Page 228 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

216 OPENING THE HALLWAY

resistance of the masses that Baudrillard talks about and that Hall seems to
have avoided in Baudrillard’s work. Baudrillard (1983) suggests that this
resistance is ‘equivalent to sending back to the system its own logic by
doubling it to reflecting like a mirror meaning without absorbing it’. It may
well be that pleasure is one of the resistances of the masses and that part of
the function of this pleasure is an attempt to disrupt or refuse the seemingly
necessary relations of power that ideology requires for the distribution and
transferral of meaning within social structures.
Hall seems to find the work of Foucault more problematic than that of
any other postmodernist, probably because he thinks it is the most
significant and most serious. On the face of it Hall and Foucault appear to
have much in common—their politicized and critically engaged studies of
how the defining and controlling social forces of capitalism operate in
particular historical conditions; their deeply felt conviction that Western
modernity has produced societies that are fundamentally alienating and
inhumane; and their assumption that the raison d’être of socio-cultural
analysis is to intervene in the object of its study.
Hall is suspicious that Foucault’s emphasis on the dispersed technologies
of power denies the value of any systematic analysis of power as a
structuring principle: He is worried that Foucault’s disconnection of power
from any class belongingness has taken too far his own and Laclau’s notion
of no necessary class belongingness. He is worried, too, that Foucault’s
shift of the focal point of critical analysis away from ideology and
consciousness to power and the body risks throwing out the healthy and
useful politics of meaning along with the dirty bath-water of a ‘grand
narrative’ theory of ideology. Certainly, Foucault does not find the concept
of ideology necessary to his account of the micro-techologies by which
power produces the docile body, and by which, through disciplining
individuated bodies, it reaches to the heart of the social body. But the
ultimate object of Foucault’s theory and analytical method may not be that
far distanced from Hall’s. For Foucault the normalization of the body and
its ways of behaving is necessarily part of the normalization of the mind
and its ways of knowing/believing. Foucault’s theory of the power of
discourse to produce truth is operating in the same arena as Hall’s theory of
the work of representation to produce reality. The key theoretical
difference between them may be summarized as that between structuralism
and post-structuralism.
Although Hall’s work has thoroughly loosened up the overdetermining
relations among the structuring forces of capitalism, it has not displaced
them. He sees clear structural connections between the class interests that
inform, say, the work of representation in the media and the class interests
that control the economy, and for him, ideology can only be understood in
terms of these, and other, social relations: for him ideology is
structural. His account of representation is deeply informed by structural