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. Modernism here involves a linked again to the capitalist metropoli- universal 'logic' of the market. For tyrannical obliteration of difference. tan centres. Together these radical Jameson, the global spread of capital Nowhere is the Faustian link between a modernist innovations, from symbol- has meant that all such centres are patriarchal gerontocracy and willed ism and cubism to surrealism and either destroyed or have been made violence towards organically-grown stream-of-consciousness writing, set over and absorbed by the interlocking 'archaic' cultural forms more clearly out to articulate the experience of cultural and economic systems that visible than in Ceausescu's crazy plan modernity. The terms of this engage- make up 'late capitalism'. In the to wrench 'his' country into the Stalin ment with modern life were always process the political and cultural maps era before he dies. As the rest of the critical, whether modernists were re- of the modern period have been re- Eastern bloc confronts the centripetal jecting 'mass culture', negating drawn so that the old oppositions - forces of perestroika and the public bourgeois norms and values or seeking science versus art, fact versus fiction, expression of formerly-suppressed to align themselves with progressive Left versus Right, high culture versus ethnic-cultural divisions and national- social forces. In the case of the low culture, mass culture versus 'prog- ist demands, Ceausescu. the ailing International Style of modern ressive' modern art and so on - no "father", is attempting in the face of architecture and the Bauhaus ideals of longer hold. In the post-modern world international opposition, to exert abso- industrial design (the so-called no values prove 'timeless', 'authentic' lute mastery over the future by turning machine aesthetic') the ambition was or 'oppositional' forever when absolu- Romania into a concentration camp. to merge with the modernisation pro tely everything from the price of cess itself in order literally to build a pickled mushrooms on a Polish street better world founded on rational princi corner to definitions of desirable art in The contention within a lot of post- ples (eg, 'form follows function'). the West moves with the market. modernism that today there is no But it's precisely this equation be- At the same time, the 'radical' nature centre is not just a gesture of solidarity tween modernity, progress and of modernism has been called into with these excluded, repressed or rationality that has itself been brought question in two ways. First, modern art exterminated 'others'. It demands a into question in the 'postmodern' era. is no longer marginal or oppositional: review of priorities and a rethinking of terms like 'representation' and 'power'

49 MARXISM TODAY JANUARY 1989 at so fundamental a level that any screens of computer terminals by mutations of the codes of journalism is description of the crisis of the Left that dealers juggling prices on the interna- the whole 'information order' upon doesn't take it seriously just will not be tional money and commodity futures which meaningful debates over issues productive. But the contention also has markets). In such a thoroughly imaged of this kind rely. The survival of the specific ramifications at both the mac- universe - the world of Reagan- public realm - a forum of debate where ro and the micro levels within theories Gorbachev photocalls, Thatcher visits conflicting interests and ideologies of postmodernism and postmodernity. to Gdansk and HRH's Vision Of Britain struggle to define reality - in turn For Jameson it indicates the end of - 'politics' becomes largely an adjunct depends upon the public's ability to locality altogether as the multinational of PR and showbiz even when the discriminate in the last analysis be- character of the late late show of etiquette is breached (eg, the attack on tween what is true and what isn't. If the capitalism reduces everything to its a newscaster on air by lesbian activists generalised scepticism towards main- own image. The implication here is that to publicise opposition to Clause 28). 'Some of the stream media reportage moves beyond we'll soon be able to watch Dallas or eat Rational critique and the will to change dailies now issues of 'fact' and interpretation - a Big Mac in any part of the inhabited the world are replaced by what he calls carry the (what happened when, where and why world. the 'ecstasy of communication' - a state "Aliens From and what does it mean?) - to question t the same time, the point characterised by 'banal seduction' and the line between truth and lies itself where we 'experience' all 'mindless fascination' where any kind Outer then the whole 'economy of truth' this and make sense of it of judgement - not just artistic but Space" collapses. as individuals has alleged- moral and political - becomes im- stories The idea of a verifiable information Aly been made over too. The 'sovereign possible. order, however precarious and shift- pioneered in subject' - central to Enlightenment Clearly a great deal more is at stake in ing, however subject to negotiation and models of rationality, science and the the apocalypse laid out by Baudrillard the notorious contestation by competing ideologies, individual - is itself 'de-centred' from than a shift in the mode of production. Sunday does not survive the transition to this the throne of authority. It's de-centred But it's also clear that he offers a kind Sport' version of new times. After all, it's not in theory by the new 'sciences' - of picture of some of the changes that as if anybody is really being asked to psychoanalysis and marxism. But in make up new times. believe in aliens. Instead they are being the 20th century it's also de-centred invited to relinquish the right to believe practically in the West by the rise of However much we want to resist the in the verifiability of public truths per mass consumption and advertising. As chilly extremism of this kind of analy- se. Such a stretching of the codes of the 'consumption economy' has de- sis, it's clear that the 'information journalistic licence beyond the limits veloped, so the value of commodities is revolution' has implications far beyond established in the early days of the seen to derive less from the laws of the extension of financial services and mass-circulation press may free the economic exchange governing the mar- the further diminution of our civil readers from any obligation to believe ket or from the ability of products to rights. The sheer volume and variety of in the bourgeois myth of disinterested satisfy primary needs as from the way information may conceal the fact that truth by offering itself as a kind of joke they function culturally as signs within the shifts are qualitative as well as in which the reader is invited to coded systems of exchange. quantitative. One result of the print participate (the 'joke' is how low can we This provides the key for the critique boom for instance, associated with go?), but its potential dangers are also of the marxist theory of value put desktop publishing, Wapping and the pretty clear: today aliens from Mars forward by the French champion of end of hot-metal trade unionism, is that kidnap joggers, yesterday Auschwitz postmodernity, Jean Baudrillard. For more and more publications compete didn't happen, tomorrow who cares Baudrillard, the distinction between for advertising revenue tied to in- what happens? Here the so-called 'real' and 'false' needs upon which creasingly fragmented and specialised 'depthlessness' of the post-modern era marxist economics is based collapses markets. Manic competition at the extends beyond the integration of signs as consumption becomes primarily ab- bottom end of the tabloid market has and commodities into saleable 'styles' out individuals and groups using com- led editors to abandon the distinction and 'packages', beyond the tendency of modities like a language to mark out between entertainment and informa- the media to feed more and more taste and status differences between tion, as tv soap gossip crowds out 'hard greedily off each other, to affect the themselves. In his later work, commod- news' on the front pages. Although the function and status of information ities and signs are seen to merge tendency isn't new, in recent years it's itself. It may be that the Left will have completely as the opposition between been intensified to the point where to dig deep to find strategies capable of what things look like and what's really hype creates its own 'reality' so that coping with the apparent 'depthless- going on begins to dissolve in the some of the dailies now carry the ness' of new times versions of the 'hyperreality' of the media age. This 'Aliens From Outer Space' stories 'public realm'. process - what he calls 'implosion of pioneered in the notorious Sunday the real' - supposedly displaces all Sport. It is easy to see why postmodernism has models of rational critique. It is no hat sense would an ortho- been characterised as an intellectual longer possible for us to see through dox left analysis make of gloss for Thatcherism - an invitation the appearance of, for instance, a 'free this decline of standards? issued by people who should know market' to the structuring 'real rela- It would probably begin by better to give up, lie back and enjoy. tions' underneath (eg, class conflict and Wmentioning the circulation war, Yet in some of their founding premises the expropriation by capital of surplus perhaps citing American precedents. It and points of focus, theories of post- value). Instead, signs begin increasing- might go on to condemn the 'Aliens modernism don't offer a description of ly to take on a life of their own Turned My Son Into An Olive' style of the dominant economic and cultural referring not to a real world outside story as degraded entertainment, even trends so very different from the themselves but to their own 'reality' - as part of the ideology of authoritarian territory mapped out on these pages as the system that produces the signs. populism in which all 'aliens' (eg, gay new times, though the analysis differs It's at this point that Baudrillard men, the loony Left, black youths, the at a fundamental level. Some versions grafts a global theory of postmodernity IRA, acid house fans etc,) are defined of postmodernism are patently fatalis- onto a global theory of cultural post- as a threat to the 'family of the nation', tic, even potentially fascistic, but the modernism to produce a scenario as part of the unassimilable enemy diverse currents and tendencies that which is well and truly apocalyptic - within. theories of the 'post' have sought to 'fatal', to use Baudrillard's word. In this But such analyses would be inadquate bind into and define have no intrinsic world of surfaces tv takes over from insofar as they remain tied to an political belonging in themselves. On the real as the place where real things outmoded 'economy of truth'. They fail the one hand, in those circles where the ' happen only if they're screened (real to acknowledge how far the ground has politics of race and sexuality are taken things here include profits made on the shifted. For what is also at stake in such seriously, critical postmodernism is

51 MARXISM TODAY JANUARY 1989 identified with diversity and differ- tower block has become a powerful account of a 'consumer economy' or as ence, a politics of contestation and symbol of a superseded socialist era. In an insistence on any particular change. On the other, in Baudrillard's the current debates, the tower block's architectural style. 'obscene' universe, postmodernity is collapse is used to point up the associated with the annihilation of weaknesses of that other larger edifice It's worth saying that within its own difference in the media age: the end of - the postwar corporate state, with its terms one of the more blatant para- politics altogether. mixed economy, its embattled health doxes of Baudrillard's account of post- For years Marxism Today has been services, its strained, unlikely social modernity is that it is itself a totalising arguing for a definition of the political and political consensus forged in the 'meta-narrative' - one which makes the as a 'war of position' in which absolute- white heat of Harold Wilson's mod- media, not the factory or class struggle ly nothing is given or guaranteed. Such ernising techno-jargon. The acquisition or science, the 'motivating' force - the a 'marxism without guarantees' has a few years back of a neo-Georgian 'Ceausescu is literal end of history. According to already dispensed with Lyotard's Barratt home in an 'executive estate' in attempting, Baudrillard the masses were an inven- 'meta-narratives'. Furthermore, the Dulwich marks the ideological cut-off in the face of tion of the modern period: one of the concentration in the work of people like point from failed Utopia to new realism, international myths used to legitimate Fordist pro- Stuart Hall on the ways in which from council house Britain to 'enter- jects as diverse as 'the dictatorship of language has been used within contem- prise culture', from stately-home and opposition, the proletariat', parliamentary demo- porary British politics to actively country-house conservatism to the to exert cracy and selling soap powder. The construct - to articulate - 'imaginary tougher, 'fairer' contours of the 'prop- absolute decline of Fordism exposes the myth of communities' clearly points a way erty-owning democracy'. the masses as an active force so forward beyond the impasse (or the Yet, beyond all the ideologising, no- mastery over completely that we live today - to quote armchair) in which so much of post- body - not even the architects - would the future by the title of one of Baudrillard's books - modern theory gets stuck. Thatcherism claim that the original 60s' tower turning literally 'in the shadow of the silent attempts to hegemonise the long-term blocks were ever widely popular. There Romania into majorities', so that all meanings 'im- movements described, though dif- is a vast literature within sociology plode' into 'the black hole' left by the ferently inflected, under the rubrics of devoted to the librium addiction and a concentra- masses' 'disappearance'. The 'logic' of new times and postmodernism within loss of community associated with tion camp' this position is as circular as it is its project of 'regressive modernisa- Britain's 'vertical streets'. The enthu- solipsistic. tion'. There is nothing natural about the siastic responses to Prince Charles' What is of course so often forgotten in relationship between those forms and vision of Britain as first and foremost a the hype surrounding Baudrillard to- forces and that political will, just as landscape to be conserved rather than day is that there is a tradition of there is nothing given or permanent designed, testified to the strength of cultural socialism closer to home that is about the 'we' that Thatcherism has popular feeling on the issue. The rooted in a similar scepticism towards called into being. affirmation within certain types of the notion of the 'masses'. The late postmodernism of the particular his much is clear in recent Raymond Williams always insisted that against the general; the decorative, the the 'mass' was a category intellectuals debates over nationhood and 'fantastic' and the 'aspirational' against national tradition. The strug- tended to reserve contemptuously for the 'rational', the 'formal' and the other people, never for themselves. gle over the meaning of mod- 'academic'; the desirability of main- Ternity, national identity and the past And if, after all is said and done, we still taining continuity with the past, the has offered a significant point of have need of meta-narratives then The reverence for the 'human scale', are all Long Revolution may ultimately prove tension in Britain throughout the late themes that can be articulated to a 80s - a point of tension which is there to more useful, more progressive and more imaginative and democratic, empowering than the one that frames be cracked open in the current con- more innovative and plural version of troversy around the role of design and the theory of postmodernity because it socialism. In the words of Alexei Sayle: acknowledges the fact that faith and architecture in British life. Thatcherite 'No more living 200 ft in the air in a definitions of 'Britishness', national idealism are themselves part of the thing that looks like an off-set lathe or a historical process, vital constituents of heritage and national pride have sought baked bean canner'. to align the 'shape of the future' with a the political will. It is also possible that selective image of the past so that even harles Jencks, the architect something like a sociology of aspiration the disruptions and upheavals of to- who coined the term 'post- for new times might grow out of the day's 'communications revolution' are modernism' in the first place, less totalising approach to 'ordinary drawn into the charmed circle of stresses the importance of people' that Williams recommends. national tradition through the analogy Cdialogue with clients, users and tradi- One of the features of post-Fordist with the Industrial Revolution and the tion/the past in the planning of new production is the leading role given to Victorian railway boom (the connection buildings. It is this assertion of the market research, packaging and pre- is especially pointed in London where legitimacy of other people's desires sentation, while it doesn't literally the great 19th-century railway termini that links postmodernism to a positive produce the social, it's nonetheless the are being redeveloped as luxury hotel, appraisal of new times. In new times case that marketing has provided the leisure centre, office and shopping mall the old hierarchical model of the expert dominant and most pervasive clas- complexes). standing Moses-like at the apex of a sifications of 'social types' in the 1980s At the same time, within architecture triangle and the masses laid out along (the yuppie is the most obvious exam- where the term first originated, 'post- the base waiting for deliverance col- ple). We use these categories as a kind modernism' has been used to describe lapses. The favoured metaphors for of social shorthand even if we are developments as different in concep- intellectual activity in modernism were reluctant to find ourselves reflected in tion and appearance as the nostalgic, military (the revolutionary 'vanguard', them. We live in a world and in bodies neo-Georgian repro-kitsch of Quinlan the artistic 'avant garde'), technical which are deeply scored by the power Terry, a planned 19-storey grey, pink ('writers are the engineers of the soul' - relations of race and class, sexuality and red office block in the City of Stalin), mechanical ('houses are and gender but we also live - whether London and the 'discreet' horizontal machines for living' - Henri le Corbu- or not we know it consciously - in a 'groundscrapers'; huge, lateral, deep sier) and medical (the critic as world of style-setters, innovators, plan dealing rooms located nearby, 'surgeon'). In postmodernism, ecologic- sloanes, preppies, empty nesters, sometimes concealed behind the origin- al and organic metaphors predominate casuals, sensibles, the constrained al facades of a block of 'historic along with the softer model of the majority, and today's prime targets, the buildings'. 'Postmodernism' here has expert as facilitator and consultant. pre-teens and the woofies. functioned largely as a cover for Postmodernism here has more value as These are the types outlined in unrestrained development for profit. one key to a pragmatic approach to commercial lifestyling and 'psychog- It's also clear that in Britain the consumer demands than as a global raphics' - forms of research which

52 MARXISM TODAY JANUARY 1989 don't present descriptions of living, Within the transfigured 'public realm' ethnic musical traditions have been breathing individuals so much as established by transnational com- transformed and adapted on the ground hypothetical 'analogues' of 'aspiration- munications networks new forms both to give a particular modernist voice and al clusters'. In other words the new of alliance and contestation are also shape to a specifically black, British intensive but speculative forms of possible. One of the things ignored in structure of feeling, in a place and at a market research are designed to offer a the more 'fatal' versions of new times is time when the new Right has been social map of desire which can be used the binding power of the new trans- implying that blackness and British- to determine where exactly which national media systems: the power they ness are, as Paul Gilroy puts it, products should be 'pitched' and have to move people not just to buy into mutually exclusive categories. In this niched'. All these types could no doubt networks that offer forms of commun- way, the new syncretic or synthetic be translated back into the old language ity and alliance which can transcend black British styles in the 80s which (it would perhaps be relatively easy to the confines of class, race, gender, 'Contrary to rely on musical and sartorial cut-ups - return them to the axis of social class) regional and national culture. Popular what mixes of sounds and images plundered but everything specific would be lost in music offers many examples of this Baudrillard from a range of ostensibly unrelated the translation. kind of bonding. Some of these 'com- sources - form part of an ongoing It's clear that such research methods munities of affect' (rather than 'com- says, there is process of active self-definition which and the marketing initiatives associ- munities of interest') are explicitly nothing is now being consciously extended by a ated with them have been developed Utopian. The simultaneously most spec- "fatal" or new generation of black British inde- precisely to cut across the old social- tacular yet most participatory exam- finished pendent film and video makers, writers, sexual polarities. The parameters are ples to date of the intellectuals and record producers. designed to be transcultural and trans- kind of bonding made about new Now young Britons of Asian origin national (the spread of 'psychog- possible across transnational com- times' have adopted similar strategies in the raphics' in the UK is linked to the drive munications systems have been the various styles associated with bhangra to go pan-European in preparation for televised events organised around music which merges traditional Pun- 1992). We may find such forms of Band Aid, Sport Aid, Live Aid and the jabi dancestyles and rhythms with knowledge immoral, objectionable or Free Mandela movement. This is where Indi-pop, black US and white GB funk, sinister - a waste of time and resources you see the optimistic will in action. house and disco rhythms. Through the which is unforgiveable in a world Televangelism is another less engaging patterns of belonging and distancing where people are starving and in a example of this kind of mobilisation established in these forms of cultural country where people are still sleeping specific to the media age. production, new forms of 'British' in the streets - but the fact is that they Rather than 'psychic autism' (Baudril- identity become available which circu- do actively create and sustain one lard) or 'the waning of affect' (Jame- late along with the records themselves version of the social. They depend for son) such phenomena suggest the in the clubs and cassette players and on their success on the accurate outlining possibility of a new kind of politics the pirate radio stations. At a time and anticipation (through observation existing primarily in and through the when the integrity of the national and interviews with 'target' subjects) airwaves and organised around issues culture is asserted against a common not just of what (some) people think of universal moral concern. Such cru- European identity, a genuinely cosmo- they want but of what they'd like to be. sades are likely to be extended in the politan post-colonial space is opened up A sociology of aspiration (or new times) 90s. Once again the desire to feel and to within and against 'Englishness' - a set might begin by combining the consider- feel connected to a transitory mass of of identities available to all irrespec- able critical and diagnostic resources other people, to engage in transitory tive of their skin colour, 'rooted' in the available within existing versions of and superficial alliances of this kind is airwaves. The process is by no means sociology and cultural studies with the not intrinsically either good or bad. confined to black and Bengali subcul- descriptive and predictive knowledge Instead it has to be articulated. Jimmy tures. The 'break up' of imaginary available within the new intensive Swaggart managed to articulate the Britishness can be heard too in the market research to get a more adequ- yearning for community and righteous- assertion of the Pogues' republicanism, ate picture of what everybody says they ness one way. Jerry Dammers, founder in The Proclaimers' militant Celtic want and what they want to be in all its of the Two Tone movement and co- style. It's not just the 'United' in the radical plurality. The challenge would organiser of the Mandela concert, 'United Kingdom' that is being broken then be to produce and distribute the helped to direct the flow of similar down today. The rise of women singers required goods and services more desires in a radically different direc- and musicians like Yazoo, Sade and efficiently, and equitably than the tion. Tanita Tikaram simultaneously chal- opposition. Such a mix of traditional At the local level, the airwaves are lenge the monolithic sexism and heter- academic/social-work and commercial/ there to be actively occupied (rather osexism of 60s' and 70s' 'rock' and marketing-knowledge functions would than passively tuned-in to). In the 'UK', racist notions of ethnic 'belonging'. take the Left beyond the ghetto of the use of music and style to articulate 'miserabilism' to which it is regularly new ethnic identities underneath and All these contradictory tendencies and consigned by the loony Right. Such a against the monolithic version of 'Bri- possibilities could be described as part shift would require what certain forms tishness' available within Thatcherism of the landscape of new times - a of postmodernism recommend: a scep- has become one of the most remarkable landscape which has yet to solidify, ticism towards imposed general, (and marketable) aspects of cultural which is still to be made. They repre- 'rational' solutions; a relaxation of the politics in the 80s. Rap, house and funk sent real challenges which cannot be old critical and judgemental postures. music, for instance, are merely the written off as part of some linear global his is not to give up the old latest in a long line of musics that have 'logic' of postmodernism any more than ground or the old contesta- offered forms of community across the they can be effectively framed within tory strategies on which left international black diaspora. At the the old language of the Left. Contrary politics have traditionally same time they have literally plugged to what Baudrillard says, there is Tbeen made. The identity and the faith, the fans back (through rhythms, lyrics nothing 'fatal' or finished about new both bound into a progressive concep- and 'quoted' snatches of speech from times. The task for the 90s has to be tion of modernity, remain in place. But dead black leaders) into a version of how to rise to the challenge, how to beyond that a new kind of politics - as black history and struggle in the New abjure certain kinds of authority we flexible and responsive to new demands World - from slavery to civil rights to might have laid claim to in the past, and initiatives, as the software that black power and the buppies - which without losing sight of the longer-term powers post-Fordist production - will may otherwise have lain silent and objectives, how to articulate a new kind have to be envisioned. This is true even forgotten. Through sampling and cita- of socialism, how to make socialism, as in the 'depthless' field of the media tion, through rap and talkover, through Raymond Williams might have said, upon which Baudrillard operates. mixing desks and on turntables, multi- without the masses. •

53 MARXISM TODAY JANUARY 1989