Page 160 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

148 INTERVIEW WITH STUART HALL

constitute a new politics out of that position. In that sense, it’s very
responsible and original. It says, let’s go through the discursive door but
then, we still have to act politically. Their problem isn’t politics but
history. They have let slip the question of the historical forces which have
produced the present, and which continue to function as constraints and
determinations on discursive articulation.
Question: Is the difference between the two books then a matter of levels
of abstraction?
SH: I think they are quite heroic, in the new book, to say that until one
can express these new positions in the form of a rigorously articulated
general theory, one is still too bogged down in the pragmatics of local
examples, conjunctural analysis, and so on. I don’t operate well at that
level, but I don’t want to deny the importance of what is sometimes called
‘theoretical practice’. It is not an autonomous practice, as some
Althusserians have tried to talk about it, but it does have its own dynamic.
At many important points, Capital is operating precisely at that level; it is a
necessary level of abstraction. So the project itself is not wrong. But in
carrying it out, they do tend to slip from the requirement to recognize the
constraints of existing historical formations. While they are very responsible
—whether you agree with them or not—about recognizing that their
position does have political consequences, when they come down to
particular political conjunctures, they don’t reintegrate other levels of
determination into the analysis. Instead, they take the abstractions which
have been developed and elaborated, in a very rigorous and conceptual
way at a high philosophical level, and insert them into the here and now. You
don’t seem them adding, adding, adding, the different levels of
determination; you see them producing the concrete philosophically, and
somewhere in there is, I think, the king of analytic slippage I am talking
about. That’s not to say that it’s theoretically impossible to develop a more
adequate set of political positions within their theoretical framework, but
somehow, the route they have taken allows them to avoid the pressure of
doing so. The structuring force, the lines of tendency stemming from the
implantation of capital, for example, simply disappears.
Question: Two other terms becoming common in cultural theory are
‘post-marxism’ and ‘post-structuralism’. Both have, at various times, been
used to describe your work. Can you describe your relation to these
categories?
SH: I am a ‘post-marxist’ only in the sense that I recognize the necessity
to move beyond orthodox marxism, beyond the notion of marxism
guaranteed by the laws of history. But I still operate somewhere within
what I understand to be the discursive limits of a marxist position. And I
feel the same way about structuralism. My work is neither a refusal nor an
apologia of Althusser’s position. I refuse certain of those positions, but
Althusser certainly has had an enormous influence on my thinking, in