Page 229 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

JOHN FISKE 217

linguistics, particularly through the work of Lévi-Strauss and Barthes, and
this theory always accords a determining pressure to the linguistic structure
or langue: to some extent, the way in which langue is structured always
determines what can be said, and the way in which it is structured is
overdetermined by its relations with the way the economy is structured, the
way political life is structured and so on. The constant echoes of the
organizing regularities that interconnect systems of representation with
systems of politics, of education, of law and order and, of course, the
economy are what give Hall’s work a footing in the structuralist enterprise
(albeit, as we have argued, he seems always poised to step out of it into the
post-structuralist one).
Foucault’s theory of discourse, however, focuses on what is said, publicly
and powerfully, in particular social conditions rather than on the structural
regularities that enable it to be spoken. The power to put certain meanings
into public discourse and to repress others is, for Foucault, a social
technology parallel to the power to produce certain bodily behaviours as
normal and to repress or abnormalize others. Dispersed though they are,
the micro-technologies of power are not haphazard. Foucault’s focus on
their sites of operation rather than on their systematic interrelations gives
priority to an empirical materiality over a theorized abstraction: these
multiple technologies do work finally as an overarching regime of power,
but the regime can be experienced only in the concreteness of its
multifarious, widely dispersed and very particular applications. For
Foucault, discourse is as material and as power-effective as incarceration or
surgery. The way that Foucault theorizes the operation of power through
discourse to discipline speech, meanings and behaviour does not, in the last
resort, seem too far removed from Hall’s theory of representation.
It is, however, directly opposed to the high structuralism of
Althusserianism and Lacanianism. Foucault’s object of study has a
materiality and a concreteness (what is said, power that is applied, the
techniques of application) that directly contradicts high structuralism’s
argument that the ultimate reality consists of the deep structuring relations
that transcend the immediate conditions in which they operate: high
structuralism’s object of study, then is accessible only through macro-
theoretical rather than empirical methodology. Hall’s constant return to
concrete political and social conditions, his insistence that the real effects
of ideology and of representation are material, historically specific and
available for empirical analysis would appear to have to have affinities with
more of Foucault’s work than he is prepared to recognize. This, of course,
is the Gramscian or ‘culturalist’ side of Hall rather than the structuralist one.
Hall’s suspicion of Foucault is uncharacteristic. What we would have
expected as more in character with his work in general, would be to see Hall
opening up a dialogue between Gramsci and Foucault, in which,
for instance, Gramsci’s concept of the ‘power bloc’ might serve to reconnect