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240 LOOKING BACK AT NEW TIMES AND ITS CRITICS

nexus of the ‘institutional-experiential-empiricar’. I will return to this in the
conclusion, where it will also be my intention to add a more feminist voice
to this debate, as it winds its way through what are now emerging as
different ‘schools’ of cultural studies. I will do this by touching once again
on pleasure and enjoyment and in returning to these I will also suggest that
serious attention to the place and meaning of these experiences need not
lead to the celebratory extremes which some have claimed them to do. Just
as there is a place for the politics of theory so must there be a place for the
politics of pleasure, and this, in some ways is where New Times started.

TRANSITIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS
The three articles which are pivotal to the New Times reader and which
have since been taken to represent its project are the ‘Introduction’ by Hall
and Jacques, Stuart Hall’s ‘The meaning of New Times’ and the
anonymous ‘The New Times’. Alongside these, and echoing many of the
ideas raised there, are the two chapters by Robin Murray which focus on
the meaning of post-Fordism, Dick Hebdige’s seminal ‘After the masses’
and Frank Mort’s equally important ‘The politics of consumption’. Finally
there is Bea Campbell’s ‘New Times towns’. In each of these a language of
shift, transition and transformation is used to signal something of the scale
of the changes which have necessitated a corresponding shift in critical and
theoretical vocabulary. While these chapters will form the focus of the
commentary that follows, it is worth reminding the reader of the prescience
of the volume as a whole. The titles of the various sections show clearly
what is on the new agenda, and it is significant that it is these same issues,
in particular ‘Identity and individual’ and ‘Globalization and localization’,
which have gone on to become such landmark terms in cultural studies in
the 1990s.
Very early the main New Times pieces establish a new framework for
understanding the social in terms of ‘diversity, differentiation and
fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardization and the
economics and organizations of scale which characterized modern mass
society’ (11). The authors are, however, anxious to assert that this does not
precipitate a new orthodoxy nor does it mark a clean break. There exists at
any moment in time many examples of different modes of production, from
Fordism to post-Fordism, from sweat shop to hi-tech cottage industry. If
there has been a definitive shift in production to post-Fordism, then this
neither exists in a pure form nor does its existence eliminate at a stroke the
continuation in some sectors, of the older forms of mass production.
The main point seems to be the occurrence of shifts right across those
levels which constitute the social as we know it, shifts which apparently
follow their own distinctive logics, and which are only at critical
political moments revealed as clearly connected to each other. Thus there is