academic mind — given the relative lack of a historical sense of both — fully grasp the major determinants of postmodern culture: the unprecedented impact of market forces on everyday life, including the academy and the art world, the displacement of Europe by America in regard to global cultural influence (and imitation), and the increase of political polarization in cultural affairs by national, racial, gender, and sexual orientation, especially within the highly bureaucratized world of ideas and opinions.
These determinants of postmodern culture are inseparable, interdependent, yet not identical. If there is a common denominator, it is the inability of a market-driven American civilization — the world power after 1945 — to constitute a culture appropriate for its new international (and imperial) status given its vast mass culture, its heterogeneous population, and its frustrated (often alienated) cultural elites of the right and left. Hence, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies abound. The leading Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson, and an exemplary conservative critic, Hilton Kramer, both view the commodification of culture and the commercialization of the arts as major culprits of our moment, while both are suspicious of liberal cultural administrators who promote these market processes in the name of diversity, pluralism, or multiculturalism. On this matter, the left postmodern journal October joins the revivified spirit of T. S. Eliot echoed in the right, modernist periodical The New Criterion. Similarly, the uncritical patriotism from above — or, more pointedly, the atavistic and jingoistic mutterings of the cultural right — is paralleled by the uncritical tribalism from below of many of the proponents of multiculturalism, even as both accuse the other of their lack of cosmopolitanism or internationalism. And cultural wars of the canon erupt over bureaucratic turf — managerial positions, tenure jobs, and curriculum offerings — alongside an already multicultural mass culture (especially in popular music), with little public opposition to hi-tech military cannons of mass destruction targeted at tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the most massive air attack in human his-517- tory. In this crude sense, postmodern culture is what we get when a unique capitalist civilization — still grappling with a recent memory of cultural inferiority anxieties toward a decimated and divided Europe — with an unwieldy mass culture of hybridity and heterogeneity and a careerist professional class of museum managers and academic professors tries to create consensus and sustain some semblance of a common culture as a new political and military imperium. These efforts — on behalf of the left, right, and middle — are bold in intent yet often pathetic in consequence. They are bold in that they are unashamedly utopian. Conservative Eurocentrists, liberal pluralists, moderate multiculturalists, and radical feminists or leftists all assume that their grand designs for cultural citizenship in American civilization can be implemented in the face of market forces, bureaucratic demands, and political expediencies in American society. Yet, for the most part, this assumption proves to be false. Instead their efforts tend to be pathetic, that is, they frustrate both themselves and their foes by not only reinforcing dissensus but also undermining the very conditions to debate the nature of the dissensus and the points of radical disagreement. This occurs principally owing to the larger de facto segregation by political persuasion, race, and subculture in a balkanized society; it is sustained by suspicion of common vocabularies or bridge-building nomenclatures that facilitate such debate. The collapse of a civic culture, once undergirded by left subgroupings (now gone) and liberal enclaves (now in disarray), contributes greatly to this tribal state of cultural affairs. Conservative ideologies promote a patriotic fervor to replace this collapse-as witnessed in William Buckley's recent call for national service or the melodramatic flagwaving to unify the nation. Yet market forces promote the proliferation of differentiated consumers, with distinct identities, desires, and pleasures to be sold and satisfied, especially in peacetime periods.
But what are these mysterious, seemingly omnipotent 'market forces'? Are they not a kind of deus ex machina in my formulations? Are they not under human control? If so, whose control? My basic claim is that Hilton Kramer and Fredric Jameson are right: commodification of culture and commercialization of the arts are the major factors in postmodern culture. These powerful social processes can be characterized roughly by a complex interplay between profit-driven -518- corporations and pleasure-hungry consumers in cultural affairs. T. S. Eliot rightly noted decades ago that American society is a deritualized one, with deracinated and denuded individuals 'distracted from distraction by distraction' — that is, addicted to stimulation, in part, to evade the boredom and horror Baudelaire saw as the distinctive features of modern life. And in a society and culture that evolves more and more around the buying and selling of commodities for stimulatory pleasures — be it bodily, psychic, or intellectual — people find counsel, consolation, and captivity in mobs, be that mob well-fed or ill-fed, well-housed or homeless, well-clad or ill-clad. And such mobs are easily seduced by fashionable ideas, fashionable clothes, or fashionable xenophobias. This Eliotic insight turns Lyotard's conception of postmodern culture on its head. There is not an increasing incredulity toward master narratives. Instead, the fashionable narratives — not just in the United States but around the world — are nationalist ones, usually xenophobic with strong religious, racial, patriarchal, and homophobic overtones. And Eliot's major followers in postmodern culture chime in quite loudly with this chauvinistic chorus. Yet, many multiculturalists who oppose this chorus simply dance a jingoistic jig to a slightly different tune. In this sense, postmodern culture looks more and more like a rehash of old-style American pluralism with fancy French theories that legitimate racial, gender, and sexual orientational entrée into the new marketplace of power, privilege, and pleasure.
But is this entrée so bad? Is it not the American way now played out in new circumstances and new conditions? Does it not democratize and pluralize the academy, museums, and galleries in a desirable manner? This entrée is not simply desirable, it is imperative. The past exclusion of nonwhite and nonmale intellectual and artistic talent from validation and recognition is a moral abomination. And it is the American way — at its best — to correct exclusion with inclusion, to democratize the falsely meritocratic, and to pluralize the rigidly monolithic. Yet it is easy to fall prey to two illusions: first, the notion that inclusion guarantees higher quality and the idea that entrée signifies a significant redistribution of cultural benefits. Inclusion indeed yields new perspectives, critical orientations, and questions. It makes possible new dialogues, frameworks, and outworks. Yet only discipline, energy, and talent can produce quality. And market forces mit-519- igate against intellectual and artistic quality — for the reasons put forward by Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and W. E. B. Du Bois, William Morris and Virginia Woolf. Second, entrée of new talent is salutary yet it benefits principally those included. Despite the hoopla about group consciousness and role models, class structures — across racial and gender lines — are reinforced and legitimated, not broken down or loosened, by inclusion. And this indeed is the American way — to promote and encourage the myth of classlessness, especially among those guilt- ridden about their upward social mobility or ashamed of their class origins. The relative absence of substantive reflections — not just ritualistic gestures — about class in postmodern culture is continuous with silences and blindnesses in the American past.
These silences and blindnesses hide and conceal an undeniable feature of postmodern culture: the pervasive violence (psychic and physical) and fear of it among all sectors of the population. Critics and theorists usually say little of this matter. Yet in the literary works of contemporary masters like Toni Morrison, Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, or Thomas Pynchon, violence of various sorts looms large in a sophisticated and subtle manner. And most of this violence — with the exception of police treatment of African American males — is citizen against citizen. The hidden injuries of class, intraracial hostilities, the machismo identity taken out on women, and the intolerance of gay and lesbian orientations generate deep anxieties and frustrations that often take violent forms. These violent acts — random, unpredictable, sometimes quite brutal — make fear and fright daily companions with life in postmodern culture. The marvels of the technological breakthroughs in communications and information stand side by side with the primitive sense of being haunted by anonymous criminals who have yet to strike. In fact, the dominant element in the imagination of dwellers in postmodern culture may well be this ironic sense of being anesthetized by victims of violence, given its frequent occurrence, and of being perennially aware that you may be next. In this way, postmodern culture is continuous with Eliot's modernist wasteland of futility and anarchy and Poe's modern chamber of horrors.
Cornel West
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