author

STUART HALL-O-RAMA

Here's what Hall has to say about some of the leading cultural theorists of the present (from "On postmodernism and articulation: An interview with Sturat Hall, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, from Journal of Communication Inquiry (1986), 10(2), 45-60):

(click here to return to Stuart Hall's author index entry)

On Jean Baudrillard.
Let's take Baudrillard's argument about representation and the implosion of meaning.This seems to rest upon an assumption of the sheer facticity of things: things are just what is seen on the surface. They don't mean or signify anything. They cannot be 'read'. We are beyond reading, language. meaning. . . . I think Baudrillard's position has become a kind of super-realism, taken to the nth degree. It says that, in the process of recognizing the real, there is nothing except what is immediately there on the surface. ... But there is all the difference in the world between the assertion that there is no one final, absolute meaning - no ultimate signified, only the endlessly sliding chain of signofication, and, on the other hand, the assertion that meaning does not exist. ... Therefore, I don't agree with Baudrillard that representation is at an end because the cultural codes have become pluralized. I think we are in a period of the infinite multiplicity of codings, which is different. We have all become, historically, fantastically codable encoding agents. We are in the middle of this multiplicity of readings and discourses and that has produced new forms of self-consciousness and reflexivity.

On Walter Benjamin.
Benjamin reminded us quite a while ago that montage would destroy the aura of the unique and singular work of art forever. And once you destroy the aura of the singular work of art because it can be reiterated, you enter into a new era which cannot be approached in the same way, using the traditional theoretical concepts. You are going to have to operate your analysis of meaning without the solace of closure: more on the basis of the semantic raids that Benjamin proposed - to find the fragments, to decipher their assembly and see how you can make a surgical cut into them, assembling and reassembling the means and instruments of cultural proauction. It is this that inaugurates the modern era. But although this breaks the one, true meaning into fragments and puts one in the universe of the infinite plurality of codes, it does not destroy the process of encoding, which always entails the imposition of an arbitrary 'closure'. Indeed it actually enriches it, because we understand meaning not as a natural but as an arbitrary act - the intervention of ideology into language.

On Marshall Berman.
It's very important to realize that, if modernism was never one project, then there have always been a series of different tendencies growing out of it as it has developed historically. I think this is similar to the argument behind Perry Anderson's critique of Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air in a recent New Left Review. While I like Berman's book very much and think that there is a rather traditionalist view of modernism built into Perry Anderson's response, I still agree with Anderson rather than Berman on the central argument about periodization. I don't think that what Berman is describing is a new epoch but rather the accentuation of certain important tendencies in the culture of the overdeveloped 'West' which, if we understand the complex histories of modernism properly, have been in play in a highly uneven way since modernism emerged.

On Foucault.
While I have learned a great deal from Foucault in this sense about the relation between knowledge and power, I don't see how you can retain the notion of 'resistance', as he does, without facing questions about the constitution of dominance in ideology. Foucault's evasion of the question is at the heart of his proto-anarchist position precisely because his resistance must be summoned up from nowhere. Nobody knows where it comes from.

On Lyotard and Habermas.
Let me consider the specific question of the debate between Habermas and Lyotard. Briefly, I don't really agree with either of them. I think Habermas's defence of the Enlightenment/modernist project is worthy and courageous, but I think it's not aufficiently exposed to some of the deeply contradictory tendencies in modern culture to which the postmodernist theories quite correctly draw our attention. But I think Lyotard, and Baudrillard in his celebratory mode, really have gone right through the sound barrier. They are involved, not simply in identifying new trends or tendencies, new cultural configurations, but in learning to love them.

On Marshall McLuhan.
When Marshall McLuhan first began to write about the media, he had come down from Cambridge as a committed Leavisite critic. His first book, The Mechanical Bride, was highly critical of the new technologies. In fact, he referred tothis book as 'a civil defense against mass media fallout'. But the disillusionment soon turned into its opposite - celebration, and in his later work, he took a very different position, just lying back and letting the media roll over him; he celebrated the very things he had most bitterly attacked. I think something like that has happened among the postmodern ideologues.

CT. Special Topics

BACK TO TOP

Last Updated: Jan. 24, 1998