Page 54 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

42 STUART HALL

them to be attracted to petty bourgeois ideas. Nevertheless, there was, he
suggested, some relationship, or tendency, between the objective position
of that class fraction, and the limits and horizons of thought to which they
would be ‘spontaneously’ attracted. This was a judgement about the
‘characteristic forms of thought’ appropriate as an ideal-type to certain
positions in the social structure. It was definitely not a simple equation in
actual historical reality between class position and ideas. The point about
‘tendential historical relations’ is that there is nothing inevitable, necessary
or fixed forever about them. The tendential lines of forces define only the
givenness of the historical terrain.
They indicate how the terrain has been structured, historically. Thus it is
perfectly possible for the idea of ‘the nation’ to be given a progressive
meaning and connotation, embodying a national-popular collective will, as
Gramsci argued. Nevertheless, in a society like Britain, the idea of ‘nation’
has been consistently articulated towards the right. Ideas of ‘national
identity’ and ‘national greatness’ are intimately bound up with imperial
supremacy, tinged with racist connotations, and underpinned by a four-
century-long history of colonization, world market supremacy, imperial
expansion and global destiny over native peoples. It is therefore much more
difficult to give the notion of ‘Britain’ a socially radical or democratic
reference. These associations are not given for all time. But they are
difficult to break because the ideological terrain of this particular social
formation has been so powerfully structured in that way by its previous
history. These historical connections define the ways in which the
ideological terrain of a particular society has been mapped out. They are the
‘traces’ which Gramsci (1971) mentioned: the ‘stratified deposits in
popular philosophy’ (324), which no longer have an inventory, but which
establish and define the fields along which ideological struggle is likely to
move.
That terrain, Gramsci suggested, was above all the terrain of what he
called ‘common sense’: a historical, not a natural or universal or
spontaneous form of popular thinking, necessarily ‘fragmentary, disjointed
and episodic’. The ‘subject’ of common sense is composed of very
contradictory ideological formations:
it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced
science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level
and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human
race united the world over.
(324)

And yet, because this network of pre-existing traces and common-sense
elements constitutes the realm of practical thinking for the masses of the
people, Gramsci insisted that it was precisely on this terrain that