Page 14 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

2 DAVID MORLEY AND KUAN-HSING CHEN

race and ethnicity’ (a formative text for Hall’s later thinking on these
questions), and ‘The problem of ideology: marxism without guarantees’,
that interview and ‘responding’ essays formed the Special Issue on Stuart
Hall.
What was generated was a dialogue between postmodernism and cultural
studies. When we look at it retrospectively, it can be seen as a starting-point,
from which cultural studies moved on, through another round of
configuration, during the next decade, in succession to its previous
engagements with humanist marxism, structuralism, feminism, post-
structuralism, etc. In the context of 1986, postmodernism provided the key
terrain which cultural studies had to work through, in order to advance. At
that time Hall was highly suspicious of the ‘postmodern project’, but parts
of his later work (see for example ‘The meaning of New Times’, in this
volume), read more like a localized, ‘postmodern’ enunciation of the
ruptures and breaks taking place in the structures of British society. In
some ways, the identity of cultural studies has always been constituted and
reconstituted by its dialogues with the issues raised in and by particular
historical conjunctures. In retrospect, we can see that in the debates that
ensued, cultural studies not only changed the shape of postmodernism, but
was also reshaped by it.
Soon after the Special Issue was released, it went quickly out of print.
Nonetheless, it became clear that the Special Issue was being heavily used
in graduate seminars, and often cited, across a range of disciplines. There
were requests to reprint it, but the reprint never materialized. The idea of
republishing the 1986 Journal of Communication Inquiry’s Special Issue,
‘Stuart Hall’ as a historical document, took shape in 1990, when the two
editors of the present book met and discussed that possibility. Of course, we
know very well that both postmodernism and cultural studies look very
different in the 1990s from how they looked in the 1980s. With the
influence of works coming after 1986, such as David Harvey’s The
Condition of Postmodernity (1989), Edward Soja’s Postmodern
Geographies (1989) and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), postmodernism has itself become an
intellectual ‘establishment’—the recent appearance of a range of
introductory textbooks on the subject is one undeniable sign of that. On
the other hand, in dialogue with postmodernism, cultural studies has also
changed gear, moving beyond the discursive space of its own previous
formation. Simply by looking at the authors involved in the 1986 debate,
we can see the postmodern ‘take’ in their own work: in fact, some of these
texts have become essential accounts of the postmodern. Chambers’ Border
Dialogues (1990) and his later Migrancy, Culture, Identity (1993),
Grossberg’s We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and
Postmodern Culture (1992), Fiske’s Reading the Popular (1989) and his
Power Plays, Power Works (1993), Hardt’s Critical Communication