Page 129 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

JENNIFER DARYL SLACK 117

‘culturalism’ (see Hall, 1980a for the meaning of ‘culturalism’). It is in the
1970s, however, that articulation begins to be explicitly theorized. This
happens as the problem of reductionism in marxism (and the
related problem of essentialism) becomes salient and the question of how
the elements of the social field are joined to form unities in a non-reductionist
way becomes paramount.
By the 1970s, cultural theorists were explicitly engaged in critiques of
‘classical’ or ‘orthodox’ marxism and its reliance on two related forms of
reductionism: economic reductionism, which relies on a limited reading of
Marx’s notion of the relationship between base and superstructure; and
class reductionism, which relies on a limited reading of Marx’s notion of
class. Briefly put, economic reductionism maintains that economic
relations, thought of as a virtually static mode of production (the base)
controls and produces (determines) everything else in society (the
superstructure). Hence, every element in society (including changes in those
elements) can be reduced to (explained by) the operations of the
corresponding mode of production—and those operations alone. Class
reductionism holds that all political and ideological practices,
contradictions, and so on, in short all that might be conceived of as other
than economic, have a necessary class belonging which is defined by the
mode of production. Consequently, the discourse of a class and the
existence of the corresponding class itself constitute a direct reflection of,
or a necessary moment in the unfolding of the economic. (For discussions of
reductionism, see especially Hall, 1977; 1980d; Laclau, 1977; Williams,
1973.)
‘Culturalism’, the term Hall used to describe what had been the dominant,
early paradigm in cultural studies, struggled against the reduction to the
economic in part by attending to the specificity of particular practices
(Hall, 1980a). But culturalism lacked, as Hall put it ‘an adequate way of
establishing this specificity theoretically’ (69). The tendency was often to fall
back on versions of the reduction to the mode of production or to class.
For example, Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy disappointedly concludes by
attributing the post-war changes in English working-class culture
essentially to capitalism, via the imposition of mass culture (Hoggart,
1958).
Posing reductionism as a problem had several related sources. Most
notable here is that marxist theorizing had developed its own ‘internal’
critique of reductionism in that reductionism offered inadequate
explanations of the mechanisms of domination and subordination in late
capitalism. Reduction to the mode of production could not account for the
shape of a social formation if it was understood to be composed of
relationships among several modes of production (Hall, 1980d). It could
not account for apparent disparities among the conditions of one’s
existence, how one lived out those conditions, and what one believed about