Page 156 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

144 INTERVIEW WITH STUART HALL

Let me come to the question of social forces. This ideology, which
transforms a people’s consciousness and awareness of themselves and their
historical situation, although it explodes culturally, does not constitute
itself directly as a social and political force. It has its limits, as all religious
forms of explanation do. But it does become articulated to a social
movement, a movement of people. And it functioned so as to harness or
draw to it sectors of the population who have never been inside that
historical bloc before. Is it a class? In the case of the Rastafarian
movement, it has at its centre the experiences, the position, the
determinations of economic life in Jamaican society. It has at its heart a
class formation. Is it only a class? No, it could not have become a
historical or political force simply reduced to an already unified class.
Indeed it never has been a unified class, with a unified ideology already in
place. It is cross-cut, deeply intersected by, a variety of other
determinations and ideologies. In fact, it only becomes a unified social
force through the constitution of itself as a collective subject within a
unifying ideology. It does not become a class or a unified social force until
it begins to have forms of intelligibility which explain a shared collective
situation. And even then, what determines the place and unity is nothing
we can reduce to the terms of what we used to mean by an economic class.
A variety of sectors of different social forces, in that moment, become
articulated to and within this particular ideology. Therefore, it is not the case
that the social forces, classes, groups, political movements, etc. are first
constituted in their unity by objective economic conditions and then give
rise to a unified ideology. The process is quite the reverse. One has to see
the way in which a variety of different social groups enter into and constitute
for a time a kind of political and social force, in part by seeing themselves
reflected as a unified force in the ideology which constitutes them. The
relationship between social forces and ideology is absolutely dialectical. As
the ideological vision emerges, so does the group. The Rastafarians were,
Marx would say, as a group in themselves, the poor. But they don’t
constitute a unified political force because they are poor. In fact, the
dominant ideology makes sense of them, not as ‘the poor’ but as the
feckless, the layabouts, the underclass. They only constitute a political
force, that is, they become a historical force in so far as they are constituted
as new political subjects.
So it is the articulation, the non-necessary link, between a social force
which is making itself, and the ideology or conceptions of the world which
makes intelligible the process they are going through, which begins to bring
onto the historical stage a new social position and political position, a new
set of social and political subjects. In that sense, I don’t refuse the
connection between an ideology or cultural force and a social force;
indeed, I want to insist that the popular force of an organic ideology
always depends upon the social groups that can be articulated to and by it.