Stuart Hall Lives: Cultural Studies in an Age of Digital Media

Peter Decherney, Katherine Sender, Peter Decherney, Katherine Sender

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138067592
• eBook ISBN: 9781351656887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The work of cultural and political theorist Stuart Hall, a pioneer of Cultural Studies who passed away in 2014, remains more relevant than ever. In Stuart Hall Lives, scholars engage with Hall's most enduring essays, including "Encoding/Decoding" and "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular," bringing them into the context of the 21st century. Different chapters consider resistant media consumers, online journalism, debates around the American Confederate flag and rainbow flags, the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, and contemporary moral panics. The book also includes Hall's important essay on French theorist Louis Althusser, which is introduced here by Lawrence Grossberg and Jennifer Slack. Finally, two reminiscences by one of Hall's former colleagues and one of his former students offer wide-ranging reflections on his years as director of Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, and as head of the Department of Sociology at The Open University. Together, the contributions paint a picture of a brilliant theorist whose work and legacy is as vital as ever.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication.

An Introduction to Stuart Hall’s Essay

Lawrence Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack

Stuart Hall was born in Jamaica in 1932. He was, for a decade, the director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and is currently Professor of Sociology at the Open University. He is one of the central figures in the continuing development of marxist cultural theory and critical practice. While his influence and importance are widely felt in many sectors of the British left, his work (not to mention the power of his presence) remains relatively unknown in the U.S., most significantly among communication researchers. This is ironic for it is to the mass media and popular culture that Hall, his students and his colleagues have consistently turned and returned as the object of their investigations; they have attempted to theorize the “political and social existence of culture” by elaborating and extending marxist notions of ideology, determination, etc. Yet their theorizing has always been complemented by their concrete analyses and by their attempt to locate, within the sphere of culture and communication, the possibilities for active political and ideological struggle.

During the summer of 1983, Hall delivered a series of lectures on cultural studies as part of the Teaching Institute on Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, organized by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.¹ The following essay, a revision of the sixth of nine lectures, is intellectually central to Hall’s position. For this reason, it may be useful to frame its argument. We have chosen to publish this particular essay, not only because it provides a clear statement of his theory of ideological articulation, but also because it demonstrates how Hall positions himself within the larger terrain of contemporary cultural theory.

In “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” (Hall, 1980), Hall described the two major camps within marxist cultural studies as “culturalism” and “structuralism.” The former, best represented by Raymond Williams, emphasizes the creativity of the cultural process and the active autonomy of human practices (often condensed in notions of Praxis); it places experience (ultimately class-determined) as the epistemological source and political standard of the social formation as a totality. The latter, represented by Louis Althusser, emphasizes the complexity of and the contradictions within the social formation, conceptualized as a structure of practices. At different historical moments, different practices are “in dominance.” Social agents, either individuals or classes, are seen as produced by different practices and, in this sense, as the bearers or supporters of this structure rather than as its authors. Hall critiques both of these paradigms: Althusser, for the structural-functionalism into which he falls; Williams, for the assumption of an identity between class and experience and for privileging creativity over the determinate “de-centering” of the subject. Hall argues for a middle position between culturalism and structuralism.

The present essay theorizes this position around the concept of “ideology.” Describing Hall’s indebtedness to Althusser, it demonstrates the importance of the “Althusserian moment” which moves cultural studies onto a structuralist terrain. Hall accepts a structuralist critique of culturalism’s theoretical humanism and its essentializing of experience, in favor of “living with difference.” He rejects Williams’ emphasis on the unity of the social formation (and the corresponding creative identity of the subject), which assumes a “necessary correspondence” between different levels of the social formation (e.g., between practices, experience and class position). But Hall also refuses to follow Althusser beyond a certain point and, drawing on the work of the Italian marxist, Antonio Gramsci, defines “the limit” position of the structuralist displacement of all identities into differences. At this site of struggle with structuralism, Hall theorizes a space between the two paradigms.

Althusser’s work is taken as standing for a whole complex body of writing which either directly or indirectly attempts to rework or reread classical marxism in the light of a structuralist critique. Hall’s argument here is primarily with those tendencies in Althusser which lead to a position of “necessary noncorrespondence.” The debate between Hall and this “poststructuralist Althusserianism” has become, in fact, a major debate in contemporary cultural theory, defining new issues and reproblematizing old terms. Hall’s limited structuralism, with its Gramscian influence now confronts a more extreme appropriation of structuralism’s emphasis on difference. This set of positions, drawing not only upon Althusser but also upon Lacan’s structural psychoanalysis, Derrida’s deconstructionism, and Foucault’s discourse theory (and his subsequent “microphysics of power”) has been most forcefully championed in Britain in journals such as Screen and Ideology and Consciousness (later I & C), in the work of Hindess and Hirst, and by various feminist groups (e.g., the m/f collective). The post-structural abandonment of any appeal to a real (or to experience) outside of discourse, and the absolute commitment to difference and rupture undercuts any attempt to theorize the “complexity of a unity,” according to Hall.

Hall defines his theory in the middle ground between necessary correspondences (in humanism and functionalism where they are guaranteed in, respectively, the first and the last instances) and necessary noncorrespondence: as a theory of “no necessary (non/) correspondence,” as a “marxism without guarantees.” He conceives of social and political practices as attempts to bring about and effect what cannot be guaranteed, either by the economic or by another deus ex machina. Complex structures or unities are not given but they can be constructed—“articulated”—depending on the nature of the historical conjuncture and the balance of forces in struggle at any time. Thus, the concept of “hegemony,” borrowed from Gramsci, becomes crucial for setting a more historically contingent and contradictory limit on the functionalism into which Althusser frequently slipped. Hegemony is not the always, ever-present, guaranteed position of dominance of a ruling class or a dominant social bloc. Rather it represents the struggle of such a bloc to articulate a variety of social and ideological practices within a “structure-in-dominance” so as to achieve that complex unity of effects which enables a dominant social alliance to exert leadership, direction and authority over a whole social formation, including over the dominated classes within it (who, of course, remain both distinct from the ruling bloc and yet constantly and actively subordinated to it). If the influence of culturalism can still be observed in this position, it is not because Hall accepts the culturalist premise of a correspondence between class and experience but because, principally under Gramsci’s influence, he has “re-read” the structuralist paradigm away from its tendency (in both its functionalist and poststructuralist versions) to abstractly read effects off from the structure, and more towards the determinate but in the end, unpredictable, historically contingent outcomes of particular forms of struggle and contradiction.

In the present essay, this theoretical debate is embodied in a reconsideration of the concept of “ideology.” Orthodox marxist theory sees ideology as “false knowledge” directly determined by—a mirror reflection of—relative class position. The culturalist orientation, while maintaining this necessary correspondence, rejects any simple reductionism by relating ideology to experience and conceiving of “experience” as an active, even a creative human practice, the site of the struggle between different classes (each with its own experiences). Structural marxism rejects both the notion of “false consciousness” and reductionism by treating ideology as a level of the social formation, a discursive practice which produces experience and the place of the individual within it. By positioning the individual within a predefined space, ideology enables the reproduction of the structure-in-dominance to take place. Thus, it is precisely over the authority of the subject and of experience that structuralism challenges the culturalist conception of ideology. For the latter, experience has a primary authenticity while, for the former, it is necessarily displaced from the center, and both consciousness and Praxis are treated, in part, as the product of ideological practices and positionings. Finally, in its post-structuralist inflections, there is a necessary noncorrespondence between social practices and their ideological representations (and hence, between the practices and their ideologically determined experiences and positions). Subjectivity is endlessly displaced and the individual is continually fractured into multiple subject positions.

Hall accepts the “displacing effects” of ideology on subjectivity and experience, as well as the fractured nature of the subject. Rejecting the culturalist assumption of identity, however, he rethinks ideology as the historical articulations between forms of consciousness and forms of practice and struggle. Ideology is, for Hall, the web of meanings and discourses, the strings of connotation and their means of representation, within which social practices, consciousnesses identities, and subjectivities are placed. This is the domain of discourse—where language is deeply penetrated and inscribed by ideology. Because of its displacements, one cannot simply “read back” from subjects and relations constructed or represented in discourse to a determining reality outside of discourse (e.g., the given class position of particular meanings). Nevertheless, Hall argues, it is also wrong to conceive of the ideological level as “autonomous,” floating free of the complex of other social practices and without effects from or on them. Ideological formations have to be analyzed in terms of their relations to other practices; ideology has real effects on and cannot be reduced to other practices. The ideological level has its own “relative autonomy” within the complex unity of practices which makes up a social formation. Thus, ideology becomes one of the key forms of contestation over the dispositions and struggles for power at different sites in society. From the perspective of either of the possibilities which are always in play in any historical situation—domination or resistance—and whose outcome no historical “law” can finally guarantee, the struggle is always—on the one side—to articulate meanings and practices by creating or constructing those “unities” which favor a particular disposition of power; and—on the other side—to disrupt or “disarticulate” those constructed unities and to construct in their place alternative points of condensation between practice and experience which enable alternative dispositions of power and resistance to emerge and be empowered.

Because of the importance of these debates in contemporary cultural theory, we have decided to include the opening pages of this essay, despite their frequent references to authors with whom communications scholars might have little familiarity. It is our hope that the present essay will contribute to the growing appreciation of and interest in Hall’s work, and broaden the scope of the positions, issues and vocabularies legitimated within communication studies in the United States.

Note

1.The entire lecture series will be published as: Stuart Hall with Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies, by Macmillan Press Ltd. We gratefully acknowledge their permission to publish this essay in CSMC.

Reference

Hall, S. (1980). Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture and Society, 2, 57–72.

Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates

Stuart Hall

—This essay attempts to assess Althusser’s contribution to the reconceptualization of ideology. Rather than offering a detailed exegesis, the essay provides some general reflections on the theoretical gains flowing from Althusser’s break with classical Marxist formulations of ideology. It argues that these gains opened up a new perspective within Marxism, enabling a rethinking of ideology in a significantly different way.

Althusser persuaded me, and I remain persuaded, that Marx conceptualizes the ensemble of relations which make up a whole society—Marx’s “totality”—as essentially a complex structure, not a simple one. Hence, the relationship within that totality between its different levels—say, the economic, the political, and the ideological (as Althusser would have it)—cannot be a simple or immediate one. Thus, the notion of simply reading off the different kinds of social contradiction at different levels of social practice in terms of one governing principle of social and economic organization (in classical Marxist terms, the “mode of production”), or of reading the different levels of a social formation in terms of a one-to-one correspondence between practices, are neither useful nor are they the ways in which Marx, in the end, conceptualized the social totality. Of course a social formation is not complexly structured simply because everything interacts with everything else—that is the traditional, sociological, multifactoral approach which has no determining priorities in it. A social formation is a “structure in dominance.” It has certain distinct tendencies; it has a certain configuration; it has a definite structuration. This is why the term “structure” remains important. But, nevertheless, it is a complex structure in which it is impossible to reduce one level of practice to another in some easy way. The reaction against both these tendencies to reductionism in the classical versions of the marxist theory of ideology has been in progress for a very long time—in fact, it was Marx and Engels themselves who set this work of revisionism in motion. But Althusser was the key figure in modern theorizing on this question who clearly broke with some of the old protocols and provided a persuasive alternative which remains broadly within the terms of the marxist problematic. This was a major theoretical achievement, however much we may now, in turn, wish to criticize and modify the terms of Althusser’s break-through. I think Althusser is also correct to argue that this is the way the social formation is in fact theorized in Marx’s “1857 Introduction” to the Grundrisse (1953/1973), his most elaborated methodological text.

Another general advance which Althusser offers is that he enabled me to live in and with difference. Althusser’s break with a monistic conception of marxism demanded the theorization of difference—the recognition that there are different social contradictions with different origins; that the contradictions which drive the historical process forward do not always appear in the same place, and will not always have the same historical effects. We have to think about the articulation between different contradictions; about the different specificities and temporal durations through which they operate, about the different modalities through which they function. I think Althusser is right to point to a stubbornly monistic habit in the practice of many very distinguished marxists who are willing, for the sake of complexity, to play with difference so long as there is the guarantee of unity further on up the road. But the significant advances over this delayed teleology are already to be found in the “1857 Introduction” to the Grundrisse. There, Marx says, for example, of course all languages have some elements in common. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to identify them as belonging to the same social phenomenon. But when we have said that we have only said something about language at a very general level of abstraction: the level of “language-in-general.” We have only begun our investigation. The more important theoretical problem is to think the specificity and difference of different languages, to examine the many determinations, in concrete analysis, of particular linguistic or cultural formations and the particular aspects which differentiate them from one another. Marx’s insight that critical thought moves away from abstraction to the concrete-in-thought which is the result of many determinations, is one of his most profound, most neglected epistemological propositions, which even Althusser himself somewhat misinterprets (cf. “Notes on the ‘1857 Introduction=’”, Hall, 1974).

I have to add right away, however, that Althusser allows me to think “difference” in a particular way, which is rather different from the subsequent traditions which sometimes acknowledge him as their originator. If you look at discourse theory,¹ for example— at post-structuralism or at Foucault—you will see there, not only the shift from practice to discourse, but also how the emphasis on difference—on the plurality of discourses, on the perpetual slippage of meaning, on the endless sliding of the signifier—is now pushed beyond the point where it is capable of theorizing the necessary unevenness of a complex unity, or even the “unity in difference” of a complex structure. I think that is why, whenever Foucault seems to be in danger of bringing things together, (such as the many epistemic shifts he charts, which all fortuitously coincide with the shift from ancien régime to modern in France), he has to hasten to assure us that nothing ever fits with anything else. The emphasis always falls on the continuous slippage away from any conceivable conjuncture. I think there is no other way to understand Foucault’s eloquent silence on the subject of the State. Of course, he will say, he knows that the State exists; what French intellectual does not? Yet, he can only posit it as an abstract, empty space—the State as Gulag—the absent/present other of an equally abstract notion of Resistance. His protocol says: “not only the State but also the dispersed microphysics of power,” his practice consistently privileges the latter and ignores the existence of state power.

Foucault (1972/1980) is quite correct, of course, to say that there are many marxists who conceive the State as a kind of single object; that is, as simply the unified will of the committee of the Ruling Class, wherever i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Text
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Stuart Hall Lives: Cultural Studies in an Age of Digital Media
• 1. An Introduction to Stuart Hall’s “Signification, Representation, Ideology”
• 2. Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates
• 3. Stuart Hall at the Open University
• 4. Notes on reconstructing “the popular”
• 5. “It’s kind of like an assault, you know”: media resisters’ meta-decoding practices of media culture
• 6. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model and the circulation of journalism in the digital landscape
• 7. Reconciling Hall with discourse, written in the shadows of “Confederate” and Rainbow Flags
• 8. #OscarsSoWhite: how Stuart Hall explains why nothing changes in Hollywood and everything is changing
• 9. New media, new panics
• 10. Regenerating Stuart Hall
• Index