Page 60 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 51

Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

marked by Hall’s important article, ‘Encoding and Decoding in
Television Discourse’, first published as a CCCS stencilled paper
in 1973 (Hall, 1999). For Hall, such meaning-making practices as
those arising out of conflicts over rival interpretations of social
reality and history are linked to ‘a struggle over a particular kind
of power—cultural power: the power to define, to “make things
mean”’ (Hall, 1982, p. 12). Moreover, the Centre’s interest in semi-
ology was often combined with various Marxist thematics,
especially those deriving from Gramsci and Althusser. These
various structuralisms and Marxisms will be considered in more
detail in the chapters that follow. Suffice it to note that the
combined impact of structuralist semiology and structural
Marxism was to establish a considerable distance between Hall
and the earlier culturalist arguments.

Structuralism versus culturalism
The precise point at which these divergences constitute a differ-
ence is difficult to document. By 1980, however, when Hall
published the seminal essay, ‘Cultural studies: two paradigms’
(Hall, 1980), ‘culturalism’ was no longer the obviously available
starting point for the would-be discipline, but rather only one of
two competing paradigms, each with its attendant strengths and
weaknesses. For Hall, ‘culture’ in Williams and ‘experience’ in
Thompson were seen as performing fundamentally analogous
theoretical functions, that is, they denoted simultaneously,
and thereby elided the distinction between, active consciousness
and relatively ‘given’, determinate conditions. The result was a
theoretical humanism, with two distinguishing characteristics:
first, a general ‘experiential pull’, and second, an ‘emphasis on
the creative’ (p. 63). Hall’s response to this ‘empiricism’ was to
insist that: ‘Analysis must deconstruct... “lived wholeness” in
order to be able to think its determinate conditions’ (p. 62). The
scene was set, then, for a structuralist ‘interruption’ as theor-
etical salvation. Formally, of course, Hall aspired not to any
thoroughgoing structuralism, but to a synthesis of culturalist and
structuralist paradigms: ‘between them...they address what
must be the core problem of Cultural Studies’ (p. 72). The logic of

51