Page 48 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

36 STUART HALL

he says clearly, ‘has scientific value’. But, still, what can he mean by ‘false’
and ‘distorted’ in this context?
He cannot mean that ‘the market’ does not exist. In fact, it is all too real.
It is the very life-blood of capitalism, from one viewpoint. Without it
capitalism would never have broken through the framework of feudalism;
and without its ceaseless continuation, the circuits of capital would come to
a sudden and disastrous halt. I think we can only make sense of these terms
if we think of giving an account of an economic circuit, which consists of
several interconnected moments, from the vantage point of one of those
moments alone. If, in our explanation, we privilege one moment only, and
do not take account of the differentiated whole or ‘ensemble’ of which it is
a part; or if we use categories of thought, appropriate to one such moment
alone, to explain the whole process; then we are in danger of giving what
Marx would have called (after Hegel) a ‘one-sided’ account.
One-sided explanations are always a distortion. Not in the sense that
they are a lie about the system, but in the sense that a ‘half-truth’ cannot be
the whole truth about anything. With those ideas, you will always
represent a part of the whole. You will thereby produce an explanation
which is only partially adequate—and in that sense, ‘false’. Also, if you use
only ‘market categories and concepts’ to understand the capitalist circuit as
a whole, there are literally many aspects of it which you cannot see. In that
sense, the categories of market exchange obscure and mystify our
understanding of the capitalist process: that is they do not enable us to see
or formulate other aspects invisible.
Is the worker who lives his or her relation to the circuits of capitalist
production exclusively through the categories of a ‘fair price’ and a ‘fair
wage’, in ‘false consciousness’? Yes, if by that we mean there is something
about her situation which she cannot grasp with the categories she is using;
something about the process as a whole which is systematically hidden
because the available concepts only give her a grasp of one of its many-
sided moments. No, if by that we mean that she is utterly deluded about
what goes on under capitalism.
The falseness therefore arises, not from the fact that the market is an
illusion, a trick, a sleight-of-hand, but only in the sense that it is an
inadequate explanation of a process. It has also substituted one part of the
process for the whole—a procedure which, in linguistics, is known as
‘metonymy’ and in anthropology, psychoanalysis and (with special
meaning) in Marx’s work, as fetishism. The other ‘lost’ moments of the
circuit are, however, unconscious, not in the Freudian sense, because they
have been repressed from consciousness, but in the sense of being invisible,
given the concepts and categories we are using.
This also helps to explain the otherwise extremely confusing terminology
in Capital, concerning what ‘appears on the surface’ (which is sometimes
said to be ‘merely phenomenal’: i.e., not very important, not the real