Page 155 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ON POSTMODERNISM AND ARTICULATION 143

of these tendential historical connections, you have to know when you are
moving against the grain of historical formations. If you want to move
religion, to re-articulate it in another way, you are going to come across all
the grooves that have articulated it already.
Nevertheless, as we look across the modern and developing worlds, we
see the extraordinary diversity of the roles which religious formations have
actually played. We also see the extraordinary cultural and ideological
vitality which religion has given to certain popular social movements. That
is to say, in particular social formations, where religion has become the
valorized ideological domain, the domain into which all the different
cultural strands are obliged to enter, no political movement in that society
can become popular without negotiating the religious terrain. Social
movements have to transform it, buy into it, inflect it, develop it, clarify it—
but they must engage with it. You can’t create a popular political
movement in such social formations without getting into the religious
question, because it is the arena in which this community has come to a
certain kind of consciousness. This consciousness may be limited, it may
not have successfully helped them to remake their history. But they have
been ‘languaged’ by the discourse of popular religion. They have, for the
first time, used religion to construct some narrative, however impoverished
and impure, to connect the past and the present: where they came from
with where they are and where they are going to, and why they are here…
In the case of the Rastafarians in Jamaica: Rasta was a funny language,
borrowed from a text—the Bible—that did not belong to them; they had to
turn the text upside-down, to get a meaning which fit their experience. But
in turning the text upside-down they remade themselves; they positioned
themselves differently as new political subjects; they reconstructed
themselves as blacks in the new world: they became what they are. And,
positioning themselves in that way, they learned to speak a new language.
And they spoke it with a vengeance. They learned to speak and sing. And
in so doing, they did not assume that their only cultural resources lay in the
past. They did not go back and try to recover some absolutely pure ‘folk
culture’, untouched by history, as if that would be the only way they could
learn to speak. No, they made use of the modern media to broadcast their
message. ‘Don’t tell us about tom-toms in the forest. We want to use the
new means of articulation and production to make a new music, with a
new message.’ This is a cultural transformation. It is not something totally
new. It is not something which has a straight, unbroken line of continuity
from the past. It is transformation through a reorganization of the elements
of a cultural practice, elements which do not in themselves have any
necessary political connotations. It is not the individual elements of a
discourse that have political or ideological connotations, it is the ways
those elements are organized together in a new discursive formation.