Page 147 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ON POSTMODERNISM AND ARTICULATION 135

sense love and human relationships in the postmodern period feel very
different—more temporary, provisional, contingent. But what we
are looking at here is the tempering and elongation of the very same
profound cultural and historical tendencies which constructed that break
with ‘the modern’ which we call ‘modernism’. And I want to be able to
retain the term ‘modernity’ to refer to the long history—the longue durée—
of those tendencies.
Question: One of the very distinctive features of the so-called
postmodern theorists is their abandonment of issues of meaning,
representation and signification, and ideology. How would you respond to
this turn?
SH: There is here a very sharp polarization. I don’t think it is possible to
conceptualize language without meaning, whereas the postmodernists talk
about the collapse or implosion of all meaning. I still talk about
representation and signification, whereas Baudrillard says we are at the end
of all representational and signifying practice. I still talk about ideology,
whereas Foucault talks about the discursive which has no ideological
dimension to it. Perhaps I am in these respects a dinosaur or a recidivist,
but I find it very difficult to understand contemporary society and social
practice giving up those three orienting points. I am not convinced by the
theoretical arguments that have been advanced against them.
First, let’s take Foucault’s argument for the discursive as against the
ideological. What Foucault would talk about is the setting in place, through
the institutionalization of a discursive regime, of a number of competing
regimes of truth and, within these regimes, the operation of power though
the practices he calls normalization, regulation and surveillance. Now
perhaps it’s just a sleight of hand, but the combination of regime of truth
plus normalization/regulation/surveillance is not all that far from the
notions of dominance in ideology that I’m trying to work with. So maybe
Foucault’s point is really a polemical, not an analytic one, contesting one
particular way of understanding those terms, within a much more linear
kind of base/superstructure model. I think the movement from that old
base/superstructure paradigm into the domain of the discursive is a very
positive one. But, while I have learned a great deal from Foucault in this
sense about the relation between knowledge and power, I don’t see how
you can retain the notion of ‘resistance’, as he does, without facing
questions about the constitution of dominance in ideology. Foucault’s
evasion of the question is at the heart of his proto-anarchist position
precisely because his resistance must be summoned up from nowhere.
Nobody knows where it comes from. Fortunately, it goes on being there,
always guaranteed: in so far as there is power, there is resistance. But at
any one moment, when you want to know how strong the power is, and
how strong the resistance is, and what is the changing balance of forces,
it’s impossible to assess because such a field of force is not conceptualizable