Page 148 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

136 INTERVIEW WITH STUART HALL

in his model. Why? Because there is no way of conceptualizing the balance
of power between different regimes of truth without society
conceptualized, not as a unity, but as a ‘formation’. If Foucault is to prevent
the regime of truth from collapsing into a synonym for the dominant
ideology, he has to recognize that there are different regimes of truth in the
social formation. And these are not simply ‘plural’—they define an
ideological field of force. There are subordinated regimes of truth which
make sense, which have some plausibility, for subordinated subjects, while
not being part of the dominant episteme. In other words, as soon as you
begin to look at a discursive formation, not just as a single discipline but as
a formation, you have to talk about the relations of power which structure
the inter-discursivity, or the inter-textuality, of the field of knowledge. I
don’t much care whether you call it ideology or not. What matters is not
the terminology but the conceptualization. The question of the relative
power and distribution of different regimes of truth in the social formation
at any one time—which have certain effects for the maintenance of power
in the social order—that is what I call ‘the ideological effect’. So I go on
using the term ‘ideology’ because it forces me to continue thinking about
that problem. By abandoning the term, I think that Foucault has let himself
off the hook of having to re-theorize it in a more radical way: he saves for
himself ‘the political’ with his insistence on power, but he denies himself a
politics because he has no idea of the ‘relations of force’.
Let’s take Baudrillard’s argument about representation and the implosion
of meaning. This seems to rest upon an assumption of the sheer facticity of
things: things are just what is seen on the surface. They don’t mean or
signify anything. They cannot be ‘read’. We are beyond reading, language,
meaning. Again I agree with Baudrillard’s attempt to contest the old
manifest/latent type of hermeneutic analyses; this stands in his work as the
base/superstructure does in Foucault’s—that which has to be contested and
displaced. Above- and under-ground is not a very useful way of thinking
about appearance in relation to structural forces. Perhaps I ought to admit
that some of the tendencies in cultural studies did go that way:
phenomenal form/real relation, despite all our qualifications, did suggest
that the surface of things was only important in so far as you penetrated it
to the underlying rules and codes. So Baudrillard is quite right in returning
us to what there is, the facticity of life, the surface, the spectacle, etc.
Politically, in England, this has come to connote a certain kind of ‘realism’
on the left which argues that you can’t always go behind what the masses
manifestly think to what they really think: you also have to recognize the
validity of how they do make sense of the world. But I think Baudrillard’s
position has become a kind of super-realism, taken to the nth degree. It
says that, in the process of recognizing the real, there is nothing except
what is immediately there on the surface. Of course, in so-called
postmodern society, we feel overwhelmed by the diversity, the plurality, of