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Dick Hebdige Explores Its Relationship with New Times and Argues That It Poses a Fundamental Challenge for the Left

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Dick Hebdige Explores Its Relationship with New Times and Argues That It Poses a Fundamental Challenge for the Left New Times After the Masses Postmodernism is all the rage. But what does it mean? Dick Hebdige explores its relationship with New Times and argues that it poses a fundamental challenge for the Left ew people - whatever their is one which is rooted in a powerful political persuasion - looking sense of modernity as a condition in at Britain in the 80s would which all traditional 'truths' and 'abso- deny that we are living in new lute' values, all 'natural' social roles timesF. The crucial question is how far and 'essential' meanings are open to are the long-term global shifts in challenge and to change. If the Left has cultural, political and economic life any unifying faith then it is the mapped out under the heading of new conviction that history is neither god- times intrinsically connected to the rise given nor predetermined but is there to of the Right? This is not an easy one. be actively made and remade in a One way of opening up this question - if process of collective struggle by men only to present a 'worst case' scenario - and women freed from the chains of is to see how these same shifts have ignorance and fear. What can a theory been interpreted in recent debates on of postmodernism or postmodernity postmodernism. have to say to people whose collective The wide currency of this term over identity and political will are so deeply the last few years in Mediaville may wedded to the sense of radical possibil- alienate many readers. For some it may ity opened up by modern times? To talk seem that the word has become too about the temporary fusion of the baggy or trendy or annexed by the heady promises of modernity and Right to be of use. Others will protest capitalism is one thing. It's to say that that they never got the hang of the vanguard of the Left has been left modernism (or its relevance for the behind for now. New times demand Left) let alone postmodernism. After new strategies for change. On the other all, what have the design of buildings or hand to use a term like postmodernity pop videos or the fate of the novel or is to say that the motor of history has the current obsession with advertising, run down, that there is no united front packaging and style got to do with the along which the Left can advance, that real political issues of the day? For there is no authority or rationality in others on the Left - perhaps those who accordance with which it can proceed. are closer to the debates themselves - It is, in other words, to give up the the resistance to the idea not just of ghost. postmodernism but more importantly There is a great deal more at issue of postmodernity - suggests a reaction here than questions of 'style'. To against that sense of an ending that appreciate just how much is at stake we hangs over so much currently fashion- have, from the start, to mark out a able theorising. After riding out all distinction between theories of post- those arguments about postindustrial- modernism which address a sense of ism and the end of ideology in the 60s crisis in the ways culture in the West is here we are again confronted with organised, produced and thought about, another version of apocalypse. and those more general theories of This refusal of apocalyptic thinking postmodernity which directly chal- runs right to the core of what the lenge the principles of hope, critique contemporary Left's about. It's a mat- and practice on which Left politics ter of principle, identity and faith. If have always been built. We may or may the multiple factions that make up the not care about the role of art and design Left have any common identity then it in contemporary culture but we can't 48 MARXISM TODAY JANUARY 1989 afford to ignore the larger crisis At the core of this question lies the the 'masterpieces' of the modern 'tradi- provoked by the severance - so evident 'legitimation crisis'. If modernity is a tion' now fetch astronomical prices at throughout the world today, not just in condition in which 'all that's solid melts auctions and sit comfortably within the 'Thatcher's Britain' - of the link into air' then all the old institutions and gallery system, and university and between modernity and progress. We centres of authority - from religion to polytechnic arts curricula; tv ads have to think through that historic royalty - which guaranteed stability routinely use all the shock effects of crisis even if we find it easier to reject and continuity in earlier epochs and modern art. Second, as part of a the claim that history nowadays is more traditional societies are prone to process of critical review, the canon of finished, or that it is, as Jean Baudril- crisis and contestation. If ideals like High Modernism has been brought to lard puts it, a 'toy' or a 'game'. A game truth and justice are not underwritten book for its 'Eurocentrism', its 'mascu- what's more, that he insists the Left has by divine authority then how is author- linist' stress on transgression and lost. ity to be guaranteed? If all values are 'Absolutely transformation, its downgrading of The idea that 'the dream is over' is flattened out beneath exchange then everything, everything that doesn't fall within its hardly a new one - it forms one of the how are true and lasting values to be definition of what's important, ie, pressures against which socialism has established? One of the quests within from the women's art, domestic culture and always sought to make itself. But at the modernity has been to find ways of price of reproduction, black and Third World same time one of the ways in which resisting this tendency towards the pickled art, 'bourgeois' and 'socialist' realism, socialism has been renewed in the past relativisation of all values and claims to mushrooms peasant and working-class white, has been by actively engaging with power by grounding knowledge and 'mass' culture, middlebrow and high those forces which have set out to legitimating authority so that they are on a Polish culture, non-metropolitan culture etc. consign it to the 'rubbish heap of placed beyond question. street corner Far from being 'progressive', it's con- history'. If the engagement with ccording to the French to definitions demned for its patriarchal values, its theories of postmodernity and post- philosopher, Jean Fran- of desirable aggressive change-the-world heroism, modernism is to be fruitful - dialectical cois Lyotard, this 'legi- its colonialist plundering of 'primitive' rather than defensive - then it has to be timation crisis' has been art in the Third World art. But you don't even acknowledged from the start that such Asolved through the invention of what he West, moves need the benefit of hindsight to see that theories pose a challenge to the Left's calls 'the great meta-narratives' of the with the any link between modernisation, mod- ambition to 'change the world' because modern period. By this he means all market' ernism and Utopia is no longer tenable. they question the belief in rationality those overarching belief systems origi- That link has been dramatically broken and progress which direct and under- nating in the Enlightenment - from the - and not just in capitalist societies. pin the Left's project(s). Those chal- belief in rationality, science and causal- The violence that can flow from the lenges have to be squarely faced if we ity to the faith in human emancipation, fusion of centralised power structures, are to move beyond them to understand progress and the class struggle. These Fordist production models, aggressive the dynamics of new times. great stories have been used over what modernisation and a debased version of he calls the past 'two sanguinary Modern Movement architectural prin- Before looking at postmodernity, we centuries' to legitimate everything ciples is nowhere more apparent than have to consider the era it supposedly from war, revolution, nuclear arsenals in Romania today where the 70 year-old replaces. Marshall Berman sets out in and concentration camps to social Ceausescu is engaged in a village- his book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air engineering, Taylorism, Fordist pro- levelling exercise described by the to provide a sketch of modern times by duction models and the gulag. The Helsinki Federation for Human Rights tracing out the connections between collapse of faith in these meta- as 'cultural genocide'. The destruction three terms. First modernisation refers narratives heralds what Lyotard calls of minority ethnic Hungarian and to the economic, social and technologic- the 'post-modern condition'. None of Saxon cultures in Transylvania and the al innovations associated with the rise the 'centres of authority' legitimated 'rationalisation' (ie, eradication) of the of capitalism. Second modernity de- by these collapsed meta-narratives - informal peasant economy on which scribes the radically-transformed char- including that essential 'holding opera- rural Romanians depend are two of the acter of life under capitalism most tion', the modern nation-state - sur- consequences of Ceausescu's trans- clearly visible in the great European vives the transition into new times, at plantation of the inhabitants of over and American cities of the 19th and least as the latter are defined in 7,000 villages to concrete 'agro- early-20th centuries. Lastly, there is post-modern theory. industrial complexes', complete with modernism - the answering wave of What replaces them for the American huge communal kitchens and experimental movements in the arts marxist critic, Fredric Jameson, is the washrooms.
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