Page 286 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

NOTES TO PAGES 17–22 275

methodological text, which not only provided a methodological bench-mark but
also allowed us to criticize the highly theoreticist epistemology which Althusser
and Balibar had culled from it: see S.Hall, ‘Notes on a reading of Marx’s 1857
Introduction’, in WPCS 6.
52 It enabled concrete links to be forged, for the first time, between the Centre and
groupings of sociologists, in which important convergences were developed: the
Centre’s link with the National Deviancy Conference, and thus with thinking in
‘the new criminology’, is a pertinent example. Similar convergences took place in
Media Studies, as mainstream communications research abandoned its earlier
functionalist stance.
53 Raymond Williams initiated this crucial work on the ‘selective tradition’ in The
Long Revolution and The Country and The City and developed it, in relation to
‘hegemony’, in Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press 1977).
54 There is an important resumé of the argument concerning the relation between
‘texts’ and ‘practices’ in Williams’s Marxism and Literature.
55 The Marxist structuralists examined ‘dominance’ but not ‘struggle and resistance’.
The concept of ‘hegemony’, elaborated through Gramsci’s work, was therefore the
crucial site of the elaboration of this perspective. One way of reading this—in
terms of incorporative, emergent and residual elements— was offered in
Williams’s ‘Base and superstructure’ essay (New Left Review no. 82, 1973), later
reprinted in Marxism and Literature. A somewhat different approach is to be found
in the overview article ‘Sub-cultures, cultures and class’, by Hall, Clarke, Critcher,
Jefferson and Roberts, in Resistance Through Rituals. Important work in social
history pointed in the same direction: for example, the collection by
A.P.Donajgrodski, Social Control In Nineteenth Century Britain (Croom Helm
1977), including R.Johnson, ‘Educating the experts: education and the state 1833–
7’. Some of this historical work, like parallel trends in the sociology of deviance,
did, however, compensate for the ‘functionalism’ of dominant cultures by a too-
easy inversion into a ‘social-control’ perspective. For a critique, see G.Stedman-
Jones in History Workshop, no. 5, and Jock Young in Fine et al. (eds.), Capitalism
and the Rule of Law (Hutchinson 1979).
56 Benjamin’s work was one of the earliest influences to stress the ‘productionist’
rather than the expressive view of cultural practice. The terms ‘signification’ and
‘signifying practice’, developed in early semiotics, reinforced the notion that
meaning was not given but produced. This depended on a fracturing of the
naturalized relation between the sign and the thing it referenced, elaborated in
structural linguistics. In Media Studies, for example, the analysis which brought
out the strategies by which dominant definitions were ‘preferred’ depended on
Vološinov’s concept of the ‘multi-accentuality’ of the sign: See Vološinov,
Marxism and The Philosophy of Language (New York: Seminar Press 1973).
Meaning was thus the product of a ‘struggle in language, over meaning’. See, inter
alia, S.Hall, ‘Encoding and decoding in television discourse’, (extracted below,
pages 128–38); Hall, Connell and Curti, ‘The unity of current affairs TV’ in WPCS
9; the exchange between Ros Coward and Connell, Curti, Chambers, Jefferson and
Hall on this point in Screen, vol. 18, nos. 1 and 4 (1977–8).
57 We deliberately use the Althusserean formulation of ‘instances’ here in a general
sense: the notion of clearly distinct and separable instances, established not only at
an analytical level but also as a feature of concrete historical societies, is not