Page 27 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 15

they head for the desert’—a form of postmodernism which Hall simply
observes ‘I don’t buy’ (1991a:33).
Again, the point also has an autobiographical inflection. Speaking at the
ICA in London in 1987, at a conference on ‘Postmodernism and the
Question of Identity’, Hall put the theoretical point in quite personal
terms: ‘My own sense of identity has always depended on the fact of being
a migrant…(now) I find myself centred at last. Now that, in the
postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become centred: what I’ve
thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the
representative modern experience…welcome to migranthood!’ (1987: 44).

THE GHOSTS OF MARXISM

In 1989, in discussion at the State University of New York, in
Binghampton, following his talk there on ‘Old and new identities’, Hall
replied to a question concerning his own politics by saying ‘I remain
marxist’ (quoted in Hall, 1991b: 68). As to the exact meaning of this
statement, we might do well to remember Marx’s own pronouncement on
the subject: ‘Je ne suis pas marxiste.’ For Hall’s contemporary position on
these issues the reader is referred to his comments in the interviews in this
volume. Certainly Hall’s relation to the marxist tradition is, and always
has been both a complex and a creative (if necessarily troubled) one. He
has noted that one crucial aspect of his own political formation was in the
‘moment’ of 1956—‘the moment of the disintegration of a certain kind of
marxism’—so that, from the very beginning, his relation to marxism has
been a contentious one: he describes himself as having come ‘into marxism
backwards, against the Soviet tanks in Budapest’ (1992c:279).
On the one hand, Hall has always been dissatisfied with any form of
‘idealist’ analysis, which ignores the materialities of power and inequality.
Thus, in his presentation to the Illinois ‘Cultural Studio’ conference
(chapter 13, here) Hall went out of his way, in his critique of what he
called the astonishing ‘theoretical fluency of cultural studies in the US’, to
characterize this as also a ‘moment of profound danger’ is so far as ‘the
deconstructive deluge’ of American literary formalism can be argued to
have led to an ‘overwhelming textualization of cultural studies’ own
discourses’, to the extent that power and politics have now come to be
constituted, within much of cultural studies, as ‘exclusively matters of
language and textuality’ (emphasis added). This is not to deny, as Hall
immediately goes on to note, that ‘questions of power and the
political have to be and are always lodged within representations of
textuality’ (ibid.: 286) but it is to suggest, as he notes earlier in that same
presentation, that ‘textuality is never enough’.
On the other hand, in his retrospective discussion of the significance of
CCCS’s encounter with the work of Volosinov (‘For Allon White: