Page 95 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 83

that ‘narrow ridge’ which Thompson had mapped as their proper terrain.
What was unique about the Birmingham case was that they took up the
version of marxism which prided itself on the fact that it was the most
rigorously ‘anti-humanist’ of intellectual projects. As Althusser famously
put it: ‘In 1845, Marx broke radically with every theory that based history
and politics on an essence of man’ (Althusser, 1969:227). According to
Althusser, ‘socialist humanism’ was an ideological intrusion into the
province of marxist science. The shift to marxism involved a rejection of
the central theoretical premise which had characterized cultural studies
from the 1950s up until that time.
The fourth major point also follows directly from the Althusserian
character of the marxism which was adopted by Hall and the majority of
the Centre’s graduate students. The first phase of cultural studies had, as
we saw above, an ‘expressive’ notion of culture. It was also, as Williams’
persistent stress upon ‘a whole way of life’ and his concern with the
‘structure of feeling’ illustrate, one which strove towards an
understanding of the ways in which the various different aspects of human
experience fitted together and formed a whole. Taken together, these views
of culture constitute a native version of the ‘expressive totality’ on which
Althusser and his followers spent so much effort in an attempt at
exorcising it from the corpus of marxism.
In the place of the expressive totality, and what were seen as its
irredeemable tendencies to reduce all of social life to the expression of a
single dominant contradiction, Althusserianism offered a quite different
model of ‘the social formation’. In particular, the problem of determination
was relegated to the last instance. The theoretical system held that the
‘lonely hour of the last instance’ really never did strike. The centre of
attention shifted from the relations between base and superstructure into
an elaboration of the internal articulation of the superstructure itself. As
Althusser put it:
…the theory of the specific effectivity of the superstructures and other
‘circumstances’ largely remains to be elaborated; and before the
theory of their effectivity or simultaneously…there must be an
elaboration of the theory of the particular essences of the specific
elements of the superstructure.
(Althusser, 1969:113–14, emphasis as in original, here and in all
quoted material, this chapter)
It was in this respect that Althusserian marxism was at its most
‘structuralist’ and at its greatest distance from the earlier concerns of
cultural studies. The close affinity of aim between some versions of
marxism and the older cultural studies had been based upon a shared belief
that the artifacts of a particular culture could be shown to in some way be