Page 28 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

16 DAVID MORLEY AND KUAN-HSING CHEN

metaphors of transformation’, 1993; chapter 15 here) Hall is at pains to
stress not only the decisive importance of the recognition of the definitively
discursive character of ideology but also the further significance of the shift
in CCCS’s work, in the wake of the encounter with Volosinov, from ‘any
lingering flirtation with even a modified version of the “base-
superstructure” metaphor to a fully discourse-and-power conception of the
ideological’ (page 297), which would preclude any return to old fashioned,
essentialist, marxist conceptions of the ‘reducibility’ of questions of culture
(or ideology) to questions of class.
In a similar vein, in his introduction to the Open University’s recent
undergraduate sociology course, ‘Understanding Modern Societies’, Hall
offers a definition of the discipline in which cultural, symbolic and
discursive practices are given a much greater prominence (and a rather
higher explanatory status) than is customary within sociology. Discursive
and textual processes are, from this perspective ‘considered to be, not
reflective but constitutive in the formation of the modern world: as
constitutive as economic, political or social processes’ which themselves, he
argues ‘do not operate outside of cultural and ideological conditions’
(culture thus lies beneath the ‘bottom line’ of economics) in so far as these
material processes ‘depend on “meaning” for their effects and have
cultural or ideological conditions of existence’ (1992e: 13). If textuality is
‘never enough’, clearly it nonetheless remains central to Hall’s conception
of any adequate analysis of society.
Moreover, beyond the general question of the relation of the textual or
(discursive) and material fields, there lies the more specific question of the
significance, for cultural studies, of the impact of feminism and
psychoanalytic work, in completely unsettling the terrain previously
established by marxism. When, at the Illinois conference, Hall spoke of the
need to live in and with the tensions created by these radically
incommensurable perspectives, in developing an ‘open-ended’ cultural
studies perspective, it was specifically to this field of contention that he
referred, when pressed on the point, in discussion:

The interrelations between feminism, psychoanalysis and cultural
studies define a completely and permanently unsettled terrain for me.
The gains of understanding cultural questions in and through the
insights of psychoanalytic work…opened up enormous insights… But
every attempt to translate the one smoothly into the other doesn’t
work…. Culture is neither just the process of the unconscious writ
large, nor is the unconscious simply the internalization of cultural
processes… (psychoanalysis completely breaks that sociological
notion of socialization…). I have to live with the tension of the two
vocabularies, of the two unsettled objects of analysis and try to read