Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism by Jim Collins (review)

Abstract

96Rocky Mountain Review of poetry as a "revolutionary vision" (100) with regard to cultural values in general. Bermann's discerning study provides clear and theoretically sound examples of the ways in which the principal tropes function in sonnet masterworks. Further, it offers a meditation on how and why such works epitomize their respective eras and anticipate in vital ways our own "postmodern condition." This expertly crafted text will be of essential interest to creative writers as well as scholars and theoreticians. Making an implicit statement about the ethos offiguration, such sensitive criticism of poetry helps keep the art alive. In her words: "The rubrics themselves [métonymie; metaphoric; ironic and allegorical] are intended as no more than figures for the lyric idioms I attempt to describe. That is, they are themselves understood to be repetitions of sorts, with no claims to finality, but only to a rethinking of poetic possibilities" (6). WILSON BALDRIDGE Wichita State University JIM COLLINS. Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and PostModernism . New York: Routledge, 1989. 157 p. The interconnectedness ofpopular culture and post-modernism provides the basis for this inquiry into the nature of contemporary cultural analysis. Jim Collins organizes his observations into five chapters: (1) Cultural Fragmentation and the Rise of Discursive Ideologies; (2) Life in the Arena: Intertextuality in Decentered Cultures; (3) Speaking in Tongues: The Languages of Popular Narrative; (4) Discursive Ideologies and Popular Film; and (5) Post-Modernism as Culmination: The Aesthetic Politics of Decenter Cultures. One ofCollins' principal theses is that " 'culture' can no longer be conceived as a Grand Hotel, as a totalizable system that somehow orchestrates all cultural production and reception according to one master system" (xiii). Moreover, it is the improbable combination of post-modernism and popular culture which has undermined that dominant paradigm. Collins examines what happens to our ideas of culture when different discourses begin to view the world in conflicting and contradictory ways at the same time. The sheer multiplicity of cultural manifestations or discourses today is such that terms such as dominant culture, high culture, and mass culture are losing much of their significance. Collins means this premise to be provocative and heretical, but it may seem less profound to those who are not primarily engaged in formal, academic cultural analysis but are merely participating unreflectedly in the great variety of cultural options available to, say, a typical North American teenager. Still, Collins is perceptive in his assessment of the centrifugal movement favoring a decentering of cultural discourses and a departure from the monolithic forms which dominated our generally accepted understanding of popular culture only ten or twenty years ago. That, for example, more than half ofthe film industry's revenue now comes from home video rentals and cable television is a concrete reflection ofthis shift from one to many centers (if center is still even an accurate term). Book Reviews97 British "White Glove" and American "hard-boiled" detective fiction between roughly 1930 and 1955 serve Collins effectively as examples for narrative modes which establish cultural worlds unto themselves while regularly referring to the literary cultures they succeeded. Indeed, Collins focuses much ofhis attention on a historical conception of cultural heritage which has each culture reacting either positively or negatively to its immediate predecessor, mainly by means of reverential or ironic allusions to or quotations from ostensible masterworks. Acknowledging a hierarchy of intertextual discourses is, Collins asserts, the natural approach to orienting one cultural form relative to another. In similar veins, Collins examines Western films, comic books, performance art, architecture, and several other related popular culture phenomena. While this study will unquestionably interest the serious student of semiotics, it is written relentlessly in the arcane language ofthe academy and presumes its reader to be already so well versed in the arguments and theories underlying modern semiotics that Collins' insights may not be especially profound or disturbing. The book is at its most lucid and engaging when the author is discussing concrete examples of the theories he is either supporting or attacking. Collins is also engaged in dissecting the cultural phenomenon of postmodernism while it is still actively functioning. Nothing wrong with that— but it makes a number of his assertions rather more tentative than he...