ABSTRACT
The notion the culture is entertainment dominates nearly all journalistic treatments of cultural phenomena. Debord's dialectical analysis of the society of the spectacle is one of the best examples of a left-oriented cultural criticism that considers both ideological and political-economic factors. Poststructural cultural criticism diverges from postmodern cultural criticism in this sense: poststructuralists deny the very possibility of disinterested cultural commentary and criticism. Radicals under sway of positivism are themselves infected by the positivism of the general culture. This relativity/relativism is countered by a more Archimedean posture that insists not only on the inevitability of cultural judgments but on the priority of certain judgments over others. The language and culture have been taken over by conformist imperatives. In this context, social and cultural criticism becomes desperate, indefatigably resisting its own cooptation by a system that turns language upside down. The myth of cultural autonomy is part and parcel of liberalism, as well as of its latest articulation in postmodernism.
