Page 226 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

214 OPENING THE HALLWAY

either thinker, mean granting them the position of prime determinant. Hall
and Gramsci both recognize that economic conditions cannot be divorced
from cultural conditions and that class struggles must, therefore, involve
cultural struggles, not as secondary, but as integral.
For Hall, then, representation (which he saw as the key form of cultural
labour) was real. There was no essential social reality that was then
represented: reality could not take an essential precedence over
representation, for representation was itself a necessary means of securing
reality. To the extent that representations are real in their effects, they
produce what passes for real in any particular conditions. Social reality and
representation are mutually constitutive, and the relations between them
are necessarily political. The labour of representation, the work of making
things mean, is as real a form of labour and as necessary to capitalism as
that performed on the factory floor.
Though Hall is deeply suspicious of postmodernism, particularly and
justifiably of the ease with which the political and the socially specific can
be evacuated from its concerns, there is an irony to his anxiety, for, of all
the critical theorists working within the (broadly conceived) marxist
tradition, Hall is the one whose work translates most readily into
postmodern conditions. His opening up of closed systems of determination
adapts to the fluidity that postmodernism claims to itself, but Hall’s
insistence that the structures still operate, if less predictably, prevents the
slippage into postmodern indeterminacy: his theory of articulation
resonates with the Derridean refusal to allow meaning any fixity, but his
insistence that meanings are made, are held in place and are used in
particular if temporary conditions prevents any slippage into the political
desert of meanings in infinite deferral: his refusal of any essential
precedence of the real over the representation prefigures the postmodern
collapse of systems of categorization and hierarchization, yet Hall refuses
to allow the absence of essential hierarchies to entail the absence of
contingent ones: His argument that representations are real is similar in
some ways to Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum, yet his insistence on
the social reality of which the representations are part avoids the total loss
of the real and the consequent evasion of the problem of how perceived
phenomena can be articulated into a sense of reality that has real effects in
a way that simulacra do not—and these reality effects, of course, are the
site of the political, so their absence in the theory of the simulacrum
accounts for its potential depoliticization.
While Hall may be over-critical of postmodernism, his criticism does not
stem from a reactionary rejection of it, but from a desire to warn that its
excesses do allow some of its practitioners to lose the dimension of critical
analysis and thus of political potential. This warning is well founded. But
Hall is well aware that there is a ‘reality’ to the conditions that