Page 208 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

196 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

only ‘correct’ (‘right on’) but convincing and convincingly presented,
arguments that capture the popular imagination, that engage directly with
the issues, problems, anxieties, dreams and hopes of real (actually existing)
men and women: arguments, in other words, that take the popular (and
hence the populace) seriously on its own terms.
At the same time, the Gramscian line is identified, at least in Britain, with
a commitment to flexible strategies, to responsive, accountable power
structures, with commitment to decentralization and local democracy. It is
associated with a challenge to the workerism and masculinism of the old
Labour left, a move away from the dogmatism which can still plague the
fringe parties, with a sensitivity to local and regional issues, with
an alertness, too, to race and gender as well as class as significant axes of
power. It is associated with a commitment to ‘advance along multiple
fronts’, with the kinds of radical policy implemented by those progressive
enclaves within the local state (for example, sponsorship for feminist, gay
rights, ethnic minority; citizens’ rights; health care and support groups;
police monitoring committees; small, alternative presses; alternative arts
programmes; cheap public transport; expanded public information services
and issue oriented ‘consciousness raising’ (e.g., anti-nuclear power)
publicity campaigns; popular festivals, etc.)—policies which so provoked
the Thatcher administration that in 1986–7 they dismantled the system of
local municipal government in the big urban centres run throughout the
1980s by Labour administrations (leaving London as the only major
western European capital without its own elected council).
The commitment on the one hand to local radicalism, to a menu of bold,
experimental policies for the inner city and on the other, the critique of
Thatcherite ‘authoritarian populism’ (Hall, 1980a) and the resolve to
engage for instance on the traditional rightist ground of ‘national-popular’
discourses represent perhaps the two dominant and potentially opposed
tendencies which derive in part from debates amongst the British left on the
relatively recently translated work of Gramsci (1985). However, while the
first tendency clearly resonates with many of the (more positive) themes of
the Post (‘68) debates, the stress on populism seems to run directly counter
to the drift of the Post. For the popular exists solely in and through the
problematic ‘we’—the denigrated mode of address, the obsolescent shifter.
This ‘we’ is the imaginary community which remains unspeakable within
the Post—literally unspeakable in Baudrillard who presents the myth of the
masses as a ‘black hole’ drawing all meaning to its non-existent centre
(1983a). In Gramsci, of course, the ‘we’ is neither ‘fatal’ in the
Baudrillardian sense, nor given, pre-existent, ‘out there’ in the pre-Post-
erous sense. Instead it is itself the site of struggle. The ‘we’ in Gramsci has
to be made and remade, actively articulated in the double sense that Stuart
Hall refers to in the interview: both ‘spoken’, ‘uttered’ and ‘linked with’,
‘combined’. It has to be at once ‘positioned’ and brought into being. The