Page 287 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

276 NOTES TO PAGES 15–16

thereby endorsed. However, the need for some analytical distinction, at a clearly
specified level of abstraction, would be defended—the notion of ‘relative
autonomy’ seems to require it—against some recent arguments (see Thompson,
The Poverty of Theory and Williams, Marxism and Literature) that any such
distinction is a false abstraction because it distinguishes analytically things which
always appear connected in any concrete historical example and in ‘experience’.
58 The very term ‘materialist’ is, of course, itself problematic. In some cases it has
become little more than a shorthand cover term for ‘economism’. It has also
frequently been recruited to support the opposite positions which could in no sense
be defined as ‘materialist’. Nevertheless, in the face of the immensely powerful
pull towards idealism in Cultural Studies, the project of a materialist theory of
culture does establish certain rudimentary theoretical limit positions —for
example, the determinate character of ‘ideas’.
59 For a brief survey of the problems, see S.Hall, ‘Rethinking the base/superstructure
metaphor’, in J.Bloomfield (ed.), Class, Hegemony and Party (Lawrence and
Wishart 1977).
60 From his review of The Long Revolution, New Left Review, nos. 9 and 10.
61 See R.Williams, ‘From Leavis to Goldmann’, New Left Review, no. 67 (May/ June
1971).
62 J.-P.Sartre, The Problem of Method.
63 This argument has recently been restated with great cogency in E.P. Thompson’s
The Poverty of Theory.
64 This was one of the seminal arguments of Marx’s 1857 Introduction; see Hall,
‘Notes on a reading of the 1857 Introduction’. But it was the generalized use of the
models of language systems elaborated in structural linguistics which, more than
anything else at this stage, made available the concept of ‘systems of difference’.
This break with a certain conception of ‘totality’ is one of the distinguishing
‘structuralist’ marks. For a highly formal elaboration of this break in a mode of
theorization, see Part I of M.Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (Tavistock
1972).
65 The term ‘over-determination’ is a borrowing from Freud, by Althusser, in his
seminal essay, ‘Contradiction and over-determination’, in For Marx.
66 This concept of the autonomy of different practices is the position to which a
number of important theoretical tendencies subscribe: for example, Foucault in
‘Orders of discourse’ and The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (Allen Lane 1979); Hirst,
Hindess, Cutler and Hussain, in Marx’s Capital and Capitalism Today, vols. 1 and
2 (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1977, 1978); also those tendencies represented by the
journals Screen, M/F and Ideology and Consciousness. For an exchange on this and
related questions, see that between the editors and Stuart Hall in Ideology and
Consciousness, no. 3 (1979). For critiques of ‘relative autonomy’ from one of these
perspectives, see Hindess, ‘The concept of class’, in Bloomfield, Class, Hegemony
and Party, and ‘Classes and politics in Marxist theory’, in Littlejohn, Smart,
Wakeford and Yuval-Davis (eds.), Power and the State (Croom Helm 1978); and
Hirst, in On Law and Ideology (Macmillan 1979).
67 This theoretical confrontation is explored in several places in On Ideology,
especially in Hall, Lumley and McLennan, ‘Politics and ideology in Gramsci’.