Page 110 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

98 COLIN SPARKS

Hall was concerned as to whether the left, by which he meant Gaitskell’s
Labour Party, had managed to adapt its thinking to the demands of the
‘New Times’. The danger was that although there was as yet no genuine
popular belief in, or enthusiasm for, the new way of life, there was the
possibility that it would erode the traditional cultural and political loyalties
upon which the left based itself. In the future, there could be: ‘a thrusting,
confident, celebration of the new capitalism on the part of the majority of
people in this country’ (Hall, 1960b: 77).
It is not stretching the sense of things too far to argue that in
Thatcherism Hall found, twenty years after he had recognized its dangers,
just such a ‘celebration of the new capitalism’. In this light his recent
concerns have been more a return to the themes of youth than a new and
radical departure. Certainly, the language and some of the issues of
relevance have changed in three decades, but the central concern with the
impact of increasing wealth, changing patterns of work, increased leisure,
the centrality of consumption, fragmentation of the social structure, the
problematization of old identities and the fragmentary and transitory
nature of their replacements, are common to the thinking of both periods.
It is almost as though Hall perceived the limits of modernity and
harbingers of postmodernity thirty years before their time.

CONCLUSION
All of this suggests that, in the current associated with Stuart Hall, the link
between marxism and cultural studies was much more contingent and
transitory than it once appeared even to its main actors. The initial
formation of cultural studies was in part a rejection of the then dominant
version of marxism. The later elaboration of marxist cultural studies took
place through the appropriation of one particular version of marxism. It
was from the start beset by internal intellectual problems arising in part
from the radical incommensurability between the project of cultural studies
and the variety of marxism adopted. The productive life of this marxist
cultural studies was very short: certainly less than a decade and perhaps as
little as five years. As the problems within Althusserian marxism became
more apparent, the move away from a strictly marxist cultural studies
began. The form of its subsequent evolution represented a continual
loosening of some of the categories usually thought to be characteristic of
marxism. It is today definitely an historical phenomenon.
We may legitimately enquire as to the implications of the trajectory we
have examined. The dominant view within the field today is probably that
in shedding its marxist husk, cultural studies has empowered itself to
address the real issues of contemporary cultural analysis. Whether one
subscribes to that view or not depends on the answers one gives to two
questions. The first is whether one believes that marxism has, after the