Page 210 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

198 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

between the two sets of concerns and emphases, for instance, in the work of
Michel Pêcheux (1982) on ‘interdiscourse’. The retention of the old
marxist terms should not be allowed to obscure the extent to which many
of these terms have been transformed—wrenched away from the ‘scientific’
mooring constructed in the Althusserian phase. What looks at first glance a
lot like the old ‘rationalist’ dualism (‘Left’ v. ‘Right’, etc.); the old
‘modernizing’ teleology (‘progressive’, ‘reactionary’, ‘emergent’, ‘residual’,
etc.); a typically ‘modernist’ penchant for military metaphors (‘dominant’
and ‘subaltern classes’, etc.); an unreconstructed ‘modernist’ epistemology
(‘ideology’, for instance, rather than ‘discourse’) looks different closer to.
From the perspectives heavily influenced by the Gramscian approach,
nothing is anchored to the ‘grands récits’, to master narratives, to stable
(positive) identities, to fixed and certain meanings: all social and semantic
relations are contestable hence mutable: everything appears to be in flux:
there are no predictable outcomes. Though classes still exist, there is no
guaranteed dynamic to class struggle and no ‘class belonging’: there are no
solid homes to return to, no places reserved in advance for the righteous. No
one ‘owns’ an ‘ideology’ because ideologies are themselves in process: in a
state of constant formation and reformation. In the same way, the concept
of hegemony remains distinct from the Frankfurt model of a ‘total closure
of discourse’ (Marcuse) and from the ascription of total class domination
which is implied in the Althusserian model of a contradictory social
formation held in check eternally (at least until ‘the last (ruptural)
instance’) by the work of the RSAs and the ISAs. Instead hegemony is a
precarious, ‘moving equilibrium’ (Gramsci) achieved through the
orchestration of conflicting and competing forces by more or less unstable,
more or less temporary alliances of class fractions.
Within this model, there is no ‘science’ to be opposed to the monolith of
ideology, only prescience: an alertness to possibility and emergence—that
and the always imperfect, risky, undecidable ‘science’ of strategy. There are
only competing ideologies themselves unstable constellations liable to
collapse at any moment into their component parts. These parts in turn can
be recombined with other elements from other ideological formations to
form fragile unities which in turn act to interpellate and bond together new
imaginary communities, to forge fresh alliances between disparate social
groups (see, for instance, Hall (1980a, 1985) and others (Jessop et al.,
1984) on ‘national popular’ discourses).
But it would be equally foolish to deny that there are crucial differences
between the two sets of orientations. A marxism of whatever kind could
never move back from or go beyond ‘modernity’ in the very general terms
in which it is defined within the Post, which is not to say that marxism is
necessarily bound to a ‘dynamic’ and destructive model of technological
‘advance’ (see Bahro (1984) on the possibility of eco-marxism: a union of
‘greens’ and ‘reds’). However it should be said that the kind of marxism