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POLITICS AS CULTURE: STUART HALL

representation’ becomes inconceivable. 20 The very term ‘representation’
is a term loaded with emotion and metaphor – not simply a synonym for
‘conception’. Hall wrote, in appreciation of the work of Althusser:

It opened the gate to a more linguistic or ‘discursive’ conception of ideology.
It put on the agenda the whole neglected issue of how ideology becomes
internalized, how we come to speak ‘spontaneously’, within the limits of
thought which exist outside us and which can more accurately be said to
think us. 21
If one accepts this formulation, then it means that one must subordinate
the economic to the political and, in turn, the political to the cultural will.
In a sense too, it can lead one to go further and deny the distinction
between cultural outlooks and action. It is not that Hall takes the absurd
view that economic and political realities or actions do not exist, only cul-
ture. It is not even that he argues that the economic and the political – all
actions – are experienced in and through culture. Hall is always careful
to recognize ‘the powerful role which the economic foundations of a
dominant social order or the dominant economic relations of a society
play in shaping and structuring the whole edifice of social life’. 22
He clearly and repeatedly affirms this ‘powerful role’. But the prob-
lem is that the economic is not so ‘powerful’ as to be persistent in its
effects. That role is not awarded to consciousness either, which, after all,
remains a highly rationalistic concept. It is awarded to culture. Culture
envelops consciousness and is more powerful than both politics and
economics. Once having arisen, culture – language, music, dance, poetry,
literature, folklore, national and social psychology, ‘style’ – is given the
capacity to so shape this economic and this political – all actions – that
the latter have little decisive force of their own. Economics and politics,
indeed, all human actions – become not merely ‘influenced’ by culture.
They become determined by culture. ‘Action’ too, in such an all-enveloping
cultural perspective, becomes, in the final analysis, if not a form of cul-
ture, simply an ‘expression’ of it. Or, if you will, culture becomes a form
of action.
This is a very deep denial indeed, or an inability to concede an inde-
pendent existence to the economic and to a lesser extent to the political –
to rationalistic action of any kind. It represents a profound subsumption
of them all under the category of culture. It must lead to a privileging of
the cultural over all other forms of politics and of politics in general over
economics. Although there is an aspect of this which is deeply quietist
and contemplative, it is not an apolitical view. In fact, it provides the
theoretical rationale for a particular type of politics. Hall is very political,

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