Page 100 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

88 COLIN SPARKS

by entering a preconstituted realm of radical alterity. Since society would
be unthinkable without language, ideology was a necessary feature of all
human societies. Ideology was thus essentially unitary, without history and
all-pervasive. What is more, the operation of ideology was coercively to
construct the individual as subject. This aspect of Althusser’s theory of
ideology was developed, particularly with regard to the cinema, by a group
around the magazine Screen, for whom the key to understanding ideology
lay in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Hall rejected the Screen interpretation of Althusser’s theory ideology on
the grounds that it was too coercive (Hall, 1980c:161–2). Cultural studies
had from the start operated with the idea of there being different possible
readings of particular texts, which depended largely on the experience of
the audiences. Hall wished to retain this notion of at least the relative
indeterminacy of decoding. On the other hand, he remained within a
framework which saw ideology as fundamentally discursive and
unconscious in its operation. It was to this end that he developed the
‘encoding/ decoding’ model away from Althusser. An engagement with
Gramsci provided a modification of the unconscious into the unconsciously
held propositions of common sense which explained why the dominant
decoding could work so apparently effortlessly. Volosinov provided the
possibility of variant, and thus oppositional, decodings through a theory of
the multi-accentuality of the sign. While these additions ‘worked’ in the
sense that they plugged the gaps in the model, the overall structure
resulting lacked the elegant simplicity of its Althusserian parent. Its
increasingly baroque structure had less and less internal stability.
The two problem areas, one involving determination and the other the
positioning power of ideology, were central to the project of the book
Policing the Crisis. This multi-authored text is in many ways an attempt to
synthesize the work of the Birmingham Centre during the heroic age, and it
is still an enormously impressive effort. It is, however, quite striking how
little input the theoretical work of the preceding five years makes to the
final text. The multiple crises facing British society are extensively
catalogued, but there is no theoretical effort to show how determination in
the last instance, or overdetermination, might be useful categories in the
analysis of a concrete social formation. Ideology, too, although central to
the book, is afforded no systematic theoretical investigation. Althusser and
his idea of the ‘ideological state apparatus’ are invoked more or less in
passing on a number of occasions, but the real centre of attention is on
developing aspects of Gramsci’s work on the winning of consent (Hall et
al., 1978:201–17).
One might wish to make detailed criticisms of this or that aspect of the
book, but the central failure is a theoretical one. Although its publication
predates the final working-out of the ‘encoding/decoding’ model, it does not
operate within that theoretical framework or any other. It is a work of