Page 149 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ON POSTMODERNISM AND ARTICULATION 137

surfaces which it is possible to produce, and we have to recognize the rich
technological bases of modern cultural production which enable us
endlessly to simulate, reproduce, reiterate and recapitulate. But there is all
the difference in the world between the assertion that there is no one, final,
absolute meaning—no ultimate signified, only the endlessly sliding chain of
signification, and, on the other hand, the assertion that meaning does not
exist.
Benjamin reminded us quite a while ago that montage would destroy the
aura of the unique and singular work of art forever. And once you destroy
the aura of the singular work of art because it can be reiterated, you enter
into a new era which cannot be approached in the same way, using the
traditional theoretical concepts. You are going to have to operate your
analysis of meaning without the solace of closure: more on the basis of the
semantic raids that Benjamin proposed—to find the fragments, to decipher
their assembly and see how you can make a surgical cut into them,
assembling and reassembling the means and instruments of cultural
production. It is this that inaugurates the modern era. But although this
breaks the one, true meaning into fragments and puts one in the universe
of the infinite plurality of codes, it does not destroy the process of
encoding, which always entails the imposition of an arbitrary ‘closure’.
Indeed it actually enriches it, because we understand meaning not as a
natural but as an arbitrary act—the intervention of ideology into language.
Therefore, I don’t agree with Baudrillard that representation is at an end
because the cultural codes have become pluralized. I think we are in a
period of the infinite multiplicity of codings, which is different. We have all
become, historically, fantastically codable encoding agents. We are in the
middle of this multiplicity of readings and discourses and that has
produced new forms of self-consciousness and reflexivity. So, while the
modes of cultural production and consumption have changed,
qualitatively, fantastically, as the result of that expansion, it does not mean
that representation itself has collapsed. Representation has become a more
problematic process but it doesn’t mean the end of representation. Again, it
is exactly the term ‘postmodernism’ itself which takes you off the tension
of having to recognize what is new, and of struggling to mobilize some
historical understanding of how it came to be produced. Postmodernism
attempts to close off the past by saying that history is finished, therefore
you needn’t go back to it. There is only the present, and all you can do is
be with it, immersed in it.
Question: To what extent would you then describe yourself as a
modernist attempting to make sense of these postmodern tendencies? To
what extent can the inherent critical categories of modernism analyse the
current forms and conditions of cultural production and reception? To
what extent, for example, can modernism make sense of MTV?