Page 124 - Decoding Culture

D
RESISTING THE O M I N ANT 1 1 7
into methodological difficulties, not least the tendency to seek to
grasp, to understand in its totality, the entire experience of social
and cultural processes and therefore to resist any form of analytical
abstraction that might serve to break down those processes into
determinately related elements. Thus, the typical mode of under­
standing fostered by this (tacit) epistemology - seen, for example,
in Williams' 'structures of feeling' - is expressive and experiential,
tending to focus upon 'lived experience' at the expense of analytic
understanding.
To this developing system of ideas Hall counterposes struc­
turalism or, rather, 'the stucturalisms'. In using the plural he
recognizes that the structuralist tradition is rather more varied
than the culturalist, and takes to task, therefore, those theorists of
the period who, much influenced by Althusser, saw the concept of
ideology as integral to structuralism. Significantly, given Hall's and
the eees' subsequent commitment to a form of cultural analysis in
which ideology is a central concept, he stresses the importance of
Levi-Strauss to the structuralist project. He singles out several fea­
tures of Levi-Strauss' thought as being of particular significance:
his concern with the production of meaning in signifying practices;
his emphasis on culture rather than on ideology; and his applica­
tion of a 'logic of arrangement' to the elements of a system rather
than a simple, reductive logic of determinacy. This engagement
with Levi-Strauss enables Hall to read Althusser in particular, and
structuralism in general, as offering a rather richer approach to the
problem of examining the determinate conditions of social life than
was apparent in other Althusser-influenced work of the period.
Furthermore, while avoiding the Lacanian turn in Screen theory's
reading of Althusser, he is nonetheless able to retain a 'structural­
ist' concept of ideology in which signifying practices are seen to
impose upon human agents an 'imaginary' relation to the real.
In this context, then, Hall goes on to consider three positive

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