Page 289 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

278 NOTES TO PAGES 15–16

preferable: for a discussion of this point, see Hall, Lumley and McLennan, ‘Politics
and ideology in Gramsci’ in On Ideology.
81 Althusser was studiously ambiguous as to how strong were the parallels he
intended to draw between his and Lacan’s discussion of ‘the Subject’. Much post-
Althusserean theory in this area has progressed by way of the argument that
Althusser abolished the integral Cartesian subject but left the question. of
‘subjectification’ empty. It has been extensively filled by more substantial
borrowings from Lacan. See, for example, the work of Heath, McCabe and
Brewster in Screen, and Ros Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism
(Routledge and Kegan Paul 1977). For a critical exchange on this point, see the
Hall/Editorial Collective exchange in Ideology and Consciousness, no. 3. The
concept of interpellation has been fruitfully developed, without its Lacanian
overtones, by Laclau in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (New Left Book
1977).
82 See, inter alia, Hall, ‘Notes On a Reading of Marx’s 1857 Introduction’; Johnson,
McLellan and Schwarz, Economy, Culture and Concept, CCCS Stencilled Paper
no. 50; the relevant essays in On Ideology; Johnson’s ‘Histories of culture/ theories
of ideology’, and ‘Thompson, Genovese and socialist-humanist history’; Johnson,
in Working Class Culture.
83 See Essays in Self-Criticism.
84 The argument is best developed in Poulantzas’s Political Power and Social Classes
(New Left Books, Sheed and Ward 1973).
85 In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
86 The substitution of ‘reproduction’ seemed, for a time, a usefully non-reductionist
way of posing the relationship between different practices and their ‘conditions of
existence’, with a warrant in Marx’s Capital. This was also Althusser’s source,
though he restricted it to the reproduction of the ideological conditions of labour
power. The ‘conditions of existence’ formula, though still extensively employed
(see Hirst and Hindess, cited in n. 66) seems increasingly an empty one, covering
for a theory of autonomy.
87 The listing is, of course, based on a direct quotation from Gramsci.
88 Post-Althusserian theories of ideology, using Lacan’s psychoanalysis and posing
the question of ideology exclusively at the level of the ‘positioning of the subject’,
tend to repeat this error from a different direction: here, too, all ideology is
dominant ideology. Oppositional ideologies cannot be theorized from this position
(see ‘Texts, readers, subjects’ below, pages 163–73).
89 A favourite phrase of Althusser’s. But it was he who insisted that a term is not
theoretically effective in the problematic of a text simply because it is inserted into
its surface argument.
90 For example, in the essay on Althusser by McLennan, Molina and Peters in On
Ideology.
91 From Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Lawrence and Wishart 1971), p. 177.
92 Though by no means universally used, the concept of ‘hegemony’ has been one of
the Centre’s organizing ideas.
93 Prison Notebooks, pp. 181–2.
94 This is an aspect which distinguishes the Centre’s use of ‘hegemony’ from those
which restrict it to questions of ‘cultural power’ and ideology. For an example of
the opposing stress, which tends to assimilate Gramsci to the ‘Frankfurt School’,