Modern Mind

providing an alternative historiography to what is now called colonialist knowledge. 52
    Underlying much of the postcolonial movement, not to mention the postmodern sensibility, was a phrase that the American critic Fredric Jameson gave to one of his books in 1981,
The Political Unconscious. 53
Postcolonial and postmodern criticism derived much of its strength from Raymond Williams’s earlier arguments that ‘serious’ literature should not be read in any way different from popular literature, and that the same is true of all art. This position was set out most fully in two celebrated articles published in
New Left Review,
one in 1984 by Jameson, entitled ‘Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ and the other, in 1985, by Terry Eagleton, professor of English at Oxford, entitled ‘Against the Grain.’ Jameson’s argument was that all ideologies are ‘strategies of containment,’ which enable a society ‘to provide an explanation of itself which suppresses its underlying contradictions.’ 54 The certainties of the nineteenth-century novel, for example, were designed to reassure the middle classes that their orderly class system would endure. Hemingway’s novels, on the other hand, with their spare, short sentences, obsessed with machismo, had to be set in exotic foreign countries because he couldn’t fit into America’s self-image as a complex, technologically sophisticated society. Jameson’s secondmajor argument was that the postmodern sensibility was by the mid-1990s not merely one way of looking at the world but the dominant one, and that this was because it was the logical outcome of late capitalism. 55 In this late stage, he said, society has finally abolished the distinction between high culture and mass culture – we have instead a culture that many decry as ‘degraded’ but younger people espouse enthusiastically: kitsch, schlock, pulp fiction and TV,
Reader’s Digest.
The first to appreciate this was Andy Warhol. The point, Jameson says, is that late capitalism recognises that art is, above all, a
commodity,
something to be bought and sold.
    Eagleton was more aggressively Marxist. The distinction between high art and popular/mass art was one of the oldest certainties, he said, and the fact that it has been undermined is an aid to the socialist, because it helps ‘expose the rhetorical structures by which non-socialist works produce politically undesirable effects.’ 56 In late capitalism, Eagleton writes, commodities have become fetishes, and he includes artistic commodities with the others. This is a new aesthetic category with no precursors.
    Critics like Jameson and Stanley Fish, his colleague, then at Duke University in North Carolina and now at the University of Illinois in Chicago, paid as much attention in their work to other media besides books – that went without saying. Films, television, comic books, advertising … all these were systems of signs. 57 The early work of Raymond Williams, postcolonialism, and postmodern literary theory, together with the theories of such French authors as Barthes, Lyotard, Lacan, Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard, plus the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, therefore came together to create a new discipline, cultural studies. This is not the same as media studies, but they both stem from the same impulse. The fundamental idea behind both is, as was mentioned above, and to return to Jameson’s phrase, the political unconscious – that works of the imagination are not ‘privileged’ in any way, to use the favoured term, that they are just as much a product of their context and environment as anything else, are subject to market forces, and therefore cannot avoid having an ideological or political angle. It is the aim of cultural studies to render this hidden agenda visible, peeling away one of the final layers of self-consciousness.
    Cultural studies is controversial, especially among an older generation brought up to believe that ‘aesthetic’ values are
sui generis,
independent of everything else, helping us to find the ‘eternal truths’ of the human condition. But cultural studies courses at universities are very popular, which must mean that they meet some needs of the young (they have been around too long now to be merely fashionable). The heart of the issue, the most controversial aspect of the new discipline, is the battle for Shakespeare. Keats called Shakespeare the ‘chief poet,’ the ‘begetter of our deep