Itinerary of a Thought- Stuart Hall Cyltural Studies and the Unresolved Problem of the Relation o

7/29/2019 Itinerary of a Thought- Stuart Hall Cyltural Studies and the Unresolved Problem of the Relation o

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2001 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.

Cultural Critique 48.1 (2001) 200-249--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Itinerary of a ThoughtStuart Hall, Cultural Studies, and the Unresolved Problem of the Relation of Culture to "Not Culture"

Janice Peck

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In a 1992 memorial for Allon White, Stuart Hall eulogized the passing of his friend and of the "metaphors oftransformation" that had been "so significant, historically, for the radical imaginary." Modeled on the"revolutionary moment" and associated with Marxism, such metaphors, Hall said, "no longer commandassent." Rather than mourning their demise, he suggested that cultural studies, having "moved decisively

beyond such dramatic simplifications and binary reversals," required a new metaphor "for imagining acultural politics" and thinking "the relations between 'the social' and 'the symbolic' " ("For Allon White," 287-88). Hall might have been recounting his own intellectual travels, having embarked on his career committedto the metaphors he now came to inter. This reversal in Hall's thought parallels the theoretical itinerary of thefield with which his name has become synonymous. Insofar as Hall is "largely responsible for developing andarticulating [its] theoretical positions" (Dworkin, 196), his writings provide a map of the trajectory of culturalstudies, from culturalism to structuralism to structuralist Marxism to poststructuralism and post-Marxism.This essay critically assesses that journey by tracing Hall's engagement with these bodies of thought as hesought to resolve the problem of a reflection theory of culture. His solution, I will argue, necessarily resultedin abandoning a materialist theory of culture while conserving the economism and idealism that culturalstudies set out to surpass. [End Page 200]

The Problem of Culture as Reflection

Cultural studies is predicated on the belief that culture must be understood on its own terms and in relation toother aspects of social life (i.e., "not culture"). In the early 1960s, two of the field's "founding" figures wereengaged in thinking that relation. Two years before the appearance of his The Making of the English WorkingClass, E. P. Thompson reviewed Raymond Williams's The Long Revolution. Applauding the book'saccomplishments, Thompson concluded that Williams had fallen short of his claim to provide "a theory ofculture as the study of the relationship between elements of a whole way of life" (Williams, Long Revolution,46). The book erred in two directions, Thompson argued, edging toward a "culture equals society"explanation while segregating culture from politics and economics without establishing "the manneraccording to which the systems are related to each other" (Thompson, "Long Revolution," 31). He counteredthat "any theory of culture must include the concept of the dialectical interaction of culture and something thatis not culture" and offered his corrective:

we must suppose the raw material of life experience to be at one pole, and all the infinitely complex humandisciplines and systems, articulate and inarticulate, formalised in institutions or dispersed in the least formalways, which "handle," transmit or distort this raw material to be at the other. (33)Although both figures would later be placed under the sign of "culturalism," the difference in their thoughtwas significant. For Thompson, the domains of culture and "not culture" were empirically distinct, whileWilliams was reaching toward a conception of culture as integral to the social totality--what he would laterterm a "whole indissoluable practice" (Marxism, 31). Indeed, he retrospectively described The LongRevolution as


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the attempt to develop a theory of social totality . . . to find ways of studying structure, in particular works andperiods, which could stay in touch with and illuminate particular art works and forms, but also forms andrelations of more general social life. ("Literature and Sociology," 10) [End Page 201]In taking up the question of the relation of culture to "not culture" and to the social totality, Thompson andWilliams took on the problem of "reflection"--the dominant understanding of culture in Western thought that

posited it as a reflection of a more primordial mental or material process. In dialogue with the intellectualforce field of Marxism, the version of reflection theory they addressed was that of the "orthodox" Marxismthat emerged within the Second International, was appropriated by the various European communist parties,and solidified under the Third International and Stalin's reign in the Soviet Union. 1 This "congealed andsimplistic conception of Marxism" (Bettelheim, 19) identified the "base" with the state of development of the

productive forces. All other aspects of existence, including culture, were relegated to the "superstructure" andtreated as a reflection of the demands of the base, which was considered autonomous, unconditioned, and self-determining. 2

Thompson and Williams challenged this mechanistic materialism and its reflection theory of culture that hadinformed Marxist literary criticism in Britain since the 1930s (Mulhern; Higgins). They were not alone in theendeavor. Beginning with Lukcs, various figures gathered under the rubric of "Western Marxism" alsoengaged the problem of reflection that lurked within the base/superstructure formulation (e.g., Bloch, Brecht,Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Gramsci, Sartre, Goldmann). As Martin Jay notes, despite their manydifferences, these thinkers shared an "utter repudiation of the legacy of the Second International" and a

preoccupation with the "critical role of culture" in reproducing capitalism (7, 8; also Anderson). WesternMarxism can thus be seen as an ongoing effort to rethink the concept of the superstructure and the problem ofreflection--a project that Hall and cultural studies would continue.

Superseding the Past, Projecting the Future of Cultural StudiesThe centrality of the problem of reflection was acknowledged by Hall in "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms."Published shortly after his decade (1969-1979) heading the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary CulturalStudies (CCCS), the essay considered the field's future [End Page 202] by reflecting on its roots in theintersection of culturalism and structuralism. The former, identified with Thompson, Williams, and RichardHoggart, was credited with revising the received Arnoldian/ Leavisite view of culture, expanding it toencompass the meanings, traditions, and practices that arise from and express human existence. Structuralism(identified with Saussure, Lvi-Strauss, Barthes, and Althusser) was also concerned with culture as meaning,

but from a decidedly different perspective. Here meaning (more accurately, signification) was seen as arising

not from subjective experience, but from within the operation of objective signifying systems that precededand determined individual experience. For structuralism, experience was not the source of signification, butits effect. Here structuralism's antihumanism collided with the humanist inclinations of culturalism.

Hall noted this tension as well as a key point of convergence: both paradigms were critical encounters withthe base/superstructure relation and rejections of reflection theory. If each paradigm was "a radical break withthe base/superstructure metaphor" ("Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," 65), both "make a constant, if flawed,return" to it; in Hall's view: "They are correct in insisting that this question--which resumes all the problemsof a non-reductive determinacy--is the heart of the matter: and that, on the solution of this problem will turnthe capacity of Cultural Studies to supercede the endless oscillations between idealism and reductionism"(72). Joining the paradigms, he intimated, might provide a means of resolving the field's "core problem" ofgrasping "the specificity of different practices and the forms of articulated unity they constitute." Culturalismand structuralism were central to the future of cultural studies because they "confront--even if in radically

different ways--the dialectic between conditions and consciousness" and "pose the question of the relationbetween the logic of thinking and the 'logic' of historical process" (72).

A decade later, Hall reconsidered the future of the field in light of its origins. This time he argued that theproject of cultural studies

begins, and develops through the critique of a certain reductionism and economism--which I think is notextrinsic but intrinsic to Marxism; a contestation with the model of base and superstructure, through which


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[End Page 203] sophisticated and vulgar Marxism alike had tried to think the relationship between society,economy and culture. ("Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies," 279)The earlier quest to comprehend culture in dialectical relation to the social totality now seemed to Hall naiveand tenuous: "there's always been something decentered about the medium of culture, about language,textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evades the attempts to link it, directly andimmediately, with other structures." In consequence, "it has always been impossible in the theoretical field ofCultural Studies . . . to get anything like an adequate account of culture's relations and its effects."Practitioners must learn to live with this "displacement of culture" and its "failure to reconcile itself with otherquestions that matter, with other questions that cannot and can never be fully covered by critical textuality"(284). In the course of a decade, then, the terms of theoretical inquiry had changed. In his memorial forWhite, Hall refers not to the dialectic of "conditions and consciousness," but sees the core problem of culturalstudies as "the relationship of the social and the symbolic, the 'play' between power and culture" ("For AllonWhite," 288). 3 It thus appears that cultural studies has undergone a signal reformulation of its problematic.Indeed, Hall characterizes the passing of "metaphors of transformation" as an "absolutely fundamental 'turn'in cultural theory" (303).

How are we to understand this movement of thought? A common response among practitioners is that thefield has outgrown its founding paradigms and their concern with the base/superstructure relation. Suchtheoretical evolution is to be expected, in Hall's view, given that "we are entering the era of post-Marxism"("Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies," 281). This stance is echoed elsewhere. Lawrence Grossberg

sees cultural studies as having surpassed the "reductionism and reflectionism" ("Cultural Studies vs. PoliticalEconomy," 79) of political economy (and, by extension, of Marxism) through the recognition that therelations between economy, society, and culture are "much more complex and difficult to describe" (76).Angela McRobbie notes that if the "two paradigms" arose in engagement with Marxism, "from the startCultural Studies emerged as a form of radical inquiry which went against reductionism [End Page 204] andeconomism" (720). The "totalizing field of Marxist theory," she suggests, has been so discredited that "it is nolonger useful to retain the word Marxism to characterize the current mode of inquiry" (723). In the wake of"post-Marxism" and decline of "grand theory," cultural studies has achieved a "greater degree of openness"(724).

Critics, in contrast, paint this movement as a regression. Colin Sparks contends that having abandoned itsoriginal task of "understanding the determination of culture," cultural studies has opted for "an essentially

textualist account" (98). Paul Smith suggests that the field has chosen to collapse the political into the culturalor place them "at a great distance from each other." Both paths elide the question of the relations between "themode of production and the formation of civic life and cultures" and "between civic life and cultures." InSmith's assessment, "Cultural studies is still at the stage where it thinks of the realms of the economic, thecivic, and the cultural as for all intents and purposes discrete" (59-60). The consequence of such analyticalseparation is to defuse the field's critical practice:

In the division of those realms, cultural studies fails to grasp that the only object it can with validity proposeas its own . . . is the totality of social relations and cultural productions at given times and in given places.Indeed, without this kind of recognition, cultural studies must be condemned as exactly one more bourgeoisform of knowledge production, as it reflects the divisions between the realms that it is the desperate effort ofcapitalist discourse to police. (60)

Dan Schiller also criticizes the withdrawal of cultural studies from thinking the relation of communication andculture to the social totality--a tendency that he says plagues the history of communication studies in general.For Schiller, this tendency derives from a dualism in communication theory between the mental and thematerial, or intellectual and manual labor, resulting in a "continuing inability to integrate, or even toencompass, 'labor' and 'communication' within a single conceptual totality" (xi).

All three critics link the failings of cultural studies to its abandonment of a materialist understanding of therelation of culture to "not culture"--in other words, to its retreat from Marxism. Sparks and Schiller see thisretreat as the result of cultural studies turning to [End Page 205] structuralism in the 1970s. Sparks contendsthat because the Birmingham Centre's appropriation of Marxism followed its embrace of structuralism in the


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work of Barthes and Lvi-Strauss, the Marxism that briefly achieved orthodoxy in cultural studies was thestructuralist Marxism of Althusser. The field's subsequent "move away from Marxism" followed fromAlthusser's own weaknesses (71). Schiller also faults the turn to structuralism that cultural studies took, whichisolated signification from the rest of practical activity: "sundered from other processes of production,signification--properly credited with being a 'real and positive social force'--veered off as an increasingly self-determining generative principle" (153). In consequence, "the full range of production, which was to remainof vital importance to Williams and others, who challenged the classic model of base and superstructure, wasseverely truncated" (153).

Sparks comments that "the dominant view within the field today is probably that in shedding its marxist husk,cultural studies has empowered itself to address the real issues of contemporary cultural analysis" (98).Indeed, many cultural studies practitioners seem relieved to have shed outmoded theoretical frameworks andimpatient with those who have not freed themselves. 4 The implication is that cultural studies has finallysurpassed idealism and reductionism and resolved "all the problems of a non-reductive determinacy" that Hallonce deemed "the heart of the matter." It is precisely this assumption that I wish to interrogate. I agree that theintellectual trajectory of cultural studies is indelibly marked by its adoption of the "structuralist paradigm" inthe 1970s, with which it hoped to counter a reflection theory of culture. Under Hall's guidance, culturalstudies tried to resolve the problem of reflection by separating culture from "not culture"--a move facilitated

by structuralism's privileging of linguistic form over substance, contingency over necessity, and synchronicstructure over diachronic development. This commitment to structuralism was decisive for the field's

subsequent appropriation of Marxism via Althusser and Gramsci. Having adopted structuralism--with itsexplicit Saussurean foundations--the pro-ject of cultural studies was inherently vulnerable to destabilization

by the poststructuralist critique of those foundations. Hall's journey from seeking to grasp the "dialecticbetween conditions and [End Page 206] consciousness" ("Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," 72) to hisadmission that it is impossible "to get anything like an adequate account of culture's relations and effects"("Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies," 284) reflects the passage from structuralism to

poststructuralism. A key casualty of that passage was the commitment of cultural studies to Marxism.

Contra to the view that this trajectory constitutes a theoretical advance, I suggest that it merely repeats thepast. Hall's solution to the problem of reflection--making culture autonomous--preserved not only thereflection/autonomy binary, but the autonomy of "not culture," which, by default, becomes the "base" or"economy." Insofar as an autonomous economy or base is the defining feature of economism, Hall therebyconserved the very specter that had haunted cultural studies from the beginning. I will argue that overcoming

a reflection theory of culture involves refusing the analytical separation of culture and "not culture" and theirautonomy and embarking on a long overdue investigation of the notion of the "base."

The Structuralist Turn in Cultural StudiesCulturalism emerged in post-WWII Europe in conjunction with socialist or Marxist humanism and drewtheoretical sustenance from Marx's early work, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Rediscovered and

published in German in 1932, French in 1933, and English in 1959, the work was introduced to Hall,Thompson, and others in the British New Left by Charles Taylor, who served with Hall as editor ofUniversities and Left Review (Dworkin, 62; Taylor). As Ali Rattansi argues, "with their emphasis on acritique of human alienation in capitalist society and the potential liberating realisation of the human 'essence'under socialism," the Manuscripts provided a means of challenging the economism that had prevailed withinMarxism since the 1930s (1). Contra to Stalinism's privileging of the productive forces, Marx's early work"urged the interpretation of human labour as an act of self-creativity of which the development of productive

technology was only one moment" (2).

Williams and Thompson stressed this theme of essential human [End Page 207] creativity in their argumentsfor the centrality of culture in the historical process. Rejecting the view that consciousness and culture werereflexes of economic forces, they sought to restore the place of praxis in history. As Thompson argued, "It isthe active process--which is at the same time the process through which men make their history--that I aminsisting upon" ("Long Revolution," 33). Williams criticized the reflectionism of "orthodox" Marxism,whereby "art is degraded as a mere reflection of the basic economic and political process, on which it isthought to be parasitic." For Williams, "the creative element in man is the root both of his personality and his


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society; it can neither be confined to art nor excluded from the systems of decision [politics] and maintenance[economy]" (Long Revolution, 115; see also Culture and Society).

If culturalism laid the foundation for cultural studies, its hegemony, according to Hall, "was interrupted by thearrival on the intellectual scene of the 'structuralisms' " ("Cultual Studies: Two Paradigms," 64). 5 It wasunder Hall's leadership that structuralism achieved paradigmatic status in cultural studies. Like culturalism,structuralism engaged with the problem of reflection and the base/superstructure formulation. In The SavageMind, Lvi-Strauss acknowledged "the incontestable primacy of infrastructures," while aiming to contributeto "that theory of superstructures scarcely touched upon by Marx" (130). Barthes's Mythologies employedSaussurean semiotics to "account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture intoa universal nature" (9). Althusser challenged economism with his notion of the "relative autonomy of thesuperstructures" and called for a "theory of the specific effectivity of the superstructures" that "largelyremains to be elaborated" (For Marx, 113). Indeed, Fredric Jameson has characterized the structuralist projectas "the study of superstructures, or, in a more limited way, of ideology" (101).

Structuralism mounted its challenge to reflection theory through the appropriation of Saussurean linguistics. Itwas Saussure's achievement to undermine previous models that had viewed language as "a reflection or anexpression of a pre-existing meaning or psychic impression, a re-presencing of something immaterial in thematerial" by proposing a relational, rather than substantialist, theory of language (Riordan, 4; see also Frank).Rejecting the existence of a [End Page 208] prior world of cognitive states represented by symbols, Saussure

suggested that words and ideas were born together through the operation of a linguistic system that, viaprinciples of differentiation and combination, imposed form on both thought and matter. In Saussure's model,language was a closed taxonomy of signs that, as binary relations of signifiers and signifieds, were articulated

by an invariant code that assigned to each signifier a unique signified. This code allowed for thedifferentiation and recombination of elements according to strict rules of formation, and the formulation ofthis principle of formation constituted the "structure" of language. Because in order to use language, a speakermust recognize the identity of a particular element through its difference from all others, Saussure held that alinguistic system is always already complete--a "synchronic (timeless) totality of interrelations" (Riordan, 5).In this model, meaning is not a property of consciousness or of things, but the effect of a formal schema ofarticulation that determines how elements are distinguished and combined. Accordingly, the relation of signsand referents is arbitrary (i.e., not a reflection of anything), and the positive content of signs (ideas and phonicsubstances) is subordinate to their function as formal values within the linguistic structure (langue) thatconstitutes the conditions of possibility for actual language use (parole). Thus, Saussure could argue that

"language is itself a form not a substance" (120) consisting of "only differences without positive terms" (118).

French structuralism arose through a "strong interpretation" of Saussure's conception of language as formrather than substance (Frank, 31). Appropriating key principles of Saussurean linguistics--its conception ofstructure, nonrepresentational model of language, doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign, indifference tolanguage's referential dimensions, prioritization of langue over parole and synchrony over diachrony--structuralism applied these to the study of culture and society in a move that had profound implications acrossthe human sciences. Positing Saussure's structure of language as the blueprint for the study of society ingeneral, structuralism proposed that the multiplicity of human practices could be understood as "differentialarticulations of signifying systems ruled by structural codes" (Riordan, 4). Thus, phenomena ranging fromkinship systems to eating habits to myth and literature could be conceived as [End Page 209] manifestationsof the same general principles. Through this prioritization of form over substance, structuralism madelanguage "the privileged object of thought, science, and philosophy," the " 'key' to man and to social history,"

and "the means of access to the laws of societal functioning" (Kristeva, 3). As Julia Kristeva notes, "thescientific knowledge of language was projected onto the whole of social practice. . . . In this way were laid thebases of a scientific approach to the vast realm of human actions" (4). Central to structuralism is that theactivities of individuals are "reduced to the level of phonic material" (ibid.). That is, individual actions arearbitrary--without substantial meaning of their own--because their significance is constituted through theirinscription within a schema of articulation that preexists them. Thus, structuralism held that human beings are"spoken by" the structure.

Pierre Bourdieu has argued that the "destiny of modern linguistics" and the human sciences that have takenthe linguistic turn was "determined by Saussure's inaugural move through which he separates the 'external'


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elements of linguistics from the 'internal' elements." In imputing autonomy to language, structural linguistics"exercise[d] an ideological effect," presenting itself as "the most natural of the social sciences by separatingthe linguistic instrument from its social conditions of production and utilization" (33). This critique holds forstructuralism, which engaged in a double movement of theoretically isolating language from the rest ofsociohistorical existence so as to submit it to scientific analysis, and then projecting the rules of operation oflanguage back onto the "whole of social practice." It was only by means of this prior separation that languagecould be made into the privileged mode of "access to the laws of societal functioning." Integral to this

privileging of language was the demotion of a diachronic (historical) understanding of meaning in favor of theview that signification derived entirely from the operation of synchronic differentiation. From such a

perspective, the diachronic is reduced to mere repetition without meaning--to a series of "discontinuoussequential structures" (Riordan, 7). Hence, structuralism's rejection of any notion of historical necessity infavor of "irreducible contingency" (Lvi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, 477). 6 Laboring under the shadowof Saussure, structuralism thus replaced history (temporal development) with structure (the internal relationallogic [End Page 210] of static systems) as both the object and method of inquiry--a move that paved the wayfor the abandonment of Marxism.

Given that cultural studies searched for a nonreflectionist conception of culture, the allure of structuralismwas predictable. According to Sparks, semiotics and structuralism were introduced at the Birmingham Centrein the late 1960s "independently of, and earlier than, any serious engagement with marxism" (81). From 1969to 1971, the Centre embarked on a "search for an alternative problematic and method" that included

"phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, structuralism and marxism" (cited in Sparks, 81). This period oftheoretical reappraisal, which coincided with Hall's rise to Centre director, marked the beginning ofculturalism's displacement from dominant paradigm status. This shift is evident in Hall's assessment of the"two paradigms," where he sides with structuralism's view of "experience" as an effect of structure, favors itsnotion of "the necessary complexity of the unity of a structure" over culturalism's "complex simplicity of anexpressive causality" ("Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," 68), and grants it methodological superiorityowing to its "concepts with which to cut into the complexity of the real" (67).

Hall's acceptance of structuralism's founding principles is evident in his treatment of Lvi-Strauss. "Thelinguistic paradigm," Hall argues, allowed Lvi-Strauss to approach culture "not at the level ofcorrespondences between the content of a practice, but at the level of their forms and structures," and toconceive " 'culture' as the categories and frameworks in thought and language through which differentsocieties classified out their conditions of existence." Further, Lvi-Strauss "thought of the manner and

practice through which these categories and mental frameworks were produced and transformed, largely on ananalogy with the ways in which language itself--the principal medium of 'culture'--operated." For Hall, Lvi-Strauss's emphasis on "the internal relations by means of which the categories of meaning were produced"

provided a new way to conceptualize the relation of culture to "not culture"--one in which "the causal logic ofdeterminacy was abandoned in favour of a structuralist causality--a logic of arrangement, of internal relations,of articulation of parts within a structure" (65).

While Hall portrays structuralism as only one theoretical influence [End Page 211] on cultural studies, hegrants it was a "formative intervention which coloured and influenced everything that followed" ("CulturalStudies and the Centre," 29). Under that influence, Hall (and with him the Birmingham Centre) made themove from meaning (as an activity of human beings) to signification (as an operation of language). Theconceptual basis of his "encoding/decoding" model of media discourse, as he noted in a 1989 interview,"reflected the beginnings of structuralism and semiotics and their impact on Cultural Studies." The

encoding/decoding model was also "an argument with Marxism . . . with the base/superstructure model, withthe notion of ideology, language and culture as secondary, not as constitutive but only as constituted by socio-economic processes" (Angus et al., 254). An understanding of signification in terms of the operation oflanguage guides Hall's description of media "meanings and messages" as "sign vehicles of a specific kindorganized, like any form of communication or language, through the operation of codes within thesyntagmatic chain of a discourse" and "constituted within the rules of 'language' " (Hall,"Encoding/Decoding," 128). He adopts the idea that linguistic systems precede and determine access to the"real": "Events can only be signified within the aural-visual forms of the televisual discourse. In the momentwhen a historical event passes under the sign of discourse, it is subject to all the complex formal 'rules' by


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which language signifies" (129). Thus, Hall argued, discourse is not "the 'transparent' representation of the'real,' " but the construction of knowledge through "the operation of a code" (29).

The influence of Lvi-Strauss and Barthes is evident in Hall's "The Determinations of News Photographs."Patterned after Barthes's "The Rhetoric of the Image," Hall's essay examines "the codes which makesignification possible" (176) in order to discern the "hidden 'deep structure' " (183) that functions as a"selection device" (181) to "classify out the world" (186). This view of signification as a process thatconstructs knowledge by assigning meaning to " 'raw' events" ("Encoding/Decoding," 129) is echoed in Hall's"Culture, the Media, and the 'Ideological Effect.' " Thus, the founding principle of structural linguistics--thatsignification results from the purely formal articulation of elements within a system--was imported intocultural studies and applied to the study of the media. For Hall, structuralism's value for building a "non-reductionist" cultural theory [End Page 212] was its method for "studying the systems of signs and . . .representations"; its "emphasis on the specificity, the irreducibility, of the cultural" ("Cultural Studies and theCentre," 30); and its break with "theoretical humanism" (31). Structuralism, he argues, "obliged us really torethink the 'cultural' as a set of practices: to think of the material conditions of signification and its necessarydeterminations" (31). Here, in the language of "practices" and "material conditions of signification," weencounter the influence of Althusser on Hall's thought. Although Lvi-Strauss had aspired to "a theory of thesuperstructures" and Barthes had turned the lens of semiotics on ideology, it was Althusser who would tie theknot of Marxism and structuralism within cultural studies.

Structuralism + MarxismAs with structuralism, the turn toward Marxism at the Birmingham Centre began under Hall's direction. 7Sparks contends that while the Centre's early forays into Marxism traversed a range of thinkers, includingLukcs and Sartre, by 1973 Althusser's structuralist Marxism had achieved "orthodoxy" (82). A chapter ofAlthusser's For Marx--"On Contradiction and Overdetermination"--was particularly formative for Hall, whoas late as 1983 applauded the "richness of its theoretical concepts" and deemed its achievement as having

begun "to think about complex kinds of determinacy without reduction to a simple unity" ("Signification,Representation, Ideology," 94). Althusser won pride of place in British cultural studies in the 1970s becausehe offered an innovative merger of Marxism and structuralism, which at the time represented the theoreticalcutting edge in the human sciences. His Marxism was antieconomistic, antihumanist, and provided a

philosophical rationale and method that promised to pierce "the opacity of the immediate" (Althusser andBalibar, 16). Althusser's critique of economism followed from his rejection of Hegelianism's notion of thesocial totality driven by "one principle of internal unity" (For Marx, 183). Hence, he renounced a Hegelian

"expressive totality" in which every element is a manifestation or reflection of a single principle. Althussersaw Stalinism as one variant of this error--where the "general contradiction" between the [End Page 213]forces and relations of production was held to unilaterally "cause" the superstructure as its phenomenalreflection. And while human-ist Marxism saw itself as diametrically opposed to Stalinism, for Althusser itwas simply the flip side of the expressive totality mistake: humanism made "alienation" (and its "negation")the single principle of unity.

Althusser's critique of the Hegelian residue in Stalinism and socialist humanism--indeed, his entire project todevelop a Marxist "science"--can be understood as an effort to rethink the problem of determination outsidethe orbit of Hegel. His end run around Hegel was executed through Spinoza, according to Christopher Norris:"the entire project of Althusserian Marxism comes down to this issue of Spinoza versus Hegel, on the claimsof a Marxist theoretical 'science' as opposed to a subject-centered dialectics of class consciousness, alienation,'expressive causality' and other such Hegelian residues" (35). From Spinoza, Althusser developed the notion

of "structural causality" where the "social totality comprises the articulated ensemble of the differentlevels . . . [of] the economic infrastructure, the politico-juridical superstructure, and the ideologicalsuperstructure" (Althusser, Philosophy, 6). While each level possessed a degree of autonomy and efficacy, itwas also determined by the totality of practices of all three instances. Althusser thereby rejected the twin

propositions that the relations of production were the "pure phenomena" of the forces of production and thesuperstructure the phenomenal expression of the base (For Marx, 100). He proposed instead the "ever pre-givenness of a structured complex unity" (199) in which "the mode of organization and articulation of thecomplexity is precisely what constitutes its unity" (202).


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Althusser thereby replaced the unitary determination of Hegelianism with the concept of "overdetermination,"where the "con-crete variations and mutations of a structured complexity such as a social formation" wereunderstood as "complexly-structurally-unevenly-determined" (210, 209). A social formation was not,however, simply "an equality of interaction between all instances" (Dews, 113), but "a structure articulated indominance" (Althusser, For Marx, 202). One level was dominant in every social formation and the mode of

production determined which level occupied that position. Thus, the economic base was determinant ("in thelast [End Page 214] instance") insofar as it "distributes effectivity between the instances of a social formation"(Dews, 114). To posit a "relative autonomy" of these different "levels" required a way of conceiving theirrelation outside the constraints of reflection theory, as Althusser recognized:

Marx has given us the "two ends of the chain," and has told us to find out what goes on between them: on theone hand, determination in the last instance by the economic (mode of production); on the other, the relativeautonomy of the superstructures and their specific effectivity. (For Marx, 111)Althusser's conception of ideology--which became central for cultural studies--derived from the structuralist

premise that a given domain of activity can be isolated and examined in terms of its internal logic andrelations. Indeed, he argued that "it was because each of these levels possesses this 'relative autonomy' that itcan be objectively considered a 'partial whole,' and become the object of a relatively independent scientifictreatment" (Philosophy, 6). Following Spinoza, who distinguished between "knowledge of imagination"(prereflective, commonsense awareness arising from practical experience) and "adequate knowledge" or

"understanding" (achieved through the correct deployment of critical reason), Althusser asserted a "crucialdistinction and opposition between science . . . and ideology" (22). While ideology was comprised of"representations, images, signs, etc." (26), its unity and meaning did not derive from those individualelements (content), but from their internal organization and relations (form): "considered in isolation, [signsand representations] do not compose ideology. It is their systematicity, their mode of arrangement andcombination, that gives them their meaning; it is their structure that determines their meaning and function"(26). That function was social reproduction: "assuring the bond among people in the totality of the forms oftheir existence, the relation of individuals to their task assigned by the social structure" (28).

Ideology was "opaque to the individuals who occupy a place in the society determined by its structure" (ibid.)because it was the hidden structuring principle that determined the way images and representations wereselected and combined. In this way, ideology "hailed" or "interpellated" (i.e., produced) social subjects, evenas it appeared to individuals as their spontaneous "free" thought. Hence, [End Page 215] Althusser's argument

that "what is represented in ideology is not the system of real relations which govern the existence ofindividuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live" (Lenin,155). Insofar as ideology is form rather than content, it is eternal and transhistorical. However, as structure, itcan also be made "the object of an objective study" (Philosophy, 26). Thus, like Lvi-Strauss, who strove tocreate a science by which one could identify the timeless "universal grammars" beneath the surface variationsin cultural practices, Althusser sought to establish scientific knowledge of the objective structure of ideologyout of which were generated specific historical variants. Such knowledge was attainable through conceptualclarification or immanent critique, which became political practice by establishing "the difference between theimaginary and the true" (Althusser and Balibar, 17).

This critical clarification, or "theoretical practice," constituted the science and the political project ofstructuralist Marxism. For Althusser, "practice" was "any process of transformation of a determinate givenraw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using

determinate means [of production]" (For Marx, 166). Practice was also divided into "levels": economic,political, ideological, and theoretical. Marxist science was located on the level of theoretical practice, which"works on raw material (representations, concepts, facts) which it is given by other practices, whether'empirical,' 'technical,' or 'ideological' " (167). At this level, the "means of production" are the conceptsemployed, the method is the way concepts are used, and the product is knowledge, or scientific truth. ForAlthusser, "To know is to produce the adequate concept of the object by putting to work means of theoretical

production (theory and method), applied to a given raw material" (Philosophy, 15). Theoretical practice mightcontribute to political practice by establishing the identity between "two different concretes: the concrete-in-thought, which is a knowledge, and concrete-reality, which is its object" (For Marx, 186). 8


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Introducing Hall to an American audience, Grossberg and Slack noted "the importance of the 'Althusserianmoment' which moves cultural studies onto a structuralist terrain" (88). From that terrain emerged what Halltermed the "critical paradigm" in media studies, in which the "move from content to structure or frommanifest [End Page 216] meaning to the level of code is an absolutely characteristic one" (Hall, "Rediscoveryof 'Ideology,' " 71). For Hall, this "paradigm shift" constituted a "theoretical revolution" in media studies, "atthe center of [which] was the rediscovery of ideology and the social and political significance of language andthe politics of the sign and discourse" (89). If the "Althusserian moment" marked the embrace of Marxism bycultural studies, it also conserved the founding principle of structuralism: that language/culture is notsubstance, but form. Culture was not the content of expression or experience, but the codes, inventories,taxonomies (i.e., the principles of formation) that provided the frameworks and basis forthought/consciousness. Signification--both the activity and product of this structuring process--was thereforethe proper object of cultural analysis.

In "The Rediscovery of 'Ideology,' " Hall states that having "dethroned the referential notion of language,"structuralism had definitively shown that "things in the real world do not contain or propose their own,integral, single, and intrinsic meaning." Rather, "the world has to be made to mean" through "language andsymbolization," which are "the means by which meaning is produced" (67). Because there is no access to the"real" except through language and "social relations have to be represented in speech and language to acquiremeaning" (Hall, "Signification, Representation, Ideology," 98), it followed that "how people will act dependsin part on how the situations in which they act are defined" (Hall, "Rediscovery of 'Ideology,' " 65).

Accordingly, Hall conceived ideology as a set of rules to generate meanings that define situations for socialaction. Ideologies, he argued,

pre-date individuals, and form part of the determinate social formations and conditions into which individualsare born. We have to "speak through" the ideologies which are active in our society and which provide uswith the means of "making sense" of social relations and our place in them. . . . ideologies "work" byconstructing for their subjects (individual and collective) positions of identification and knowledge whichallow them to "utter" ideological truths as if they were their authentic authors. ("Whites of Their Eyes," 31-32)This implies that we can have no knowledge of our inscription within an ideological discourse, as Hall notes:"We are not ourselves [End Page 217] aware of the rules of systems of classification of an ideology when weencounter an ideological statement." However, following structuralism and Althusser, he maintained that

ideologies, "like the rules of language . . . are open to rational inspection and analysis by modes ofinterpretation and deconstruction, which can open up a discourse to its foundations and allow us to inspect thecategories which generate it" ("Signification, Representation, Ideology," 106).

Such a project turns on the assumption that it is possible to stand apart from a structure (of language, ofideology), identify its principle of formation, and disengage from the practical awareness it constructs for allof us. It presumes that one can be both "inside" (determined by) and "outside" (free from) the structure, andthus able to pierce the generative "foundations" of a discourse. It is precisely this notion of a generativefoundation--a structure with a "center" and an "outside"--that poststructuralism would steadily erode,

beginning with Derrida's dissection of the metaphysical heart of Saussurean linguistics. In the wake of thatcritical enterprise, the commitment of cultural studies to a materialist (i.e., Marxist) account of culture wouldof necessity capsize. Hall attempted, by way of Gramsci, to sidestep the path that led through Marxism and"right out the other side again" ("Problem of Ideology," 28), but was ultimately unable to reverse this

"unstoppable philosophical slide" ("Signification, Representation, Ideology," 94) precisely because he hadalready accepted the founding principles of structuralism.

The Gramscian Turn: The Synthesis of the Paradigms

If the history of Marxist theory during the 1960's can be characterised by the reign of "althusserianism," thenwe have now, without a doubt, entered a new phase: that of "gramscism." (Mouffe, 1)In her introduction to Gramsci and Marxist Theory, Chantal Mouffe proposed that the Gramscianrevival--"developed in the wake of the events of 1968"--signaled a shift from pessimism to optimism amongleft intellectuals who, having earlier placed their hopes in Third World movements for national liberation,


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now envisioned [End Page 218] "possibilities of revolutionary transformations in the countries of advancedcapitalism" (1). 9 Hall would be among those who made that shift in the 1980s. Cultural studies turned towardGramsci as Althusser was coming under attack from friends and foes alike. 10 In "Cultural Studies and theCentre," Hall argued that "Gramsci massively corrects the ahistorical, highly abstract formal and theoreticistlevel at which structuralist theories operate" and "provided, for us, very much the 'limit' case for marxiststructuralism" ("Cultural Studies and the Centre," 36, 35). Gramsci also appeared compatible withculturalism. In "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," Hall argued that culturalism's emphasis "on theaffirmative moment of the development of conscious struggle . . . against its persistent downgrading in thestructuralist paradigm" had been further developed via Gramsci, who

provided us with a set of more refined terms through which to link the largely "unconscious" and givencultural categories of "common sense" with the formation of more active and organic ideologies, which havethe capacity to intervene in the ground of common sense . . . to organize masses of men and women. (69)Gramsci thus promised to be an antidote to criticisms of Althusser, a bridge to culturalism, and a possible path

beyond the limitations of both that might carry cultural studies into the future.

Ironically, Hall's move to Gramsci was provoked by Althusser. In Reading Capital, Althusser treated Gramscias an important, but historicist-tainted figure in Marxist thought. Painting Gramsci with a Hegelian brush,Althusser implied that one could follow him or Gramsci, but not both. Hall rejected that choice. In "Politics

and Ideology: Gramsci," Hall, Bob Lumley, and Gregor McLennan challenged Althusser's critique. Far frombeing incompatible with Althusser, they argued, "Gramsci has played a generative role and occupies a pivotalposition in relation to the work of structuralist marxism as a whole" (57). Making Gramsci a precursor toAlthusser was justified through their commonalities: both rejected economism, stressed the importance of thesuperstructure, spoke of ideology's role in producing "common sense," and were committed to politicalintervention. Hall and his coauthors concluded that the meeting of [End Page 219] structuralist Marxism andGramsci constituted "one of the most important encounters in the field of contemporary marxist theory" (58-59). Thereafter, Gramsci would play a costarring role with Althusser in the pantheon of seminal theorists incultural studies.

Hall has insisted that Althusserianism in its "fully orthodox form . . . never really existed for the Centre"("Cultural Studies at the Centre," 35). Without rejecting this claim, I propose that Hall's prior engagementwith structuralism, and structuralist Marxism in particular, was determinate for his encounter with Gramsci

and subsequent response to poststructuralism. 11 Turning Gramsci into a protostructuralist meant that his keyconcepts could be integrated into the already accepted principles of structuralism, an operation that began inHall's first engagement with his thought. Working within an Althusserian problematic, Hall, Lumley, andMcLennan characterized Gramsci's conception of social formations as comprising three levels--the economic,

political, and ideological--mirroring Althusser's categories. For both theorists, they said, the economic wasdeterminate "in the last instance," but the political and ideological levels enjoyed a significant autonomy. The

political level, which Hall et al. equated with "civil society," was the "intermediary sphere that includesaspects of the structure and superstructure" (47), while the ideological level, solely superstructural, "serves tocement and unify . . . classes and class fractions into positions of domination and subordination" (48).Corresponding to Althusser's conception of a social formation as a "structured complex unity," Gramsci'sconcept of hegemony was credited with "keep[ing] the levels of the social formation distinct and held incombination" (49). Althusser's distinction between ideology and science was paralleled for Hall and companyin Gramsci's couplet of "common sense" and "systematic thought" or "philosophy," which could transform

"good sense and class instinct . . . into a coherent socialist perspective" (53). They also characterizedGramsci's view of ideology as "an epistemological and structural matter" (46) in line with Althusser's notionthat ideology "interpellates" social subjects. Just as "theoretical practice" was the Althusserian key tounmasking ideologies, Gramsci seemed to imply that radical intellectuals could denaturalize "common sense"through the application of "systematic thought" (50).

Like Althusser before him, Gramsci was appended to Hall's [End Page 220] antireductionist crusade. In"Cultural Studies and the Centre," Hall proposed that Gramsci's work "stands as a prolonged repudiation ofany form of reductionism--especially that of economism" (35). 12 Key for Hall were Gramsci's concepts of"civil society," seen as "the terrain in which classes contest for power" (Hall, Lumley, and McLennan, 47);


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the "war of position" and centrality of intellectuals in seizing a leadership position; and hegemony, which"played a seminal role in cultural studies" (Hall, "Cultural Studies and the Centre," 35). In Hall'sappropriation, hegemony was defined as "the (temporary) mastery of a particular theatre of struggle and thearticulation of that field into a tendency [to] create the conditions whereby society and the state may beconformed in a larger sense to certain formative national-historic tasks." Because the outcome of that process"always depends on the balance in the relations of force," Hall held that the concept of hegemony "ridsGramci's thinking of any trace of a necessitarian logic and any temptation to 'read off' political and ideologicaloutcomes from some hypostatized economic base" (36). Gramsci was deemed less reductive than Althusser

because he emphasized "ideological struggle." Adopting Althusser's notion that ideology works by "binding"or "cementing" together signs, interests, subjects, classes, and levels of the social formation, Hall proposedthat Gramsci enabled cultural studies to understand how an ideology could "intervene in popular thinking'positively' in order to recompose its elements and add new ones, or 'negatively' by setting the boundaries onits development" (Hall, Lumley, and McLennan, 50). Combining Althusser and Gramsci meant that culturalstudies should focus on "the 'articulation' of ideology in and through language and discourse" (Hall,"Rediscovery of 'Ideology,' " 80).

The concept of articulation became the linchpin of Hall's attempt to recast the two paradigms through asynthesis of Gramsci and Althusser. As employed in structural linguistics and structuralist Marxism,articulation is the enactment of a structure's principle of formation, which determines how elements (e.g.,signifiers, signifieds, signs, discursive or ideological propositions, levels of the social formation, etc.) are

differentiated and combined. That operation is "arbitrary" insofar as the elements possess no prior substantialmeaning, but acquire significance relationally only through the [End Page 221] process of articulation. InHall's fusion of structuralist Marxism and Gramsci, the concept of articulation undergoes a crucial revision.He conserves the structuralist view of meaning as relational and arbitrary in his definition of articulation as

the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is alinkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. . . . the so-called "unity" of adiscourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be re-articulated in different ways

because they have no necessary "belongingness." The "unity" which matters is a linkage between thatarticulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need notnecessarily, be connected. (Grossberg, "Interview with Stuart Hall," 53)However, rather than treating articulation--as Althusser did--as a structural operation, Hall reconceives it as

an activity of social subjects engaged in ideological struggle. Hence, he argued "one of the ways in whichideological struggle takes place and ideologies are transformed is by articulating the elements differently,thereby producing a different meaning: breaking the chain in which they are currently fixed" ("Whites ofTheir Eyes," 31).

This reconceptualization of ideology, in Hall's view, helped cultural studies understand how "ideas ofdifferent kinds grip the minds of masses," permitting a historical bloc to "maintain its dominance andleadership" and "reconcile the mass of the people to their subordinate place." It also shed light on how "newforms of consciousness . . . arise, which move the masses of the people into historical action against the

prevailing system." Armed with this knowledge, cultural studies was equipped to "comprehend and master theterrain of struggle" (29). From this perspective, challenging a particular ideology involved identifying its"articulating principle" or rules of formation so as to recombine its elements and expose the constructednessof its apparently natural unity. Thus, Hall envisioned a "theoretically-informed political practice" that

identified the generative foundations of an ideological discourse in order to "bring about or construct thearticulation between social or economic forces and those forms of politics and ideology which might [EndPage 222] lead [the masses] in practice to intervene in history in a progressive way" ("Signification,Representation, Ideology," 95). 13

This argument is riven by a contradiction, however. Once one adopts the structuralist premise that individualelements (signs, units of discourse, etc.) have no inherent (substantial) meaning unless and until they are setinto relation with each other by the structure (the formulation of the principle of formation), the idea ofindividuals effecting a different meaning by substituting or recombining elements is nonsensical. Becausemeaning is always and only inscribed by the logic of the structure, any change in the meaning of individual


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elements arises only through a change within the structure itself. The question then becomes how, why, andunder what circumstances a structure changes. From a classic structuralist position, the answer is that,fundamentally, it doesn't: structure is a priori, timeless, and at every moment complete. Hence, structuralismrejects diachrony (temporal development) in favor of synchrony (a serial succession of structures). Within astructuralist paradigm, then, one might identify the operating logic of a given structure, but the idea ofindividuals changing that logic is illogical. For Hall to argue that individuals might intervene in an ideology

by rearranging its components only makes sense if he assumes that those elements do have a substantial(versus merely formal) meaning that derives from something other than the principle of formation of thestructure. That is, he is forced to appeal to an "outside" of the structure (of language, discourse, ideology) thatwould facilitate different practical inflections of meaning. It is on this problem of an "outside" that bothstructuralism, and Hall's attempt to fuse Gramsci and structuralist Marxism, founders.

In "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Derrida launched a definitive assaulton structural linguistics and structuralism. He zeroed in on fundamental problems in Saussurean linguistics:its notion of structure as a closed taxonomy and belief that a structure's unity could be grasped from theoutside by an investigator. Derrida argued that the principle of unity (principle of formation) of a structure can

be neither inside nor outside of it. If the unity of meaning is outside (i.e., identifiable by an externalinvestigator), then it can have no meaning, since meaning is by definition [End Page 223] an effect of thedifferential relations of elements in a system. Conversely, if the principle of unity is inside the structure, thenits own meaning is determined by its difference from all other values in the system, and it cannot be the

unifying principle for that system. While Derrida accepted Saussure's "conception of a differential articulationof the sign," he rejected "the idea that this articulation takes place in a theoretically comprehensive andenclosed system" (Frank, 25). He thus concluded that a structure cannot be a closed system organized by aunifying law; it must of necessity be forever open, without a founding principle or an "outside," and "subjectto infinite transformations" (ibid.). Derrida thereby judged structuralism guilty of the very metaphysics itimagined itself as transcending. This is the heart of the poststructuralist critique, not only of structuralism, butof all systems of thought that require a foundational (metaphysical) principle, be it god, nature, "man,"structure, or the forces of production.

The consequence of this critique was a progressive destabili-zation across the human sciences, includingcultural studies. In "Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates,"Hall responded to poststructuralism in an attempt to salvage his synthesis of Gramsci and Althusser and avoidthe slide out of Marxism. He reiterated his rejection of "classical" Marxism, which he characterized as relying

on "the idea of a necessary correspondence between one level of a social formation and another." He alsocriticized what he erroneously took to be poststructuralism's "declaration that there is 'necessarily nocorrespondence' " and its implication that "nothing really connects with anything else" (94). Hall counteredwith a "third position" of "no necessary correspondence" in which "there is no law which guarantees that theideology of a class is already and unequivocally given in or corresponds to the position which that class holdsin the economic relations of capitalist production" (ibid.). He conceded that Derrida was "correct in arguingthat there is always a perpetual slippage of the signifier, a continuous 'deference' " (93), but asserted that hisown "claim of 'no guarantee' . . . also implies that there is no necessary non-correspondence." Therefore, heinsisted, "there is no guarantee that, under all circumstances, ideology and class can never be articulatedtogether in any way or produce a social force capable for a time [End Page 224] of self-conscious 'unity inaction,' in a class struggle" (94-95). Hall accused poststructuralism of privileging difference over "unity." Inhis view, signification might in theory be the perpetual motion of diffrance, but in practice it necessarilyinterrupted that movement to construct unity or identity: "without some arbitrary 'fixing,' or what I am calling

'articulation,' there would be no signification or meaning at all. What is ideology but, precisely, this work offixing meaning through establishing, by selection and combination, a chain of equivalences?" (93).

That Derrida would find nothing to disagree with in this statement reveals Hall's inadequate understanding ofpoststructuralism. It also exposes a fundamental weakness in his attempt to bridge structuralism (viaAlthusser) and culturalism (via Gramsci). From the former, Hall accepted the view of ideology as a formalstructure that forges relations between elements to constitute the meaning of social subjects and their relationto "real conditions"--meanings that cannot exist independently of or prior to that suturing. From the latter, heretained the notion that meaning is constituted by social subjects in response to their lived conditions.Conflating the paradigms, Hall proposed that these same subjects could not only identify the articulating


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principle (i.e., the "center") of an ideological discourse, but also personally dismantle it by consciouslyrearranging its elements. Thus, Hall's "third position" salvaged the founding paradigms of cultural studies bywedding structuralism's conception of language with culturalism's conception of human subjects. These

positions are, first of all, incompatible. Further, neither (alone or in combination) is capable of standing up tothe poststructuralist critique. In his early assessment of the two paradigms, Hall imagined that cultural studieswas poised to resolve "the question of the relation between the logic of thinking and the 'logic' of historical

process" ("Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," 72). A dozen years later, he stated that the "question of how to'think,' in a non-reductionist way, the relations between 'the social' and 'the symbolic,' remains the paradigmquestion in cultural theory" ("For Allon White," 287). The inability of cultural studies to answer thosequestions, I suggest, lies within its founding paradigms themselves, neither of which Hall has relinquished norsurpassed. [End Page 225]

Countering Reflection with Autonomy: Economism ConservedHall's synthesis of Althusser and Gramsci ultimately resolved the problem of a reflection theory of culture byopting for its binary opposite--autonomy--and in so doing preserved that very polarity. In effect, he splicedtogether structuralism's autonomous signifying systems and culturalism's autonomous subject, while retainingthe autonomy of the "economic" inherited from economistic Marxism and bourgeois economics. This move ofseparating language/culture/the symbolic, consciousness/subjectivity, and objective conditions/economy intodiscrete objects or domains necessarily conserves economism because it treats the economic as autonomous,external, and self-conditioning. Further, once these are deemed separate entities, the problem becomes, as

Grossberg puts it, "how one thinks about the relationships or links between the different domains (forms andstructures of practices) of social life" ("Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy," 72). The absence of a"necessary" relation between these domains requires something to link them together: that something issignification/articulation.

Having adopted structuralism's conception of language as autonomous form, Hall conceived ideologicalstruggle through the logic of language--as the formal differentiation and combination of elements thatdisrupted established meanings and created new ones. The point of such signifying practice (or "articulation")was to create a link, for example, between class and ideology, so as to "move the masses . . . into historicalaction" ("Problem of Ideology," 29). However, having rejected structuralism's notion that linguistic structuresalso produce subjects on the grounds that this was another form of reductionism (a reflection theory ofconsciousness), Hall's model required subjects who were somehow independent of and not reducible todiscourse or conditions. As he has stated, "people are not cultural dopes. . . . they know something about who

they are. If they engage in a project it is because it has interpolated them, hailed them, and established somepoint of identification with them" (Hall, "Old and New Identities," 59).

Although Hall employs Althusserian language, he imports a humanist conception of human beings as self-aware, self-determining [End Page 226] subjects whose actions derive from the force of arguments(ideologies) presented to them. Similarly, those who seek social leadership (hegemony) by fashioningconvincing arguments (ideologies) must also be nonidentical with the structure of language and theirconditions of existence. In Althusser, the subject hailed by ideology is inscribed in/spoken by the structure(form), but misrecognizes this as the freely chosen content of her/his thought; for Hall, interpolation andhailing are akin to persuasion. That is, people can be "hailed" by an ideology only if it resonates with "whothey are," and who they are must precede and be independent of that ideological interpellation. In Hall's view,Laclau had "dismantled" the validity of any notion of a "class determination of ideas" ("Problem of Ideology,"39) and thereby made untenable the notion that people are "irrevocably and indelibly inscribed with the ideas

they ought to think" or the politics they "ought to have" based on their position in the social formation("Signification, Representation, Ideology," 96). Thus, Hall argued, "there must always be some distancebetween the immediate practical consciousness or common sense of ordinary people, and what it is possiblefor them to become" (Grossberg, "Interview with Stuart Hall," 52). Consciousness was therefore given neither

by conditions nor by language--its relation to both is contingent because some remainder of subjectivityalways exceeds its determinations.

This contingent subject is coupled with the contingency of the symbolic: because "language by its nature isnot fixed in a one-to-one relation with its referent"; it "can construct different meanings around what isapparently the same relation or phenomenon" (Hall, "Problem of Ideology," 36). The perpetual "slippage" of


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language interferes with its ability to fully determine subjects; this instability of language, combined with thatof the subject, precludes their perfect correspondence. Contingency is also extended to social conditions:"there is 'no necessary correspondence' between the conditions of a social relation or practice and the numberof different ways it can be represented" (Hall, "Signification, Representation, Ideology," 104). Given theabsence of any necessary, interior relation between language, subjectivity, and conditions, any connection isexternal and has to be created discursively to move people to hold the ideas (and politics) they "ought tohave." In Hall's words: "by [End Page 227] generating discourses which condense a range of differentconnotations, the dispersed conditions of a practice of different social groups can be effectively drawntogether to make those social forces . . . capable of intervening as a historical force" (104).

This conception of autonomous subjects who can be turned (and turn others) into a social force by rhetoricallyforging a correspondence between conditions and consciousness reflects Hall's apparent concession to

poststructuralism's critique of foundationalism. I suggest, however, that he fell prey to a commonmisunderstanding of that critique by associating it with a modernist--rather than poststructuralist--view offoundationalism. Philip Wood contrasts the modernist position, which conceives foundationalism as "theopposite of self or autonomous legislation" (i.e., the self as externally legislated by god, nature, reason, etc.),to poststructuralism's critique of any foundation or "ground" of being. For the latter, "the very ideals of 'self,''autonomy,' and even ostensibly anti-foundationalist notions like 'structure,' which were expressly designed toshatter notions of selfhood, all work with a secret assumption of a ground" (168-69). In rejecting the notionthat consciousness is an effect of language or expression of material conditions, Hall defaulted to a modernist

ideal of freedom based on an autonomous, self-legislating subject--one contingently related to language andsocial conditions who can be moved to engage in a political project through the practice of articulation. 14

Which brings us to the third autonomy. If any correspondence between people's consciousness and theirconditions of existence has to be created by signifying practice, for Hall there are clearly better and worsearticulations: those that move the masses to challenge the prevailing system and intervene in history in a

progressive way, versus those that maintain the hegemony of the "power bloc" and reconcile the "people" totheir subordinate place. Thus, while there is no necessary correspondence between signs, subjects, andcircumstances, there is a politically superior one, which it is the goal of cultural studies to foster. Oneresponse to making the relation between language, consciousness, and conditions purely arbitrary is aHumean conventionalism and relativism embraced by the likes of Rorty, Lyotard, and Fish. Given Hall'saffinity for a Marxian position, he rejected this relativist option. But to assert that there are progressive andretrograde [End Page 228] ways of articulating the links between these domains is to presume a basis upon

which to make that judgement and appeal to "the people" to intervene in history. That is, Hall requires a"truth" that precedes any particular articulation. That truth resides in what he has variously construed as "thereal conditions of existence," the "social formation," "social relations," "the prevailing system," "structures,"and "the economic," which he holds to exist independently of symbolic representation or subjectiveexperience:

Social relations do exist. We are born into them. They exist independently of our will. They are real in theirstructure and tendency. We cannot develop a social practice without representing those conditions toourselves in some way or another; but the representations do not exhaust their effect. Social relations exist,independent of mind, independent of thought. And yet they can only be conceptualized in thought, in thehead. (Hall, "Signification, Representation, Ideology," 105)Having rejected the idea that "social relations give their own unambiguous knowledge to perceiving, thinking

subjects," Hall maintained that we have no access to "the 'real relations' of a particular society outside of itscultural and ideological categories" (97). This neo-Kantian formulation seems to grant determinative primacyto the means of representation; indeed, this is a critique of Althusser made by Paul Hirst, who suggested thatthis was simply another species of reflection theory: "It is not too much to argue that once any autonomy isconceded to these means of representation, it follows necessarily that the means of representation determinethe represented" (395). Responding to that critique, Hall proposed that Hirst failed to appreciate the difference

between "autonomy and relative autonomy." For Hall, the former resulted in "a theory of the absoluteautonomy of everything from everything else," while the latter allowed one to conceptualize "a 'unity' whichis not a simple or reductionist one" (" 'Political' and the 'Economic,' " 58). However, to posit that everything is"relatively autonomous" from everything else still begs the question of the nature of their relationship and


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unity. In 1977, Hall located that unity in "the economic structure," which, in his view, Marx had conceived"as in some sense other than a reductionist one, 'determining' " (58). To do otherwise, he believed, [End Page229] would be to abandon the "Marxist 'topography' of the base and superstructure" that constituted the"boundary limit for Marxism" (59).

Thus, the basis upon which one might articulate a temporary correspondence between representations andsubjects ultimately leads back to the economic, and it is here that Hall's economism surfaces, despite his

persistent attacks on economic reductionism. 15 Before proceeding, Hall's characterization of "reductionism"warrants closer examination. His criticism of a Marxism "guaranteed by the laws of history" (Grossberg,"Interview with Stuart Hall," 58) is a recurring theme in Hall's writings from the late 1950s to the early 1990s,where it serves as the "other" to cultural studies--that which the field came into being in order to vanquish.Indeed, his work evinces a sense that economism is the special province of Marxism and that no Marxistthought outside of cultural studies has gotten beyond Stalinism (with the exception of Althusser, who was

plagued by other errors, and, of course, Gramsci). Neither implication is accurate. It is fair to say that none ofthe figures associated with "western Marxism" (including Lukcs) held to this "automatic Marxism." In fact,their various projects were consciously opposed to it, as was Maoism (including the French Maoists NicosPoulantzas and Charles Bettelheim), whose break with Soviet Marxism centered precisely on rejecting itseconomistic privileging of the productive forces (see Rossanda). One might take issue with other aspects ofthese thinkers' work, even find traces of economism in their thought, but one can-not accuse them of viewinghistory as the unfolding of some iron economic law.

Further, to identify economism exclusively with Marxism is to ignore the history of bourgeois politicaleconomy and modern economics. Bettelheim's criticism of economistic Marxism--that it "bore withinitself . . . the premises . . . of bourgeois ideology" (20)--echoes Marx's critique of classical political economy.Samir Amin argues that Marx's aim in Capital was to expose the economism at the heart of liberal politicaleconomy: "to reveal the secret of capitalist society, the logic that causes it to present itself as being directlyunder the control of the economy, which occupies the center stage of society and, in its unfolding, determinesthe other dimensions of society, which appear to have to adjust themselves to its demands" (5). [End Page230]

Bourgeois political economy is founded on this understanding of capitalism as the natural progression ofproductive capacity, the necessary outcome of a "law" of supply and demand, and the social expression ofinnate human nature, i.e., individuals as Homo oeconomicus, naturally self-interested, competitive beings

who seek to "maximize their satisfactions" (Godelier, xv). Far from being the exclusive province ofeconomistic Marxism, economism is the dominant mode of explanation within bourgeois economics. Amincalls economism the "dominant ideology" of capitalism itself, in which "economic laws are considered asobjective laws imposing themselves on society as forces of nature . . . as forces outside of the socialrelationships peculiar to capitalism" (7). That is, the economy is treated as an autonomous, unconditioned,self-determining force, thing, or institution. Economistic Marxism conserved this conception even as it sawitself as a radical critique of capitalism. Its understanding of social relations, consciousness, andsuperstructures as reflections of the forces of production parallels the liberal political economy's view of theeconomy as the "center stage" upon which the rest of society performs.

To the extent that Hall's critique of reductionism has focused on the culture-as-reflection problem withoutsimultaneously interrogating the received notion of the economic as an unconditioned, external force ordomain, he has also conserved economism. In "A Sense of Classlessness" (1958), an early engagement with

the question of the relation of culture to "not culture," Hall criticized "vulgar Marxist interpretations" of thesuperstructure, suggested refining the notion of the base, and called for a "freer play in our interpretationbetween" the two (27). However, his analysis of post-WWII Britain was squarely located within aneconomistic framework, complete with a reflection theory of consciousness and culture. He referred to a"shift in patterns of social life" that could be traced to changes in "the rhythm and nature of work,""technological innovations," and "growth in the volume of consumer goods" (26). In Hall's view, these factorshad changed objectively and "subjectively, i.e., as they present themselves to the consciousness of working

people" (27), thereby "giv[ing] rise to a different set of emotional responses" manifested in a "new 'classconsciousness' " (28). Thus, apparently self-propelled changes in the base were reflected in subjectivity. AsHall argued: [End Page 231]


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The transformation of the technical base has done its work. . . . the development of the means of productionmust in turn raise the level of human consciousness, and may make possible, and in turn, create the demandfor greater participation in all the human activities--the "social relations of production" associated with work.(28)This demand from below was not inevitable, however, because a new form of capitalism "based inconsumption" (29) had created a "general sense of class confusion . . . resulting in a false consciousness inworking class people" (30). Thus, Hall cautioned,

the material and technological means for complete human freedom are almost to hand . . . [but] the structureof human, social and moral relationships are in complete contradiction and have to be set over against ourmaterial advances, when we are reckoning them up. (31)Although Hall would no doubt reject his early analysis as reductionist, the issues it raised effectivelyestablished the agenda for cultural studies for the next three decades: the base/superstructure(economy/culture) relationship; the relation of culture to "not culture" and consciousness to conditions; the

problem of why the working class (or "the people") did not/could not/would not recognize their owndomination; and the question of what critical intellectuals might do about it. The journey through

structuralism, structuralist Marxism, and Gramsci provided new analytical concepts and methods, and alongthe way gender and race were added as sites of analysis, but Hall's original questions endured. So did thetendency to conceive the economic (or capitalism) as unconditioned--a self-driven force or thing. Whatchanged are the terms in which Hall conceived the relation of culture and consciousness to the economic.

Writing during the "Althusserian moment," Hall countered reductionism by conceiving the political andideological as relatively autonomous levels with their own structures, effects, and "conditions of existence"that were "not reducible to 'the economic.' " However, he continued to view their relation as linear, i.e., theeconomic precedes the other "levels" conceptually and actually. The political, juridical, and ideological, heargued, "are related but 'relatively [End Page 232] autonomous' practices, and thus the sites of distinct formsof class struggle, with their own objects of struggle, and exhibiting a relatively independent retroactive effecton 'the base.' " (" 'Political' and the 'Economic,' " 56; emphasis added). The autonomy of the superstructurallevels facilitates "effects within what we have broadly designated as the 'economic' " (ibid.), but the economic

still takes precedence; its effect upon the other levels are primary, theirs are secondary and "retroactive." Thatis, the political, ideological, and juridical do not produce the economic--which appears to be self- generated--

but only respond to it after the fact.

Nine years later, after the Gramscian detour, this conception of the economic persists, despite Hall's claim tooffer a new, nonreductionist determinacy. In "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees," heargues that "the relations in which people exist are the 'real relations' which the categories and concepts theyuse help them to grasp and articulate in thought," but the "economic relations themselves cannot prescribe asingle, fixed and unalterable way of conceptualizing it [sic]" because "it can be expressed within differentideological discourses" (38). If working people accept the representation of "the market" as a "system driven

by the real and practical imperatives of self-interest" (34), this is a consequence of representation. Thus, "aworker who lives his or her relation to the circuits of capitalist production exclusively through the categoriesof a 'fair price' and a 'fair wage' " is not plagued by false consciousness, but hindered by "inadequate"

frameworks of knowledge. In Hall's words, "There is something about her situation which she cannot graspwith the categories [of thought] she is using" (37).

By also insisting that the discourses within which "the process of capitalist production and exchange" isrepresented "situate us as social actors . . . and prescribe certain identities for us" (39), Hall risks making themeans of representation determinate. He sidesteps this issue by asserting that the "real relations" can beknown through an "adequate" or "theoretical discourse," thus implying that there are true correspondences

between language, conditions, and consciousness. Where does this adequate discourse--as well as inadequateones--come from? For Hall, they are ultimately supplied by the economic: [End Page 233]


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the economic aspect of capitalist production processes has real limiting and constraining effects (i.e.,determinacy), for the categories in which the circuits of production are thought, ideologically, and vice versa.The economic provides the repertoire of categories which will be used, in thought. What the economic cannotdo is (a) to provide the contents of the particular thoughts of particular social classes or groups at any specifictime; (b) to fix or guarantee for all time which ideas will be made use of by which classes. The determinacy ofthe economic for the ideological can, therefore, be only in terms of the former setting limits for defining theterrain of operations, establishing the "raw materials" of thought. Material circumstances are the set ofconstraints, the "conditions of existence," for practical thought and calculation about society. (42)Hall therefore distinguishes his conception of economic determinacy from reflection theory by privilegingform over content--the structuralist solution. By providing the "raw materials" of experience (conceived hereas the classificatory schema of thought), the economic (i.e., "material circumstances") determines the

boundaries (or principle of formation) of what it is possible to think, even if it cannot command what anygiven individual actually does think. It therefore continues to precede both thought and action as anunconditioned external cause. Indeed, Hall suggested that Althusser's ill-fated "determination in the lastinstance" be replaced by "determination by the economic in the first instance," since "no social practice or setof relations floats free of the determinate effects of the concrete relations in which they are created" (43).

Both shifts and continuities are evident when comparing Hall's "A Sense of Classlessness" to his analysis ofThatcherism in the 1980s, culminating in the New Times project, where the synthesis of Althusser, Gramsci,

and Laclau and the "no necessary correspondence" thesis are everywhere evident. In the conclusion to TheHard Road to Renewal, Hall reiterates his view that "There is no automatic correspondence between class

position, political position and ideological inclination. Majorities have to be 'made' and 'won'--not passivelyreflected" (281). Class is no longer an organizing trope, given the presumably discredited notion of any classdetermination of consciousness. Working class and ruling class have been replaced, via Laclau, by thetheoretically amorphous notion of "the people" versus "the power bloc." False consciousness has also been

jettisoned-- [End Page 234] usurped by "identities"--since consciousness hinges on how our "real conditionsof existence" are articulated. Gone too is the claim that people's interests are given by their position withinexisting social conditions, because "social interests are contradictory" and must be marshaled by ahegemonizing project (ibid.).

These differences, however, belie an important continuity in Hall's treatment of the economic as a self-legislating foundation. In their introduction to New Times, Hall and Martin Jacques argue that the New Times

project grew out of the fact that "the world has changed," that "advanced capitalist societies are increasinglycharacterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and theeconomies and organisations of scale which characterised modern mass society" (11). "New Times" are theresult of the transition from "Fordism" to "post-Fordism," characterized by "the rise of 'flexible specialisation'in place of the old assembly-line world of mass production. It is this, above all, which is orchestrating anddriving on the evolution of this new world." They deem this transition "epochal"--comparable to thenineteenth-century passage "from the 'entrepreneurial' to the advanced or organised stage within capitalism,"which "has shifted the centre of gravity of the society and the culture markedly and decisively in a newdirection." In sum, "post-Fordism is at the leading edge of change, increasingly setting the tone of society and

providing the dominant rhythm of cultural change" (12). This is not far removed from Hall's claim in 1958that "the transformation of the technical base has done its work." In both cases, the economic perks along ofits own volition and everything else (culture, consciousness, politics, etc.) reacts to that external momentum.

This conception of the economic also traverses Hall's writings on race, ethnicity, and globalization in the1980s. In two 1989 lectures, Hall addresses a tension in globalization between homogenization (identity) andspecificity (difference). Although rejecting class as a "master concept" ("Old and New Identities," 46) and

positioning himself against a view of capital

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Itinerary of a Thought- Stuart Hall Cyltural Studies and the Unresolved Problem of the Relation o