Page 179 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

HISTORY, POLITICS AND POSTMODERNISM 167

that both positions are anti-elitist. Neither seeks to speak for the masses as
a ventriloquist, but rather, to make a space in which the voices of the
masses can be heard. Neither seeks to define the appropriate sites of
struggle, but rather, to locate and assist those struggles that have already
been opened up. And neither assumes that the masses are the passively
manipulated, colonized zombies of the system, but rather, the actively
struggling site of a politics in, if not of, everyday life.
Nevertheless, there are significant theoretical differences between
cultural studies and postmodernism. I want to argue for the former’s
theory of articulation and the latter’s theory of ‘wild realism’. The failure
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of postmodern theory is not that it has no notion of macrostructures but
rather that it has no way of theorizing the relations between different levels
of abstraction, between the microphysics of power and biopolitics
(Foucault) or between the child in the bubble and the simulacrum
(Baudrillard). Similarly, the failure of postmodern theory is not that it
denies a reality behind the surfaces of everyday life but rather that it
always forgets that there are many surfaces of everyday life and that reality
is produced within the relations amongst these surfaces. The factory (even
in the Third World) is as much a surface of our lives as is television.
Because one does not frequently move across its terrain does not mean it is
not having its effects. One must remember that not all surfaces are
articulated or present or even effective in the same ways—that is precisely
the site of the struggle over the real. In both instances, the lacuna in
postmodernism is a theory of articulation.
On the other hand, the failure of cultural studies is not that it continues
to hold to the importance of signifying and ideological practices but rather,
that it always limits its sense of discursive effectivity to this plane. It fails to
recognize that discourses may not only have contradictory effects within
the ideological, but that those ideological effects may themselves be placed
within complex networks of other sorts of effects. Consequently, the
particular model of articulation falls back into a structuralism of empty
spaces in which every place in the ideological web is equally weighted,
equally charged so to speak. The cultural field remains a product of oddly
autonomous, indeterminate struggles, an amorphous field of equal
differences and hence, of equivalences. Surprisingly, in the end, this seems
to leave no space for the power of either the text itself or the historical
actor to excite and incite historical struggles around particular discourses.
While Hall argues that the audience cannot be seen as passive cultural
dopes, he cannot elaborate its positivity. Neither aspect of the relation can
be understood as merely a matter of the tendential structures that have,
historically, already articulated a particular discourse or subject into
powerful ideological positions. The critic, distanced from the effectivity of
the popular, can decide neither where nor whether to struggle over any
particular discourse. More importantly, the critic cannot understand why