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HISTORY, POLITICS AND POSTMODERNISM 171

contemporary existence. There are powerful new historical determinations
(for example, the destructability and disposability of the planet; significant
redistributions of wealth, population and power; new structures of
commodity production; new media of communication), ideological and
affective experiences (for example, the collapse of visions of the future and
of transcendental values capable of giving shape and direction to our lives;
an increasing sense of justified paranoia, terror and boredom). Hall has
already opened up these spaces by giving a central role to questions about
the relations between the media and the masses (as it is defined in
Benjamin’s theory of history) and between leadership and the popular (in
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony). But they remain undeveloped and one
must assume that this is due, in part, to the difficulty of accounting for
their effectivity within the traditional marxist categories of power.
The fact remains that such ‘postmodern events’ appear to have an
increasingly significant place in our everyday lives and that the discourses
which anchor themselves in these events appear to have a powerful place in
our cultural relations. Both postmodernism and cultural studies need to
find ways of describing the complex contexts—the conjunctural formations
—within which the possibilities of struggle are shaped, grasped and
enacted.

NOTES

1 For a more complete biography of Stuart Hall, see my entry in The
Biographical Dictionary of Neo-Marxism, Robert Gorman (ed.), Westport:
Greenwood Press, 1985, 197–200.
2 There is an ongoing debate about the relationship between post-structuralism
(as a theoretical and cultural practice) and postmodernism. My own
assumption is that the former represents the last stages of the modernist
epistemological problematic: the relationship between the subject and the
forms of mediation, in which the problem of reality is constantly displaced.
Postmodernism on the other hand moves from epistemology to history, from
subjectivity to a recovery of the real, from mediation and universality to
effectivity and contextuality. The conflation of these positions has serious
consequences for the analysis of both cultural practices and historical
context. It often leads one back into a politics of codes and communications,
of the construction and deconstruction of boundaries, despite what may be
interesting and insightful analyses of the postmodern context of
contemporary life. See Donna Haraway, ‘A manifesto for Cyborgs: science,
technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review 80 (March/
April) 1985, 65–107.
3 Postmodern cultural practices are often characterized as denying totality,
coherence, closure, depth (both expressive and representational), meaning,
teleology, narrativity, history, freedom, creativity, and hierarchy; and as
celebrating discontinuity, fragmentation, rupture, materiality, surfaces,