That is what Benjamin meant by saying that it isn’t only the new means of mechanical reproduction but the historical presence of the masses which interrupts history. He didn’t mean this as a guarantee that the masses are instantly going to take over the world and remake modern culture in their own image. He meant that they are now, irrevocably, on the historical stage and nothing can move any longer—including the dominant cultural industries—without taking that “presence” into account. Nothing can be constituted as high art without recognizing, in the existing distribution of educational practices, its relative divorce from the masses’ experience. Nothing can become popular which does not negotiate the experiences, the codes of the popular masses.

For something to become popular entails a struggle; it is never a simple process, as Gramsci reminded us. It doesn’t just happen. And that means there must be always some distance between the immediate practical consciousness or common sense of ordinary people, and what it is possible for them to become. I don’t think that history is finished and the assertion that it is, which lies at the heart of postmodernism, betrays the inexcusable ethnocentrism—the Eurocentrism—of its high priests. It is their cultural dominance, in the West, across the globe, which is historically at an end. The masses are like an irritant, a point that you have to pass through. And I think that postmodernism has yet to go through that point; it has yet to actually think through and engage the question of the masses. I think Baudrillard needs to join the masses for a while, to be silent for two-thirds of a century, just to see what it feels like. So, it is precisely at the site of the question of the political possibilities of the masses that my political objections to, and contestations with, postmodernism come through most sharply.