Page 218 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

206 IAIN CHAMBERS

A crisis in the languages of representation, both in culture and politics,
fundamentally involves a crisis in the legitimation of knowledge and
power. The productive tensions in this crisis have many histories and follow
diverse tempos. They do not really acquire wider, effective contact and
shape until the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps this is only finally caught up
with and acknowledged (?) by some intellectuals in Anglo-American
contexts in the 1970s when the term ‘postmodernism’ begins to make the
rounds in architecture and the visual arts, often crossing and sometimes
colluding with subsequent interrogations emerging from ‘cultural studies’,
and then even more extensively in continental western Europe in the wake
of the ‘crisis of marxism’ in the 1980s.
This shift, which is certainly not unified, can nevertheless be traced in
critical, historical, political and aesthetic terms. It is most marked by a
movement away from an idealized, theoretical production that reveals the
‘real relations’ and political agendas of a culture and world rendered
transparent by critique. That comforting clarity has largely been forsaken
for an engagement with the experiential and contingent meanings (which,
of course, are not without their own abstract, theorizing moment) involved
in inhabiting the opaque complexities of inherited, and unresolved,
histories. At this point, in the ‘critique of the critique’ (Nietzsche), we enter
the zone of the post-ideological, not because ideologies have somehow
magically evaporated, but because the need to step beyond the earlier
securities of ideological critique is now explicitly evoked. What was once
considered to be the point of critical arrival—the revelation of the critique
—has become the point of departure in an altogether more uncertain
journey as thought abandons its own ideological stance, its ‘critical
distance’, and is displaced from an exterior and universal point of view to a
more modest but involved sense in its own prosaic practices and politics.
So, there is no clean break or sharp rupture but rather a widening sense
of attempts to break through, break up and rewrite languages that are
straining under the load of the present. At this point, postmodernism, like
any—ism, is not, of course, the answer. But its disruptive presence, which
is certainly both theoretical, irreverent and sometimes simply modish, has
produced a space in the West in which to explicitly evaluate the adequacy
of our accounts. Its nihilist strain has provided the opportunity to break
with the silent authority of certain inheritances and to more self-
consciously address the conditions of contemporary critical work. This,
however, is not to say that the past is merely abandoned, rather it comes to
be reworked and re-sited from another vantage point: its traces are not
merely accumulative, they are also polidimensional and re-scriptable. Put in
other terms, the world we inherit and inhabit can still be transformed.

Postscript: the breath of language