Page 109 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 97

Of course, ‘civil society’ is no ideal realm of pure freedom. Its micro-
worlds include the multiplication of points of power and conflict—
and thus exploitation, oppression and marginalisation. More and
more of our everyday lives are caught up in these forms of power,
and their lines of intersection. Far from there being no resistance to
the system, there has been a proliferation of new points of
antagonism, new social movements of resistance organised around
them—and consequently, a generalisation of ‘politics’ to spheres
which hitherto the Left assumed to be apolitical: a politics of the
family, of health, of food, of sexuality, of the body. What we lack is
any overall map of how these power relations connect and of their
resistances. Perhaps there isn’t, in that sense, one ‘power game’ at all,
more a network of strategies and powers and their articulations—and
thus a politics which is always positional.
(Hall, 1989b:130)

The systematizing discursive formations of ideology, with their power to
constitute individuals as subjects, and the concern with the extent to which
it is possible to construct some kind of theory of determination have here
disappeared. There has been a change not only in the theoretical reference
points but in the kinds of questions which are set out as requiring
investigation.
The novelty of the framework may, however, be more apparent than
real. In an essay titled ‘The supply of demand’, first published in 1960,
Stuart Hall had written about the corrosive effects of affluence on the older
patterns of politics and of culture. Much of the essay is borrowed more or
less directly from Williams and Hoggart, but it is remarkable in the ways in
which it extends those ideas into a central focus on the impact, which Hall
very often sees as a positive impact, of the capitalist boom on the everyday
life experience of the working class:
Even if working-class prosperity is a mixed affair…it is there: the fact
has bitten deep into the experience of working people…. There has
been an absolute rise in living standards for the majority of workers,
fuller wage-packets, more overtime, a gradual filling out of the home
with some of the domestic consumer goods which transform it from a
place of absolute drudgery. For some, the important move out of the
constricting environment of the working-class slum into the more
open and convenient housing estate or even the new industrial town.
The scourge of TB and diseases of undernourishment no longer
haunting whole regions; the Health Service to turn to if the children are
ill. Above all, the sense of security—a little space at least to turn
around in.
(Hall, 1960b:79)