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Post-Marxism and cultural studies 83

real sense in which cultural studies was always-already post-Marxist. As Hall (1992)
points out,

There was never a prior moment when cultural studies and Marxism represented
a perfect theoretical fit. From the beginning . . . there was always-already the
question of the great inadequacies, theoretically and politically, the resounding
silences, the great evasions of Marxism – the things that Marx did not talk about or
seem to understand which were our privileged object of study: culture, ideology,
language, the symbolic. These were always-already, instead, the things which had
imprisoned Marxism as a mode of thought, as an activity of critical practice – its
orthodoxy, its doctrinal character, its determinism, its reductionism, its immutable
law of history, its status as a metanarrative. That is to say, the encounter between
British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement
with a problem – not a theory, not even a problematic (279).

Post-Marxism can mean at least two things. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
(2001) point out in their deeply influential contribution to post-Marxism, Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, ‘if our intellectual project in
this book is post-Marxist, it is evidently also post-Marxist’ (4). To be post-Marxist is to
leave behind Marxism for something better, whereas to be post-Marxist is to seek to
transform Marxism, by adding to it recent theoretical developments from, especially,
feminism, postmodernism, post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Laclau
and Mouffe are more post-Marxist than they are post-Marxist. They envisage a partner-
ship between Marxism and the ‘new feminism, the protest movements of ethnic,
national and sexual minorities, the anti-institutional ecology struggles waged by
marginalized layers of the population, the anti-nuclear movement, the atypical forms
of social struggle in countries on the capitalist periphery’ (1). In my view, cultural stud-
ies is post-Marxist in the positive sense advocated by Laclau and Mouffe.
The concept of discourse is central to the development of post-Marxism. As Laclau
(1993) explains, ‘The basic hypothesis of a discursive approach is that the very pos-
sibility of perception, thought and action depends on the structuration of a certain
meaningful field which pre-exists any factual immediacy’ (431). To explain what they
mean by discourse Laclau and Mouffe (2009) give an example of two people building
a wall. The first person asks the second to pass him/her a brick. On receiving the brick,
the second person adds it to the wall. The totality of this operation consists in a
linguistic moment (the request for a brick) and a non-linguistic moment (adding the
brick to the wall). Discourse, according to Laclau and Mouffe, consists in the totality
of the linguistic and non-linguistic. In other words, they use the term discourse ‘to
emphasize the fact that every social configuration is meaningful. If I kick a spherical
object in the street or if I kick a ball in a football match, the physical fact is the same,
but its meaning is different. The object is a football only to the extent that it establishes
a system of relations with other objects, and these relations are not given by the
mere referential materiality of the objects, but are, rather, socially constructed. This sys-
tematic set of relations is what we call discourse’ (159). Moreover,