Page 144 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

132 INTERVIEW WITH STUART HALL

work, he took a very different position, just lying back and letting the
media roll over him; he celebrated the very things he had most bitterly
attacked. I think something like that has happened among the postmodern
ideologues. You can see, behind this celebration of the American age, the
deep disillusionment of the left-bank Parisian literary intelligentsia. So, in
relation to the still-too-integrated positions enunciated in the critical theory
of Habermas, postmodernists are quite correct to talk about the erosion of
the Enlightenment project, the sharp changes taking place in modernism,
etc. But I think the label ‘postmodernism’, especially in its American
appropriation (and it is about how the world dreams itself to be
‘American’) carries two additional charges: it not only points to how things
are going in modern culture, but it says, first, that there is nothing else of
any significance—no contradictory forces, and no counter-tendencies; and
second, that these changes are terrific, and all we have to do is to reconcile
ourselves to them. It is, in my view, being deployed in an essentialist and
uncritical way. And it is irrevocably Euro- or western-centric in its whole
episteme.
So we are caught between two unacceptable choices: Habermas’s
defensive position in relation to the old Enlightenment project and
Lyotard’s Euro-centred celebration of the postmodern collapse. To
understand the reasons for this oversimplified binary choice is simple
enough, if one starts back far enough. I don’t think that there is any such
thing as the modernist impulse, in the singular. Modernism itself was a
decisively ‘western’ phenomenon. It was always composed of many
different projects, which were not all integratable or homogeneous with
one another; they were often, in fact, in conflict. For example, consider
Adorno and Benjamin: both were theorists of the modern and in some
ways, very close together in formation. They are also bitterly, deeply,
opposed to one another on some key questions. Now I know that
shorthand terms like ‘modernism’ can be useful in everyday exchanges but
I don’t know, analytically, what the single project was which modernism
might have been. And it’s very important to realize that, if modernism was
never one project, then there have always been a series of different
tendencies growing out of it as it has developed historically. I think this is
similar to the argument behind Perry Anderson’s critique of Marshall
Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air in a recent New Left Review. While
I like Berman’s book very much and think that there is a rather
traditionalist view of modernism built into Perry Anderson’s response, I
still agree with Anderson rather than Berman on the central argument
about periodization. I don’t think that what Berman is describing is a new