Page 50 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

38 STUART HALL

symbol of the more abstract freedoms; or in the self-interest and intrinsic
competitiveness of market advantage the ‘representation’ of something
natural, normal and universal about human nature itself.
Let me now draw some tentative conclusions from the ‘re-reading’ I have
offered about the meaning of Marx’s passage in the light of more recent
critiques and the new theories advanced.
The analysis is no longer organized around the distinction between
the ‘real’ and the ‘false’. The obscuring or mystifying effects of ideology are
no longer seen as the product of a trick or magical illusion. Nor are they
simply attributed to false consciousness, in which our poor, benighted,
untheoretical proletarians are forever immured. The relations in which
people exist are the ‘real relations’ which the categories and concepts they
use help them to grasp and articulate in thought. But—and here we may be
on a route contrary to emphasis from that with which ‘materialism’ is
usually associated—the economic relations themselves cannot prescribe a
single, fixed and unalterable way of conceptualizing it. It can be
‘expressed’ within different ideological discourses. What’s more, these
discourses can employ the conceptual model and transpose it into other,
more strictly ‘ideological’, domains. For example, it can develop a discourse
—e.g. latter-day monetarism—which deduces the grand value of ‘Freedom’
from the freedom from compulsion which brings men and women, once
again, every working day, into the labour market. We have also by-passed
the distinction ‘true’ and ‘false’, replacing them with other, more accurate
terms: like ‘partial’ and ‘adequate’, or ‘one-sided’ and ‘in its differentiated
totality’. To say that a theoretical discourse allows us to grasp a concrete
relation ‘in thought’ adequately means that the discourse provides us with
a more complete grasp of all the different relations of which that relation is
composed, and of the many determinations which form its conditions of
existence. It means that our grasp is concrete and whole, rather than a
thin, one-sided abstraction. One-sided explanations, which are partial,
part-for-the-whole, types of explanations, and which allow us only to
abstract one element out (the market, for example) and explain that they
are inadequate precisely on those grounds. For that reason alone, they may
be considered ‘false’. Though, strictly speaking, the term is misleading if
what we have in mind is some simple, all-or-nothing distinction between the
True and the False, or between Science and Ideology. Fortunately or
unfortunately, social explanations rarely fall into such neat pigeonholes.
In our ‘re-reading’, we have also attempted to take on board a number
of secondary propositions, derived from the more recent theorizing about
‘ideology’ in an effort to see how incompatible they are with Marx’s
formulation. As we have seen, the explanation relates to concepts, ideas,
terminology, categories, perhaps also images and symbols (money; the
wage packet; freedom) which allow us to grasp some aspect of a social