The Sublime and Contemporary Popular Culture: The Radical Text in a Post-Political Era

摘要

This paper attempts to re-examine the question of to what extent is it possible in the contemporary cultural situation for popular media texts such as music videos, mainstream films or television programmes, for example, to embody notions of the radical. Many, now conventional, variants of postmodern theory would seem to suggest the very notion of “the radical” has become an anachronism in a media landscape where the sphere of popular culture has become little other than a generally uncritical, depoliticised and hyper-commodified terrain, and within which attempts to radicalise this sphere in ways suggested in previous periods are doomed to failure. Drawing upon the ideas of commentators such as Lyotard, Jameson and iek, the paper revisits the notion of the sublime in an attempt to argue for a critical postmodernism, rather than a more conventional and conservative interpretation of the term, as a means to begin to conceive of new, radical media production.