Page 187 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

DICK HEBDIGE 175

all those things as ‘postmodern’ (or more simply, using a current
abbreviation, as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence
of a buzzword.
This is not to claim that because it is being used to designate so much the
term is meaningless (though there is a danger that the kind of blurring of
categories, objects, levels which goes on with certain kinds of
‘postmodernist’ writing will be used to license a lot of lazy thinking: many
of the (contentious) orientations and assertions of the post are already
becoming submerged as unexplicated, taken for granted ‘truths’ in some
branches of contemporary critique). Rather I would prefer to believe, as
Raymond Williams indicates in Keywords, that the more complexly and
contradictorily nuanced a word is, the more likely it is to have formed the
focus for historically significant debates, to have occupied a semantic
ground in which something precious and important was felt to be
embedded. I take then, as my (possibly ingenuous) starting-point that the
degree of semantic complexity and overload surrounding the term
‘postmodernism’ at the moment signals that a significant number of people
with conflicting interests and opinions feel that there is something
sufficiently important at stake here to be worth struggling and arguing
over.
I want to use this opportunity to try to do two things, both of which will
incidentally involve reflections on and responses to the interview with
Stuart Hall but neither of which engage directly with the substance of what
Stuart had to say. First I shall attempt to summarize in a quite schematic
way some of the themes, questions and issues that gather round this term.
This attempt at clarification will involve a trek across territory already
familiar to many readers. It will also entail my going against the spirit of
postmodernism (which tends to favour what Paul Virilio calls ‘the art of
the fragment’) and attempting some kind of interpretive and historical
overview. However, I think it’s worth trying because it may help to ground
what is, after all, a notoriously vertiginous concept and to offer an opening
onto the debates in Europe and the States between marxism and
postmodernism and more specifically between postmodernism and British
cultural studies which I think frame much of what Stuart Hall had to say in
the interview. I make no claims for the authority of what I have to say: the
tone here will be credulous but critical. I shall merely be taking one man’s
route, as it were, through or round ‘the Post’. Second, resorting to what I
hope is a more constructive or at least more positive register, I shall seek to
specify exactly what it is that I feel is at stake in these debates and to offer
a few suggestions about the lessons I’ve learned from living through them.