Page 61 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

the argument, however, leaves culturalism with remarkably little
to do. In truth, Hall’s was an anti-culturalist argument, its effects
all the more damaging because of its professed evenhandedness.
The crucial difference here was between Williams’ and Hall’s
respective readings of Gramsci. If hegemony is a culture, in a
recognisably culturalist sense, as Williams supposed, then it is
materially produced by the practices of conscious agents, and
may be countered by alternative, counter-hegemonic, practices.
If hegemony is a structure of ideology, as Hall came to believe,
then it will determine the subjectivity of its subjects in ways
that radically diminish the prospects for counter-hegemonic
practice. Hegemony as culture is a matter of material produc-
tion, reproduction and consumption; hegemony as structure
is a matter for textual decoding. While Williams’ interpretation
of Gramsci remained resolutely ‘post-culturalist’, Hall pro-
gressively assimilated it to a developing structuralist—and
post-structuralist—paradigm. These theoretical differences
increasingly devolved, moreover, on a particular substantive
issue: how to read the political successes of the Anglo-American
New Right during the 1980s and 1990s.

Postmodern ‘New Times’
Defined originally in exclusively British terms as ‘Thatcherism’,
but later generalised as ‘New Times’, Hall and his co-workers
directly addressed the cultural politics of what we would now
recognise as the ‘postmodern’ late twentieth century. The issues
at stake were claimed for cultural studies, rather than political
science, precisely insofar as they appeared to pertain to the social
construction of consent: ‘What is particularly significant for our
purposes’, wrote Hall, ‘is Thatcherism’s capacity to become
popular, especially among those sectors of society whose inter-
ests it cannot possibly be said to represent in any conventional
sense of the term’ (Hall, 1988, p. 41).
Hall’s analyses commenced from the assumption that Thatch-
erism was substantially different from earlier forms of
Conservatism, and that this difference centred on the particular
ways in which hegemony was established and maintained.

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