Page 238 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

226 STUART HALL

contradictions’, ‘impersonal structures’ and processes that work ‘behind
men’s (sic) backs’, have disabled us from confronting the subjective
dimension in politics in any very coherent way.
In part, the difficulty lies in the very words and concepts we use. For a
long time, being a socialist was synonymous with the ability to translate
everything into the language of ‘structures’. But it is not only a question of
language. In part, the difficulty lies in the fact that men so often provide
the categories within which everybody experiences things, even on the left.
Men have always found the spectacle of the ‘return’ of the subjective
dimension deeply unnerving. The problem is also theoretical. Classical
marxism depended on an assumed correspondence between ‘the economic’
and ‘the political’: one could read off political attitudes and objective social
interests and motivations from economic class position. For a long time,
these correspondences held the theoretical analyses and perspectives of the
left in place. However, any simple correspondence between ‘the political’
and ‘the economic’ is exactly what has now disintegrated—practically and
theoretically. This has had the effect of throwing the language of politics
more over to the cultural side of the equation.
‘Postmodernism’ is the preferred term which signals this more cultural
character of ‘New Times’. ‘Modernism’, it argues, which dominated the art
and architecture, the cultural imagination, of the early decades of the
twentieth century, and came to represent the look and experience of
‘modernity’ itself, is at an end. It has declined into the International Style
characteristics of the freeway, the wall-of-glass skyscraper and international
airports. Modernism’s revolutionary impulse—which could be seen in
surrealism, Dada, constructivism, the move to an abstract and non-
figurative visual culture—has been tamed and contained by the museum. It
has become the preserve of an avant-garde elite, betraying its revolutionary
and ‘populist’ impulses.
‘Postmodernism’, by contrast, celebrates the penetration of aesthetics
into everyday life and the ascendancy of popular culture over the High
Arts. Theorists like Fredric Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard agree on
many of the characteristics of ‘the postmodern condition’. They remark on
the dominance of image, appearance, surface-effect over depth (was Ronald
Reagan a president or just a B-movie actor, real or cardboard cut-out, alive
or Spitting Image?). They point to the blurring of image and reality in our
media-saturated world (is the Contra war real or only happening on TV?).
They note the preference for parody, nostalgia, kitsch and pastiche—the
continual re-working and quotation of past styles—over more positive
modes of artistic representation, like realism or naturalism. They note,
also, a preference for the popular and the decorative over the brutalist or
the functional in architecture and design. ‘Postmodernism’ also has a more
philosophical aspect. Lyotard, Baudrillard and Derrida cite the erasure of a
strong sense of history, the slippage of hitherto stable meanings, the