Page 231 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

JOHN FISKE 219

It is by discursive practices such as the politics of meaning that social
differences are kept alive and well, and through which they are able to
exert constant resistances (however varied in degree and kind) to the
equally constant attempts of the dominant to make their social power as
effective as possible. And this points to a profound difference between Hall
and Baudrillard, for Hall respects those social groups that Baudrillard
lumps dismissively under the term ‘the masses’. Hall respects the cultural
resistance of the disempowered and subordinated. Despite more than a
century of economic, political and ideological domination, they are still
active and kicking: they still make it difficult for hegemony to work, they
still maintain an uncomfortable and unaccommodating variety of social
identities despite the powerful political and economic attempts to
homogenize them. For Hall, the people are not a passive, silent mass. Their
power to contest meanings enables them to produce cultural formations
through which they can speak and circulate their meanings. Hall’s account
of Rastafarian culture is a clear example of articulation in both senses of the
word. This ability of the subordinate to re-articulate themselves as their
material conditions change and as their meanings of those conditions
change is evidence of the vitality and resilience that Hall respects so deeply.
But this ability to articulate a subcultural identity exists only within and
against hegemonic forces. Hall recognizes clearly that discursive resources
are as inequitably distributed as economic resources, and that the
subordinate are limited to devalued and disempowered discursive
formations—they rarely speak in literature, in film, on television. But they
do speak, they do make their own meanings, for their own identities: The
discourse of the repressed is never as repressed as Foucault implies.
And the role of an ‘opened up’ ideology is crucial to these struggles.
What Hall calls an ‘organic ideology’, that is one arising from the shared
material conditions of various formations of the people, can act to unify
them and construct for them something approaching a class identity, a
class consciousness. This organic ideology unifies by providing forms of
intelligibility which explain the collective situation of different social
groups: an organic ideology, then, empowers the subordinate. Feminism is
a clear and potent example of an organic ideology working to unify and
empower. (Incidentally, the comparative lack of acknowledgement of
feminism in Hall’s work is both surprising and unfortunate.) The notion of
an ideology empowering the subordinate rather than the dominant may
seem, on the face of it, a surprising one but it is a vital part of Hall’s
respect for the subordinate, for their power to resist the dominant, and to
maintain awkward social contradictions.
Hall constantly emphasizes the contradictions in society, the
contradictions in meanings, the contradictions in ideologies and the
contradictions in subjectivities; and those pervasive, structural
contradictions are both the seeds and the fruit of resistance. But all these