Page 130 - Decoding Culture

RESISTIN G THE D O M I NANT 123

episodic thinking which provide us with the taken-for-granted
elements of our practical knowledge' (ibid: 73). Always undergoing
adaptation, this 'reservoir of themes and premises' was bound into
the very fabric of the social formation.
It is also from Gramsci (and V o losinov) that Hall draws inspira­
tion in extending the idea of the politics of signification in terms of
the 'class struggle in language' or, as he expresses it more gener­
ally, the 'struggle over meaning'. The generalization is important,
of course, since it partially disconnects the idea of contesting ide­
ological meanings from a strictly class location: 'though discourses
could become an arena of social struggle, and all discourses
entailed certain definite premises about the world, this was not
the same thing as ascribing ideologies to classes in a fixed, neces­
sary or determinate way' (ibid: 80) . Ideology and ideological
struggle, therefore, could not be understood as merely reflecting
the terms of, say, the economic base; they had 'relative autonomy'.
This is not to lose sight of the crucial concept of dominance, how­
ever, where a framework may be imposed (by force or 'ideological
compulsion') on a subordinate group, but this too must be enlarged
in terms of Gramsci's concept of hegemony. Hegemony depends
on cultural leadership to control the 'form and level of culture and
civilization' in such a way as to sustain the dominant 'social and pro­
ductive system'. Thus, 'hegemony is understood as accomplished,
not without the due measure of legal and legitimate compulsion,
but principally by means of winning the active consent of those
classes and groups who were subordinated within it' (ibid: 85) . It is,
then, the 'production of consent' that is the key role of the media
within a given social formation.
This process of loosening the links between ideology (and,
therefore, culture) and class is part of an ongoing shift away from
marxist orthodoxy in both Hall's work and that of the CCCS.
Compare this 1982 formulation of class, ideology and hegemony,

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