Page 104 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

92 COLIN SPARKS

Although Hall himself has expressed hesitations about following this logic
through to its conclusion, there can be little doubt that the development of
cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s has accepted this account of the
radical non-determinacy of ideological discourses.
Third, to the extent that there was now any relation of determination
between ideology and social subject, it was through the activity of ideology
that the link was made. The origins of ideologies were indeterminate, but a
political ideology could, for example, constitute a given social group as
part of ‘the people’. In this, it did not differ radically from the implications
of Althusserian ideas. The tendency of the Althusserian concern, however,
had been in determinant nature of interpellation. In Laclau’s version, while
an ideology had the potential to determine a subject-position, this
determination was merely a possibility rather than a given.
Fourth, ‘class’ was displaced from the privileged position which it holds
in marxism, even Althusser’s marxism. In Laclau’s account: ‘If class
contradiction is the dominant contradiction at the abstract level of the
mode of production, the people/power-bloc contradiction is dominant at
the level of the social formation’ (Laclau, 1979:108). The really-existing
‘people’ always consists of elements of different classes whose unity is
constituted not by their objective relationship to the means of the
production but by the extent to which they subscribe to a particular
discursive ideology. If this is the case, however, there is no logical reason
why we should insist that the sole or dominant constitutive element of any
ideology must be the interests of a social class. It could just as well be any
other social division. It thus became possible to think the centrality of
the troublesome ‘new’ categories of gender and ethnicity in cultural studies
in ways that were not possible within the marxist framework. As one,
rather uncritical, representative of the newer cultural studies put it:

The classical Marxist view of the industrial working class as the
privileged agent of revolutionary historical change has been
undermined and discredited from below by the emergence of
numerous social movements—feminisms, black struggles, national
liberation, anti-nuclear and ecological movements—that have also
reshaped and redefined the sphere of politics.
(Mercer, 1990:44)

The urgent claims of these new social movements had been pressing against
cultural studies for some time. One of the reasons for the dispute over the
implications of Althusser which we examined above was precisely that his
work was taken by some, by token of its privileging the category of the
unconscious and thus of psychoanalysis, to entail a shift of attention from
class to the construction of gender. In rejecting this ‘strong’ version of
ideology, cultural studies was left without theoretical space to