Editorial note

the editors 5 Editorial note This special issue on the politics of postmodern culture has been assembled in what might now already be wryly described as the highest tradition of postmodernity: that is to say, with a non-unitary heterogeneity in mind. Indeed, arguably the two most salient features of postmodern culture are the sense, first, that all experiences, events and their representations are, as the famous phrase has it, "always already" figured and coded for us a thousand times over— so much so that older notions of the "authentic" and/or "real" disappear amid a crackle of derisory laughter; and, second, that this babble of codes, discourses and signifiers which seems not only to spUl over but to constitute our experience, our so-called "subjectivity" itsdf, is essentially without an essence, consistently discontinuous, by definition without a master term or vantage point to make the giddy sickening chaos fall into place. To decry such a state of affairs as simply "wrong" is beside the point; equally irrelevant, for our purposes at least, would be the attempt to critique and condemn those typically French thinkers, from Foucault to Baudrillard, who have abstracted the experience of postmodernity as described above into the new sublimities of post-structural and "post-Marxist" theory. Rather, a properly materialist approach to the question of postmodernity will seek to understand it as our Contributing Editor Fredric Jameson has done in his recent essay in New Left Review, as the experiential result of the cultural logic of late capitaUsm itself. Seen in this light, postmodernism is ndther a set of cultural practices which may be employed or deplored, nor a sd of theoretical-philosophical terms, but what Raymond Williams might describe as an increasingly hegemonic "structure of feeling" within the white male capitalist Empire, one increasingly capable of subsuming, marginalizing, and/or distorting beyond recognition even and especially those other cultural and experiential "feels" and fields most apparently, even doggedly opposed to itself. Our purpose, then, in compiling these readings has been to dramatize the questions raised by the appearance of such a "structure of feeUng" within the fidd of cultural production alone. To begin to see some of these questions, and to see how they place you, you might try reading Joyce Savre's scrupulous conjuration of the haUowed high-art space in "I Believe This Is the Home of Georgia OTCeefe" against Barry SternUeb's "Nixon at Yaddo." Or try setting off the translucent stringencies of Tom Wayman, Jim Scully, or Ochester's Brecht against the playfuUy self-loathing compUcitousness of R. Salasin and James D. Miley. Or, for that matter, try comparing the whole project of Uterary production, "committed " or not, as traditionally conceived to the inherently unstable, polyvalent moment of "punk production" in L.A., as described and analyzed in David James' exemplary piece. We set out such a ndwork of correspondences and contradictions not (of course) to drown all hope for engaged, committed writing from within this impacted nerve central of late capitalism today, but to suggest some of the challenges it must confront—as well as the ruses it must avoid. As Linda Andre's essay on postmodernist photography makes clear, mere display or re-representation of the codes and icons of power is not in itself a radical act: the question is, though, what kind of cultural production is or can be radical here and now. This question is in turn merely a subset of the larger question of the nature and possibility of a revolutionary poUtics for us, as Carl Freedman's surprisingly relevant examination of the precocious 'postmodernity of Hugh MacDiarmid's podry reminds us. Thus, it is fitting that our selection of readings for this special issue ends with some of the late Michel Pêcheux's final worryings of the question of ideology today within advanced capitaUsm, where it is always on the move, where there is, as he says, "no 'game of all games.'" As Warren Montag's introduction to Pêcheux's address suggests, Michel Pêcheux was one of the few thinkers of our time to attempt to do full justice to the complexities, dispersals, and deliriums of advanced capitalism without losing sight...