Page 42 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

30 STUART HALL

doors he opened provided precisely the exit points through which many
abandoned the problematic of the classical marxist theory of ideology
altogether. They gave up, not only Marx’s particular way in The German
Ideology of coupling ‘ruling class and ruling ideas’, but the very
preoccupations with the class structuring of ideology, and its role in the
generation and maintenance of hegemony.
Discourse and psychoanalytic theories, originally conceived as
theoretical supports to the critical work of theory revision and
development, provided instead categories which substituted for those of the
earlier paradigm. Thus, the very real gaps and lacunae in the ‘objective’
thrust of marxist theory, around the modalities of consciousness and the
‘subjectification’ of ideologies, which Althusser’s use of the terms
‘interpellation’ (borrowed from Freud) and ‘positioning’ (borrowed from
Lacan) were intended to address, became themselves the exclusive object of
the exercise. The only problem about ideology was the problem of how
ideological subjects were formed through the psychoanalytic processes. The
theoretical tensions were then untied. This is the long descent of
‘revisionist’ work on ideology, which leads ultimately (in Foucault) to the
abolition of the category of ‘ideology’ altogether. Yet its highly
sophisticated theorists, for reasons quite obscure, continue to insist that
their theories are ‘really’ materialist, political, historical, and so on: as if
haunted by Marx’s ghost still rattling around in the theoretical machine.
I have recapitulated this story in an immensely abbreviated form because
I do not intend to engage in detail with its conjectures and refutations.
Instead, I want to pick up their thread, acknowledging their force and
cogency at least in modifying substantially the classical propositions about
ideology, and, in the light of them, to reexamine some of the earlier
formulations by Marx, and consider whether they can be refashioned and
developed in the positive light of the criticisms advanced—as most good
theories ought to be capable of—without losing some of the essential
qualities and insights (what used to be called the ‘rational core’) which they
originally possessed. Crudely speaking, that is because—as I hope to show
—I acknowledge the immense force of many of the criticisms advanced.
But I am not convinced that they wholly and entirely abolish every useful
insight, every essential starting-point, in a materialist theory of ideology. If,
according to the fashionable canon, all that is left, in the light of the
devastatingly advanced, clever and cogent critiques, is the labour of
perpetual ‘deconstruction’, this essay is devoted to a little modest work of
‘reconstruction’—without, I hope, being too defaced by ritual orthodoxy.
Take, for example, the extremely tricky ground of the ‘distortions’ of
ideology, and the question of ‘false consciousness’. Now it is not difficult to
see why these kinds of formulations have brought Marx’s critics bearing
down on him. ‘Distortions’ opens immediately the question as to why some
people—those living their relation to their conditions of existence through