Page 254 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

242 LOOKING BACK AT NEW TIMES AND ITS CRITICS

crucial category in the shift to post-Fordism and the participative pleasures
discovered in the marketplace by ‘the people’ is not wholly answered by the
New Times writers. It is a question to which the final section of this
chapter will return, the suggestion being that this intersection produces
what cultural studies in the past labelled ‘popular culture’. It is significant
that it has been precisely this meeting-point, this sometimes smooth but
often clumsy and unexpected collision place of capitalist commerce with
popular desires, that has given rise to the angriest denunciations by those
who interpret the ‘New Timers’ as somehow simply celebrating the market
(‘sales and styles’ as Frith and Savage put it) and of attributing to it an
empowering capacity through providing consumers with the possibility of
finding meanings which allow them to have more control over areas of
their lives.
But looking back, it seems both important and necessary to raise the
question, as Dick Hebdige did at the end of ‘After the masses’, of how
commercial and global televisual events like BandAid could, as
entertainment, simultaneously produce a desire on the part of viewers at
home and in front of the TV, to be actively engaged in a bigger political
issue, one which as it happens the left could hardly disavow as important.
Likewise Frank Mort concludes his article by insisting that shopping, with
the new eco-politics of food production, and car culture with its politics of
pollution are
localized points where consuming meshes with social demands and
aspirations in new ways. What they underline is that consumption is
not ultimately about individualism versus collectivism, but about
articulating the two in a new relation which can form the basis of a
future common sense.
(Mort, 1989:172)

And finally Stuart Hall continues in this mode of thinking by suggesting
that while it is through the increasingly differentiated market and the
‘medium of consumption’ at present that many people experience
something of the pleasures of difference and cultural diversity, ‘This
pluralization of social life expands the positionalities and identities
available to ordinary people…. Such opportunities need to be more, not
less, widely available across the globe, and in ways not limited by private
appropriation’ (Hall, 1988:129). This is to grant a legitimacy to the
experiences currently found within the orbit of the market on the basis that
the private sphere is of course circumscribed through access and ability to
pay, and that a more socialized provision would allow greater expression
of these collective desires.