Page 103 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 91

struggle’ was more properly thought of as a single struggle between
ideology and science. In adopting Laclau’s alternative version of ideology,
it became possible to direct attention to the formulations of particular
kinds of hegemonic ideologies.
Second, Laclau further weakened the notion that there might be a
determinate relation between ideology and the social structure. In the
Althusserian schema, there had always been the saving phrase of
‘determination in the last instance’. As we have seen, in concrete
Althusserian analyses this tended to be ritual incantation rather than an
informing principle of the investigation, but it nevertheless represented a
continued commitment to the principle of material determination.
Theorizing the precise weight to be given to determination was always a
most difficult part of the Althusserian project but it remained part of the
project. It was at this point that Coward, and other equally rigorous
Althusserian critics, had attacked marxist cultural studies for adhering to
obsolete expressive notions of cultural practices. None of the attempts at
constructing a convincing reply seemed satisfactory at either the theoretical
or the empirical level. The solution proposed by Laclau represented a step
away from any concern with determination.
In fact, in his earlier formulation it remained the ‘elements’ of any given
ideological discourse which were free of class determination, while the
determination of the discourse itself remained problematic. In later
formulations produced with his co-thinker Chantal Mouffe, he cleared
up this remaining ambiguity by breaking radically with any notion of
determination:

Let us draw the conclusions. It is not the case that the field of the
economy is a self-regulated space subject to endogenous laws; nor
does there exist a constitutive principle for social agents which can be
fixed in an ultimate class core; nor are class positions the necessary
location of historical interests…even for Gramsci, the ultimate core of
the hegemonic subject’s identity is constituted at a point external to
the space it articulates: the logic of hegemony does not unfold all its
deconstructive effects on the theoretical terrain of classical Marxism.
We have witnessed, however, the fall of this last redoubt of class
reductionism, insofar as the very unity and homogeneity of class
subjects has split into a set of precariously integrated positions which,
once the thesis of the neutral character of the productive forces is
abandoned, cannot be referred to any necessary point of future
unification. The logic of hegemony, as a logic of articulation and
contingency, has come to determine the very identity of the
hegemonic subjects.
(Laclau and Mouffe, 1985:85)