Page 237 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE MEANING OF NEW TIMES 225

shifts of this order in economic life must be taken seriously in any analysis
of our present circumstances.
A recent writer on the subject of contemporary cultural change,
Marshall Berman, notes that ‘modern environments and experiences cut
across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality,
of religion and ideology’—not destroying them entirely, but weakening and
subverting them, eroding the lines of continuity which hitherto stabilized
our social identities.

THE RETURN OF THE SUBJECT
One boundary which ‘New Times’ has certainly displaced is that between
the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ dimensions of change. This is the so-called
‘revolution of the subject’ aspect. The individual subject has become more
important, as collective social subjects—like that of class or nation or
ethnic group—become more segmented and ‘pluralized’. As social theorists
have become more concerned with how ideologies actually function, and
how political mobilization really takes place in complex societies, so they
have been obliged to take the ‘subject’ of these processes more seriously. As
Gramsci remarked about ideologies, ‘To the extent that ideologies are
historically necessary they have a validity which is “psychological”’ (Prison
Notebooks, 1971:377). At the same time, our models of ‘the subject’ have
altered. We can no longer conceive of ‘the individual’ in terms of a whole,
centred, stable and completed Ego or autonomous, rational ‘self’. The ‘self’
is conceptualized as more fragmented and incomplete, composed of
multiple ‘selves’ or identities in relation to the different social worlds we
inhabit, something with a history, ‘produced’, in process. The ‘subject’ is
differently placed or positioned by different discourses and practices.
This is novel conceptual or theoretical terrain. But these vicissitudes of
‘the subject’ also have their own histories which are key episodes in the
passage to ‘New Times’. They include the cultural revolution of the 1960s;
‘1968’ itself, with its strong sense of politics as ‘theatre’ and its talk of
‘will’ and ‘consciousness’; feminism, with its insistence that ‘the personal is
political’; the renewed interest in psychoanalysis, with its rediscovery of the
unconscious roots of subjectivity; the theoretical revolutions of the 1960s
and 1970s—semiotics, structuralism, ‘post-structuralism’—with their
concern for language, discourse and representation.
This ‘return of the subjective’ aspect suggests that we cannot settle for a
language in which to describe ‘New Times’ which respects the old
distinction between the objective and subjective dimensions of change.
‘New Times’ are both ‘out there’, changing our conditions of life, and ‘in
here’, working on us. In part, it is us who are being ‘re-made’. But such a
conceptual shift presents particular problems for the left. The conventional
culture and discourses of the left, with its stress on ‘objective