Page 103 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

itself a consequence of a previous process of prolonged theoretical
attrition.
During the 1970s Stuart Hall, like Raymond Williams, had moved
from an essentially left-Leavisite culturalism toward a kind of
“Gramscianism”: the “concept of ‘hegemony’”, Hall would recall in
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1980, “has played a seminal rôle in Cultural Studies”. Hall, however,
was much more responsive than Williams to the appeal both of
structuralism and of post-structuralism. His essay on “Encoding and
Decoding in Television Discourse”, which drew heavily on French
and Italian semiotic theory, had first been published as a Centre
Stencilled Paper as early as 1973. By 1980, when Hall produced his
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own seminal sketch of the current state of the theoretical art in cultural
studies, Williams and Thompson’s “culturalism” was no longer the
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obvious starting point for the would-be discipline, but rather only
one of two competing paradigms, each with its attendant strengths
and weaknesses; and, for all its professed evenhandedness, Hall’s own
position had already become effectively anti-culturalist.
The difference between Hall’s and Williams’s readings of Gramsci
takes us to what was very probably the theoretical heart of the matter
at issue between cultural materialism and structuralism: whether to
understand hegemony as culture or as structure, and what relative weight
to attach to the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic respectively. If
hegemony is a culture, then it is materially produced by the practice of
conscious agents, and may be countered by alternative, counter-
hegemonic, practices; if hegemony is a structure of ideology, then it will
determine the subjectivity of its subjects in ways which radically diminish
the prospects for counter-hegemonic practice, except in the
characterizically attenuated form of a plurality of post-structuralist
resistant readings. Hegemony as culture is a matter of material production,
reproduction and consumption; hegemony as structure a matter for
textual decoding. Where Williams’s interpretation of Gramsci provided
the theoretical basis for cultural materialism, Hall’s interpretation became
progressively assimilated to a developing structuralist and post-
structuralist paradigm. Hence Hall’s eventual view of Gramsci as
anticipating “many of the actual advances in theorizing” brought about
by “structuralism, discourse and linguistic theory or psychoanalysis”. 66
As the decade proceeded, post-structuralist thematics, particularly those
deriving from Foucault, were to become much more obviously present
both in Hall’s own work and in cultural studies more generally.
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