Page 194 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

LANGUAGE 183

theses (that is, with systems of representation which differ from the
rejection and blunt its violence). 12
This describes the way in which the conflict is resolved: the signifying practices
intervene to constitute a new understanding.
It is vital for Marxism to take into account this process of the unconscious,
whose effects are heard and felt in the conscious. If not, the psychology at work
in propaganda and political action remains mechanistic, a simplistic causality. It
ignores the process by which social contradictions articulate themselves
subjectively, the way in which they can produce a reactionary stance—in short,
the contradiction between ideological practice and economic and political
practices.
The conversation that Charles Woolfson analyses in WPCS 9 provides a
means of illustrating this argument. One worker (Worker 6) attempts to provide a
political intervention into the conversation of several other workers. His
approach shows exactly the practical effects of a lack of psychology in politics.
Far from challenging ‘the whole basis of authority’ (as the analysis claims),
Worker 6 rests his whole intervention on himself as authoritative, on conceiving
discussion as a matter of winning or losing. Looking at the speech of Worker 5,
however, we see that his speech is anti-authoritarian in a confused and by no
means conscious way. This appears dramatically in his verbal slip which
Woolfson has carefully recorded: ‘workers are their own worst enemies—they
expect the union—the, eh, I beg your pardon—the gaffers, you know, the
employers—to be fair and just…’. It’s clear that at some level the terms
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‘union’ and ‘gaffers’ are more interchangeable than he is prepared to admit. He
has a profound unease about ideas of authority, which expresses itself
consciously in an annoyance with Worker 6, a ‘gut’ opposition to the display of
superiority. This unease demands to be politicized. This is not to put a positive
value-judgement on Worker 5 as ‘confusedly political’ or to condemn Worker 6
as ‘authoritarian’ in any simplistic way. It is to propose a different political
attitude, which sees the points at which Worker 5’s conscious confusion (and
bloody-mindedness) are the expression of a multitude of contradictions which
demand to be politicized. This can be achieved by generalizing the themes he
situates himself within; by producing an awareness of contradiction to enrich his
critical thinking. It shows that it is he who holds the idea of authority as
problematic, that he has a deep unease in the region where Worker 6 finds a firm
basis for his political style. Such a reading does not pay attention to the ‘manifest
content’ of the speech so much as to its production, the way in which it comes
out, the way in which speakers are orienting themselves. It is an analysis based
not on classification but on listening symptomatically for what is being said
underneath what is said.