Page 39 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

In other words, material reality is only a ‘setting of limits’ for consciousness,
only a ‘defining the space of operations’ and not the determining force as
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such. What this boils down to is the assertion, rejected above, that while
true consciousness derives from reality, false consciousness does not. The
latter derives from idiom, metonymy and psychology – in this sense, is
generated non-rationalistically. Consciousness now becomes ‘culture’.
The problem here is not with the assertion of the relative autonomy
of consciousness. This much is present in both Hegel and Marx. The
problem arises when Hall goes beyond autonomy and then implies that
consciousness, although arising initially from material reality, subse-
quently is not only autonomous but determining. Moreover, Hall’s logic
of consciousness is a non-rationalistic ‘psycho-logic’. The problem there-
fore is not the relative autonomy of consciousness but its authority and
concept. In other words, as a form of agency, in Hall, cultural agency
(language, social and national psychology) trumps both economic-political
agency as well as conscious reason. Cultural politics becomes the most
important form of politics. Let us look at a characteristic passage.
In a discussion of the problem of ideology and ‘the ways in which
ideas of different kinds grip the minds of masses’, he wrote:

It has especially to do with the concepts and the languages of practical
thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which
reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate
place in the social formation. It has also to do with the processes by which
new forms of consciousness, new conceptions of the world, arise, which
move the masses of the people into historical actions against the prevailing
system. 14

Here the conception is not simply one of the autonomy of ideology.
Ideology here is conceived of as being able to ‘grip the minds of masses’ –
largely, as it were, by the force of its ideological and emotive power – and,
through ‘the concepts and languages of practical thought’ either stabilize
or destabilize political power. In other words, it is not ideology combined
with the bitter experiences of material reality which moves people, willy-
nilly, often in spite of their ideological outlook, to act or not to act in a
particular way and, indeed, to reflect on and perhaps slowly change their
consciousness. It is ‘meaning’, by virtue of its mastery of popular idiom
and concepts, which is able to convince millions – by virtue, if you will,
of its social-psychological penetration, cultural astuteness and dramatic
power. Hence the vital political importance of understanding popular
‘style’ in Hall’s thought. 15 Grasp of this style and adaptation to it, not
superficially but deeply, are the essential components in making political

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