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POLITICS AS CULTURE: STUART HALL

ideas popular, not the actual ability of these ideas to speak to and really
solve the economic and political questions which face millions of people
in the world today. Here one encounters the failure characteristic of this
line of thinking – a profound underestimation of human rationality. False
consciousness, conceived of by Marxism as rooted in the camera obscura
of reality and in that sense rational, is here presented as hidden deep
within the recesses of metaphor and ‘multi-accentuated’ meaning.
Cultural and ‘psycho-logics’ are the key. In turn, this necessarily leads to
a deep disregard of economic issues and the enduring rationalistic con-
nections between the economic, the political and the ideological.
These ideas are elaborated when Hall discusses Laclau’s notions of
how the inner dynamics of thought enables thought to grip the masses and
thus to shape political action – presented as a profoundly non-rationalistic
process. Hall wrote: ‘But its [consciousness] cogency depends on the ‘logics’
which connect one proposition to another in a chain of connected mean-
ings: where the social connections and historical meaning are condensed
and reverberate off one another.’ 16 In other words, the reason why an
ideological outlook ‘grips the masses’ is not because it arises from and is
consonant with real economic and political experiences. The development
and understanding of popular consciousness are not a rationalistic process
in that sense. To understand popular consciousness one needs not logic
but ‘logics’. What changes or sustains popular ideas is not the real ability
to resolve economic and political issues, not, so to speak – the political
and economic efficacy of ideology. The relationship is the other way
around. It is the ‘inner logics’ which are decisive. Political, economic or
even ideological efficacy – in the rationalistic sense – are neither here nor
there. What wins the masses over to a particular outlook is the rhetorical
power of ideology rather than its practical vindication in everyday expe-
rience. It is inadequate mastery over popular ‘common sense’ which is
the problem.
Hall always argued that the effectiveness of Thatcherism derived from
its mastery of a certain kind of populist conservative rhetoric. Of course,
given the intractable political and economic contradictions and gross
inequalities of our time, no one can deny that social, cultural and racist
demagogy of every conceivable kind necessarily plays a central role in
helping dominant social groups to maintain power and legitimacy. But
such an observation begs the question as to what lies behind the effec-
tiveness of this demagogy. Is it the mastery of idiom – the dialect in
which demagogy presents its case? Or are the causes deeper? Hall has
never paid much attention in his analyses to the economics of the triumph
of Thatcherism or to the glaring failures of the Left and Social Democracy

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