Page 101 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 89

many productive insights, but it does not deliver the synthesis which it
promised. If it is the high point of the heroic age of cultural studies, it is
also the end point. The attempt to recast cultural studies in the form of
Althusserian marxism has not been achieved. In the long run, the attempt
to understand a field of enquiry which had been delimited in terms of
expressive humanism with the methods of structuralist marxism proved
impossible to complete.

THE ROAD FROM MARX
In its classic form, then, the attempt at an Althusserian marxist cultural
studies had a life of at most ten years. It did not immediately and publicly
collapse, but by the time that cultural studies was experiencing
internationalization, its specifically marxist element was already in serious
decline. In retrospect, it is clear that the theoretical developments of the
mainsteam of cultural studies in the 1980s constituted a slow movement
away from any self-identification with marxism. The inexorable logic of
this development was probably as invisible to the protagonists as it was to
outside observers such as the present author. The main body of Hall’s
writings during this period appeared in a journal with the title of Marxism
Today, and his concerns remained throughout the decade centred upon the
development of a ‘marxism without guarantees’.
The gradual nature of this disengagement was partly because Hall’s road
away from Marx lay through the writing of Laclau. In the collection of
reviews and essays which formed his first book, Laclau provided a
significant weakening of the rigours of the Althusserian version of marxism
‘from within’. Laclau was concerned to produce a ‘non-reductive’ theory of
ideology and the mechanisms by which it functioned in society, especially
with reference to the problem of classical fascism. For Laclau, the ‘correct
method’ in understanding ideology was:
to accept that ideological ‘elements’ taken in isolation have no
necessary class connotation, and that this connotation is only the result
of the articulation of those elements in a concrete ideological
discourse. This means that the precondition for analysing the class
nature of an ideology is to conduct the inquiry through that which
constitutes the distinctive unity of an ideological discourse.
(Laclau, 1979:99)
This proposition has two concrete consequences. In the first place,
theoretically speaking, any ‘element’ could be part of any ‘class ideology’.
Laclau chose the example of nationalism, which he argued was part of the
ideology of various and diverse social classes. Secondly, the internal
ideological structure was more important for the purposes of analysis than