Page 40 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

28 STUART HALL

dominance of those ideas. In order to make their polemical point, they
simplified many of their formulations. Our subsequent problems have
arisen, in part, from treating these polemical inversions as the basis for a
labour of positive general theorizing.
Within that broad framework of usage, Marx advances certain more
fully elaborated theses, which have come to form the theoretical basis of
the theory in its so-called classical form. First the materialist premise: ideas
arise from and reflect the material conditions and circumstances in which
they are generated. They express social relations and their contradictions in
thought. The notion that ideas provide the motor of history, or proceed
independent of material relations and generate their own autonomous
effects is, specifically, what is declared as speculative, and illusory about
bourgeois ideology. Second, the thesis of determinateness: ideas are only
the dependent effects of the ultimately determining level in the social
formation—the economic in the last instance. So that transformations in
the latter will show up, sooner or later, as corresponding modifications in
the former. Thirdly, the fixed correspondences between dominance in the
socio-economic sphere and the ideological; ‘ruling ideas’ are the ideas of
the ‘ruling class’—the class position of the latter providing the coupling and
the guarantee of correspondence with the former.
The critique of the classical theory has been addressed precisely to these
propositions. To say that ideas are ‘mere reflexes’ establishes their
materialism but leaves them without specific effects; a realm of pure
dependency. To say that ideas are determined ‘in the last instance’ by the
economic is to set out along the economic reductionist road. Ultimately,
ideas can be reduced to the essence of their truth—their economic content.
The only stopping-point before this ultimate reductionism arises through
the attempt to delay it a little and preserve some space for manoeuvre by
increasing the number of ‘mediations’. To say that the ‘ruling-ness’ of a
class is the guarantee of the dominance of certain ideas is to ascribe them
as the exclusive property of that class, and to define particular forms of
consciousness as class-specific.
It should be noted that, though these criticisms are directly addressed to
formulations concerning the problem of ideology, they in effect recapitulate
the substance of the more general and wide-ranging criticism advanced
against classical marxism itself: its rigid structural determinancy, its
reductionism of two varieties—class and economic; its way of
conceptualizing the social formation itself. Marx’s model of ideology has
been criticized because it did not conceptualize the social formation as a
determinate complex formation, composed of different practices, but as a
simple (or, as Althusser called it in For Marx and Reading Capital, an
‘expressive’) structure. By this Althusser meant that one practice—‘the
economic’—determines in a direct manner all others, and each effect is