Page 193 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

DICK HEBDIGE 181

‘political representation’ and in the sturcturalist sense of a distortive
‘ideological’ representation of a pre-existent real—is regarded as
problematic. From this point on, all forms and processes of
‘representation’ are suspect. As the films of Jean-Luc Godard set out to
demonstrate, no image or utterance, from political speeches to narrative
films to news broadcasts to advertisements and the inert, reified images of
women in pornography was to be regarded as innocent (‘In every image we
must ask who speaks’ [Godard]). All such representations were more or
less complicit with, more or less oppositional to the ‘dominant ideology’. At
the same time, the self-congratulatory rhetoric of political representation as
a guarantor of individual and collective freedoms managed through the
orderly routines and institutions of parliamentary democracy was rejected
as a sham. This of course was nothing new: such an orientation forms the
basis of a much older oppositional consensus. But more than that, for the
disaffected factions who lived through the events of May 1968 the idea of
an individual or a political party representing, speaking for a social group,
a class, a gender, a society, a collectivity let alone for some general notion
of History or Progress was untenable. (What ‘he’ could ever speak
adequately for ‘her’, could recognize ‘her’ needs, could represent ‘her’
interests?) What tended to happen after 1968 is that these two senses of the
term ‘representation’ were run together around and through the notion of
discourse and language as in themselves productive of social relations,
social and sexual inequalities, through the operations of identification,
differentiation and subject-positioning. In the closely related interrogation
of and assault upon the idea of the (unitary) subject a similar ambiguity was
there to be exploited: on the one hand the ‘subject’ as in classical rhetoric
and grammar, the subject of the sentence, the ‘I’ as in ‘I did it my way,’ ‘I
changed the world’, etc., the mythical ‘I’ implying as it does the self-
conscious, self-present Cartesian subject capable of intentional, transparent
communication and unmediated action on the world. On the other hand,
there is the ‘subjected subject’: ‘subject’ as in subject to the crown,
subjugated, owned by some higher power. In the gap between these two
meanings we became subjects of ideology, subject to the Law of the Father
in the Althusserian and Lacanian senses respectively: apparently free agents
and yet at the same time subject to an authority which was at once
symbolic and imaginary—not ‘really’ there but thoroughly real in its
effects. The project of freeing the subject from subjection to the Subject
was interpreted after 1968 by a growing and increasingly influential
intellectual contingent as being most effectively accomplished through the
deflection of critical and activist energies away from abstractions like the
state-as-source-and-repository-of-all-oppressive-powers towards
particular, localized struggles and by directing attention to the play of
power on the ground as it were in particular discursive formations.