Page 259 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies
P. 259
ANGELA MCROBBIE 247
discourses which we inhabit, then new kinds of sensibilities begin to be
clearly discernible. To anybody interested in the sociology of youth or in
youth subcultures this is immediately obvious because of the strong
symbolic coding which accompanies these ‘different, youthful,
subjectivities’ (McRobbie, 1994). But for the mainstream left, the very
question of subjectivity is difficult to swallow because of its particular
theoretical legacy through Lacanian psychoanalysis and then through the
later work of Foucault where the subject shows itself able to construct
itself through ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 1988). The sheer
eclecticism of New Times, as well as the attempt to use theory to construct
a political practice which takes into account difference and which actively
recognizes the autonomous dynamics of the social movements and the new
politics of sexuality, ethnicity, ecology (and indeed kind of pressure-group
politics and even the politics of charity), raises the question of a pluralism
which is not merely a rerun of classical liberal pluralism but something
rather different.
Much of this was heresy to others on the left including the academic left.
From New Left Review to Capital and Class, from the New Socialist to the
New Statesman, from New Formations to Feminist Review, ‘New Times’
was either denounced for its disavowal of politics altogether, or for its
virtual embracing of the language of Thatcherism (and more recently
Majorism) as a desperate attempt to tune into what it was that made
Thatcher click with ordinary people in the hope that if her lessons could be
learnt then the left might be able to construct for itself a more electable
platform. (McGuigan characterizes Stuart Hall’s question baldly as ‘Why
did Thatcherism become so popular?’ [McGuigan, 1992].) There was a
more muted response from Mike Rustin (also published in New Times),
who argued that the project of change and transformation being described
by the New Times writers was indeed part of the absolute logic of
Thatcher’s radical restructuring of the whole fabric of British society. At
the same time ‘Thatcherism may be understood as a strategy of post-
Fordism initiated from the perspective of the Right’ (Rustin, 1989:319).
Rustin therefore secures the New Times analysis to a more familiar political
anchor. He is saying that market forces, enterprise culture and the whole
programme of privatization are what have effected the other shifts at the
level of culture and everyday life. This is a somewhat nuanced account of
New Times and it chooses to all but ignore the political challenge it begins
to pose to old ‘New Left’ thinking. Instead it is seen purely as a new
complicity: ‘The positive emphases given to modernisation, consumption
and individualism are instances of the tacit accommodation to the values of
resurgent capitalism’ (313).
The various writers closely linked with the journal Capital and Class are
even more scathing in their condemnation of New Times. In a string of
articles published over a period of five years they take the kind of writing