Page 164 - Culture Society and Economy

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CONCLUSION

intellectual activity. My argument has been that cultural and sociological
theory does not simply ignore the economy – often they do not – but they
confine themselves to the noisy sphere of the lifeworld – the profusions
of the developed capitalist marketplace. The key to understanding the
problems of consciousness and everyday life lies in understanding pro-
duction, as Hall inadvertently recognized when, in an aside, he criticized
the tendency in Marx ‘to insist on the prior analytical value to be accorded
to the relations of production’ which he argues has led some Marxists into
a ‘productivist’ error. 2
This work has also attempted to show that one of the most vexed the-
oretical and practical problems which plagues modern social, cultural and
political life – the relationship between race and class, between identity
politics and class politics, arises from the theorizing of the cultural sphere
or the market as autonomous from production. In these viewpoints, race
is seen to arise from a deeply experienced historical inter-subjectivity,
from the famous Hegelian ‘recognition’ explicated by Charles Taylor and
Nancy Fraser or from a simple historical inertia persisting from the days
of plantation slavery and not from material production, not from imperi-
3
alism as in the work of Lauren and Tabili. Thus, race and class, ‘identity’
and class politics deriving from different sources – one about culture and
respect and the other about distributive economic justice – are necessar-
ily conceived of as separate. Any enlightened person would, of course,
attempt to join the two in practice, but this is a pragmatic humanistic and
4
ethical act not a logically necessary one. The two are not inherently
joined in theory and therefore do not have to be joined in practice. But
what if ‘identity’ is not primordial but is, on more careful analysis, a ratio-
nalistic form of consciousness? What if identity, like class, has a material
foundation? What if class is not at bottom a matter of distributive economic
justice but of the relations of production in the hidden abode?
My argument has been that this apparent contradiction can only be
adequately resolved if the, by no means obvious, nexus between the noisy
sphere and the hidden abode is restored in critical analysis. The same
applies to the debates over hybridity, creolization and diasporic public
spaces, all of which are various attempts both to understand the chief
characteristics of the monopoly capital globalization process as well as to
escape from purist concepts of culture as overly integrated. Here we are
paying a high price, not only for the abandonment of Marx but also for the
rejection of Hegel, again a common feature of cultural studies and post-
modernism. Because, despite his many well-known limitations – to which
list we can add racism and sexism – Hegel’s notion of development
necessarily taking place through contradictions – a vale of tears – but with
humanity eventually emerging in rationality on the other side, is the one

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