Page 244 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

232 STUART HALL

and deskilled work patterns approximate more to some post-Fordist
patterns. Motor cars, from which the age of Fordism derived its name, with
its multiple variations on every model and market specialization (like the
fashion and software industries) is, in some areas at least, on the move
towards a more post-Fordist form. The question should always be, where
is the ‘leading edge’ and in what direction is it pointing.

THE CULTURAL DIMENSION

Another major requirement for trying to think through the complexities
and ambiguities of New Times is simply to open our minds to the deeply
cultural character of the revolution of our times. If ‘post-Fordism’ exists,
then it is as much a description of cultural as of economic change. Indeed,
that distinction is now quite useless. Culture has ceased (if ever it was—
which I doubt) to be a decorative addendum to the ‘hard world’ of
production and things, the icing on the cake of the material world. The
word is now as ‘material’ as the world. Through design, technology and
styling, ‘aesthetics’ has already penetrated the world of modern
production. Through marketing, layout and style, the ‘image’ provides the
mode of representation and fictional narrativization of the body on which
so much of modern consumption depends. Modern culture is relentlessly
material in its practices and modes of production. And the material world
of commodities and technologies is profoundly cultural. Young people,
black and white, who can’t even spell ‘postmodernism’ but have grown up
in the age of computer technology, rock-video and electronic music,
already inhabit such a universe in their heads.
Is this merely the culture of commodified consumption? Are these
necessarily Trivial Pursuits? (Or, to bring it right home, a trendy ‘designer
addiction’ to the detritus of capitalism which serious left magazines like
Marxism Today should renounce—or even better denounce—forever?)
Yes, much—perhaps, even most—of the time. But underlying that, have we
missed the opening up of the individual to the transforming rhythms and
forces of modern material life? Have we become bewitched by who, in the
short run, reaps the profit from these transactions (there are vast amounts
of it being made), and missed the democratization of culture which is also
potentially part of their hidden agenda? Can a socialism of the twenty-first
century revive, or even survive, which is wholly cut off from the landscapes
of popular pleasures, however contradictory and ‘commodified’ a terrain
they represent? Are we thinking dialectically enough?
One strategy for getting at the more cultural and subjective dimensions of
New Times would be to start from the objective characteristics of post-
Fordism and simply turn them inside out. Take the new technologies. They
not only introduce new skills and practices. They also require new ways of
thinking. Technology, which used to be ‘hard-nosed’ is now ‘soft’. And it