Stuart Hall

Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

Kuan-Hsing Chen, David Morley, Kuan-Hsing Chen, David Morley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134881475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare nell'arte

Stuart Hall's work has been central to the formation and development of cultural studies as an international discipline. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies is an invaluable collection of writings by and about Stuart Hall. The book provides a representative selection of Hall's enormously influential writings on cultural studies and its concerns: the relationship with Marxism; postmodernism and 'New Times' in cultural and political thought; the development of cultural studies as an international and postcolonial phenomenon, and Hall's engagement with urgent and abiding questions of 'race', ethnicity and identity.
In addition to presenting classic writings by Hall and new interviews with Hall in dialogue with Kuan-Hsing Chen, the collection, which includes work by Angela McRobbie, Kobena Mercer, John Fiske, Charlotte Brunsdon, Ien Ang and Isaac Julien, provides a detailed analysis of Hall's work and his contribution to the development of cultural studies by leading cultural critics and cultural practitioners. The book also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Stuart Hall's writings.

Part I
(Un)Settling accounts
Marxism and cultural studies

Chapter 1
The problem of ideology
Marxism without guarantees

Stuart Hall

In the past two or three decades, marxist theory has been going through a remarkable, but lop-sided and uneven revival. On the one hand, it has come once again to provide the principal pole of opposition to ‘bourgeois’ social thought. On the other hand, many young intellectuals have passed through the revival and, after a heady and rapid apprenticeship, gone right out the other side again. They have ‘settled their accounts’ with marxism and moved on to fresh intellectual fields and pastures: but not quite. Postmarxism remains one of our largest and most flourishing contemporary theoretical schools. The post-marxists use marxist concepts while constantly demonstrating their inadequacy. They seem, in fact, to continue to stand on the shoulders of the very theories they have just definitely destroyed. Had marxism not existed, ‘post-marxism’ would have had to invent it, so that ‘deconstructing’ it once more would give the ‘deconstructionists’ something further to do. All this gives marxism a curious life-after-death quality. It is constantly being ‘transcended’ and ‘preserved’. There is no more instructive site from which to observe this process than that of ideology itself.

I do not intend to trace through once again the precise twists and turns of these recent disputes, nor to try to follow the intricate theorizing which has attended them. Instead, I want to place the debates about ideology in the wider context of marxist theory as a whole. I also want to pose it as a general problem—a problem of theory, because it is also a problem of politics and strategy. I want to identify the most telling weaknesses and limitations in the classical marxist formulations about ideology; and to assess what has been gained, what deserves to be lost, and what needs to be retained—and perhaps rethought—in the light of the critiques.

But first, why has the problem of ideology occupied so prominent a place within marxist debate in recent years? Perry Anderson (1976), in his magisterial sweep of the western European marxist intellectual scene, noted the intense preoccupation in these quarters with problems relating to philosophy, epistemology, ideology and the superstructures. He clearly regarded this as a deformation in the development of marxist thought. The privileging of these questions in marxism, he argued, reflected the general isolation of western European marxist intellectuals from the imperatives of mass political struggle and organization; their divorce from the ‘controlling tensions of a direct or active relationship to a proletarian audience’; their distance from ‘popular practice’ and their continuing subjection to the dominance of bourgeois thought. This had resulted, he argued, in a general disengagement from the classical themes and problems of the mature Marx and of marxism. The over-preoccupation with the ideological could be taken as an eloquent sign of this.

There is much to this argument—as those who have survived the theoreticist deluge in ‘western marxism’ in recent years will testify. The emphases of ‘western marxism’ may well account for the way the problem of ideology was constructed, how the debate has been conducted and the degree to which it has been abstracted into the high realms of speculative theory. But I think we must reject any implication that, but for the distortions produced by ‘western marxism’, marxist theory could have confortably proceeded on its appointed path, following the established agenda: leaving the problem of ideology to its subordinate, second-order place. The rise to visibility of the problem of ideology has a more objective basis. First, the real developments which have taken place in the means by which mass consciousness is shaped and transformed—the massive growth of the ‘cultural industries’. Second, the troubling questions of the ‘consent’ of the mass of the working class to the system in advanced capitalist societies in Europe and thus their partial stabilization, against all expectations. Of course, ‘consent’ is not maintained through the mechanisms of ideology alone. But the two cannot be divorced. It also reflects certain real theoretical weaknesses in the original marxist formulations about ideology. And it throws light on some of the most critical issues in political strategy and the politics of the socialist movement in advanced capitalist societies.

In briefly reviewing some of these questions, I want to foreground, not so much the theory as the problem of ideology. The problem of ideology is to give an account, within a materialist theory, of how social ideas arise. We need to understand what their role is in a particular social formation, so as to inform the struggle to change society and open the road towards a socialist transformation of society. By ideology I mean the mental frameworks—the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation—which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works.

The problem of ideology, therefore, concerns the ways in which ideas of different kinds grip the minds of masses, and thereby become a ‘material force’. In this, more politicized, perspective, the theory of ideology helps us to analyse how a particular set of ideas comes to dominate the social thinking of a historical bloc, in Gramsci’s sense; and, thus, helps to unite such a bloc from the inside, and maintain its dominance and leadership over society as a whole. It has especially to do with the concepts and the languages of practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation. It has also to do with the processes by which new forms of consciousness, new conceptions of the world, arise, which move the masses of the people into historical action against the prevailing system. These questions are at stake in a range of social struggles. It is to explain them, in order that we may better comprehend and master the terrain of ideological struggle, that we need not only a theory but a theory adequate to the complexities of what we are trying to explain.

No such theory exists, fully prepackaged, in Marx and Engels’ works. Marx developed no general explanation of how social ideas worked, comparable to his historico-theoretical work on the economic forms and relations of the capitalist mode of production. His remarks in this area were never intended to have a ‘law-like’ status. And, mistaking them for statements of that more fully theorized kind may well be where the problem of ideology for marxism first began. In fact, his theorizing on this subject was much more ad hoc. There are consequently severe fluctuations in Marx’s usage of the term. In our time—as you will see in the definition I offered above—the term ‘ideology’ has come to have a wider, more descriptive, less systematic reference, than it did in the classical marxist texts. We now use it to refer to all organized forms of social thinking. This leaves open the degree and nature of its ‘distortions’. It certainly refers to the domain of practical thinking and reasoning (the form, after all, in which most ideas are likely to grip the minds of the masses and draw them into action), rather than simply to well-elaborated and internally consistent ‘systems of thought’. We mean the practical as well as the theoretical knowledges which enable people to ‘figure out’ society, and within whose categories and discourses we ‘live out’ and ‘experience’ our objective positioning in social relations.

Marx did, on many occasions, use the term ‘ideology’, practically, in this way. So its usage with this meaning is in fact sanctioned by his work.

Thus, for example, he spoke in a famous passage of the ‘ideological forms in which men become conscious of…conflict and fight it out’ (Marx, 1970: 21). In Capital he frequently, in asides, addresses the ‘everyday consciousness’ of the capitalist entrepreneur; or the ‘common sense of capitalism’. By this he means the forms of spontaneous thought within which the capitalist represents to himself the workings of the capitalist system and ‘lives out’ (i.e., genuinely experiences) his practical relations to it. Indeed, there are already clues there to the subsequent uses of the term which many, I suspect, do not believe could be warranted from Marx’s work. For example, the spontaneous forms of ‘practical bourgeois consciousness’ are real, but they cannot be adequate forms of thought, since there are aspects of the capitalist system—the generation of surplus value, for example—which simply cannot be ‘thought’ or explained, using those vulgar categories. On the other hand, they can’t be false in any simple sense either, since these practical bourgeois men seem capable enough of making profit, working the system, sustaining its relations, exploiting labour, without benefit of a more sophisticated or ‘truer’ understanding of what they are involved in. To take another example, it is a fair deduction from what Marx said, that the same sets of relations—the capitalist circuit—can be represented in several different ways or (as the modern school would say) represented within different systems of discourse.

To name but three—there is the discourse of ‘bourgeois common sense’; the sophisticated theories of the classical political economists, like Ricardo, from whom Marx learned so much; and, of course, Marx’s own theoretical discourse—the discourse of Capital itself.

As soon as we divorce ourselves from a religious and doctrinal reading of Marx, therefore, the openings between many of the classical uses of the term, and its more recent elaborations, are not as closed as current theoreticist polemics would lead us to believe.

Nevertheless, the fact is that Marx most often used ‘ideology’ to refer specifically to the manifestations of bourgeois thought; and above all to its negative and distorted features. Also, he tended to employ it—in, for example, The German Ideology, the joint work of Marx and Engels—in contestation against what he thought were incorrect ideas: often, of a well-informed and systematic kind (what we would now calls ‘theoretical ideologies’, or, following Gramsci, ‘philosophies’; as opposed to the categories of practical consciousness, or what Gramsci called ‘common sense’). Marx used the term as a critical weapon against the speculative mysteries of Hegelianism; against religion and the critique of religion; against idealist philosophy, and political economy of the vulgar and degenerated varieties. In The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy Marx and Engels were combating bourgeois ideas. They were contesting the anti-materialist philosophy which underpinned the dominance of those ideas. In order to make their polemical point, they simplified many of their formulations. Our subsequent problems have arisen, in part, from treating these polemical inversions as the basis for a labour of positive general theorizing.

Within that broad framework of usage, Marx advances certain more fully elaborated theses, which have come to form the theoretical basis of the theory in its so-called classical form. First the materialist premise: ideas arise from and reflect the material conditions and circumstances in which they are generated. They express social relations and their contradictions in thought. The notion that ideas provide the motor of history, or proceed independent of material relations and generate their own autonomous effects is, specifically, what is declared as speculative, and illusory about bourgeois ideology. Second, the thesis of determinateness: ideas are only the dependent effects of the ultimately determining level in the social formation—the economic in the last instance. So that transformations in the latter will show up, sooner or later, as corresponding modifications in the former. Thirdly, the fixed correspondences between dominance in the socio-economic sphere and the ideological; ‘ruling ideas’ are the ideas of the ‘ruling class’—the class position of the latter providing the coupling and the guarantee of correspondence with the former.

The critique of the classical theory has been addressed precisely to these propositions. To say that ideas are ‘mere reflexes’ establishes their materialism but leaves them without specific effects; a realm of pure dependency. To say that ideas are determined ‘in the last instance’ by the economic is to set out along the economic reductionist road. Ultimately, ideas can be reduced to the essence of their truth—their economic content. The only stopping-point before this ultimate reductionism arises through the attempt to delay it a little and preserve some space for manoeuvre by increasing the number of ‘mediations’. To say that the ‘ruling-ness’ of a class is the guarantee of the dominance of certain ideas is to ascribe them as the exclusive property of that class, and to define particular forms of consciousness as class-specific.

It should be noted that, though these criticisms are directly addressed to formulations concerning the problem of ideology, they in effect recapitulate the substance of the more general and wide-ranging criticism advanced against classical marxism itself: its rigid structural determinancy, its reductionism of two varieties—class and economic; its way of conceptualizing the social formation itself. Marx’s model of ideology has been criticized because it did not conceptualize the social formation as a determinate complex formation, composed of different practices, but as a simple (or, as Althusser called it in For Marx and Reading Capital, an ‘expressive’) structure. By this Althusser meant that one practice—‘the economic’—determines in a direct manner all others, and each effect is simply and simultaneously reproduced correspondingly (i.e., ‘expressed’) on all other levels.

Those who know the literature and the debates will easily identify the main lines of the more specific revisions advanced, from different sides, against these positions. They begin with the denial that any such simple correspondences exist, or that the ‘superstructures’ are totally devoid of their own specific effects, in Engels’ gloss on ‘what Marx thought’ (especially in the later correspondence). The glosses by Engels are immensely fruitful, suggestive and generative. They provide, not the solution to the problem of ideology, but the starting-point of all serious reflection on the problem. The simplifications developed, he argued, because Marx was in contestation with the speculative idealism of his day. They were one-sided distortions, the necessary exaggerations of polemic. The criticisms lead on through the richly tapestried efforts of marxist theorists like Lukács to hold, polemically, to the strict orthodoxy of a particular ‘Hegelian’ reading of Marx, while in practice introducing a whole range of ‘mediating and intermediary factors’ which soften and displace the drive towards reductionism and economism implicit in some of Marx’s original formulations. They include Gramsci—but from another direction—whose contribution will be discussed at a later place in the argument. They culminate in the highly sophisticated theoretical interventions of Althusser and the Althussereans: their contestation of economic and class reductionism and of the ‘expressive totality’ approach. Althusser’s revisions (in For Marx and, especially, in the ‘Ideological state apparatuses’ chapter of Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays) sponsored a decisive move away from the ‘distorted ideas’ and ‘false consciousness’ approach to ideology. It opened the gate to a more linguistic or ‘discursive’ conception of ideology. It put on the agenda the whole neglected issue of how ideology becomes internalized, how we come to speak ‘spontaneously’, within the limits of the categories of thought which exist ou...