Page 31 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

In fact, the challenge in grasping Hall’s thinking lies precisely here:
he refuses to reject completely the force of economics and the material.
He rejects the concept of ‘discourse’ and insists on the concept ‘ideology’,
for example. This is vital for understanding Hall. For we are not here con-
fronted with a simple rejection of the economic and a construing of it as
another discourse, in the manner of Foucault, although Hall repeatedly
and frequently uses the word ‘discourse’. Nor is Hall comfortable with
the anti-humanism in Althusser and either the scientistic or irrationalistic
tirades against the Enlightenment. Hall has lived too long and too deeply
on the side of the oppressed to lose sight of where irrationalism leads
politically and culturally. What we confront in Hall is not a rejection of
the economic but its confinement to the ‘first instance’.
For example, he wrote the following with reference to Foucauldian
and other postmodern discourses:

One of the consequences of this kind of revisionist work has often been to
destroy altogether the problem of the class structuring of ideology and the
ways in which ideology intervenes in social struggles. Often the approach
replaces the inadequate notions of ideologies ascribed in blocks to classes
with an equally unsatisfactory ‘discursive’ notion which implies total free
floatingness of all ideological elements and discourses. The image of great,
immovable class battalions having their ascribed ideological number plates
on their backs, as Poulantzas once put it, is replaced here by the infinity of
subtle variations through which the elements of a discourse appear spon-
taneously to combine and recombine with each other, without material con-
straints of any kind other than that provided by the discursive operations
themselves. 2

Hall rejects this ‘free-floating’ discursive approach which is often what
one encounters in other versions of cultural studies today – for example,
in Gilroy, whose work I shall discuss later. He insists on the necessity to
link intellectual and cultural work to political struggles and not to pre-
tend that these are ends in themselves which they never are. Hall’s cri-
tique of Marxism is a determined attempt to de-Stalinize it – cleansing it
of its authoritarian formulations and arbitrariness. He insists on the con-
nection between theory and political practice but he wants this connection
to be a flexible one which gives capacious space to intellectual, cultural
and political creativity, free from diktat from without or within.
In fact, although not always obvious in his later work, there are signs
in his earlier work that Hall operated implicitly from a particular mate-
rialist thesis. Sparks made the point when he quoted this passage from
‘The Supply of Demand’, first published by Hall in 1960. Hall wrote:

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