Page 161 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ON POSTMODERNISM AND ARTICULATION 149

many positive ways that I continue to acknowledge, even after he has gone
out of fashion. So ‘post’ means, for me, going on thinking on the ground of
a set of established problems, a problematic. It doesn’t mean deserting that
terrain but rather, using it as one’s reference point. So I am, only in that
sense, a post-marxist and a post-structuralist, because those are the two
discourses I feel most constantly engaged with. They are central to my
formation and I don’t believe in the endless, trendy recyling of one
fashionable theorist after another, as if you can wear new theories like T-
shirts.
Question: It is clear that cultural studies is enjoying a new measure of
success in the United States. I wonder how you feel about these recent
successes to institutionalize and codify cultural studies?
SH: I would like to perhaps make a distinction between the two terms
that you use. I am in favour of institutionalization because one needs to go
through the organizational moment—the long march through the
institutions—to get people together, to build some kind of collective
intellectual project. But codification makes my hackles rise, even about the
things I have been involved in. People talk about ‘the Birmingham school’
[The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of
Birmingham] and all I can hear are the arguments we used to have in
Birmingham that we never were one school; there may have been four or
five but we were never able to unify it all, nor did we want to create that
kind of orthodoxy. Now let me say something, perhaps controversial, about
the American appropriation of all that was going on at Birmingham, and
cultural studies in general, for I see some interesting presences and
absences. For instance, I find it interesting that formal semiotics here
rapidly became a sort of alternative interpretive methodology, whereas I
don’t think anybody in England ever really believed in it as a complete
method. When we took on semiotics, we were taking on a methodological
requirement: you had to show why and how you could say that that is what
the meaning of any cultural form or practice is. That is the semiotic
imperative: to demonstrate that what you were calling ‘the meaning’ is
textually constituted. But as a formal or elaborated methodology, that was
not what semiotics was for us. In America, taking on semiotics seemed to
entail taking on the entire ideological baggage of structuralism. Similarly, I
notice there is now a very rapid assimilation of the Althusserian moment into
literary studies but without its marxist connotations. And I notice the same
thing about Gramsci’s work. Suddenly, I see Gramsci quoted everywhere.
Even more troubling, I see Gramscian concepts directly substituted for
some of the very things we went to Gramsci to avoid. People talk about
‘hegemony’ for instance as the equivalent of ideological domination. I have
tried to fight against that interpretation of ‘hegemony’ for twenty years.
Sometimes, I hear a similar kind of easy appropriation when people start
talking about cultural studies. I see it establishing itself quite rapidly on the