Page 242 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

230 STUART HALL

historical epoch’ begins with ‘a new mechanism of accumulation and
distribution of finance capital based directly on industrial production’. But
his characterization of ‘Fordism’ also includes a range of other social and
cultural phenomena which are discussed in the essay: the rationalization of
the demographic composition of Europe; the balance between endogamous
and exogamous change; the phenomenon of mass consumption and ‘high
wages’; ‘psychoanalysis and its enormous diffusion since the war’; the
increased ‘moral coercion’ exercised by the state; artistic and intellectual
movements associated with ‘Modernism’; what Gramsci calls the contrast
between ‘super-city’ and ‘super-country’; feminism, masculinism and ‘the
question of sex’. Who, on the left, now has the confidence to address the
problems and promise of New Times with a matching comprehensiveness
and range? The sad fact is that a list of ‘new questions’ like that are most
likely to engender a response of derision and sectarian back-biting at most
meetings of the organized political left today—coupled with the usual cries
of ‘sell-out’!
This lack of intellectual boldness on the left is certainly, in part,
attributable to the fact that the contradictory forces associated with New
Times are just now, and have been for some time, firmly in the keeping and
under the tutelage of the right. The right has imprinted them with the
apparent inevitability of its own political project. However, as we argued
earlier, this may have obscured the fact that what is going on is not the
unrolling of a singular, unilinear logic in which the ascendancy of capital,
the hegemony of the New Right and the march of commodification are
indissolubly locked together. These may be different processes, with
different time-scales, which the dominance of the right in the 1980s has
somehow rendered natural and inevitable.
One of the lessons of New Times is that history does not consist of what
Benedict Anderson calls ‘empty, homogeneous time’, but of processes with
different time-scales and trajectories. They may be convened in the same
conjuncture. But historic conjunctures of this kind remain complex, not
simple: not in any simple sense ‘determined’ but over-determined (that is,
the result of a fusion or merging of different processes and contradictions
which nevertheless retain their own effectivity, ‘the specific modalities of
their actions’—(Althusser, ‘Contradiction and over-determination’). That is
really what a ‘new conjuncture’ means, as Gramsci clearly showed. The
histories and time-scales of Thatcherism and of New Times have certainly
overlapped. Nevertheless, they may belong to different temporalities.
Political time, the time of regimes and elections, is short: ‘a week is a long
time in politics.’ Economic time, sociological time, so to speak, has a
longer durée. Cultural time is even slower, more glacial. This does not
detract from the significance of Thatcherism and the scale of its political
intervention, about which we have been writing. There is nothing slow,