[...] Springsteen is a phenomenon that can be read, with equal conviction, in at least two diametrically opposed ways. His audiences seem to be made up of people from five to fifty, busily reading him in different ways. The symbols are deeply American—populist in their ambiguity; he’s both in the White House and On The Road. In the 1960s you had to be one or the other. Springsteen is somehow both at the same time. That’s what I mean by fragmentation.

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.

[...] If you go back to the early formulations of historical materialism, what Marx always talks about is the way in which social and cultural structures overdetermine the natural ones. Marx is aware that we remain natural beings, that we remain in nature. What he’s talking about is the elaborations of social and cultural organization which complete those natural structures. Our genetic constitution is extraordinarily open-ended and is thus a necessary but not sufficient way of becoming human. What is happening, historically, is the massive complexification of the social, the overdetermination of the natural by the social and cultural. So Nature can no longer stand as the ultimate guarantee of materialism. Already in the nineteenth century, Marx polemicized against that kind of vulgar materialism but there was, and still is, a sense in which orthodox Marxists think that something is ultimately only real when you can put your hands on it in Nature. We can’t be materialists in that way any longer. But I do think that we are still required to think about the way in which ideological/cultural/discursive practices continue to exist within the determining lines of force of material relations, and the expropriation of nature, which is a very different question. Material conditions are the necessary but not sufficient condition of all historical practice. Of course, we need to think material conditions in their determinate discursive form, not as a fixed absolute. I think the discursive position is often in danger of losing its reference to material practice and historical conditions.