Page 158 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

146 INTERVIEW WITH STUART HALL

The question is, can one, does one, follow that argument to the point
that there is nothing to practice but its discursive aspect? I think that’s
what their recent book does. It is a sustained philosophical effort, really, to
conceptualize all practices as nothing but discourses, and all historical agents
as discursively constituted subjectivities, to talk about positionalities but
never positions, and only to look at the way concrete individuals can be
interpellated in different subject positionalities. The book is thus a bold
attempt to discover what a politics of such a theory might be. All of that I
think is important. I still prefer Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory
over Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (Perhaps I ought to say in
parenthesis that I do find an alarming tendency in myself to prefer people’s
less complete works to their later, mature and complete ones. I prefer The
Eighteenth Brumaire to book II of Capital. I prefer Althusser’s For Marx to
Reading Capital. I like people’s middle period a lot, where they have gotten
over their adolescent idealism but their thought has not yet hardened into a
system. And I like Laclau when he’s struggling to find a way out of
reductionism and beginning to reconceptualize marxist categories in the
discursive mode.) But in the last book, there is no reason why anything is
or isn’t potentially articulatable with anything. The critique of reductionism
has apparently resulted in the notion of society as a totally open discursive
field.
I would put it polemically in the following form: the last book thinks that
the world, social practice, is language, whereas I want to say that the social
operates like a language. While the metaphor of language is the best way of
rethinking many fundamental questions, there’s a kind of slippage from
acknowledging its utility and power to saying that that’s really the way it
is. There’s a very powerful tendency which pushes people, as soon as they
get to the first position, to make the theoretically logical move of going all
the way. Theoretically, perhaps, they are much more consistent than I am.
Logically, once you’ve opened the gate, it’s reasonable to go through it and
see what the world looks like on the other side. But I think that that often
becomes its own kind of reductionism. I would say that the fully discursive
position is a reductionism upward, rather than a reductionism downward,
as economism was. What seems to happen is that, in the reaction against a
crude materialism, the metaphor of x operates like y is reduced to x=y.
There is a very dramatic condensation which, in its movement, reminds me
of theoretical reductionism very strongly. You see it most clearly in
something like the reworking of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
And at that point, I think it’s theoretically wrong in fact, what is left of
the old materialist in me wants to say extremely crude things like ‘I’d like
to make you eat your words.’ Let me put this another more serious way. If
you go back to the early formulations of historical materialism, what Marx
always talks about is the way in which social and cultural structures
overdetermine the natural ones. Marx is aware that we remain natural