ABSTRACT
A spectre is haunting Europe and America: the spectre of Post-Modernism. Western culture is undergoing a transforming shift in its ‘structure of feeling’. But perhaps the image of a revolution in taste is wrong, because what is occurring in aesthetic life today is recuperative, and, in many ways profoundly conservative. Of course, this aesthetic conservatism cannot be equated with the mood of political conservatism that is infecting Western societies; indeed it may have more in common with, say, the ‘progressive’ conservationism of the ecological lobby, or the anti-nuclear movements, than with anything that might comfort Mrs Thatcher.
