The Contradictions of Postmodernism

Why is everyone talking about culture? Because there are, of course, rather more important topics to talk about. The idea, fashionable now among sectors of the Western left, that everything is cultural belongs to the doctrine known as culturalism, a doctrine quite as reductive in its own way as economism, biologism, essentialism, or any of the other "isms" against which it is a mildly panic stricken overreaction. Culturalism inflates the importance of what is constructed, coded, conventional about human life, as against what human beings have in common as natural material animals. Historicism, likewise, tends to emphasize what is changeable, relative, and discon tinuous about history, rather than what has remained massively, unmovably, and somewhat depressingly consistent about it. Culturalism belongs to a specific historical place and time?in our case, to an advanced capitalist West, but now increasingly, it would seem, about to be imported into China and other "emergent" societies. What are the reasons for this?

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