Page 174 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

162 LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

his attention to the ‘autonomy’ of civil society (in the so-called
‘democratic’ nations) as a problem; how is it that the very freedom of civil
and cultural institutions from direct political intervention results in the
rearticulation of the already dominant structures of meaning and power?
How does the appeal to ‘professional codes’, in the production of both news
and entertainment consistently re-inscribe ‘hegemonically preferred’
meanings? How are people ‘subject-ed’ to particular definitions and
practices of ‘freedom’?
For Hall (1984c), the appearance of ‘hegemony’ is tied to the
incorporation of the great majority of people into broadly based relations
of cultural consumption. Of course, this required both the incorporation of
culture into the sphere of market relations and the application of modern
industrial techniques to cultural production. This was and remains a
limited form of cultural enfranchisement for it left unchallenged the
people’s ‘expropriation from the processes of democratization of the means
of cultural production’. But it also had its real effects upon the social
formation and empowered the population. Benjamin had observed that
‘The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a
process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.’ Hall
(1976) echoes and elaborates this:

Once the masses enter directly into the transformation of history,
society and culture, it is not possible any longer to construct or
appropriate the world as if reality issues in The World from the
wholly individual person of the speaking, the uttering subject…. We
are, as historical subjects and as speakers, ‘spoken’ by ‘the others’. It
is the end of a certain kind of western innocence, as well as the birth-
point of a new set of codes.

The appearance of ‘the masses’ on the historical scene, especially as an
agent in the scene of culture, displaces the field of cultural struggle from
the expression of class conflict into a larger struggle between the people
and the elite or ruling bloc. (This does not deny the continuing relevance of
class contradictions but places them in relation to other contradictions: for
example, race, gender, age.) As a result of this restructuring of the field of
cultural relations, new forms and organizations of cultural politics emerged:
this is Hall’s (1986) reading of the Gramscian notion of hegemony.
Hegemony is not a universally present struggle; it is a conjunctural
politics opened up by the conditions of advanced capitalism, mass
communication and culture. Nor is it limited to the ideological struggle of
the ruling class bloc to win the consent of the masses to its definitions of
reality, although it encompasses the processes by which such a consensus
might be achieved. But it also depends upon the ability of the ruling bloc
(an alliance of class fractions) to secure its economic domination and