Postmodernism and the Politics of 'Culture'

"Postmodernism and the Politics of "Culture" is a sustained critique of contemporary cultural studies and its theoretical underpinnings. The book situates texts and arguments of cultural studies in relation to symptomatic critiques of leading post-modern theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard. Katz explains how the politics of resistance to closure has reduced cultural studies to a new form of liberalism. Furthermore, Postmodernism and the Politics of "Culture" addresses the mode in which cultural studies constitutes and reproduces itself along with its objects, showing that the same logic of heterogeneity and subversion cultural studies located in the "popular" also serves to present cultural studies itself as a (post) discipline immune to structural critique. In the process, Postmodernism and the Politics of "Culture" joins the argument in defense of Marxist categories such as "totality," "ideology," and "contradiction." It also resituates classical Marxism on the terrain of global capitalism, challenging the conclusions drawn by most contemporary theorists from phenomena such as hyper-reality and simulacral politics, and questioning the progressive credentials of now canonical concepts such as undecidability and performativity."--BOOK JACKET.