Page 241 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE MEANING OF NEW TIMES 229

character: material abundance here, producing poverty and immiseration
there; greater diversity and choice—but often at the cost of
commodification, fragmentation and isolation. More opportunities for
participation—but only at the expense of subordinating oneself to the laws
of the market. Novelty and innovation—but driven by what often appear
to be false needs. The rich ‘West’—and the famine-stricken South. Forms
of ‘development’ which destroy faster than they create. The city—privileged
scenario of the modern experience for Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin—
transformed into the anonymous city, the sprawling city, the inner city, the
abandoned city…
These stark paradoxes project uncertainty into any secure judgement or
assessment of the trends and tendencies of New Times especially on the
left. Are New Times to be welcomed for the new possibilities they open?
Or rejected for the threat of horrendous disasters (the ecological ones are
uppermost in our minds just now) and final closures which they bring in
their wake? Terry Eagleton has recently posed the dilemma in comparable
terms, when discussing the:

true aporia, impasse or undecidability of a transitional epoch,
struggling out as it is from beneath an increasingly clapped-out,
discreditable, historically superannuated ideology of Autonomous
Man, (first cousin to Socialist Man) with no very clear sense as yet of
which path out from this pile of ruins is likely to lead us towards an
enriched human life and which to the unthinkable terminus of some
fashionable new irrationalist barbarism.
(Eagleton, 1987:47)
We seem especially on the left, permanently impaled on the horns of these
extreme and irreconcilable alternatives.
It is imperative for the left to get past this impossible impasse, these
irreconcilable either/ors. There are few better (though many more
fashionable) places to begin than with Gramsci’s ‘Americanism and
Fordism’ essay, which is of seminal importance for this debate, even if it is
also a strangely broken and ‘unfinished’ text. ‘Americanism and Fordism’
represented a very similar effort, much earlier in the century, to describe
and assess the dangers and possibilities for the left of the birth of that
epoch ‘Fordism’—which we are just supposed to be leaving. Gramsci was
conducting this exercise in very similar political circumstances for the left—
retreat and retrenchment of the working-class movement, ascendancy of
fascism, new surge of capital ‘with its intensified economic exploitation and
authoritarian cultural expression’.
If we take our bearings from ‘Americanism and Fordism’ we are obliged
to note that Gramsci’s ‘catalogue of…most important or interesting
problems’ relevant to deciding ‘whether Americanism can constitute a new