On the Dangers of Theory without History

Abstract

In his 1988 Paris paper, End of Mass Culture, Michael Denning has provided dazzling and complex critique of cultural moment: the end of the eighties. His survey and assessment of cultural theory is so comprehensive and so persuasive that it is tempting to conclude that there is little else to be said. While it is possible to quarrel with his conclusion that all is under capitalism, what he means by this kind of dramatic assertion is clear within his own terms. All the facets of his argument that are most appealing, however?the interesting pairing of Jameson and Hall, the explication and critique of Bourdieu's investment theory, his observations on post-modernism, his assault on recent American (mis)appropriations of Gramsci, and his own agenda for political reconstruction through ?underscore his preoccupation with cultural criti cism and with the present. His questions are critical, designed to arm the analyst to deal with the present cultural moment, and the field of play is the broad expanse of contemporary cultural criticism and theory. The objectives of the game are, in his own words, do we think about the relations between commodity and class formations? and may we get beyond the standard cultural categories (high/low, mass/modernism, the brows etc.)? For Denning, the cultural world as of 1980 or thereabouts is kind of given; the problem seems to be one of rethinking its terms and categories and, among other things, achieving such objectives as creating a new conception of the spectrum of cultural forms but without recourse to the past that produced them. What is disturbing, at least to historian, is the temporal shallowness of his portrayal of the cultural scene. His key cultural categories, such central terms as mass culture or high culture or modernism, are used in way that suggests their meaning can be taken for granted and need not be historically derived. He is, therefore, stranded in everybody's preconceptions of what these terms might mean. It seems fair to ask how it is possible to change the course of cultural analysis, let alone cultural politics, without recourse to the circumstances in which one's own cultural terminology was evolved. Are there, for example, more things we need to know, or can we obtain satisfactory results by simply juggling, however skillfully, elements from the present? The ahistorical and theoretical cast of Denning's essay, in fairness to him, probably owes something to his charge from the Colloquium on Mass Culture and the Working Class, for which it was prepared. Conferees were asked to focus on cultural reception, an area of cultural inquiry that is more speculative, at least for