Page 152 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

140 INTERVIEW WITH STUART HALL

hackles is the comfortable way in which French intellectuals now take
it upon themselves to declare when and for whom history ends, how the
masses can or cannot be represented, when they are or are not a real
historical force, when they can or cannot by mythically invoked in the
French revolutionary tradition, etc. French intellectuals always had a
tendency to use ‘the masses’ in the abstract to fuel or underpin their own
intellectual positions. Now that the intellectuals have renounced critical
thought, they feel no inhibition in renouncing it on behalf of the masses—
whose destinies they have only shared abstractly. I find it ironic that the
silent majority, whom the intellectuals only discovered yesterday, is fueling
the postmodernist collapse. France, like all western European capitalist
societies, is in deep trouble. And, against the revolutionary myths which
French intellectuals kept alive for so long, what we continue to confront in
such developed western industrial societies is the much more accurate—and
continuing—problem of the insertion of the masses in subordinate
positionalities within dominant culture practices. The longer that history
has gone on, the more popular culture has been represented as inevitably
corrupt, etc. It is critical intellectuals, locked into their own kind of
cultural elitism, who have often succumbed to the temptation to give an
account of the Other—the masses—in terms of false consciousness or the
banalization of mass culture, etc. So the recognition of the masses and the
mass media as significant historical elements is a useful corrective against
that in postmodernism. But the politics which follows from saying that the
masses are nothing but a passive reflection of the historical, economical
and political forces which have gone into the construction of modern
industrial mass society, seems to me historically incorrect and politically
inadequate.
I would say quite the opposite. The silent majorities do think; if they do
not speak, it may be because we have taken their speech away from them,
deprived them of the means of enunciation, not because they have nothing
to say. I would argue that, in spite of the fact that the popular masses have
never been able to become in any complete sense the subject-authors of the
cultural practices in the twentieth century, their continuing presence, as a
kind of passive historical-cultural force, has constantly interrupted, limited
and disrupted everythig else. It is as if the masses have kept a secret to
themselves whie the intellectuals keep running around in circles trying to
make out what it is, what is going on.
That is what Benjamin meant by saying that it isn’t only the new means
of mechanical reproduction but the historical presence of the masses which
interrupts history. He didn’t mean this as a guarantee that the masses are
instantly going to take over the world and remake modern culture in their
own image. He meant that they are now, irrevocably, on the historical
stage and nothing can move any longer—including the dominant cultural
industries—without taking that ‘presence’ into account. Nothing can be