Page 150 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

138 INTERVIEW WITH STUART HALL

SH: I think MTV is quite extraordinary. It takes fragmentation, the
plurality of signification, to new heights. But I certainly couldn’t say that it
is unintelligible. Each so-called meaningless fragment seems to me rich with
connotations. It seems perfectly clear where MTV comes from: indeed, it is
almost too predictable in its ‘unpredictability’. Unpredictability is its meta-
message. We know enough about the tendencies of mass culture for the last
hundred years to recognize that MTV does not come from outer space.
Don’t misunderstand me. I do appreciate the genuine ‘openness’ of
postmodernism before these new cultural trends and forces. But the
extrapolations about the universe it makes from them are plainly wildly
exaggerated and ideological, based on taking one’s own metaphors literally,
which is a stupid mistake to make. Not all of those tendencies are by any
means progressive; many of them are very contradictory. For instance,
modern mass phenomena like the mega-event—like Live Aid, Farm Aid,
etc., or like Springsteen’s current success—have many post-modern
elements in them. But that doesn’t mean they are to be seen as the
unambiguous cultural expressions of an entirely new epoch. It seems to me
that such events are, precisely, massively defined by their diversity, their
contradictory plurality. Springsteen is a phenomen that can be read, with
equal conviction, in at least two diametrically opposed ways. Hs audiences
seem to be made up of people from 5 to 50, busily reading him in different
ways. The symbols are deeply American—populist in their ambiguity; he’s
both in the White House and On The Road. In the 1960s, you had to be
one or the other. Springsteen is somehow both at the same time. That’s
what I mean by fragmentation.
Now, if postmodernism wants to say that such processes of diversity and
fragmentation, which modernism first tried to name, have gone much
further, are technologically underpinned in new ways, and have penetrated
more deeply into mass consciousness, etc., I would agree. But that does not
mean that this constitutes an entirely new epoch or that we don’t have any
tools to comprehend the main trends in contemporary culture, so all we
can do is to lie back and love it. I don’t feel that those things which people
are pointing to in postmodernism so entirely outrun our critical theories as
to render those theories irrelevant. The problem is that it is assumed that
theory consists of a series of closed paradigms. If paradigms are closed, of
course, new phenomena will be quite difficult to interpret, because they
depend on new historical conditions and incorporate novel discursive
elements. But if we understand theorizing as an open horizon, moving
within the magnetic field of some basic concepts, but constantly being
applied afresh to what is genuinely original and novel in new forms of
cultural practice, and recognizing the capacity of subjects to reposition
themselves differently, then you needn’t be so defeated. True, the great
discourses of classical Reason, and of the rationalist actor or subject are
much weaker in their explanatory power now than they were before. So