Page 246 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

234 STUART HALL

a network of strategies and powers and their articulations—and thus a
politics which is always positional.
One of these critical ‘new’ sites of politics is the arena of social
reproduction. On the left, we know about the reproduction of labour
power. But what do we really know—outside of feminism—about
ideological, cultural, sexual reproduction? One of the characteristics of this
area of ‘reproduction’ is that it is both material and symbolic, since we are
reproducing not only the cells of the body but also the categories of the
culture. Even consumption, in some ways the privileged terrain of
reproduction, is no less symbolic for being material. We need not go so far
as Baudrillard (1977:62), as to say ‘the object is nothing’ in order to
recognize that, in the modern world, objects are also signs, and we relate to
the world of things in both an instrumental and a symbolic mode. In a
world tyrannized by scarcity, men and women nevertheless express in their
practical lives not only what they need for material existence but some
sense of their symbolic place in the world, of who they are, their identities.
One should not miss this drive to take part or ‘come on’ in the theatre of
the social—even if, as things stand, the only stage provided is within what
the Situationists, in 1968, used to call the ‘fetishized spectacle of the
commodity’.
Of course, the preoccupation with consumption and style may appear
trivial—though more so to men, who tend to have themselves
‘reproduced’, so as to say, at arm’s length from the grubby processes of
shopping and buying and getting and spending and therefore take it less
seriously than women, for whom it was destiny, life’s ‘work’. But the fact
is that greater and greater numbers of people (men and women)—with
however little money—play the game of using things to signify who they
are. Everybody, including people in very poor societies whom we in the
West frequently speak about as if they inhabit a world outside of culture,
knows that today’s ‘goods’ double up as social signs and produce meanings
as well as energy. There is no clear evidence that, in an alternative socialist
economy, our propensity to ‘code’ things according to systems of meaning,
which is an essential feature of our sociality, would necessarily cease—or,
indeed, should.
A socialism built on any simple notion of a ‘return to nature’ is finished.
We are all irrevocably in the ‘secondary universes’ where culture
predominates over nature. And culture, increasingly, distances us from
invoking the simple, transparent ground of ‘material interests’ as a way of
settling any argument. The environmental crisis, which is a result of the
profound imbalance between nature and culture induced by the relentless
drive to subordinate everything to the drive for profitability and capital
accumulation cannot be resolved by any simple ‘return’ to nature. It can only
be resolved by a more human—that is, socially responsible and
communally responsive—way of cultivating the natural world of finite