Page 98 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

86 COLIN SPARKS

internally structured activity which gave new meanings to the elements
within it which bore only contingent relations to the meanings with which
they were invested within other cultures.
Both the desire to trace the class origins of particular styles and the
efforts at reading yielded extremely interesting and valuable material. The
theoretical problem, from the standpoint of Althusserian marxism, was in
the link between the two elements. The expressive theory of subcultures
pointed back to the earlier humanist model, while the theory of style
pointed towards the new structural marxist model.
The problem was very clearly identified by one ultra-orthodox
schismatic from the Centre in a review of Resistance through Rituals which
is worth quoting at some length. The authors, she argued, had attempted to
combine a reductivist account of the class determination of culture with an
‘ideological’ reading of signification: they had failed to resolve this
impossible contradiction:

We now begin to see more clearly some of the consequences of these
theoretical premises: the social formation is understood in terms of an
essential division between capital and labour which is directly
reflected in economic classes, which themselves are reflected at the
level of culture and ideology. Thus, the theory remains fundamentally
committed to a conception of economic determination, with the
economic understood, not as production and exchange relations, but
as relations between monolithic classes, which are knowable through
the object ‘consciousness’. Even though the analysis appears at first to
give attention to the ideological level, it becomes clear, when its
conception of the social formation is analysed, that there is no
autonomy attributed to the inscription of ideological or political
representations which become simply functions or expressions of
economic interest. In this way, issues such as the conceptualisation of
the feminist movement or the possibility of politically reactionary
positions of the working class are either ignored or, in the latter case,
invested with a radical potential which is displaced according to the
distortions operated by bourgeois ideology.
(Coward, 1977:90)

The collective attempt to rebut these charges was not really successful and
the problems remained unresolved in this phase of cultural studies
(Chambers et al., 1977–8).
We can observe another aspect of the problem if we briefly trace the
Centre’s thinking about the relationship of ideology to the mass media. The
development of the ‘encoding/decoding’ model of television discourse, and
its elaboration into a version of the ‘dominant ideology thesis’, was one of
Hall’s major intellectual achievements during the period. It seems first to