Page 172 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

160 LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

practices. Ideologies must attempt to win subjects already spoken for into
their representations by articulating various social identities into chains of
equivalence which constitute and are articulated into structures of
domination and resistance.
Such ideological struggles can only be read by examining the complex
‘ideological structuration’ of the text and its insertion into concrete
historical struggles. It is here that one must locate the most significant work
that Hall accomplished and sponsored while at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies. For example, Hall and Jefferson (1976)
offer a theory of subcultures centring on the question of style as the
articulation of an alternative ideology which offers its members a ‘magical’
solution to the real contradictions of their social position. Similarly, the
Centre’s main contributions to media studies in the 1970s can be
understood in the context of Hall’s developing theory of ideology. In
particular, Hall’s analytic separation of the moments of encoding and
decoding (Hall et al., 1980) can be seen as one version of the struggle of
articulation. In the studies around the ‘Nationwide’ programme (Brunsdon
and Morley, 1978; Morley, 1980), the gap between the two moments
becomes evident as the authors elucidate first the semiotic structures of the
programme and then, the various ways in which audience fragments
interpret the programme. The particular signifying practices of the text (for
example, its modes of address, its modes of representation, the ways in
which it frames various ‘ideological problematics’) not only embody real
historical choices (an ‘encoded’ or ‘preferred’ reading) but also become the
active sites at which ideological struggles are waged. Of course, not only
are different ‘decodings’ possible, but such alternative readings are
themselvs inflected into different political formations and relations.
While Hall wants to argue that the ideology of a text is not guaranteed,
no text is free of its encoded structures and its ideological history. Texts
have
already appeared in some place—and are therefore already inscribed
or placed by that earlier positioning. They will be inscribed in the
particular social relations which produced them…. The vast majority
will already be organized within certain ‘systems’ of classification.
Each practice, each placing, slides another layer of meaning across
the frame.
(1984b)
These ‘traces’ of past struggles do not guarantee future articulations but
they do mark the ways in which the text has already been inflected. If we
are to understand ideology as a contested terrain, we must not only
recognize the struggle but also learn ‘to read the cultural signposts and