Page 151 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ON POSTMODERNISM AND ARTICULATION 139

are the great evolutionary chains of explanation predicated on some
teleological, progressive historical movement. But in the era of Hi Tech,
the corporate, international economy and global communication networks,
what does it mean to say—except as a metaphor exaggerated for affect—
that the age of rationalism has ended. Only those who speak of ‘culture’
abstracted from its material, technical and economic conditions of
existence could hold such a position.
I think a postmodernist would be likely to see my response as too
complacent, and perhaps that’s what you mean by characterizing me as a
modernist. I admit to being a modernist, in the sense that I find the early
stages of the modernist project—when it is breaking through, historically,
aesthetically, when it is all happening at once—the moment of Braque,
Picasso, Joyce, Klee, the Bauhaus, Brecht, Heartfield, Surrealism and Dada
—to be one of the most fantastically exciting intellectual moments in
twentieth-century history. Of course, I recognize that this movement was
limited and did not directly engage with or transform the popular. How
could it? How could culture, on its own, transcend the social, political and
economic terrain on which it operates? Certainly, failing in its radical
promise, many modernist impulses were then pulled back into more elitist
formations. Williams long ago explained how emergent movements are
assimilated into the dominant. This does not diminish the radical break
with the epistemes of the modern which modernism represented. Since then,
the engagement between modernism and the popular has been following a
rapid but uneven path. This articulation—far from being completed—is
only now really beginning. It’s not that I don’t respond positively to many
elements in postmodernism, but the many separate and diverse strands,
which modernism tried to hold together in one framework, have once again
separated out. So there’s now an aesthetic postmodernism an achitectural
postmodernism, postmodernist theory, postmodernist film making, etc.
Postmodern culture has become a set of disassociated specialisms. I
suppose I am still very attracted by that highly contradictory point at the
inception of modernism when an old paradigm is breaking up and a new
one is being born. I’m drawn by the immediate intellectual excitement that
is generated in the capacity to move from one thing to another, to make
multiple cross-linkings, multi-accentualities, which was at the centre of the
modernist project. However, while my tastes tend toward the modernist, I
don’t know whether I would locate myself now within the modernist
theoretical project.
Question: It seems to me that the most powerful challenge to your theory
of articulation—and its political implications—is Baudrillard’s description
of the masses as an implosive force that ‘can no longer be spoken for,
articulated and represented.’
SH: I think the whole collapse of the critical French intelligentsia during
the Mitterrand era is inscribed in that statement. What raised my political