Page 105 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 93

accommodate to the theories and practices of feminism. In adopting the
formulations of Laclau, it became possible to give equal weight to each of
the members of the ‘holy trinity’ of race, class and gender.
We can track the effects of this theoretical loosening of the constraints of
Althusserian marxism if we look at the development of the three areas of
work we explored above: the analysis of youth cultures, the encoding/
decoding model and the analysis of the historical moment. In the
development of the study of youth cultures, there have been two different
trajectories. The best known of these is that so brilliantly represented by
Dick Hebdige. In all of his work, the stress has always been upon ‘reading
the style’, rather than upon style as an expression of class position. His
earlier writing sat a little uneasily in the theoretical framework of
Resistance through Rituals. His later and better known work elaborates a
theory of youth cultures in which the concerns with class determination are
more or less absent. One could encapsulate the emphasis which he has
imparted to this field of study by claiming that he has shifted the centre of
theoretical concern away from subcultures and towards lifestyles. Musical
taste, rather than social situation, has come more and more to be the focus
of his analysis and the defining characteristic of his subjects. The theoretical
grounding for this shift has been a growing engagement with
postmodernity, which is interpreted as requiring us

to redefine the function(s) of critique. To concentrate on the
problematic of affect involves a break with those forms of
(interpretive, functionalist, (post)structuralist) cultural critique which
are bound into the problematic of meaning. It involves a shift away
from semiotics to pragmatics, from the analysis of the putative
relations between cultural practices and social formations, between
‘texts’ and ‘readers’ towards a critical engagement with those
processes through which libidinal and ‘information’ flows are
organised via networks in which ‘meanings’ and ‘affects’ circulate,
form clusters, separate in a flux combining signifying and asignifying
elements.
(Hebdige, 1988:223)
The intellectual framework deployed here is one in which neither of the
terms of Resistance through Rituals has a place. The problem of the
difficulty of reconciling a theory of determination with a theory of style has
been resolved by an abolition of the former. Style itself has been
transformed from the meaningful articulation of a group’s social self-
identification into a free play of indeterminate signifiers.
The opposite movement is best identified with Paul Willis, whose
response to the crisis of cultural theory is a more or less direct restatement
of the earlier positions of Williams on culture: