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HISTORY, POLITICS AND POSTMODERNISM 169

(including ideological) of cultural practices functions within an affective
economy of everyday life. It is ironic that so much contemporary writing
on popular culture offers accounts of affectively powerful texts which are
always mired within what Benjamin called ‘organizations of pessimism’.
Hall himself has recognized (1984c) the need to theorize and describe the
‘sensibility of mass culture’ but has, thus far, left the question unanswered.
But without an answer, the enormous power of contemporary culture
(especially the mass media) and the investment that we make in it cannot
be adequately approached. I would suggest that this sensibility depends in
fact on the particular historical relations between ideological and affective
struggles, between resistance and empowerment, that surround the mass
media and contemporary social struggles. It is here, in fact, in an
understanding of ‘the popular’ as an affective plane, that one can find any
grounds for an ‘optimism of the will’ today, any space to negotiate between
utopianism and nihlism.
The third and perhaps most important domain of postmodern work
involves the attempt to understand the specificity of the contemporary
historical formation. This is also the most controversial and certainly the
one most fraught with difficulties and dangers. Here postmodern irony and
excess operate against themselves: a theory of the collapse of the distinction
between elite and popular becomes a new elitism; a theory that
denies innocent and totalized descriptions offers itself as an innocent and
totalized description; a theory that denies the new in favour of bricolage,
not only offers itself as new, but announces that the absence of the new is a
new situation; and a theory of the impossibility of meta-narrative becomes
its own meta-narrative absence. More importantly, a theory that celebrates
otherness fails to acknowledge the difference between experiences, real
historical tendencies and cultural discourses and meanings, as well as the
complex relations that exist between them. Moreover, even within the
specific domains of experience and discourse, it fails to recognize the
uneven and contradictory relations that exist within and between different
sites of postmodern effects: history, subjectivity, values, reality, politics. I
would agree with Hall that to read history as rupture, to see the present as
the site of the apocalypse (the end of the old, the beginning of the new) is a
powerful ideological moment. Echoing Hall, if reality was never as real as
we have constructed it, it’s not quite as unreal as we imagine it; if
subjectivity was never as coherent as we imagine it, it’s not quite as
incoherent as we fantasize it; and if power was never as simple or monolithic
as we fantasize it (reproducing itself, requiring giants and magical subjects
to change it), it’s not quite as dispersed and unchallengeable as we fear.
Thus, I would argue that Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum
confuses the collapse of a particular ideology of the real for the collapse of
reality; it confuses the collapse of a particular ideology of the social
(articulated into public and private) with the end of the social. But that