Page 169 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

HISTORY, POLITICS AND POSTMODERNISM 157

It offers a different version of determination, a rigorously
antireductionist model of the production of social life as a field of power.
Furthermore, Hall argues that these systems of power are organized upon
contradictions, not only of class and capital, but of gender and race as
well; these various equally fundamental contradictions may or may not be
made to correspond—this is yet another site of articulation and power.
Hall’s theory offers, as well, a non-essentialist theory of agency: social
identities are themselves complex fields of multiple and even contradictory
struggles; they are the product of the articulations of particular social
positions into chains of equivalences, between experiences, interests,
political struggles and cultural forms, and between different social
positions. This is a fragmented, decentred human agent, an agent who is
both ‘subject-ed’ by power and capable of acting against those powers. It is
a position of theoretical anti-humanism and political humanism, for
without an articulated subject capable of acting, no resistance is possible.

Culture and ideology
These same principles and practices define Hall’s (1977, 1982, 1983, 1985)
contribution to the theory of culture and ideology. Culture is never merely
a set of practices, technologies or messages, objects whose meaning and
identity can be guaranteed by their origin or their intrinsic essences. For
example, Hall (1984b) argues that

there is no such thing as ‘photography’; only a diversity of practices
and historical situations in which the photographic text is produced,
circulated and deployed…. And of course, the search for an ‘essential,
true original’ meaning is an illusion. No such previously natural
moment of true meaning, untouched by the codes and social relations
of production and reading, exists.
Cultural practices are signifying practices. Following Volosinov as well as
the structuralists, Hall argues that the meaning of a cultural form is not
intrinsic to it; a text does not offer a transparent surface upon or through
which we may discern its meaning in some non-textual origin, as if it had
been deposited there, once and for all, at the moment of its origin. The
meaning is not in the text itself but is the active product of the text’s social
articulation, of the web of connotations and codes into which it is inserted.
Hall (1981) writes:

The meaning of a cultural symbol is given in part by the social field
into which it is incorporated, the practices with which it articulates
and is made to resonate. What matters is not the intrinsic or