Page 171 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

HISTORY, POLITICS AND POSTMODERNISM 159

once and forever. This year’s radical symbol or slogan will be
neutralized into next year’s fashion; the year after, it will be the
object of a profound cultural nostalgia

or, one might add, it may be re-articulated as a symbol of opposition.
Moreover, ‘it depends…on the way concrete practices are used and
implemented in concrete historical conditions, the [strength] with which
certain codes are constituted as “in dominance”, the relations of struggle
within the social relations of representation.’ It is the struggle to articulate
certain codes into a position of dominance, to legitimate their claim, not
only to define the meaning of cultural forms but to define the relation of
that meaning (and hence, the text) to reality as one of representation, that
defines the specificity of the ideological. That is, ideological practices entail
a double articulation of the signifier, first to a web of
connotation (signification) and second, to real social practices and subject-
positions (representation).
Ideological practices are those through which particular relations,
particular chains of equivalences, are ‘fixed’, ‘yoked together’. They
construct the necessity, the naturalness, the ‘reality’ of particular
identifications and interpretations (and of course, the simultaneous
exclusion of others as fantastic, contingent, unnatural or biased). Ideology
is the naturalization of a particular historical cultural articulation. What is
natural can be taken for granted; it defines ‘common sense’. Ideology
‘yokes together’ particular social practices and relations with particular
structures of meaning, thus anchoring them in a structure in which their
relations to social identity, political interests, etc., have already been
defined and seem inevitable.
We cannot live social reality outside of the cultural forms through which
we make sense of it. Ideology involves the claim of particular cultural
practices to represent reality. Yet, it is not reality that is represented (and
constructed); it is rather our relation to it, the ways we live and experience
reality. Ideology constructs the field and structures of our experience. It is,
then, a contradictory field in which we struggle to define the systems of
representation through which, paraphrasing Althusser, we live the
‘imaginary’ relations between ourselves and our real conditons of existence
(Hall, 1985). The necessity which it inscribes upon particular
interpretations is grounded in the ‘immediacy’ of experience and in the
ways we are located within it. Ideology links particular social identities
with particular experiences, as if the former were the necessary source of
the latter. While the individual is positioned—their identity as the author/
subject of experience defined—within ideological practices, the individual
is never a tabula rasa seduced into a simple idoeological structure. The
ideological field is always marked by contradictions and struggles.
Moreover, the individual is already defined by other discourses and