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POLITICS AS CULTURE: STUART HALL

on the extent to which the determinations and contradictions in reality
have emerged and, so to speak, specified themselves. Both true and false
consciousness have a certain necessity, historically speaking. In other
words, it is not consciousness which obscures reality. It is reality which
obscures itself. Reality presents and conceals truth at one and the same
time. On the basis of this approach, consciousness remains anchored in
actual political-economic processes – an ‘ideology’ – and does not float
off as a disembodied ‘discursive formation’. Nor, given this Hegelian
approach outlined above, can there be any simple reflection of the econ-
omy in consciousness, least of all a one-to-one correspondence between
social class and ideological outlook. The contradictions and determinations
of consciousness do not emerge automatically but are the result of the
most intense struggle and effort. Mechanistic notions of consciousness,
which was a basic staple of Stalinism, are to be abhorred.
Why, then, do I find Hall’s conception inadequate and misleading? In
the first place, Hall’s conception of the failures of consciousness as due
to its partial nature is insufficiently historical. The failure as presented by
him is a failure of the incompleteness of the perspective which con-
sciousness has on reality – its ‘take’ on reality and consequent lack of
penetration, as it were. Hall does not sufficiently historicize this process,
does not sufficiently present this lack of grasp as itself a necessary stage
in the emergence of a truthful consciousness – a process governed by its
own logic and necessity. Since truth is always relative, in many cases
false consciousness is a consciousness which was once true. Put in
Hegelian terms, there is no phenomenology of false consciousness in Hall.
Because there is no phenomenology, the effort and struggle for true con-
sciousness to emerge – the arduousness of the process by which truth
emerges in a struggle with previous ‘truths’ and supersedes them – are
not appreciated or brought to the fore. Paradoxically, the result of this is
to underestimate the role of intellectual effort in the discovery and expo-
sure of the truths of reality.
But there is a more important issue. As soon as Hall recognizes that
both truthful and false consciousness arise from actual material experi-
ence, he excessively elevates the agency of consciousness. He confines
the agency of the economy only to ‘the first instance’. Hall wrote:

It would be preferable, from this perspective, to think of the ‘materialism’ of
Marxist theory in terms of ‘determination by the economic in the first
instance’, since Marxism is surely correct, against all idealisms, to insist
that no social practice or set of relations floats free of the determining
effects of the concrete relations in which they are located. 12

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