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unfamiliar to many communications scholars. Hall works within both
marxist and semiotic discourses which attempt to understand the nature of
contemporary social life and the central place of communication within it.
To try, in the name of generalization, to eliminate either his fundamental
concern with power and historical change, or the real theoretical
advances, over a broad range of issues, accomplished in his vocabulary,
would be a disservice. Moreover, it would be a distortion of Hall’s work
not to recognize that his position has changed, over time, in response to
new theoretical and historical questions; old concepts and strategies have
occasionally disappeared from his writing, but more commonly, they are
reappropriated into a new theoretical formation which re-articulates not
only their significance but their political challenge as well. In what follows,
then, I will try to move between the abstraction and the detail, offering a map
of Hall’s own current strategies and struggles.
For Hall, all human practices (including communication and
communication theory) are struggles to ‘make history but in conditions not
of our own making.’ He brings this marxist maxim to bear upon at least
three different, albeit related projects: (1) to offer a theory of ideology
which sees communicative practices in terms of what people can and do
make of them; (2) to describe the particular historical form of
contemporary cultural and political struggle (hegemony); and (3) to define
a ‘marxism without guarantees’ by rethinking the ‘conjunctural’ nature of
society. At each of these levels, Hall connects, in complex ways, theory and
writing to real social practices and struggles.
There can be no radical separation between theory, at whatever level of
abstraction, and the concrete social historical context which provides both
its object of study and its conditions of existence. This is not merely a
political position (although it is that); it is also an epistemological one.
Hall extends the marxist attempt to ‘reproduce the concrete in thought’
with Benjamin’s comparison of the magician and the surgeon: the magician
acts upon the surface of reality, the surgeon cuts into it. (It is not
coincidental that Benjamin’s metaphor describes the new media
technology, specifically photography.) Rejecting the ‘magical incantations’
of the empiricist who claims to have secure access to the real (even in its
marxist forms: e.g., theories of false consciousness), Hall (1980a) seeks
‘concepts with which to cut into the complexity of the real, in order precisely
to reveal and bring to light relationships and structures which cannot be
visible to the naive naked eye,’ relations of power and contradiction, of
domination and struggle. Hall disclaims abstract and universal theory;
rather, his epistemology derives from a reading (1974) of Marx which sees
the relation between conceptual and empirical reality as a constant
movement between different levels of abstraction. Hall also refuses the
relativism of rationalism: although theories and descriptions are always
ideological, their ‘truth’ is measured in the context of concrete historical