proportion in the spatial arrangements. Its reflector glass skin
achieves a 'peculiar and placeless dissociation of the Bonaventure from
its neighbourhood', the elevators are like great Japanese lanterns or
gondolas, passing inside and outside the building and splashing down
into an internal moat, whilst the vast internal spaces are confusingly
laid out, 'transcending the capacities of the individual human body to
locate itself' (Jameson, 1984, p.83). (The reader might be amused to note
that this populist-style hotel declared bankruptcy just before this author
and BBC colleagues arrived to make a television programme to
accompany this book, thus threatening to make it the first monument to
post-modernity!)
3.2 CULTURE AND POLITICS
We now move on to the second issue, the question of whether post

modernism is also related to the end of the primacy of class-based
politics as the result of an increased social pluralism-a multiplicity of
social groups and sources of identity, giving rise to different political
interests. Jameson agrees that one of the most profoundly post-modern
phenomena is the emergence of a whole range of small-group, non-class
political practices-rnicropolitics. However, Jameson criticizes those
whom be describes as 'post-modernist ideologues' who claim that these
new social movements (women, gays, blacks, ecologists, regional
autonomists, etc.) 'arise in the void left by the disappearance of social
classes and in the rubble of the political movements organized around
those' Uameson, 1991, p.319). According to Jameson, the conditions that
give rise to these social movements or groups are real social changes,
but they are nothing to do with the disappearance of classes and class
conflicts.
How classes could be expected to disappear, save in the unique

special-case scenario of socialism, has never been clear to me; but
the global restructuration of production and the introduction of
radically new technologies- that have flung workers in archaic
factories out of work, displaced new kinds of industry to
unexpected parts of the world, and recruited work forces different
from the traditional ones in a variety of features, from gender to
skill and nationality -explain why so many people have been
willing to think so, at least for a time. Thus the new social
movements and the newly emergent global proletariat both result
from the prodigious expansion of capitalism in its third (or
'multinational') stage; both are in that sense 'post-modern', at least
in terms of the account of post-modernism offered here.
(Jameson, 1991, p.319)
Despite his criticisms of those he labels as 'post-modern ideologues'

Jameson is careful to avoid the impression that he is advocating a return
to a base-superstructure deterministic type of explanation of the new
social movements:
Two positions must be distinguished here, which are both wrong.

On the one hand, for a properly post-modern 'cynicaJ reason' the
new social movements are simply the result- the concomitants
and the products-of capitalism itself in its final and most
unfettered stage. On the other hand, for a radical-liberal populism
such movements are always to be seen as the local victories and
the painful achievements and conquests of small groups of people
in struggle (who are themselves figures for class struggle in
general, as that had determined all the institutions of history, very
much including capitalism itself). In short, and no longer to put so
fine a point on it, are the 'new social movements' consequences
and after effects of late capitalism? Are they new units generated
by the system itself in its interminable inner self-differentiation
and self-reproduction? Or are they very precisely new 'agents of
history' who spring into being in resistance to the system as forms
of opposition to it, forcing it against the direction of its own
internal logic into new reforms and internal modifications? But
this is precisely a false opposition, about which it would be just as
satisfactory to say that both positions are right; the crucial issue is
the theoretical dilemma, replicated in both, of some seeming
explanatory choice between the alternatives of agency and system.
In reality, however, there is no such choice, and both explanations
or models- absolutely inconsistent with each other- are also
incommensurable with each other and must be rigorously
separated at the same time that they are deployed simultaneously.
ijameson, 1991, p.326)
The position taken by Jameson on this dilemma as it related to the issue

of the 'new social movements' and their relationship to capitalism
leaves him open to the charge that he wants to 'have his cake and eat it'.
He maintains that there is the simultaneous possibility of active
political commitment working through such partial and limited
movements and, at the same time, of continuing to develop a more
totalizing and systematic social theory, 'and not some sterile choice
between those two things' (ibid., p.320). In other words, he believes it is
right to take part in non-class-based social movements, but his Marxist
systematic analysis would also insist that such alliances {or the
'Rainbow Coalition') are generally not as durable as those organized
around class and the development of class consciousness. It is for this
reason that he prefers the example of Jesse Jackson's attempt to develop
a Rainbow Coalition in American politics during the 1980s, because 'he
rarely makes a speech in which working-class experience is not
"constructed" as the mediation around which the equivalence of the
coalition is to find its active cohesion' (ibid., p.331). Whereas, the
modern approach of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy (1985) is criticized because, although they
provide a good description of the way in which alliance politics
function- in the establishing of an axis of equivalence along which
parties line up- the equivalence could be in terms of non-class
such as abortion or nuclear energy, and so lacks durability.
The political problem, as Jameson sees it, is that people can

with groups, as represented through the media, but they cannot
with large, amorphous classes. Consequently, in the era of post·
modernism, it is virtually impossible for the metanarrative of clase
conflict and of the eventual triumph of the proletariat to succeed
encompassing all developments. Classes can no longer function
represented as the 'agents' or 'subjects' of history. On the other
whilst the plurality of protest groups and social movements can
allegiance and offer an identity, their 'very lively social struggles
current period are largely dispersed and anarchic' (Jameson, 1991
p.349). It is difficult to unite them in some metanarrativeof alliance and

combined struggle because there is not a single enemy group against
which they can struggle. Late capitalism has become such an
impersonal system that it is difficult to develop convincing
representations of a 'ruling class' as an identifiable group. An actual
group of influential businessmen, such as those who advised and
backed President Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and 1980s, is more
likely to be regarded as a local network of cronies (in southern
California and the Sun Belt) engaged in conspiracy, rather than bringing
discredit on business or being regarded as representatives of the ruling
class Qameson, 1991).
According to Jameson, the different groups should unite against a

common enemy, which he calls corporate capitalism. But this entity is
dispersed throughout the whole social system and culture: there are
many levels and centres of power. Furthermore, post-modern culture
itself would have to be identified as decadent and simply a ruling-class
culture, which is diffic ult to do convincingly because of its seeming
popularity and the pleasures that consumption offers. Opposition to it
it'.
can seem puritanical or a form of out-of-date 6litism. Despite these
problems, Jameson maintains his faith in the Marxist metanarrative of
history and a belief in the eventual emergence of a global class struggle
combining the many local groups at present engaged in dispersed power
struggles:
I'm convinced that this new post-modern global form of capitalism

will now have a new class logic about it, but it has not yet
completely emerged because labour has not yet reconstituted itself
on a global scale, and so there is a crisis in what classes and class
consciousness are. It's very clear that agency on the Left is not
there in those older forms but the Marxist narrative assures us that
some form of agency will reconstitute itself and that is the sense in
which I still find myself committed to the Marxist logic.
Qameson, 1991, p.31)
As he himself admits, although this belief is supported by the logic of

the Marxist metanarrative, his faith is based on individual belief and
'could just be an aberrant personal religion of some sort' (ibid.). His own
brilliant analysis of the fragmented post-modern culture makes clear
how difficult it is for such metanarratives to survive in contemporary
society.
4 REJECTIONS OF POST-MODERNISM
Outright rejections of the thesis that we are entering a post-modern

epoch take several forms. Perhaps the most outright rejection is that
voiced by orthodox Marxists who seek to reaffirm the revolutionary
socialist tradition and the primacy of class-based politics against those

they regard as 'revisionists' or proponents of more pluralistic 'New
Times'. Such rejection is to be found in the work of Callinicos,
especially in his aptly titled book Against Post-modernism: a Marxist
critique (1989). Callinicos describes his approach as
continuing in a very minor key Marx's critique of religion, where

he treats Christianity in particular not simply, as the
Enlightenment had, as a set of false beliefs, but as the distorted
expression of real needs denied by class society. Similarly I seek
here not simply to demonstrate the intellectual inadequacy of post·
modernism, understood as the claim, justified by appeal to post·
modern art, post-structural philosophy, and the theory of post
industrial society, that we are entering a post-modern epoch, but to
set it in historical context. Post-modernism, then, is best seen as a
symptom.
(Callinicos, 1989, p.6)
It is interesting that Callinicos should treat post-modernism as Marx

treated religion, merely as a symptom of something more 'real', by
which he means economic conditions associated with capitalism, and as
a set of political attitudes reflecting those conditions. Thus, 'post
modernist' ideas are said to be a reflection of opportunities for an 'over
consumptionist lifestyle offered upper white-collar strata by capitalism
in the 1980s and political disillusionment in the aftermath of 1968'
(Callinicos, 1989, p.7).
Jean-Fran<;:ois Lyotard in France, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal

Mouffe in Britain, are cited as examples of leading 'post-Marxists' who
argue that socialists should abandon 'classism' - the classical Marxist
stress upon the class struggle as the driving force of history, and of the
working-class as the agency of socialist change. The resulting fusion of
post-modernism and post-Marxism was exemplified in the 1980s by the
magazine Marxism Today, which expressed the idea that we are living
in 'New Times', as follows:
Unless the Left can come to terms with those New Times, it must
live on the sidelines... At the heart of New Times is the shift from
the old mass-production Fordist economy to a new, more
post-Fordist order based on computers, information technology
and robotics. But New Times are about more than economic
change. Our world is being remade. Mass production, the mass
consumer, the big city, the big-brother state, the sprawling
estate, and the nation-state are in decline: flexibility, diversity,
differentiation, mobility, communication, decentralization and
internationalization are in the ascendant. In the process our
identities, our sense of self, our own subjectivities are being
transformed. We are in transition to a new era.
(Marxism Today, October 1988)
CHAPTER 5 SOCIAl PLURALISM AND POST-MODERNITY 239
Callinicos's criticisms of the thesis of New Times and the era of post
modernity include detailed arguments about the extent to which Fordist
mass production has declined (an issue discussed in Chapter 4 of this
book), and whether post-modernist cultural trends are any different
from modernism. He makes a strong case against the thesis that there
bas been a decisive shift from a modern to a post-modern era, although
the case against the more moderate thesis of a gradual change is less
conclusive. However, the crux of his argument is directed against any
distraction from the predominant importance of class conflict.
The response of those who argue that we are in New Times or a post
modern era is that other social positions and identities have become
more important or 'real' for people, irrespective of whether or not that is
a distraction from their supposed class interests and so a form of 'false
consciousness'. Capitalism may be a major cause of some problems
as a addressed by feminists, ecologists, New Age religionists,
fundamentalists, and other groups, but they define their concerns
differently. And, as one of the early American sociologists, William
I.Thomas, pointed out: 'If men (sic) define situations as real, they are
real in their consequences'. In other words, we have to take their
reasoning seriously, not prejudge the question of the most significant
factors in each situation. This is particularly important in a period
where there is an apparent increase in social pluralism and new cultural
formations. (It is still possible to follow Callinicos's example and to
question the degree of social pluralism or cultural novelty, provided the
evidence is considered in an open-minded way and takes account of the
views of the people being studied, particularly their judgements as to
where their interests and allegiances lie.)
5 RECONSTRUCTIONS IN POST
MODERNITY OR NEW TIMES
Most of the theorists who have written about post-modernity have

viewed it as some kind of transition period in which older systems of
production are giving way to newer ones, as in the change from Fordist
to post-Fordist production; services are overtaking manufacturing
occupations; supranational forms of organization are increasing at the
expense of national forms; 'civil society' is expanding and becoming
more diversified, not only in terms of different consumer groups and
lifestyles, but also with respect to a pluralization of social life in which
ordinary people in industrialized societies have a greater range of
positions and identities available in their everyday working, social,
familial and sexual lives. There are different opinions about the extent
of these changes (particularly about whether they only apply to
industrialized countries and to the better-off two-thirds of the people in
those countries) and also about whether they are capable of being
subsumed under the logic of a new stage of global capitalism. However,
240 MOOERNITY AND ITS FUTURES
leaving aside the question of whether it is possible to predict a future

stage of social development in the way that the Enlightenment project
envisaged, there is no doubt that analyses of post-modernity or New
Times are attempting to develop new concepts and categories that are
adequate to the rich kaleidoscope of contemporary social life and that
they have succeeded in opening up fresh and stimulating debates.
What distinguishes those I have called the 'constructive post

modernists' from some other post-modernists and critics of post
modernism is their tendency to look for positive developments through
their efforts to create new 'emancipatory narratives', new identities,
original syntheses and rearticulations of otherwise divergent or
fragmented elements. Dick Hebdige provides a good description of some
of these developments in Britain during the 1980s, particularly those
that sought to use popular culture and the media. His comments are
made from the political point of view of a committed socialist who is
concerned about the political implications of these developments, but
they have a wider relevance irrespective of any political project. In
reading the following quotation from Hebdige's article, After the Masses,
you should form your own judgements about the social significance of
such efforts to construct new identities and communities. Do they
justify a more positive view of post-modernity or New Times than is
allowed by the outright critics of the idea of post-modernism such as
Callinicos?
In the following extract from Hebdige's article, he begins by showing

how consumer identities and lifestyles constitute social types and
categories that could be used in a more positive way by sociologists so
as to develop a 'sociology of aspiration' (what people desire to be). He
does not envisage this as a substitute for class analysis, but he believes
it is another important dimension of social stratification that has
become more significant in these New Times.
One of the features of post-Fordist production is the leading role

given to market research, packaging and presentation. While it
doesn't literally produce the social, it's none the less the case that
marketing has provided the dominant and most pervasive
classifications of 'social types' in the 1980s (the yuppie is the most
obvious example). We use these categories as a kind of social
shorthand even if we are reluctant to find ourselves reflected in
them. We live in a world and in bodies which are deeply scored by
the power relations of race and class, sexuality and gender but we
also live- whether or not we know it consciously- in a world
style-setters, innovators, sloanes, preppies, empty nesters (working
couples with grown up families), dinkies (dual-income-no-kids),
casuals, sensibles, the constrained majority, and today's prime
targets, the pre-teens and woofies (well-off-older folk).
These are the types outlined in commercial lifestyling and

'psychographies' - forms of research which don't present
descriptions of living, breathing individuals so much as
hypothetical 'analogues' of 'aspirational clusters'. In other words

the new intensive but speculative forms of market research are
designed to offer a social map of desire which can be used to
determine where exactly which products should be 'pitched' and
'niched'. All these types could no doubt be translated back into the
old language (it would perhaps be relatively easy to return them to
the axis of social class) but everything specific would be lost in the
translation.
It is clear that such research methods and the marketing initiative

associated with them have been developed precisely to cut across
the old social-sexual polarities. The parameters are designed to be
transcultural and transnational (the spread of 'psychographies' in
the UK is linked to the drive to go pan-European in preparation for
1992). We may find such forms of knowledge immoral,
objectionable or sinister- a waste of time and resources which
are unforgiveable in a world where people are starving and in a
country where people are still sleeping in the streets- but the fact
is that they do actively create and sustain one version of the social.
They depend for their success on the accurate outlining and
anticipation (through observation and interviews with 'target'
subjects) not just of what (some) people think they want but of
what they'd like to be. A sociology of aspiration might begin by
combining the considerable critical and diagnostic resources
available within existing versions of sociology and cultural studies
with the descriptive and predictive knowledge available within the
new intensive market research to get a more adequate picture of
what everybody says they want and what they want to be in all its
radical plurality.
(Hebdige, 1989, pp.89-90)
The key point that Hebdige is making in this discussion of lifestyles and
consumer groups is that these are social phenomena that are no less real
than previously privileged sociological categories such as 'class', and
they are now more important and complex than in earlier periods. (See
Book 3 (Bocock and Thompson, 1992), Chapter 3.) Consequently, the
Left has to take them more seriously and accept 'what certain forms of
post-modernism recommend: a scepticism towards imposed general,
"rational" solutions: a relaxation of the old critical and judgemental
postures, although without retreating from its principles' (ibid.).
The second set of new collectivities that requires positive appraisal

according to Hebdige, are those that actively use the mass media to
construct an identity. Unlike more pessimistic post-modernist analysts,
and the critics of post-modernism, Hebdige emphasizes the capacity of
people to develop new communities and identities through popular
culture and the mass media, rather than being passive masses.
It may well be true that the two great collective identities through
which the masses came together to 'make history' in the last two
hundred years- the first associated with nation, the second with
class - are breaking down today in the overdeveloped world. But

new 'emancipation narratives' are being written round collectives
other than the imaginary community of nation or the international
brotherhood of socialist man. This is true even in popular culture
and the 'depthless' field of the media upon which Baudrillard
operates.
Within the transfigured 'public realm', established by transnational

communication networks, new forms, both of alliance and
contestation, are possible. One of the things ignored in the more
'fatal' versions of new times is the binding power of the new
transnational media systems: the power they have to move people
not just to buy the products of the culture industries but to buy
into networks that offer forms of community and alliance which
can transcend the confines of class, race, gender, regional and
national culture. Popular music offers many examples of this kind
of bonding. Some of these 'communities of affect' (rather than
'communities of interest') are explicitly utopian. The
simultaneously most spectacular yet most participatory examples
to date of the kind of bonding, made possible across transnational
communication systems have been the televised events organized
round Band Aid, Sport Aid, Live Aid and the Free Mandela
movement. This is where you see the optimistic will in action.
Televangelism is another less engaging example of this kind of
mobilization specific to the media age.
Rather than 'psychic autism' (Baudrillard) or the waning of affect

Uameson) such phenomena suggest the possibility of a new kind of
politics existing primarily in and through the airwaves and
organized around issues of universal moral concern. Such crusades
are likely to be extended in the 1990s. Once again the desire to feel
and to feel connected to a transitory mass of other people, to
engage in transitory and superficial alliances of this kind is not
intrinsically either good or bad. Instead it has to be articulated.
Jimmy Swaggart managed to articulate the yearning for community
and righteousness one way. Jerry Dammers, founder of the Two
Tone movement and co-organizer of the Mandela concert, helped
to direct the flow of similar desires in a radically different
direction.
(Hebdige, 1989, pp.90-1)
This discussion of new forms of 'communities of affect' or emotionally

based collectivities takes us beyond the consumer identities and their
related images as focused on by theorists such as Jameson and
Baudrillard. They cannot be 'read-off' or understood simply as the
'cultural logic of late capitalism' Uameson).
The remaining two alternatives draw different conclusions about the

implications of the increasing and diverse social pluralism that has
attracted the label 'post-modernity'. The first position, which we will
discuss next, is represented by Jean Baudrillard, who maintains that
Live Aid Concert
the post-modern era 'appearances are everything'. The second position,

to be discussed later, is that of the various constructive post-modernists,
who hold that it is possible to combine cultural codes that were thought
to be irreconcHable or contradictory according to Enlightenment
thought (including radical Enlightenment theory, such as Marxism). An
example of this in practice would be the varied 'post-modern' family
regimes described by Judith Stacey the American sociologist in Brave
New Families (1990) with their surprising linkings and crossover codes
involving fundamentalist religion, left-wing politics, feminism,
patriarchalism, and other seemingly incongruent elements. Other
examples include New Age religion and various charismatic
movements.
6 POST-MODERNITY: CONSUMPTION AND

APPEARANCES
Baudrillard's account of the post-modern era is significant for the light

that it throws on two aspects that distinguish it from earlier eras: the
proliferation of communications through the mass media, particularly
television, and the full emergence of consumer society. The new mass
media use a montage of images (unlike print) and juxtapose or collapse
time-space distancing. The result is that culture is now dominated by
simulations - objects and discourses that have no firm origin, no
referent, no ground or foundation. Signs get their meanings from their
relations with each other, rather than by reference to some independent
reality or standard. There is a multiplicity of constantly shifting cultural
codes, with no fixed metacode to which they all relate and against
which they can be judged. Similarly, with respect to the economy,
activities and styles of consumption often play a larger role in defining
people's identities and consciousness than position in the production
system. Baudrillard rejects Marxism and other structuralist theories that
deny the surface 'appearance' of things in favour of a hidden underlying
structure. Such interpretative strategies all privilege some form of
rationality. Like the philosopher Nietzsche, Baudrillard criticizes such
claims to 'truth' and favours a model based on what he calls 'seduction'.
Seduction plays on the surface; it is the surface appearance that is
effective in determining action, not some latent or hidden structure as
claimed by Marxism or Freudianism.
Baudrillard's position has become progressively more radically opposed

to the Enlightenment tradition of rational thought and its project of
promoting progress through scientific means. In his early works, Le
Systeme des Objets (The System of Objects) (1968) and La Societe de
Consommation (Consumer Society) (1970), he simply sought to extend
the Marxist critique of capitalism to areas beyond the scope of the
theory of the mode of production, so as to take account of the meaning
and communicational structure of commodities in post-war society. He
explored the possibility that consumption had become the chief basis of
the social order and of the classification system that encodes behaviour
and groups. Such classifications could not be explained by reference to
some other structure, such as the mode of production and economic
classes, or by reference to 'real' needs or use value. Consumer objects
constituted a system of signs that took their meaning from the play of
differences between the signs, and these were inexhaustible in their
ability to incite desire (or to seduce). Consequently, like many social
and literary theorists who took a 'linguistic turn' in the 1960s, he moved
steadily in the direction of analysing linguistic or symbolic codes purely
in terms of their internal relationships and without reference to some
external objects that they might be supposed to represent. In his later
work, Simulacres et Simulations (1981), Baudrillard's theory of
commodity culture removes any distinction between object and
representation. In their place he pictures a social world constructed out
of models or 'simulacra' which have no foundation in any reality except
their own.
A simulation is different from a fiction or lie in that it not only

presents an absence as a presence, the imaginary as the real, it also
undermines any contrast to the real, absorbing the real within
itself. Instead of a 'real' economy of commodities that is somehow
bypassed by an 'unreal' myriad of advertising images, Baudrillard
now discerns only a hyperreality, a world of self-referential signs.
He has moved from the TV ad which, however, never completely
erases the commodity it solicits, to the TV newscast which creates
the news if only to be able to narrate it, or the soap opera whose
daily events are both referent and reality for many viewers.
(Poster (ed.), 1988, p.6)
CHAPTER 5 SOCIAL PlURALISM AND POST-MODERNITY 245
Main Street, Disneyland, Los Angeles, simulates idealized reality. A newer

development, City Walk, L.A., aims to go further and mimic the city in which it is
located, but without the poverty, danger and dirt. It is a cross between a shopping
mall and a real street, 'based on the assumption that a city's essence can be
distilled, enhanced and artfully packaged like so much synthetic perfume' (Los
Angeles Times, 29 February 1992). Developers said there would be no real litter,
but 'candy wrappers will be embedded in the terrazzo flooring, as if discarded by
previous visitors' (ibid.).
A good example of Baudrillard's use of the concepts of simulation a nd

hyperreality is to be found in his statements about Disneyland in Los
Angeles. He describes it as a perfect model of the ways in which
simulation works. At first glance it appears to be simply a play of
illusions and phantasms, such as pirates, the frontier, future worlds, etc.
'This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation
successful. But what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the
social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real
America, in its delights and drawbacks' (Poster (ed.), 1988, p.171). In
Disneyland, all of America's values are exalted in miniature and comic
strip form. It is not just a question of Disneyland providing an idealized
digest of American life and values, which works i d eol o gi ca lly to
conceal 'real' contradictions in American society.
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe

that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angel es and the
America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the
hyperreal and simulation. It is no longer a question of a false
representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that
the real is no l o nger real, and thus of saving the realit y principle ...
It is meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe
that the adults are elsewhere, in the 'real' world, and to conceal
the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among
those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster
illusions of their real childishness.
(Poster (ed.), 1988, p.172)
Although this is a rather paradoxical statement - suggesting that there

is no 'real' Los Angeles or America- it does make sense if we accept it
as an exaggerated version of the point that society itself is increasingly
composed of constructed images (simulacra). Nowhere is this more
clearly demonstrated than in Los Angeles, the site of Hollywood and
Disneyland. However, critics of Baudrillard on the political left, whilst
echoing some of his ideas about simulation and hyperreality, accuse
him of lapsing into political apathy. One critic said that Baudrillard's
version of California, in his short book America (1988), was 'Reaganized
and yuppified' and that in it 'there are no migrant workers, no Chicano
barrios, no Central American refugees, no Vietnamese refugees or
Asians, not even any blacks .. .' (Kellner, 1989, pp 171 2).
. -
Baudrillard would probably respond that such groups are themselves

co-opted into the world of simulacra and hyperreality, of which
Disneyland and Hollywood are merely the most extreme examples. He
notes sarcastically that, because America imagines itself as an 'achieved
utopia', minorities and the poor must disappear from view: it is only
bad taste if they continue to show themselves (Baudrillard, 1988, p.111).
ACTIVITY 2 Yuu should now takP stock of the implications of the radical post·
moclln mst position represented by Baudrillard. I suggest you make a
summary of I his position, referring to the preceding discussion. (You
might also soc the earlier refenmres to Baudrillard <md consumption ll
Book 3 (Bocock and Thompson, 1992). Chapter:�.) What would you
consider to he the main contributions of this approach and what do)
think are its dolicienc:ios'?
It is difficult to form a conclusive judgement about Baudrillard's

contribution, partly because of the rather convoluted expressions he
uses, but also because he seems to adopt an extreme position in order
shock his readers and perhaps jolt them out of what he would regard
their complacency or dogmatism. Nevertheless, he does focus on
important features of contemporary social life that distinguish the
present period from earlier epochs and so might justify the label
modernity', although he rejects the label 'post-modernist' for his
position.
The key contribution is to make us aware of how radically social

and our perceptions have been changed by the development of
endlessly differentiated consumer lifestyles, the constant stream of
television images, and the expanded capacity of the media to
CHAPTER 5 SOCIAl. PLURALISM AND POST-MODERNITY 247
in a strange new world of 'hyperreality': a world of simulations which is

immune to rationalist critique, whether Marxist, liberal or any other
metatheory of reality. Baudrillard's radical, post-modernist message, is
that the media images do not merely represent reality: they are reality,
because their meaning derives from their position within a system of
signs, not from some referent in a 'real' world outside that system.
Whereas earlier sociologists, such as the founders of Symbolic
Interactionism, George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) and Charles H.Cooley
(1864-1929) emphasized the development of the individual's self
concept through primary group interaction (family and other significant
relationships) and seeing ourselves through the eyes of those 'significant
others', Baudrillard emphasizes the influence of the mechanically
reproduced images of the media. For Baudrillard, the mass media are
not a means of communication because there is no feedback or
exchange of information. (He regards media surveys and opinion polls
as just another media spectacle.) The only political strategy he can
recommend to the masses (a term which encompasses everyone, not as
in the older distinction between elite and masses) is to refuse to take the
media seriously; that is, to refuse to play the game and so merely regard
the media as nothing but spectacles.
Needless to say, Baudrillard's position is thought to be far too accepting

of the status quo by those who believe the media do distort reality, or
reflect a reality that must be changed. Critical theorists, such as Jurgen
Habermas, believe that it is possible to establish rational criteria for
judging the adequacy of representations of reality, and they are prepared
to advocate social changes that would create the conditions for non
distorted communication and debate in civil society. (This is discussed
further by Gregor McLennan in Chapter 7 of this book.) Others such as
Hebdige, argue that groups and social movements can offer resistance by
resignifying the meanings that are presented to them by the media and
in consumer objects. We will turn to some examples of other strategies
in the next section, which focuses on efforts to combine different
cultural codes in everyday life.
7 NEW CONNECTIONS OF
CONSTRUCTIVE POST-MODERNISM
Hebdige's comment that some of the media-related movements were

sometimes explicitly utopian, and usually sought to provide a bond of
moral community, gives us a link to the ideas of other writers who have
taken a constructive approach to post-modernism. These are the various
scholars from different disciplines who have discerned post-modernist
trends that constitute a challenge to the negative aspects of modernism,
such as its materialism, secularism, individualism, patriarchy,
scientism, anthropocentrism and ecological vandalism. Constructive
post-modern thought seeks new connections and syntheses that might
offer alternatives to the negative aspects of modernism. The kinds of

phenomena studied include some that modernist thought would have
regarded as marginal or antithetical to modern life: the sacred, charisma,
passion, spirituality, cosmic meaning and unity, enchantment,
community and so-called 'feminine' qualities such as 'love' and
'romance'. Some of these were emphasized in the nineteenth century
Romantic Movement, which was a reaction against assumed negative
aspects of Enlightenment thought and modernity. However, there is an
important difference in that constructive post-modernism does not have
a romanticized view of the pre-modern, but seeks to combine the
benefits of modernity with values and qualities that it believes were
devalued by modernism as an ideology (materialistic capitalism is
viewed as a contributory factor, but not the sole cause).
Judith Stacey's book Brave New Families (1990) describes the varied
pattern of family regimes in an area of California, Silicon Valley, where
there seems to be surprising linkings and crossovers involving
fundamentalist religion, left-wing politics, feminism, patriarchalism,
and various other seemingly incongruent elements. On the basis of her
case studies of these extremely complicated family patterns, in which
some of the women were finding that membership of a 'born again'
religious movement provided 'a flexible resource for reconstituting
gender and kinship relationships in post-modern and post-feminist
directions' (p.18), she came to the conclusion:
We are living, I believe, through a transitional and contested

period of family history, a period after the modern family order,
but before what we cannot foretell. Precisely because it is not
possible to characterize with a single term the competing sets of
family cultures that co-exist at present, I identify this family
regime as post-modern. The post-modern family is not a new
model of family life, not the next stage in an orderly progression
family history, but the stage when the belief in a logical
progression of stages breaks down. Rupturing evolutionary
of family history and incorporating both experime ntal and
nostalgic elements, 'the' post-modern family lurches forward
backward into an uncertain future.
(Stacey, 1990, p.18)
The various 'post-modern' family forms that Stacey found in Silicon

Valley were marked by differences rather than uniformities. At first
glance they resembled the traditional, extended family household,
on closer examination they were found to be composed of various
mixtures of friends and relatives, and the members of the uv•1""'L'u""'
subscribed to sets of beliefs and rationalities that would tra(1JU(lDaD
have been regarded as incongruous. They do not conform to any
cultural code or form of social organization, and in that sense
'disorganized'. But for these Californians, who had experienced
and acute economic and cultural change, they represent j.JlOJ...,.... ,....
attempts to bold together their different subject positions (e.g. as
partner, mother, feminist, worker, political liberal and religious

fundamentalist) and to provide a buffer against the effects of further
disruptive changes.
It is just such reactions to modernity that we need to focus on in our

discussion of post-modernity. These reactions are interesting, not only
because they represent new and often surprising combinations and
crossovers of codes and discourses, but also because they offer a
challenge to the grand theories and concepts derived from the
Enlightenment tradition concerning the course of social development.
On the whole, such tendencies or movements are not seeking to turn the
clock back to a pre-modern 'golden age', as did some conservative
reactionaries in responding to the emergence of the modern age. They
are efforts to articulate new identities, communities, and even utopias,
in the face of increasing ephemerality and social life that lacks
foundation- a society of spectacles and fashions, fragmentation of
work and class identities, destruction of local communities and natural
resources.
Another example of constructive post-modernism that combines

elements of religion, psychology and business, is that of 'New Age'
religions. Heelas bas traced these to the distinctive view of the self that
began to take root in the 1960s and to what the sociologist Talcott
Parsons (1975) called 'the expressive revolution', which is concerned
with discovering one's 'true' nature, delving within in order to
experience the riches of 'life' itself, and which is all about authenticity,
liberation, creativity and natural wisdom (Heelas, 1991). Many people
have been content with a more psychological version of expressivism,
seeking self-development or self-actualization, in which importance is
attached to getting in touch with feelings and being oneself. Others,
however, have become involved with a more utopian version of the
quest within. For these New Age or self-religionists, the key belief is
that God lies within. 'Rather than the self being quasi-sacralized' as in
the more psychological wing of expressivism, it is now accorded an
explicitly sacred status (Heelas, 1991, p.1). In many respects the
contemporary New Age religion is the direct descendant of the late
1960s and early 1970s hippie counter-culture, but New Age religionists
do not think that it is necessaxy to 'drop out' in order to avoid the 'iron
cage' of modernity. Whereas, prior to the 1960s, this kind of quest for
actualization of a sacred self was limited to small numbers of cultural
sophisticates (Heelas mentions literary figures like Rousseau, Goethe,
Whitman and Emerson), it then began to enter popular culture and
subsequently spread through the agency of therapists, counsellors,
healers in alternative medicine, management trainers (especially in
Human Resource Management), educationalists, and some of the
authors addressing feminist and environmentalist issues. The
persuasiveness of self-religiosity may owe much to the failure of the
ideology of progress to produce collectivist solutions by way of
reforming institutions, leaving people to seek perfection and utopia
within themselves. If this also serves to motivate them to perform their
work and other institutional roles more effectively, then institutional

encouragement is likely to be forthcoming. Large companies in Britain,
America and other countries have been prepared to spend considerable
sums of money on training courses based on techniques deriving from
the early self-religionist, Gurdjieff, or contemporary gurus such as
Erhard's Seminars Training (EST). Perhaps the fears of Daniel Bell about
'a disjunction between the kind of organization and the norms
demanded in the economic realm, and the norms of self-realization that
are now central in the culture' (Bell, 1976, p.15) will be dispelled by the
New Age religionists. Alternatively, future economic crises may force a
reversion to materialistic concerns at the expense of the quest for
actualization of the sacred self: New Age religion may then be revealed
as a temporary 'yuppie religion'.
Let us take another example: the televangelists that Hebdige mentions.

They are part of an upsurge of fundamentalist and charismatic religious
movements that have appeared across the globe and across religious
boundaries - not only across Christian denominational boundaries, but
also other religions such as Islam and Judaism. They accept and use
many of the techniques and facilities made possible by modernity,
whilst rejecting various aspects of modernist ideology. According to the
secularization thesis and theories of social deprivation, such movements
should have been diminishing and have had a residual appeal confined
to the poor. But, as an article on the televangelists Jim and Tammy
Baaker pointed out, this was not the case:
Many, if not most, academic discussions of fundamentalist religion

or televangelism in the nineteen-eighties rested on the premise that
fundamentalism was a reaction against modernity on the part of
the dispossessed, the uneducated, the minority of Americans left
behind by the modern world. To theorists of fundamentalism, the
donors to a televangelist such as Baaker bad to be poor rural folk,
elderly women living on Social Security: people outside the
mainstream of middle-class American society. How a minority of
poor rural folk managed to contribute such huge sums to the
telepreachers - the total bad risen to a billion five hundred
million dollars annually by 1986- was a question that most
theorists never bothered to address. Of course, anyone who
actually looked at Baaker's audiences in his high-tech television
studios would see hundreds of well-dressed and extremely
respectable looking people of all ages: a cross-section one might
imagine of the American middle class.
(Fitzgerald, 1990, p.48)
Nor were these involvements merely transitory and limited to passive

television viewing. Over a hundred thousand o f Baaker's supporters
contributed a thousand dollars each for 'lifetime partnerships' in his
community/theme park called Heritage USA. Other televangelists built
universities, hospitals, hotels, television studios, and community
centres. One of them, Pat Robertson, campaigned unsuccessfully in
1988 for the Presidency of the United States and was even thought to be
a serious threat to the eventual winner, George Bush, at one stage. There
are many explanations offered to account for this upsurge of
fundamentalism, and its attractiveness to a wide cross-section of people.
(Some of these explanations were referred to in Book 3 (Bocock and
Thompson, 1992), Chapter 7, when the secularization thesis was
discussed.) The point being made here is that it represents one of the
forms taken by constructive post-modernism, combining elements of
modernity with values that seemed to be excluded in the ideology of
modernism.
The two concepts in classical sociology that might have been usefully
developed to account for these trends - charisma and the sacred -
were thought to refer to fringe phenomena destined to decline under the
impact of science and the process of rationalization. Even Max Weber
and Emile Durkheim, who developed the concepts, tended to think of
them as being undercut by modernity.
Weber limited the concept of charisma to the relationship between

outstanding leaders and their followers; and he said the opportunities
for leaders to exercise a charismatic sway over their followers were
destined to decline under the deadening force of rationalization and
bureaucracy. Durkheim did not use the term charisma, but he attributed
a kind of charismatic force to the sacred, which was a quality of the
suprapersonal community: the sense of the social as timeless, all
encompassing, vital, emotionally compelling, evoking deep
commitment and a sense of surpassing value. Durkheim saw such
experiences of self-transcendence as being engendered by emotionally
charged group rituals, and these were less likely to occur in modern
society. However, he believed they had to occur to some extent in all
societies, and the lack of such opportunities in his own time could only
be because it was a 'transitional era'. Since Durkheim's lifetime (he died
in 1917) there has been a significant development that he could not
have foreseen: the growth of the mass media, which made possible a
new sense of 'collective effervescence' and imagined community.
However, it is also the case that the apparent pluralization of sources of
identity and imagined communities owes much to mass media
representations or simulations. It is one of the strengths of theories of
post-modernity that they emphasize these processes, as we saw in our
discussions of Jameson, Baudrillard and Hebdige.
Even mundane areas of life can give a mild taste of the collective
effervescence and social communion offered by charisma. Identification
with local or national sports teams, or with entertainment idols and
their styles, can function in that way. Another alternative to
membership of charismatic movements with an explicitly religious
nature is found in the strong attachment fostered between individuals
and the nation. In times of national crisis, this attachment may be
strengthened by the rise of a charismatic leader who is thought to
embody the potent characteristic of the threatened sacred nation. In the
culture of everyday life, even the act of buying can be an exercise in
community, as the shopping mall becomes an arena in which to

congregate with others and to enjoy a pleasurable disjuncture of
ordinary awareness within a group ijacobs, 1984). In the shopping mall
the personalized images that have been connected to the products -
images of sexual power, glamour, or national pride - serve to convince
shoppers that while purchasing goods they are simultaneously
participating together in a shared experience of a more vital and sensual
world (Lindholm, 1990).
However, it can be argued that in contemporary western societies, the

major alternative forms of charisma are found not in public, secular
realms of capitalist consumption, nor in the worship of the nation, nor
in entertainment, nor in religion, either orthodox or magical. Instead,
people experience merger and self-loss, fundamental meaning and
identity, in more intimate circumstances. For example, it is in the
supposedly private community of the family or home, whatever form or
regime it takes, that people look for a 'haven in a heartless world'
(Lasch, 1977). But because so much is now required of the family in
terms of personal fulfilment, and because the social pressures on the
family are so great (the need for two incomes, housing shortages, social
mobility, low status of housework), many are disappointed at what is
actually delivered. Lindholm, in his study of charismatic communities
and movements, suggests that it is for this reason that many
countercultural communes, such as the Manson group who committed
several brutal murders in California in 1969, call themselves 'families'
and attempt to live out in the commune a fantasy of what they believed
families ought to be (Lindholm, 1990, p.182).
The challenge that 'reconstructive post-modernists' face is to develop a

sociological paradigm, developing further ideas that were only touched
on by earlier theorists such as Weber and Durkheim, which will do
justice to the non-rational aspects of the social. Concepts such as
charisma and the sacred point to the fact that society is based upon a
deeply evocative communion of self and other, and the Enlightenment
privileging of reason has distracted sociological attention from that
fundamental dimension of social life. Such a paradigm also has political
and policy implications because it focuses, not merely on the ownership
and distribution of wealth, but also on the conditions which would
permit a pluralistic and multiplex society to tolerate and even promote
numerous middle-level communal groups offering a satisfying sense of
commitment and emotional gratification.
8 CONCLUSION
It is difficult to make an overall assessment of the many and diverse

elements that have been included under the label of post-modernity or
post-modernism. To some extent this may be because it is not yet
established as a distinct period or a single tendency. In many respects
the label is more usefully seen as indicating a number of developments

that do not seem to fit in with the Enlightenment's metanarratives about
progress, rationalization and secularization, which were continued in
sociological convergence theories of modernity and modernization
maintaining that all societies were evolving in the same direction, and
in Marxist scientific materialist theories of increasing class polarization
and class consciousness.
Post-modernism, as it relates to aesthetics, supports this reading, as it

refers to a tendency towards pastiches of incongruent cultural codes,
without any single articulating principle or theoretical foundation. It is
very much a question of indiscriminate populism: 'anything goes' or
'whatever turns you on'. Of course, there are limits to this apparent free
for all - not least the fact that things are seldom free; indeed, culture is
increasingly commodified. In that respect there are definite ties between
culture and economic developments. However, capitalism as an
economic system is now so firmly established, despite its cycles of
booms and slumps, that it can afford to allow a high level of social and
cultural pluralism. If anything, it is in the interests of capitalism to
foster the dynamic tendencies of social and cultural pluralism because
they encourage innovation and develop more niche markets and flexible
specialization. As we have seen, even socially innovative phenomena
such as Band Aid and New Age religion, which are motivated by
autonomous moral principles that may appear to be antithetical to
materialistic and commercial values, may be reconciled with and even
co-opted into the economic system. This may be viewed negatively, or it
can be interpreted more positively as indicating that there is scope
within late capitalism for increased social and cultural variety and
pluralism. Consequently, there are different views about how post
modernism should be judged in political terms. If, as Jameson and
others believe, post-modernism indicates that we are in a transitional
phase before the emergence of a new epoch, then it is too soon to make
a final judgement about its potentially progressive or reactionary
qualities. There is still room for debate, and that may be the best thing
to come out of the current fascination with post-modernism and post
modernity. This is the conclusion of some (though not at all) feminists,
for example Janet Flax, who welcome the space opened up for new and
partial standpoints:
Feminist theories, like other forms of postmodernism, should

encourage us to tolerate and interpret ambivalence, ambiguity, and
multiplicity as well as to expose the roots of our needs for
imposing order and structure no matter how arbitrary and
oppressive these needs may be. If we do our work well, 'reality'
will appear even more unstable, complex, and disorderly than it
does now.
(Flax, 1987, p.643)
REFERENCES
Baudrillard, J. (1968) Le Systeme des Objets, Paris, Gallimard.

Baudrillard, J. (1970) La Societe de Consommation, Paris, Gallimard.
Baudrillard, J. (1981) Simulacres et Simulations, Paris, Galilee, part
translated as Simulations, New York, Semiotext(e), 1983.
Baudrillard, J. (1988) America, London, Verso. Originally published in
French, 1986.
Bell, D. (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, New York, Basic
Books.
Bell, D. (1976) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, London,
Heinemann.
Bocock, R. and Thompson, K. (eds) (1992) Social and Cultural Forms of
Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Callinicos, A. (1989) Against Post-modernism: a Marxist Critique,
Cambridge, Polity Press.
Connor, S. (1989) Post-modernist Culture, Oxford, Blackwell.
Fitzgerald, F. (1990) 'Reflections: Jim and Tammy' The New Yorker,
April 1990, pp.45-87.
Flax, J. (1987) 'Post-modernism and gender relations in feminist theory',
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol.12, No.4, pp.621-
43.
Gott, R. (1986) 'Modernism and post-modernism: the crisis of
contemporary culture', The Guardian, 1 December, 1986, p.lO.
Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell.

Hebdige, D. (1989) 'After the masses', in Hall, S. and Jacques, M. (eds),
New Times, London, Lawrence and Wishart.
Heelas, P. (1991) 'The sacralization of the self and new age capitalism'
in Abercrombie N. and Warde, A. (eds), Social Change in Contemporary
Britain, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Jacobs, J. (1984) The Mall, Prospect Heights, Illinois, Waveland.
Jameson, F. (1984) 'Post-modernism or the cultural logic of late
capitalism', New Left Review, No.146, pp.53-92.
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, London, Verso.
Kellner, D. (1989) Jean Baudrillord: From Marxism to Postmodemism

and Beyond, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,

London, Verso.
Lasch, C. (1977) Hoven in a Heartless World, New York, Basic Books.
Lindholm, C. (1990) Charisma, Oxford, Blackwell.
Marxism Today (1988) October.
Parsons, T. (1975) The Educational and Expressive Revolutions,

London, London School of Economics.
Poster, M. (ed.) (1988) Jean Baudrillard: Selected works, Cambridge,
Polity Press.
Simmel, G. (1900) Die Philosophie des Geldes, Leipzig: Duncker and
Humblot, translated as The Philosophy of Money London, Routledge,
,
1978.
Stacey, J. (1990) Brave New Families, New York, Basic Books.
Venturi, R. et al. (1977) Learning from Las Vegas, revised edition,
c Cambridge, M.I.T. Press.
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Thompson, Kenneth. 1992. “Social Pluralism and Postmodernity.

” Pp221–255 in Modernity and Its

SOCIAL PLURALISM AND

3 POST-MODERNISM AS THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE

3. 1 Culture and economy 231

4 REJECTIONS OF POST-MODERNISM 237

5 RECONSTRUCTIONS IN POST-MODERNITY OR NEW TIMES 239

6 POST-MODERNITY: CONSUMPTION AND APPEARANCES 243

7 NEW CONNECTIONS OF CONSTRUCTIVE

Reading A: The condition of postmodernity 256

The first half of the twentieth century was dominated by

The above quotation is from Richard Gott's article 'The crisis of

If post-modernism had simply been about a change in cultural styles

modernity. Some of the related social developments have already been

Demolition of post-war residential tower blocks in Hackney, London

To these possibly epochal changes might be added one that is

Do we need post-modern social theories to evaluate these changes, or is

whether post-modernism marks the end of the 'Enlightenment project'

1 Is there a distinctive cultural trend towards post-modernism?

The discussion of these issues is structured as follows:

Section 2 considers David Harvey's description (Reading A) of the

Section 3 examines one of the most influential attempts to relate post·

and its traditional organizational institutions and concepts. That a

In the end, therefore, despite his acknowledgement that there is a

Section 5 considers the case for a constructive view of post-modern

Section 6 looks at Baudrillard's account of the distinctive culture of the

Section 7 turns to a selection of more positive or constructive views of

hundred flowers to bloom. The perspectives of minority groups- for

These rufferent figures are therefore taken as representing different

Callinicos offers a 'root and branch' rebuttal of post modernism's

claims, and reaffirms the primacy of class politics from a classical

My own position in these debates is one which welcomes the opening

There are many ways of trying to describe what is meant by post­

modernism' follows, and is rapidly replacing, modernism, the term used

One of the clearest summaries of some of the issues is provided by

1 Our main interest in this discussion of the culture of post­

228 MODERNITY AND ITS FUTURES

Other voices: the post-modern feminist art of Barbara Kruger

new social epoch of post-modernity- a pluralistic, post-industrial,

ACTIVITY 1 You should now read Reading A, 'The condition of postmodernity'. b\

\Vhl!re do you think Harvey stands in terms of Gott's contrast behH'

1 In architecture, post-modernism prefers the popular and vernacular

Experience is reduced to a 'series of pure and unrelated presences in

compression arising from the pressures of capital accumulation, with its

3 POST-MODERNISM AS THE CULTURAL

3.1 CULTURE AND ECONOMY

In his essay, 'Post-modernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism'

Jameson from the 1960s), the phase of late capitalism, of multinational

Where an older Marxist social theory saw cultural forms as part of

According to Jameson, a better way of modelling this situation is as 'an

explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social

What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become

Whereas modernist culture could be judged against certain dominant

the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and older

Excalibur Castle Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada

The constitutive stylistic features of post-modernist culture for Jameson

('signifiers') with no referent except other signifiers, also has a kind of

3.2 CULTURE AND POLITICS

We now move on to the second issue, the question of whether post­

There are many ways of trying to describe what is meant by post

1 Our main interest in this discussion of the culture of post

We now move on to the second issue, the question of whether post

What distinguishes those I have called the 'constructive post