Page 146 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

134 INTERVIEW WITH STUART HALL

provincial town. A student, who is in the town for reasons which are never
fully explained, turns up at a dinner party she’s giving on her birthday.
She thinks her friends have invited him, and they think she’s invited him, so
he comes in, is accepted as a guest, takes part in the conversations, and so
forth. In the middle of the party there is a fleeting and unsuccessful sexual
encounter with the teacher. The next day, he shows up again at her house,
he sits at the table, starts conversing, and then he shoots himself. And the
rest of the film is ‘about’ who this person is who comes from nowhere, and
why does he kill himself there, and does it have any connection with any
other part of her life. Now, the interesting thing about the film, and why I
say it contains emergent ‘postmodernist’ elements, as it were, is that there
is no story in the old sense. He doesn’t come from anywhere; there is no
whole story about him to tell. When his girlfriend turns up, she doesn’t
quite know why she’s there either. She just came to the funeral and stays on
a few days. But she doesn’t want to be made into the explanation for him.
So while the film has a very conventional structure, at its centre is what I
would call a recognizably postmodernist experience. In some ways this
note in the British cinema is qualitatively new. But it isn’t totally different
from that disintegration of whole experiences, or from that experience of
the self as a whole person with an integrated history whose life makes sense
from some fixed and stable position that’s been ‘in trouble’ since at least
Freud, Picasso, James Joyce, Brecht, and Surrealism.
So I would say postmodernism is the current name we give to how these
old certainties began to run into trouble from the 1900s onwards. In that
sense, I don’t refuse some of the new things the postmodernists point to.
They are extremely important, and the traditional Habermasian defence
won’t do. But the attempt to gather them all under a singular sign—which
suggests a kind of final rupture or break with the modern era—is the point
at which the operation of postmodernism becomes ideological in a very
specific way. What it says is: this is the end of the world. History stops
with us and there is no place to go after this. But whenever it is said that
this is the last thing that will ever happen in history, that is the sign of the
functioning, in the narrow sense, of the ideological—what Marx called the
‘eternalizing’ effect. Since most of the world has not yet properly entered
the modern era, who is it who ‘has no future left’ ? And how long will this
‘no future’ last into the future, if you’ll excuse the paradox? If the Titanic
is going down [A reference to the slogan, ‘if you’re sailing on the Titanic,
go first class’—LG], how long is it going to take? If the bomb has already
gone off, can it go on ‘going off’ forever? You can’t be another century
constantly confronting the end of the world. You can live this as a
metaphor, suggesting that certain contemporary positions and ideas are
now deeply undermined, rendered increasingly fragile as it were, by having
the fact of the world’s end as one of their imminent possibilities. That is a
radically new historical fact and, I think, it has de-centred us all. In that