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postmodernism identifies as its own, and he is well aware that critical
theory needs to engage with them.
Postmodernism, he says, is the current name given to the problems raised
with the ‘disintegration of whole experiences’ which began in the 1920s. In
accusing postmodernism of attempting to ‘gather them all under a single
sign’, a sign which says ‘this is the end of the world’, Hall uses allegory: ‘If
the Titanic is going down, how long is it going to take? If the bomb has
gone off, it can’t go on going off forever.’ The allusion to disaster is
ideologically significant, but more telling is the suggestion that the
discursive suspension of closure-as-meaning in the face of the ultimate
closure is, ipso facto, the suspension of meaning as anything other than
metaphor.
If the Titanic is going down, the question ‘How long is it going to take?’
becomes less immediately demanding than ‘What shall we do in the
meantime?’ Meaning is less urgent than experience and pleasure—a notion
that Hall rarely manages to take on board (to continue the metaphor) in
his theory. For Hall, the struggle for meaning is too important, too
inherently serious, to be adequately explained by a theory of pleasure.
This concept of pleasure as deceptive and culpable is too Althusserian,
too unproblematic. If postmodern love and human relationships are as
profoundly different as Hall suggests—although he doesn’t say where the
difference lies—then one question begged asks about the failure of
ideological approaches to examine meanings of pleasure rather than to see
it only as escape from or evasion of narrative closure and denial of
consequences. Dominance exists as epistemology not simply as power.
Pleasure-as-resistance and/or -refusal is no less proscribed by an
articulating politics of meaning than are more ‘rational’ regimes. This might
be illustrated if we take a look at Hall’s comments on Baudrillard. He
assumes that Baudrillard is suggesting that there is a ‘shared facticity of
things, things are just what we seem on the surface’. However, this seems
to be something of a forced reading: Baudrillard (1983) writes in his article
‘Implosion of meaning in the media’ that: ‘Information devours its own
contents. It devours communication and the social for two reasons. Instead
of communication it exhausts itself in the act of staging the communication.
Instead of producing meaning it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning’
(1). This is very different from saying that meaning simply resides on the
surface. Rather Baudrillard is suggesting that the surface is where meaning
is performed as process, not produced as product. Baudrillard’s denial of
any deep structure that organizes reality certainly puts him on the other
side of the street from Hall, but his notion that meanings exist only in their
performance or staging may not be as politically vacuous as Hall implies: it
may well be that ideological processes, as processes of information or
processes of explanation or revelation, have become precisely this sort of
vehicle for meaning. In which case pleasure can be seen as part of the