Page 62 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 53

Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

What was at issue, he argued, was the ‘move toward “author-
itarian populism”—an exceptional form of the capitalist state
which... has been able to construct around itself an active
popular consent’ (Hall, 1983, pp. 22–3). Strongly influenced by
the ‘post-Marxism’ of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
(Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Laclau & Mouffe, 1987), whose work he
would describe as ‘seminal’ and ‘extraordinarily rich’ (Grossberg,
1996, p. 145), Hall’s central contention was that this popular
consent had been secured through the effective ‘articulation’ of
Thatcherism with key elements in traditional working-class
culture. According to Hall, Thatcherism operated directly ‘on
popular elements in the traditional philosophies and practical
ideologies of the dominated classes’. This was possible, he
explained, because such elements ‘have no intrinsic, necessary or
fixed class meaning’ and can therefore be recomposed in new
ways, so as ‘to construct the people into a populist political
subject: with, not against, the power bloc’ (Hall, 1983, p. 30).
In subsequent reformulations, Hall sought to ‘disarticulate’ the
politics of the Anglo-American New Right from economic
and cultural postmodernity: Thatcherism, he insisted, ‘represents
. . . an attempt...to harness and bend to its political project
circumstances... which do not necessarily have a “New Right”
political agenda inscribed in them’ (Hall, 1989, pp. 116–17).
No doubt Hall was right to insist that the Left could neither
revive nor survive if ‘wholly cut off from the landscapes of
popular pleasures, however contradictory and “commodified”’
(pp. 128–9). But some critical distance, some continuing sense of
the ‘classed’ nature of capitalism, was surely necessary were the
Left to go on being left. There were good empirical reasons,
moreover, to treat Hall’s approach with some caution. Alternative
explanations were available: Williams himself had suggested that
the scale of Conservative electoral victory was more plausibly
explained by the ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system than by a
successfully Thatcherite ideological mobilisation (Williams, 1989,
p. 163); he had shown that pro-Labour loyalties persisted among
union members, the unemployed and manual workers (Williams,
1983, pp. 156–7); and that the fall in the Labour vote was as much
a consequence of the splits in the Party as of any direct transfer

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