Page 107 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 95

production of ‘popular’ readings. His account of the category of ‘the
people’ who actually produce such readings is that ‘it does not exist in
objective reality’. It is better thought of ‘in terms of people’s felt collectivity’
and one may move between different forms of ‘popular formation’
apparently more or less at will (Fiske, 1989:24).
The analysis of the historical moment is the subject of Hall’s only major
published work during the 1980s. This was concerned with the analysis of
British politics. While it represented a focus rather different than that of the
immediately preceding period, it developed out of, and built upon, the
work published in Policing the Crisis. In the essays collected as The Hard
Road to Renewal, Hall developed the idea of the success of Thatcherism as
being a consequence of the successful interpellation of at least a section of
the working class by the discourse of ‘popular authoritarianism’. This
constituted a new hegemonic order which succeeded in presenting
particular partial political strategies as the commonsense embodiment of
universal truths. For Hall, the support for the British recovery of the
Malvinas/Falklands Islands, was a clear illustration of the way this process
worked:
The Falkland crisis may have been unpredicted, but the way in which
it has been constructed into a populist cause is not. It is the apogee of
the whole arc of Thatcherite populism. By ‘populism’ I mean
something more than the ability to secure electoral support for a
political programme, a quality all politicians must possess. I mean the
project, central to the politics of Thatcherism, to ground neo-liberal
policies directly in an appeal to ‘the people’; to root them in the
essentialist categories of commonsense experience and practical
moralism—and thus to construct, not simply awaken, classes, groups
and interests into a particular definition of ‘the people’.
(Hall, 1988:71)
The theoretical point of reference which Hall used to argue for this position
is explicitly drawn from Laclau (Hall, 1988:139–40). It is his notion of
hegemony and of the construction of ‘the people’ which, with some small
reservations, Hall employs throughout his work in the 1980s.
Hall developed this theoretical position in the ‘official’ Communist Party
celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Marx’s death. He
contributed a piece which has become widely known in different forms and
which is there published as ‘The problem of ideology: marxism without
guarantees’. This was written within a framework which clearly identified
itself as wishing to continue with the marxist theoretical project as a ‘living
body of thought’ (Hall, 1983:84). Hall again drew heavily on Laclau to
argue against reductivism in the realm of ideology: ‘Laclau has
demonstrated definitively…the untenable nature of the proposition that