Page 56 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

44 STUART HALL

are, indeed, determinate: i.e. mutually determining. The structure of social
practices—the ensemble—is therefore neither free-floating nor immaterial.
But neither is it a transitive structure, in which its intelligibility lies
exclusively in the one-way transmission of effects from base upwards. The
economic cannot effect a final closure on the domain of ideology, in the
strict sense of always guaranteeing a result. It cannot always secure a
particular set of correspondences or always deliver particular modes of
reasoning to particular classes according to their place within its sytem.
This is precisely because (a) ideological categories are developed, generated
and transformed according to their own laws of development and
evolution; though, of course, they are generated out of given materials. It is
also because (b) of the necessary ‘openness’ of historical development to
practice and struggle. We have to acknowledge the real indeterminancy of
the political—the level which condenses all the other levels of practice and
secures their functioning in a particular system of power.
This relative openness or relative indeterminancy is necessary to marxism
itself as a theory. What is ‘scientific’ about the marxist theory of politics is
that it seeks to understand the limits to political action given by the terrain
on which it operates. This terrain is defined, not by forces we can predict
with the certainty of natural science, but by the existing balance of social
forces, the specific nature of the concrete conjuncture. It is ‘scientific’
because it understands itself as determinate; and because it seeks to develop
a practice which is theoretically informed. But it is not ‘scientific’ in the sense
that political outcomes and the consequences of the conduct of political
struggles are foreordained in the economic stars.
Understanding ‘determinancy’ in terms of setting of limits, the
establishment of parameters, the defining of the space of operations, the
concrete conditions of existence, the ‘givenness’ of social practices, rather
than in terms of the absolute predictability of particular outcomes, is the
only basis of a ‘marxism without final guarantees’. It establishes the open
horizon of marxist theorizing—determinancy without guaranteed closures.
The paradigm of perfectly closed, perfectly predictable, systems of thought
is religion or astrology, not science. It would be preferable, from this
perspective, to think of the ‘materialism’ of marxist theory in terms of
‘determination by the economic in the first instance’, since marxism is
surely correct, against all idealisms, to insist that no social practice or set of
relations floats free of the determinate effects of the concrete relations in
which they are located. However, ‘determination in the last instance’ has
long been the repository of the lost dream or illusion of theoretical
certainty. And this has been bought at considerable cost, since certainty
stimulates orthodoxy, the frozen rituals and intonation of already
witnessed truth, and all the other attributes of a theory that is incapable of
fresh insights. It represents the end of the process of theorizing, of the
development and refinement of new concepts and explanations which,