Page 61 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL AND THE MARXIST CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 49

The popular-democratic interpellation not only has no precise
content, but it is the domain of ideological class struggle par
excellence. Every class struggles at the ideological level
simultaneously as class and as the people, or rather, tries to give
coherence to its ideological discourse by presenting its class objectives
as the consummation of popular objectives.
(Laclau, 1977:108–9)

Whereas Laclau never attempts to ascertain Marx’s concept of ideology
and the starting-point of his own construction is a critique and elaboration
of Althusser, Hall is explicitly aware of Marx’s contribution and seeks to
assess it (1983). The first problem he confronts is the nature of the
‘distortion’ it apparently entails. But even before he addresses that problem
he has already established his own definition (quoted above) which totally
leaves out the idea of distortion. This does not present a problem for Hall
because (a) there is no fully developed theory of ideology in Marx; (b) there
are severe fluctuations in Marx’s use of the term; (c) we now use the term
‘to refer to all organized forms of social thinking’; and (d) ‘Marx did, on
many occasions, use the term ideology, practically, in this way’ (Hall, 1983:
60). However, to his credit, Hall recognizes that most of the time Marx
used the term as a critical weapon against other religious, philosophical
and economic theories and acknowledges ‘the fact…that Marx most often
used “ideology” to refer specifically to the manifestations of bourgeois
thought; and above all to its negative and distorted features’ (1983:61).
Having said this, Hall critically examines the theoretical bases of the
classical version: (a) ideas arise from and reflect the material conditions; (b)
ideas are effects of the economic level; and (c) ruling ideas are the ideas of
the ruling class. In spite of showing the insufficiency and problematic
nature of these propositions Hall proposes to be constructive, especially in
relation to the issue of distortion, and discovers, for instance that the way
in which Marx deals with the question of truth and falsehood in relation to
classical political economy is far more complex than the critics would have
us believe. Distortion in this context would amount to eternalization and
naturalization of social relations. Equally, Marx’s analysis of the operation
of the market and its deceptive appearances provides another source of
sophisticated insights into the problem of distortion, this time as ‘one-
sidedness’, ‘obscuring’ or ‘concealment’ (Hall, 1983:67–73).
Ultimately Hall’s effort to interpret Marx’s notion of distortion aims at
bypassing the distinction true-false, that is to say, at excluding from the
definition of distortion the connotation of falsehood in the sense of illusion
or unreality. In the second place, he aims to show that the ‘economic
relations themselves cannot prescribe a single, fixed and unalterable way of
conceptualizing’ reality, but that reality ‘can be “expressed” within
different ideological discourses’ (Hall, 1983:76). With both of these