Page 59 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL AND THE MARXIST CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 47

ideology in the explanation of Thatcherism. Hall tries to show that there is
one interpretation of ideology (a neutral version of Gramscian,
Althusserian and Laclauian inspiration) which best accounts for the
Thatcherite ideological phenomenon, whereas there is another (‘the “classic
variant” of the marxist theory of ideology, such as we find in or derive
from Marx and Engels’ German Ideology’) which cannot adequately
explain it (Hall, 1988a: 41). The purpose of this article is to examine this
claim, but more importantly, through it, to compare the analytical
capabilities of the neutral and critical versions of the marxist concept of
ideology as represented by Hall in the first case and by my interpretation of
Marx in the second. It must be clear therefore that my aim is not a critique
of Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism nor a systematic critique of Thatcherism
from the point of view of Marx’s concept of ideology, although I shall
claim that this can and must be done in addition to, and not instead of
Hall’s analyses.

POLITICS AS ARTICULATION AND IDEOLOGY AS
INTERPELLATION
The tradition which Hall represents within marxism can be traced back to
Althusser through the mediation of the early Laclau. Together with other
2
Althusserians like Mepham, Poulantzas, Godelier and Pêcheux, Laclau and
Hall criticize the notion of false consciousness and start from the premise
that it is not the subject that produces ideology as ideas but it is ideology,
conceived as a material instance of practices and rituals, that constitutes
the subject. Yet whereas the former maintain the negative conception of
ideology present in the early Althusser and emphasize the idea of ideology
as an ‘imaginary transposition’, its opposition to science, and the fact that
it interpellates individuals as subjects in a fundamental misrecognition
which helps reproduce the domination system, the latter are
unambiguously critical of Althusser’s shortcomings and selectively
synthetic in trying theoretically to fuse what was best in his approach with
a Gramscian perspective. Laclau and Hall know Marx very well and, at
least at the beginning, want to develop their theories within marxism, but
do not hesitate in abandoning both the original marxian negative concept
of ideology and Althusser’s early negative version. The idea of a theory of
ideology ‘in general’, the exclusive functional role of ideology as
reproducing production relations and the opposition between science and
ideology are discarded and class struggle is reinserted at the centre of the
problematic of ideology.
Yet this reinsertion is carried out in a way which entails a renewed attempt
to depart from essentialism and class reductionism. The principles of this
attempt are, first, that difference cannot be reduced to identity and
therefore social totality cannot be conceived as constituted by a basic