Page 143 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

Chapter 6
On postmodernism and articulation
An Interview with Stuart Hall

Edited by Lawrence Grossberg

Question: I would like to begin by asking how you would locate your
interest in and relationship to the current explosion of work within what is
called ‘postmodernism’. Perhaps, as a way of getting into this rather
convoluted set of discourses, you could comment on how you would
position yourself in the debate between Habermas and Lyotard.
SH: I am interested in it for a number of reasons. First I am fascinated by
the degree to which postmodernism has taken off in America—its
immediate success as a concept, compared with either post-marxism or
poststructuralism. ‘Postmodernism’ is the biggest success story going. And
since it is, in essence, such a devastating story—precisely about American
culture, it seems a funny thing to be so popular. It’s like asking, how long
can you live with the end of the world, how much of a bang can you get out
of the big bang? And yet, apart from that, one has to come to terms with
it. The concept poses key questions about the shape and tendency of
contemporary culture. It is emerging in Europe as a central focus of debate,
and there are very serious issues involved. Let me consider the specific
question of the debate between Habermas and Lyotard.
Briefly, I don’t really agree with either of them. I think Habermas’s
defence of the Enlightenment/modernist project is worthy and courageous,
but I think it’s not sufficiently exposed to some of the deeply contradictory
tendencies in modern culture to which the postmodernist theories quite
correctly draw our attention. But I think Lyotard, and Baudrillard in his
celebratory mode, really have gone right through the sound barrier. They
are involved, not simply in identifying new trends or tendencies, new
cultural configurations, but in learning to love them. I think they collapse
these two steps—analysis and prescription—into one. It’s a bit like that
precursor-prophet of postmodernism, Marshall McLuhan. When Marshall
McLuhan first began to write about the media, he had come down from
Cambridge as a committed Leavisite critic. His first book, The Mechanical
Bride, was highly critical of the new technologies. In fact, he referred to
this book as ‘a civil defense against mass media fallout’. But the
disillusionment soon turned into its opposite—celebration, and in his later

Reprinted from Journal of Communication Inquiry (1986), 10(2), 45–60.