Page 258 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

246 LOOKING BACK AT NEW TIMES AND ITS CRITICS

technology and ‘ideology’ to produce an intensification of labour (which is
how they are seen by some of the contributors to the journal Capital and
Class, notably Pollert and Clarke). They do, however, present to readers a
clear account of that trajectory of analysis which winds its way through the
French post-industrial writers (Touraine, Gorz) whose technological
determinism allow them to anticipate the decline of class, the coming of
a leisure society and the growth, perhaps, of social movement politics.
Stuart Hall asks ‘Are the New Times to be welcomed for the new
possibilities they open? Or rejected for the threat of horrendous disasters…
and final closures which they bring in their wake?’ (Hall: 124). He then
goes on to argue that the left must work its way out of ‘extreme and
irreconcilable alternatives’ (125). Hall proposes approaching the question
of an epochal shift through the kind of dense and layered analysis which
Gramsci developed in his account of ‘Americanism and Fordism’. That is, a
convincing analysis must somehow be able to embrace the range and the
scale of changes as they seep from the public world of politics and
production down into the most private and intimate of our everyday
experiences. Or is it, as some might ask, the other way round, must
‘politics’ and ‘production’ be so primary? That presumably depends on how
both terms are defined. Feminism has shown intimacy to be as productive
of political sensibilities as any other moment in the circuit of social
experience.
Finally Hall makes the important point that the arrival of new goods in
shiny wrapping-paper is not simply a symbol of the advantage of living in
the ‘prosperous West’, ‘Everybody, including people in very poor societies
whom we in the West frequently speak about as though they inhabit a
world outside culture, knows that today’s “goods” double up as social signs
and produce meanings as well as energy’ (Hall: 131).

NEW TIMES AND ITS CRITICS
New Times marked a controversial turning-point for the left and for those
concerned with the politics of culture. From a cultural studies perspective it
was important that by drawing on the work of the Regulation School
theorists New Times engaged with work, leisure, employment and with the
economy, as well as with questions of the globalized mass media and with
new cultural identities. Identity was also associated with the more
theoretical strand marked out by the term subjectivity which appears in
New Times as the ‘return of the subject’. This is an axiomatic point
because it indicates the decisive turn away from the Althusserian
assumption of people being the subject of ideology, to a more active
account of new subjectivities emerging precisely from the different
constellation of social, cultural and economic forces. If we are in part
constructed as subjects through the particular layering of historical