Page 123 - Decoding Culture

116 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE
studies, reminding us that his and the CCCS' preferred terms of
the period are marxist in their general tenor, if not in all their
detail. He sees Williams, therefore, as a key figure, uniting the
recognition that culture is 'threaded through all social practices'
(Hall, 1980b: 60) with an attempt to reformulate the typical
base-superstructure approach to culture found in orthodox marx­
ist analysis. This view Hall characterizes as 'radical interactionism'
in which human practices are conceived to stand in complex inter­
relation, rather than specific (material) elements being singled out
as ultimate determinants. In developing these ideas, Hall claims,
Williams may still only be 'skirting the problem of determinancy'
(ibid) rather than resolving it, but it remains an important topic
with which Williams would continue to grapple in his later work.
Indeed, it is in response to Thompson's critique of The Long
Revolution, Hall suggests, that Williams recognizes the significance
of the idea of 'struggle' in the cultural domain and the consequent
importance of Gramsci's concept of 'hegemony' for rethinking the
relation between culture and the other elements of social life.
These were ideas that would become central to the whole CCCS
project.
How, then, does Hall summarize the culturalist tradition?
Standing in opposition to models of the relationship between ideal
and material that routinely give primacy to the economic base over
the cultural superstructure, culturalism 'conceptualizes culture as
interwoven with all social practices; and those practices, in turn, as
a common form of human activity: sensuous human praxis, the
activity through which men and women make history' (ibid: 63).
But this is not the whole story. Also central to culturalism is what
Hall calls the 'experiential pull' of the perspective, an aspect which,
along with its emphasis on the active contribution of social agents
to making their own history, is a key element in forming the basic
'humanism' of the position. In Hall's view this leads culturalism

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