Page 35 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

when viewed from particularly insightful angles, spontaneous expressions
of consciousness often arrive at profound representations of reality. This
is particularly true in the field of popular art but, alas, only for a few
artistes. Their work attains a lasting status because they capture a partic-
ularly telling moment when events force truth to peep out from reality –
a moment which we all recognize, if only instinctively.
Therefore, where the falsity of spontaneity derives from is not intel-
lectual error or a failure in reasoning. To argue this way is to pose the
problem entirely within the framework of empiricism or of traditional
French rationalism. Falsity derives from the very operations of political-
economic reality itself. It is a real experience which obscures the fullness
of reality and, therefore, it is only real experience which can change it. It
is because spontaneous forms of consciousness are anchored in real expe-
riences and social relationships – for example, the real experience of mar-
ket exchanges – why they arise in the first place and are so tenacious.
They are not figments of the imagination – mere ‘errors’ of reasoning or
failures of empirical ‘data analysis’. Part of the cunning of reality is just
this: it produces both the reality as well as the processes which obscure
reality. A complete grasp of reality would therefore go beyond the spon-
taneous and would explain, not only what the underlying reality consists
of but also, even more important, how economic processes themselves
operated to generate a camera obscura.
Thus far, Hall’s account of false consciousness is materialist, some
may even say orthodox. Although he does not there acknowledge it –
indeed, under the influence of Althusser, Hall explicitly makes a number
of anti-Hegelian asides – this line of thinking is clearly Hegelian. Ideas
such as the distinction between a ‘surface’ which is the ‘form’ of reason
and which, while an expression of Reason’s ‘substance’ may obscure its
‘essence’ are unmistakably Hegelian in nature. In the Philosophy of Right,
Hegel wrote:

The great thing is to apprehend in the show of the temporal and the tran-
sient the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. For
since rationality (which is synonymous with the Idea) enters upon external
existence simultaneously with its actualization, it emerges with an infinite
wealth of forms, shapes, and appearances. 5
In fact, without resorting to the considerable Hegelian heritage in Marx,
it is impossible to arrive at a notion of ideology which is non-mechanistic.
Indeed, the basic Hegelian distinction between Understanding (Verstehen)
which remains at the level of ‘show’ (Schein), and Reason (Vernunft), more or
less corresponds to the distinction in Marx between false consciousness

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