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ITINERARY FA THOUGHTSTUARTHALL,CULTURALTUDIES,AND THEUNRESOLVEDPROBLEMFTHERELATIONFCULTUREO NOTCULTURE

Janice Peck

In a 1992 memorial for Allon White, Stuart Hall eulogized thepassing of his friend and of the metaphors of transformation thathad been so significant, historically, for the radical imaginary.Modeled on the revolutionary moment and associated with Marx-ism, such metaphors, Hall said, no longer command assent. Ratherthan mourning their demise, he suggested that cultural studies, hav-ing moved decisively beyond such dramatic simplifications andbinary reversals, required a new metaphor forimagining a culturalpolitics and thinking the relations between 'the social' and 'thesymbolic ' ( For Allon White, 287-88). Hall might have beenrecounting his own intellectual travels, having embarked on hiscareer committed to the metaphors he now came to inter. This rever-sal in Hall's thought parallels the theoretical itinerary of the fieldwith which his name has become synonymous. Insofar as Hall is

largely responsible for developing and articulating [its] theoreticalpositions (Dworkin, 196), his writings provide a map of the trajec-tory of cultural studies, from culturalism to structuralism to struc-turalist Marxism to poststructuralism and post-Marxism. This essaycritically assesses that journey by tracing Hall's engagement withthese bodies of thought as he sought to resolve the problem of areflection theory of culture. His solution, I will argue, necessarilyresulted in abandoning a materialist theory of culture while conserv-ing the economism and idealism that cultural studies set out tosurpass.CulturalCritique48-Spring 2001-Copyright 2001 Regentsof the Universityof Minnesota

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ITINERARYOF A THOUGHT | 201

THE PROBLEMOF CULTUREAS REFLECTIONCultural studies is predicated on the belief that culture must beunderstood on its own terms and in relation to other aspects of sociallife (i.e., not culture ). In the early 1960s, two of the field's found-ing figures were engaged in thinking that relation. Two years beforethe appearance of his The Making of the English WorkingClass, E. P.Thompson reviewed Raymond Williams's The Long Revolution.Applauding the book's accomplishments, Thompson concluded thatWilliams had fallen short of his claim to provide a theory of cultureas the study of the relationship between elements of a whole way oflife (Williams, LongRevolution,46). The book erred in two directions,Thompson argued, edging toward a culture equals society expla-nation while segregating culture from politics and economics with-out establishing the manner according to which the systems arerelated to each other (Thompson, Long Revolution, 31). He coun-tered that any theory of culture must include the concept of thedialectical interaction of culture and something that is not cultureand offered his corrective:

we must suppose the raw material of life experience to be at one pole,and all the infinitely complex human disciplines and systems, articulateand inarticulate,formalised in institutions or dispersed in the least for-mal ways, which handle, transmitor distort this raw materialto be atthe other. (33)

Although both figures would later be placed under the sign ofculturalism, the difference in their thought was significant. For

Thompson, the domains of culture and not culture were empiri-cally distinct, while Williams was reaching toward a conception ofculture as integral to the social totality-what he would later term awhole indissoluable practice (Marxism, 31). Indeed, he retrospec-tively described TheLongRevolutionas

the attempt to develop a theory of social totality ... to find ways ofstudying structure,in particularworks and periods, which could stay intouch with and illuminateparticularart works and forms,but also formsand relations of more generalsocial life. ( Literatureand Sociology, 10)


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In taking up the question of the relation of culture to not cul-ture and to the social totality, Thompson and Williams took on theproblem of reflection -the dominant understanding of culture inWestern thought that posited it as a reflection of a more primordialmental or material process. In dialogue with the intellectual forcefield of Marxism, the version of reflection theory they addressed wasthat of the orthodox Marxism that emerged within the SecondInternational, was appropriated by the various European communistparties, and solidified under the Third International and Stalin'sreign in the Soviet Union.1 This congealed and simplistic conceptionof Marxism (Bettelheim, 19) identified the base with the state ofdevelopment of the productive forces. All other aspects of existence,including culture, were relegated to the superstructure and treatedas a reflection of the demands of the base, which was consideredautonomous, unconditioned, and self-determining.2

Thompson and Williams challenged this mechanistic material-ism and its reflection theory of culture that had informed Marxistliterary criticism in Britain since the 1930s (Mulhern; Higgins). Theywere not alone in the endeavor. Beginning with Lukacs, various fig-ures gathered under the rubric of Western Marxism also engagedthe problem of reflection that lurked within the base/superstructureformulation (e.g., Bloch, Brecht, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin,Gramsci, Sartre, Goldmann). As Martin Jaynotes, despite their manydifferences, these thinkers shared an utter repudiation of the legacyof the Second International and a preoccupation with the criticalrole of culture in reproducing capitalism (7, 8; also Anderson). West-ern Marxism can thus be seen as an ongoing effort to rethink the con-cept of the superstructure and the problem of reflection-a projectthat Hall and cultural studies would continue.

SUPERSEDING THE PAST, PROJECTINGTHE FUTUREOF CULTURALSTUDIES

The centrality of the problem of reflection was acknowledged by Hallin Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms. Published shortly after hisdecade (1969-1979) heading the Birmingham Centre for Contempo-rary Cultural Studies (CCCS), the essay considered the field's future


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by reflecting on its roots in the intersection of culturalism and struc-turalism. The former,identified with Thompson, Williams, and RichardHoggart, was credited with revising the received Arnoldian/Leavisite view of culture, expanding it to encompass the meanings,traditions, and practices that arise from and express human exis-tence. Structuralism (identified with Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Barthes,and Althusser) was also concerned with culture as meaning, but froma decidedly different perspective. Here meaning (more accurately,signification) was seen as arising not from subjective experience,but from within the operation of objective signifying systems thatpreceded and determined individual experience. For structuralism,experience was not the source of signification, but its effect. Herestructuralism's antihumanism collided with the humanist inclinationsof culturalism.

Hall noted this tension as well as a key point of convergence:both paradigms were critical encounters with the base/superstructurerelation and rejections of reflection theory. If each paradigm was aradical break with the base/superstructure metaphor ( CulturalStudies: Two Paradigms, 65), both make a constant, if flawed,return to it; in Hall's view: They are correct in insisting that thisquestion-which resumes all the problems of a non-reductive deter-minacy-is the heart of the matter: and that, on the solution of thisproblem will turn the capacity of Cultural Studies to supercede theendless oscillations between idealism and reductionism (72). Join-ing the paradigms, he intimated, might provide a means of resolv-ing the field's coreproblem of grasping the specificity of differentpractices and the forms of articulated unity they constitute. Cultur-alism and structuralism were central to the future of cultural studiesbecause they confront-even if in radically different ways-thedialectic between conditions and consciousness and pose the ques-tion of the relation between the logic of thinking and the 'logic' ofhistorical process (72).A decade later, Hall reconsidered the future of the field in light ofits origins. This time he argued that the project of cultural studies

begins, and develops through the critique of a certain reductionism andeconomism-which I think is not extrinsic but intrinsic to Marxism; acontestation with the model of base and superstructure, through which


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sophisticated and vulgar Marxism alike had tried to think the relation-ship between society, economy and culture. ( CulturalStudies and ItsTheoreticalLegacies, 279)

The earlier quest to comprehend culture in dialectical relation to thesocial totality now seemed to Hall naive and tenuous: there's alwaysbeen something decentered about the medium of culture, about lan-guage, textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evadesthe attempts to link it, directly and immediately, with other struc-tures. In consequence, it has always been impossible in the theo-retical field of Cultural Studies ... to get anything like an adequateaccount of culture's relations and its effects. Practitioners mustlearn to live with this displacement of culture and its failure toreconcile itself with other questions that matter, with other questionsthat cannot and can never be fully covered by critical textuality(284). In the course of a decade, then, the terms of theoretical inquiryhad changed. In his memorial for White, Hall refers not to the dialec-tic of conditions and consciousness, but sees the core problem ofcultural studies as the relationship of the social and the symbolic,the 'play' between power and culture ( ForAllon White, 288).3Itthus appears that cultural studies has undergone a signal reformula-tion of its problematic. Indeed, Hall characterizes the passing of

metaphors of transformation as an absolutely fundamental 'turn'in cultural theory (303).How are we to understand this movement of thought? A com-mon response among practitioners is that the field has outgrown itsfounding paradigms and their concern with the base/superstructurerelation. Such theoretical evolution is to be expected, in Hall'sview, given that we are entering the era of post-Marxism ( CulturalStudies and Its Theoretical Legacies, 281). This stance is echoedelsewhere. Lawrence Grossberg sees cultural studies as having sur-passed the reductionism and reflectionism ( Cultural Studies vs.Political Economy, 79) of political economy (and, by extension,of Marxism) through the recognition that the relations between econ-omy, society, and culture are much more complex and difficult todescribe (76). Angela McRobbie notes that if the two paradigmsarose in engagement with Marxism, from the start Cultural Studiesemerged as a form of radical inquiry which went against reductionism


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and economism (720). The totalizing field of Marxist theory, shesuggests, has been so discredited that it is no longer useful to retainthe word Marxism to characterize the current mode of inquiry (723).In the wake of post-Marxism and decline of grand theory, cul-tural studies has achieved a greater degree of openness (724).

Critics, in contrast, paint this movement as a regression. ColinSparks contends that having abandoned its original task of under-standing the determination of culture, cultural studies has optedfor an essentially textualist account (98). Paul Smith suggests thatthe field has chosen to collapse the political into the cultural orplace them at a great distance from each other. Both paths elide thequestion of the relations between the mode of production and theformation of civic life and cultures and between civic life and cul-tures. In Smith's assessment, Cultural studies is still at the stagewhere it thinks of the realms of the economic, the civic, and the cul-tural as for all intents and purposes discrete (59-60). The conse-quence of such analytical separation is to defuse the field's criticalpractice:

In the division of those realms, cultural studies fails to grasp that theonly object it can with validity propose as its own ... is the totality ofsocial relations and cultural productions at given times and in givenplaces. Indeed, without this kind of recognition, cultural studies mustbe condemned as exactly one more bourgeois form of knowledge pro-duction, as it reflects the divisions between the realms that it is the des-perate effort of capitalistdiscourse to police. (60)

Dan Schiller also criticizes the withdrawal of cultural studies fromthinking the relation of communication and culture to the socialtotality-a tendency that he says plagues the history of communica-tion studies in general. For Schiller, this tendency derives from adualism in communication theory between the mental and the mate-rial, or intellectual and manual labor, resulting in a continuinginability to integrate, or even to encompass, 'labor' and 'communi-cation' within a single conceptual totality (xi).All three critics link the failings of cultural studies to its aban-donment of a materialist understanding of the relation of culture tonot culture -in other words, to its retreat from Marxism. Sparksand Schiller see this retreat as the result of cultural studies turning to


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structuralism in the 1970s. Sparks contends that because the Birm-ingham Centre's appropriation of Marxism followed its embrace ofstructuralism in the work of Barthes and Levi-Strauss, the Marxismthat briefly achieved orthodoxy in cultural studies was the struc-turalist Marxism of Althusser. The field's subsequent move awayfrom Marxism followed from Althusser's own weaknesses (71).Schiller also faults the turn to structuralism that cultural studiestook, which isolated signification from the rest of practical activ-ity: sundered from other processes of production, signification-properly credited with being a 'real and positive social force'-veered off as an increasingly self-determining generative principle(153). In consequence, the full range of production, which was toremain of vital importance to Williams and others, who challengedthe classic model of base and superstructure, was severely trun-cated (153).

Sparks comments that the dominant view within the field todayis probably that in shedding its marxist husk, cultural studies hasempowered itself to address the real issues of contemporary culturalanalysis (98). Indeed, many cultural studies practitioners seemrelieved to have shed outmoded theoretical frameworks and impa-tient with those who have not freed themselves.4 The implication isthat cultural studies has finally surpassed idealism and reductionismand resolved all the problems of a non-reductive determinacy thatHall once deemed the heart of the matter. It is precisely thisassumption that I wish to interrogate. I agree that the intellectual tra-jectory of cultural studies is indelibly marked by its adoption of thestructuralist paradigm in the 1970s, with which it hoped to countera reflection theory of culture. Under Hall's guidance, cultural studiestried to resolve the problem of reflection by separating culture fromnot culture -a move facilitated by structuralism's privileging oflinguistic form over substance, contingency over necessity, andsynchronic structure over diachronic development. This commit-ment to structuralism was decisive for the field's subsequent appro-priation of Marxism via Althusser and Gramsci. Having adoptedstructuralism-with its explicit Saussurean foundations-the pro-ject of cultural studies was inherently vulnerable to destabilizationby the poststructuralist critique of those foundations. Hall's jour-ney from seeking to grasp the dialectic between conditions and


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creativity in their arguments for the centrality of culture in thehistorical process. Rejecting the view that consciousness and culturewere reflexes of economic forces, they sought to restore the place ofpraxis in history. As Thompson argued, It is the active process-which is at the same time the process through which men make theirhistory-that I am insisting upon ( Long Revolution, 33). Williamscriticized the reflectionism of orthodox Marxism, whereby art isdegraded as a mere reflection of the basic economic and politicalprocess, on which it is thought to be parasitic. For Williams, thecreative element in man is the root both of his personality and hissociety; it can neither be confined to art nor excluded from thesystems of decision [politics] and maintenance [economy] (LongRevolution, 115;see also Cultureand Society).If culturalism laid the foundation for cultural studies, itshegemony, according to Hall, was interrupted by the arrival on theintellectual scene of the 'structuralisms' ( Cultual Studies: TwoParadigms, 64).5 It was under Hall's leadership that structuralismachieved paradigmatic status in cultural studies. Like culturalism,structuralism engaged with the problem of reflection and thebase/superstructure formulation. In The Savage Mind, Levi-Straussacknowledged the incontestable primacy of infrastructures, whileaiming to contribute to that theory of superstructures scarcelytouched upon by Marx (130). Barthes's Mythologiesemployed Saus-surean semiotics to account in detail for the mystification whichtransforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature (9).Althusser challenged economism with his notion of the relativeautonomy of the superstructures and called for a theory of the spe-cific effectivity of the superstructures that largely remains to beelaborated (ForMarx, 113). Indeed, Fredric Jameson has character-ized the structuralist project as the study of superstructures, or, in amore limited way, of ideology (101).Structuralism mounted its challenge to reflection theory throughthe appropriation of Saussurean linguistics. It was Saussure'sachievement to undermine previous models that had viewed lan-guage as a reflection or an expression of a pre-existing meaning orpsychic impression, a re-presencing of something immaterial in thematerial by proposing a relational, rather than substantialist, theoryof language (Riordan, 4; see also Frank). Rejecting the existence of a


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ITINERARYOF A THOUGHTI 209

prior world of cognitive states represented by symbols, Saussuresuggested that words and ideas were born together through the oper-ation of a linguistic system that, via principles of differentiation andcombination, imposed form on both thought and matter. In Saus-sure's model, language was a closed taxonomy of signs that, asbinary relations of signifiers and signifieds, were articulated by aninvariant code that assigned to each signifier a unique signified. Thiscode allowed for the differentiation and recombination of elementsaccording to strict rules of formation, and the formulation of thisprinciple of formation constituted the structure of language.Because in order to use language, a speaker must recognize the iden-tity of a particular element through its difference from all others,Saussure held that a linguistic system is always already complete-a

synchronic (timeless) totality of interrelations (Riordan, 5). In thismodel, meaning is not a property of consciousness or of things, butthe effect of a formal schema of articulation that determines howelements are distinguished and combined. Accordingly, the relationof signs and referents is arbitrary (i.e., not a reflection of anything),and the positive content of signs (ideas and phonic substances) issubordinate to their function as formal values within the linguisticstructure (langue) that constitutes the conditions of possibility foractual language use (parole).Thus, Saussure could argue that lan-guage is itself a form not a substance (120) consisting of only dif-ferences withoutpositive terms (118).French structuralism arose through a strong interpretation ofSaussure's conception of language as form rather than substance(Frank,31). Appropriating key principles of Saussurean linguistics-its conception of structure, nonrepresentational model of language,doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign, indifference to language'sreferential dimensions, prioritization of langue over paroleand syn-chrony over diachrony-structuralism applied these to the study ofculture and society in a move that had profound implications acrossthe human sciences. Positing Saussure's structure of language asthe blueprint for the study of society in general, structuralism pro-posed that the multiplicity of human practices could be understoodas differential articulations of signifying systems ruled by struc-tural codes (Riordan, 4). Thus, phenomena ranging from kinshipsystems to eating habits to myth and literature could be conceived as


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manifestations of the same general principles. Through this prioriti-zation of form over substance, structuralism made language theprivileged object of thought, science, and philosophy, the 'key' toman and to social history, and the means of access to the laws ofsocietal functioning (Kristeva, 3). As Julia Kristeva notes, the sci-entific knowledge of language was projected onto the whole of socialpractice.... In this way were laid the bases of a scientific approachto the vast realm of human actions (4). Central to structuralism isthat the activities of individuals are reduced to the level of phonicmaterial (ibid.). That is, individual actions are arbitrary-withoutsubstantial meaning of their own-because their significance is con-stituted through their inscription within a schema of articulationthat preexists them. Thus, structuralism held that human beings are

spoken by the structure.Pierre Bourdieu has argued that the destiny of modern linguis-tics and the human sciences that have taken the linguistic turn wasdetermined by Saussure's inaugural move through which he sepa-rates the 'external' elements of linguistics from the 'internal' ele-ments. In imputing autonomy to language, structural linguisticsexercise[d] an ideological effect, presenting itself as the most nat-ural of the social sciencesby separating the linguistic instrument fromits social conditions of production and utilization (33). This critiqueholds for structuralism, which engaged in a double movement of the-oretically isolating language from the rest of sociohistorical existenceso as to submit it to scientific analysis, and then projecting the rulesof operation of language back onto the whole of social practice.It was only by means of this prior separation that language could bemade into the privileged mode of access to the laws of societal func-

tioning. Integral to this privileging of language was the demotion ofa diachronic (historical) understanding of meaning in favor of theview that signification derived entirely from the operation of syn-chronic differentiation. From such a perspective, the diachronic isreduced to mere repetition without meaning-to a series of discon-tinuous sequential structures (Riordan, 7). Hence, structuralism'srejection of any notion of historical necessity in favor of irreduciblecontingency (Levi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, 477).6 Laboringunder the shadow of Saussure, structuralism thus replaced history(temporal development) with structure (the internal relational logic


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of static systems) as both the object and method of inquiry-a movethat paved the way for the abandonment of Marxism.Given that cultural studies searched for a nonreflectionist con-ception of culture, the allure of structuralism was predictable.According to Sparks, semiotics and structuralism were introduced atthe Birmingham Centre in the late 1960s independently of, and ear-lier than, any serious engagement with marxism (81). From 1969 to1971, the Centre embarked on a search for an alternative problem-atic and method that included phenomenology, symbolic interac-tionism, structuralism and marxism (cited in Sparks, 81). Thisperiod of theoretical reappraisal, which coincided with Hall's rise toCentre director, marked the beginning of culturalism's displacementfrom dominant paradigm status. This shift is evident in Hall's assess-ment of the two paradigms, where he sides with structuralism'sview of experience as an effect of structure, favors its notion ofthe necessary complexity of the unity of a structure over cultural-ism's complex simplicity of an expressive causality ( CulturalStudies: Two Paradigms, 68), and grants it methodological superior-ity owing to its concepts with which to cut into the complexity ofthe real (67).

Hall's acceptance of structuralism's founding principles is evi-dent in his treatment of Levi-Strauss. Thelinguistic paradigm, Hallargues, allowed Levi-Strauss to approach culture not at the levelof correspondences between the contentof a practice, but at the levelof their forms and structures, and to conceive 'culture' as the cate-gories and frameworks in thought and language through which dif-ferent societies classified out their conditions of existence. Further,Levi-Strauss thought of the manner and practice through whichthese categories and mental frameworks were produced and trans-formed, largely on an analogy with the ways in which languageitself-the principal medium of 'culture'-operated. For Hall, Levi-Strauss's emphasis on the internal relations by means of which thecategories of meaning were produced provided a new way toconceptualize the relation of culture to not culture -one in whichthe causal logic of determinacy was abandoned in favour of a struc-turalist causality-a logic of arrangement,of internal relations, ofarticulation of parts within a structure (65).While Hall portrays structuralism as only one theoretical influence


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on cultural studies, he grants it was a formative intervention whichcoloured and influenced everything that followed ( Cultural Stud-ies and the Centre, 29). Under that influence, Hall (and with him theBirmingham Centre) made the move from meaning (as an activity ofhuman beings) to signification (as an operation of language). Theconceptual basis of his encoding/decoding model of media dis-course, as he noted in a 1989 interview, reflected the beginnings ofstructuralism and semiotics and their impact on Cultural Studies.The encoding/decoding model was also an argument with Marxism... with the base/superstructure model, with the notion of ideology,language and culture as secondary, not as constitutive but only asconstituted by socio-economic processes (Angus et al., 254). Anunderstanding of signification in terms of the operation of languageguides Hall's description of media meanings and messages as

sign vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any form of commu-nication or language, through the operation of codes within thesyntagmatic chain of a discourse and constituted within the rulesof 'language ' (Hall, Encoding/Decoding, 128). He adopts the ideathat linguistic systems precede and determine access to the real :Events can only be signified within the aural-visual forms of thetelevisual discourse. In the moment when a historical event passesunder the sign of discourse, it is subject to all the complex formal'rules' by which language signifies (129). Thus, Hall argued, dis-course is not the 'transparent' representation of the 'real, ' but theconstruction of knowledge through the operation of a code (29).The influence of Levi-Strauss and Barthes is evident in Hall's

The Determinations of News Photographs. Patterned afterBarthes's The Rhetoric of the Image, Hall's essay examines thecodeswhich make signification possible (176) in order to discern thehidden 'deep structure ' (183) that functions as a selection device(181) to classify out the world (186). This view of signification as aprocess that constructs knowledge by assigning meaning to 'raw'events ( Encoding/Decoding, 129) is echoed in Hall's Culture,the Media, and the 'Ideological Effect.' Thus, the founding principleof structural linguistics-that signification results from the purelyformal articulation of elements within a system-was imported intocultural studies and applied to the study of the media. For Hall,structuralism's value for building a non-reductionist cultural theory


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was its method for studying the systems of signs and ... representa-tions ; its emphasis on the specificity, the irreducibility, of thecultural ( Cultural Studies and the Centre, 30); and its break with

theoretical humanism (31). Structuralism, he argues, obliged usreally to rethink the 'cultural' as a set of practices: to think of thematerial conditions of signification and its necessary determina-tions (31). Here, in the language of practices and material condi-tions of signification, we encounter the influence of Althusser onHall's thought. Although Levi-Strauss had aspired to atheory of thesuperstructures and Barthes had turned the lens of semiotics onideology, it was Althusser who would tie the knot of Marxism andstructuralism within cultural studies.

STRUCTURALISM+ MARXISMAs with structuralism, the turn toward Marxism at the BirminghamCentre began under Hall's direction.7 Sparks contends that while theCentre's early forays into Marxism traversed a range of thinkers,including Lukacs and Sartre, by 1973 Althusser's structuralist Marx-ism had achieved orthodoxy (82). A chapter of Althusser's ForMarx- On Contradiction and Overdetermination -was particu-larly formative for Hall, who as late as 1983 applauded

the richnessof its theoretical concepts and deemed its achievement as havingbegun to think about complex kinds of determinacy without reduc-tion to a simple unity ( Signification, Representation, Ideology,94). Althusser won pride of place in British cultural studies in the1970s because he offered an innovative merger of Marxism and struc-turalism, which at the time represented the theoretical cutting edgein the human sciences. His Marxism was antieconomistic, antihu-manist, and provided a philosophical rationale and method thatpromised to pierce the opacity of the immediate (Althusser andBalibar, 16). Althusser's critique of economism followed from hisrejection of Hegelianism's notion of the social totality driven by oneprinciple of internal unity (For Marx, 183). Hence, he renounced aHegelian expressive totality in which every element is a manifesta-tion or reflection of a single principle. Althusser saw Stalinism as onevariant of this error-where the general contradiction between the


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ITINERARYOF A THOUGHT1 215instance ) insofar as it distributes effectivity between the instancesof a social formation (Dews, 114). To posit a relative autonomy ofthese different levels required a way of conceiving their relationoutside the constraints of reflection theory, as Althusser recognized:

Marx has given us the two ends of the chain, and has told us to findout what goes on between them: on the one hand, determinationn thelast instanceby the economic modeof production);n the other, therelativeautonomyof thesuperstructuresndtheirspecificeffectivity.ForMarx,111)

Althusser's conception of ideology-which became central forcultural studies-derived from the structuralist premise that a givendomain of activity can be isolated and examined in terms of its inter-nal logic and relations. Indeed, he argued that it was because each ofthese levels possesses this 'relative autonomy' that it can be objec-tively considered a 'partialwhole,' and become the object of a rela-tively independent scientific treatment (Philosophy,6). FollowingSpinoza, who distinguished between knowledge of imagination(prereflective, commonsense awareness arising from practical expe-rience) and adequate knowledge or understanding (achievedthrough the correct deployment of critical reason), Althusserasserted a crucial distinction and opposition between science ...and ideology (22). While ideology was comprised of representa-tions, images, signs, etc. (26), its unity and meaning did not derivefrom those individual elements (content), but from their internalorganization and relations (form): considered in isolation, [signsand representations] do not compose ideology. It is their systematic-ity, their mode of arrangementand combination,that gives them theirmeaning; it is their structure that determines their meaning and func-tion (26). That function was social reproduction: assuring the bondamong people in the totality of the forms of their existence, the rela-tion of individuals to their task assigned by the social structure (28).

Ideology was opaque to the individuals who occupy a place inthe society determined by its structure (ibid.) because it was thehidden structuring principle that determined the way images andrepresentations were selected and combined. In this way, ideologyhailed or interpellated (i.e., produced) social subjects, even as itappeared to individuals as their spontaneous free thought. Hence,


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Althusser's argument that what is represented in ideology is not thesystem of real relations which govern the existence of individuals,but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations inwhich they live (Lenin,155). Insofar as ideology is form rather thancontent, it is eternal and transhistorical. However, as structure, it canalso be made the object of an objective study (Philosophy,26). Thus,like Levi-Strauss, who strove to create a science by which one couldidentify the timeless universal grammars beneath the surface vari-ations in cultural practices, Althusser sought to establish scientificknowledge of the objective structure of ideology out of which weregenerated specific historical variants. Such knowledge was attain-able through conceptual clarification or immanent critique, whichbecame political practice by establishing the difference between theimaginary and the true (Althusser and Balibar,17).This critical clarification, or theoretical practice, constitutedthe science and the political project of structuralist Marxism. ForAlthusser, practice was any process of transformation of a deter-minate given raw material into a determinate product,a transforma-tion effected by a determinate human labour, using determinatemeans [of production] (For Marx, 166). Practice was also dividedinto levels : economic, political, ideological, and theoretical. Marx-ist science was located on the level of theoretical practice, whichworks on raw material (representations, concepts, facts) which it isgiven by other practices, whether 'empirical,' 'technical,' or 'ideolog-ical ' (167). At this level, the means of production are the conceptsemployed, the method is the way concepts are used, and the productis knowledge, or scientific truth. For Althusser, To know is to pro-duce the adequate concept of the object by putting to work means oftheoretical production (theory and method), applied to a given rawmaterial (Philosophy,15). Theoretical practice might contribute topolitical practice by establishing the identity between two differentconcretes: the concrete-in-thought,which is a knowledge, and concrete-reality,which is its object (ForMarx, 186).8

Introducing Hall to an American audience, Grossberg and Slacknoted the importance of the 'Althusserian moment' which movescultural studies onto a structuralist terrain (88). From that terrainemerged what Hall termed the critical paradigm in media studies,in which the move from content to structure or from manifest


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meaning to the level of code is an absolutely characteristic one(Hall, Rediscovery of 'Ideology, ' 71). For Hall, this paradigmshift constituted a theoretical revolution in media studies, at thecenter of [which] was the rediscovery of ideology and the social andpolitical significance of language and the politics of the sign and dis-course (89). If the Althusserian moment marked the embrace ofMarxism by cultural studies, it also conserved the founding principleof structuralism: that language/culture is not substance, but form.Culture was not the content of expression or experience, but thecodes, inventories, taxonomies (i.e., the principles of formation) thatprovided the frameworks and basis for thought/consciousness.Signification-both the activity and product of this structuringprocess-was therefore the proper object of cultural analysis.In The Rediscovery of 'Ideology, ' Hall states that havingdethroned the referential notion of language, structuralism haddefinitively shown that things in the real world do not contain orpropose their own, integral, single, and intrinsic meaning. Rather,the world has to be made to mean through language and symbol-ization, which are the means by which meaning is produced (67).Because there is no access to the real except through language andsocial relations have to be represented in speech and language toacquire meaning (Hall, Signification, Representation, Ideology,98), it followed that how people will act depends in part on how thesituations in which they act are defined (Hall, Rediscovery of 'Ide-ology, ' 65). Accordingly, Hall conceived ideology as a set of rules togenerate meanings that define situations for social action. Ideologies,he argued,

pre-date individuals, and form part of the determinate social forma-tions and conditions into which individuals are born. We have tospeak through the ideologies which are active in our society andwhich provide us with the means of makingsense of social relationsand our place in them.... ideologies work by constructing for their

subjects (individual and collective) positions of identification andknowledge which allow them to utter ideological truths as if theywere their authentic authors. ( Whitesof TheirEyes, 31-32)

This implies that we can have no knowledge of our inscriptionwithin an ideological discourse, as Hall notes: We are not ourselves


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aware of the rules of systems of classification of an ideology when weencounter an ideological statement. However, following structural-ism and Althusser, he maintained that ideologies, like the rules oflanguage ... are open to rational inspection and analysis by modes ofinterpretation and deconstruction, which can open up a discourse toits foundations and allow us to inspect the categories which generateit ( Signification, Representation, Ideology, 106).Such a project turns on the assumption that it is possible to standapart from a structure (of language, of ideology), identify its prin-ciple of formation, and disengage from the practical awareness itconstructs for all of us. It presumes that one can be both inside(determined by) and outside (free from) the structure, and thusable to pierce the generative foundations of a discourse. It is pre-cisely this notion of a generative foundation-a structure with acenter and an outside -that poststructuralism would steadilyerode, beginning with Derrida's dissection of the metaphysical heartof Saussurean linguistics. In the wake of that critical enterprise, thecommitment of cultural studies to a materialist (i.e., Marxist) accountof culture would of necessity capsize. Hall attempted, by way ofGramsci, to sidestep the path that led through Marxism and rightout the other side again ( Problem of Ideology, 28), but was ulti-mately unable to reverse this unstoppable philosophical slide( Signification, Representation, Ideology, 94) precisely because hehad already accepted the founding principles of structuralism.

THE GRAMSCIAN TURN: THE SYNTHESIS OF THE PARADIGMS

If the history of Marxist theory during the 1960's can be characterisedby the reign of althusserianism, then we have now, without a doubt,entered a new phase: that of gramscism. (Mouffe, 1)

In her introduction to Gramsci and Marxist Theory,Chantal Mouffeproposed that the Gramscian revival- developed in the wake ofthe events of 1968 -signaled a shift from pessimism to optimismamong left intellectuals who, having earlier placed their hopes inThird World movements for national liberation, now envisioned


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structuralist Marxism and Gramsci constituted one of the mostimportant encounters in the field of contemporary marxist theory(58-59). Thereafter, Gramsci would play a costarring role withAlthusser in the pantheon of seminal theorists in cultural studies.Hall has insisted that Althusserianism in its fully orthodox form... never really existed for the Centre ( Cultural Studies at theCentre, 35). Without rejecting this claim, I propose that Hall's priorengagement with structuralism, and structuralist Marxism in particu-lar, was determinate for his encounter with Gramsci and subsequentresponse to poststructuralism.ll Turning Gramsci into a protostruc-turalist meant that his key concepts could be integrated into thealready accepted principles of structuralism, an operation that beganin Hall's first engagement with his thought. Working within anAlthusserian problematic, Hall, Lumley, and McLennan character-ized Gramsci's conception of social formations as comprising threelevels-the economic, political, and ideological-mirroring Alth-usser's categories. For both theorists, they said, the economic wasdeterminate in the last instance, but the political and ideolog-ical levels enjoyed a significant autonomy. The political level, whichHall et al. equated with civil society, was the intermediary spherethat includes aspects of the structure and superstructure (47), whilethe ideological level, solely superstructural, serves to cement andunify ... classes and class fractions into positions of domination andsubordination (48). Corresponding to Althusser's conception of asocial formation as a structured complex unity, Gramsci's conceptof hegemony was credited with keep[ing] the levels of the socialformation distinct and held in combination (49). Althusser's dis-tinction between ideology and science was paralleled for Hall andcompany in Gramsci's couplet of common sense and systematicthought or philosophy, which could transform good sense andclass instinct ... into a coherent socialist perspective (53). They alsocharacterized Gramsci's view of ideology as an epistemological andstructural matter (46) in line with Althusser's notion that ideology

interpellates social subjects. Just as theoretical practice was theAlthusserian key to unmasking ideologies, Gramsci seemed to implythat radical intellectuals could denaturalize common sensethrough the application of systematic thought (50).Like Althusser before him, Gramsci was appended to Hall's


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antireductionist crusade. In Cultural Studies and the Centre, Hallproposed that Gramsci's work stands as a prolonged repudiationof any form of reductionism-especially that of economism (35).12Key for Hall were Gramsci's concepts of civil society, seen as theterrain in which classes contest for power (Hall, Lumley, andMcLennan, 47); the war of position and centrality of intellectualsin seizing a leadership position; and hegemony, which played aseminal role in cultural studies (Hall, Cultural Studies and theCentre, 35). In Hall's appropriation, hegemony was defined as the(temporary) mastery of a particular theatre of struggle and the artic-ulation of that field into a tendency [to] create the conditionswhereby society and the state may be conformed in a larger sense tocertain formative national-historic tasks. Because the outcome ofthat process always depends on the balance in the relations offorce, Hall held that the concept of hegemony rids Gramci's think-ing of any trace of a necessitarian logic and any temptation to 'readoff' political and ideological outcomes from some hypostatizedeconomic base (36). Gramsci was deemed less reductive thanAlthusser because he emphasized ideological struggle. AdoptingAlthusser's notion that ideology works by binding or cementingtogether signs, interests, subjects, classes, and levels of the social for-mation, Hall proposed that Gramsci enabled cultural studies tounderstand how an ideology could intervene in popular thinking'positively' in order to recompose its elements and add new ones, or'negatively' by setting the boundaries on its development (Hall,Lumley, and McLennan, 50). Combining Althusser and Gramscimeant that cultural studies should focus on the 'articulation' of ide-ology in and through language and discourse (Hall, Rediscoveryof 'Ideology, ' 80).The concept of articulation became the linchpin of Hall's attemptto recast the two paradigms through a synthesis of Gramsci andAlthusser. As employed in structural linguistics and structuralistMarxism, articulation is the enactment of a structure's principle offormation, which determines how elements (e.g., signifiers, signi-fieds, signs, discursive or ideological propositions, levels of the socialformation, etc.) are differentiated and combined. That operation is

arbitrary insofar as the elements possess no prior substantialmeaning, but acquire significance relationally only through the


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process of articulation. In Hall's fusion of structuralist Marxism andGramsci, the concept of articulation undergoes a crucial revision. Heconserves the structuralist view of meaning as relational and arbi-trary in his definition of articulation as

the form of the connection that canmake a unity of two different ele-ments, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary,determined, absolute and essential for all time.... the so-called unityof a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elementswhich can be re-articulatedin differentways because they have no nec-essary belongingness. The unity which matters is a linkage be-tween that articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can,under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be con-nected. (Grossberg, Interviewwith StuartHall, 53)

However, rather than treating articulation-as Althusser did-as astructural operation, Hall reconceives it as an activity of social sub-jects engaged in ideological struggle. Hence, he argued one of theways in which ideological struggle takes place and ideologies aretransformed is by articulating the elements differently, thereby pro-ducing a different meaning: breaking the chain in which they arecurrently fixed ( Whites of Their Eyes, 31).This reconceptualization of ideology, in Hall's view, helpedcultural studies understand how ideas of different kinds grip theminds of masses, permitting a historical bloc to maintain its domi-nance and leadership and reconcile the mass of the people to theirsubordinate place. It also shed light on how new forms ofconsciousness ... arise, which move the masses of the people into his-torical action against the prevailing system. Armed with this knowl-edge, cultural studies was equipped to comprehend and master theterrain of struggle (29). From this perspective, challenging a partic-ular ideology involved identifying its articulating principle orrules of formation so as to recombine its elements and expose theconstructedness of its apparently natural unity. Thus, Hall envi-sioned a theoretically-informed political practice that identifiedthe generative foundations of an ideological discourse in order to

bring about or construct the articulation between social or eco-nomic forces and those forms of politics and ideology which might


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lead [the masses] in practice to intervene in history in a progressiveway ( Signification, Representation, Ideology, 95).13This argument is riven by a contradiction, however. Once oneadopts the structuralist premise that individual elements (signs,units of discourse, etc.) have no inherent (substantial) meaningunless and until they are set into relation with each other by thestructure (the formulation of the principle of formation), the idea ofindividuals effecting a different meaning by substituting or recom-bining elements is nonsensical. Because meaning is always and onlyinscribed by the logic of the structure, any change in the meaning ofindividual elements arises only through a change within the struc-ture itself. The question then becomes how, why, and under what cir-cumstances a structure changes. From a classic structuralist position,the answer is that, fundamentally, it doesn't: structure is a priori,timeless, and at every moment complete. Hence, structuralismrejects diachrony (temporal development) in favor of synchrony (aserial succession of structures). Within a structuralist paradigm,then, one might identify the operating logic of a given structure, butthe idea of individuals changing that logic is illogical. For Hall toargue that individuals might intervene in an ideology by rearrangingits components only makes sense if he assumes that those elementsdo have a substantial (versus merely formal) meaning that derivesfrom something other than the principle of formation of the struc-ture. That is, he is forced to appeal to an outside of the structure (oflanguage, discourse, ideology) that would facilitate different practi-cal inflections of meaning. It is on this problem of an outside thatboth structuralism, and Hall's attempt to fuse Gramsci and struc-turalist Marxism, founders.

In Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sci-ences, Derrida launched a definitive assault on structural linguisticsand structuralism. He zeroed in on fundamental problems in Saus-surean linguistics: its notion of structure as a closed taxonomy andbelief that a structure's unity could be grasped from the outside byan investigator. Derrida argued that the principle of unity (principleof formation) of a structure can be neither inside nor outside of it. Ifthe unity of meaning is outside (i.e., identifiable by an external inves-tigator), then it can have no meaning, since meaning is by definition


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an effect of the differential relations of elements in a system. Con-versely, if the principle of unity is inside the structure, then its ownmeaning is determined by its difference from all other values in thesystem, and it cannot be the unifying principle for that system. WhileDerrida accepted Saussure's conception of a differential articulationof the sign, he rejected the idea that this articulation takes place ina theoretically comprehensive and enclosed system (Frank, 25). Hethus concluded that a structure cannot be a closed system organizedby a unifying law; it must of necessity be forever open, without afounding principle or an outside, and subject to infinite transfor-mations (ibid.). Derrida thereby judged structuralism guilty of thevery metaphysics it imagined itself as transcending. This is the heartof the poststructuralist critique, not only of structuralism, but of allsystems of thought that require a foundational (metaphysical) princi-ple, be it god, nature, man, structure, or the forces of production.The consequence of this critique was a progressive destabili-zation across the human sciences, including cultural studies. In

Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates, Hall responded to poststructuralism in anattempt to salvage his synthesis of Gramsci and Althusser and avoidthe slide out of Marxism. He reiterated his rejection of classicalMarxism, which he characterized as relying on the idea of a neces-sary correspondence between one level of a social formation andanother. He also criticized what he erroneously took to be post-structuralism's declaration that there is 'necessarily no correspon-dence ' and its implication that nothing really connects withanything else (94). Hall countered with a third position of nonecessary correspondence in which there is no law which guaran-tees that the ideology of a class is already and unequivocally given inor corresponds to the position which that class holds in the economicrelations of capitalist production (ibid.). He conceded that Derridawas correct in arguing that there is always a perpetual slippage ofthe signifier, a continuous 'deference ' (93), but asserted that his ownclaim of 'no guarantee' ... also implies that there is no necessarynon-correspondence. Therefore, he insisted, there is no guaranteethat, under all circumstances, ideology and class can never be articu-lated together in any way or produce a social force capable for a time


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COUNTERINGREFLECTIONWITH AUTONOMY:ECONOMISMCONSERVED

Hall's synthesis of Althusser and Gramsci ultimately resolvedthe problem of a reflection theory of culture by opting for its binaryopposite-autonomy-and in so doing preserved that very polarity.In effect, he spliced together structuralism's autonomous signifyingsystems and culturalism's autonomous subject, while retaining theautonomy of the economic inherited from economistic Marxismand bourgeois economics. This move of separating language/culture/the symbolic, consciousness/subjectivity, and objective con-ditions/economy into discrete objects or domains necessarily con-serves economism because it treats the economic as autonomous,external, and self-conditioning. Further,once these are deemed sepa-rate entities, the problem becomes, as Grossberg puts it, how onethinks about the relationships or links between the different domains(forms and structures of practices) of social life ( Cultural Studiesvs. Political Economy, 72). The absence of a necessary relationbetween these domains requires something to link them together:that something is signification/articulation.

Having adopted structuralism's conception of language asautonomous form, Hall conceived ideological struggle through thelogic of language-as the formal differentiation and combination ofelements that disrupted established meanings and created new ones.The point of such signifying practice (or articulation ) was to createa link, for example, between class and ideology, so as to move themasses ... into historical action ( Problem of Ideology, 29). How-ever, having rejected structuralism's notion that linguistic structuresalso produce subjects on the grounds that this was another formof reductionism (a reflection theory of consciousness), Hall's modelrequired subjects who were somehow independent of and notreducible to discourse or conditions. As he has stated, people arenot cultural dopes.... they know something about who they are. Ifthey engage in a project it is because it has interpolated them, hailedthem, and established some point of identification with them (Hall,Old and New Identities, 59).

Although Hall employs Althusserian language, he imports ahumanist conception of human beings as self-aware, self-determining


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subjects whose actions derive from the force of arguments (ideolo-gies) presented to them. Similarly, those who seek social leadership(hegemony) by fashioning convincing arguments (ideologies) mustalso be nonidentical with the structure of language and their condi-tions of existence. In Althusser, the subject hailed by ideology isinscribed in/spoken by the structure (form), but misrecognizes thisas the freely chosen content of her/his thought; for Hall, interpola-tion and hailing are akin to persuasion. That is, people can behailed by an ideology only if it resonates with who they are, andwho they are must precede and be independent of that ideologicalinterpellation. In Hall's view, Laclau had dismantled the validityof any notion of a class determination of ideas ( Problem of Ideol-ogy, 39) and thereby made untenable the notion that people are

irrevocably and indelibly inscribed with the ideas they ought tothink or the politics they oughtto have based on their position inthe social formation ( Signification, Representation, Ideology, 96).Thus, Hall argued, there must always be some distance between theimmediate practical consciousness or common sense of ordinarypeople, and what it is possible for them to become (Grossberg,Interview with Stuart Hall, 52). Consciousness was therefore givenneither by conditions nor by language-its relation to both is con-tingent because some remainder of subjectivity always exceeds itsdeterminations.

This contingent subject is coupled with the contingency of thesymbolic: because language by its nature is notfixed in a one-to-onerelation with its referent ; it can construct different meaningsaround what is apparently the same relation or phenomenon (Hall,Problem of Ideology, 36). The perpetual slippage of languageinterferes with its ability to fully determine subjects; this instabilityof language, combined with that of the subject, precludes theirperfect correspondence. Contingency is also extended to social con-ditions: there is 'no necessary correspondence' between the condi-tions of a social relation or practice and the number of different waysit can be represented (Hall, Signification, Representation, Ideol-ogy, 104). Given the absence of any necessary, interior relationbetween language, subjectivity, and conditions, any connection isexternal and has to be created discursively to move people to holdthe ideas (and politics) they ought to have. In Hall's words: by


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generating discourses which condense a range of different connota-tions, the dispersed conditions of a practice of different social groupscan be effectively drawn together to make those social forces ... capa-ble of intervening as a historical force (104).This conception of autonomous subjects who can be turned (andturn others) into a social force by rhetorically forging a correspon-dence between conditions and consciousness reflects Hall's apparentconcession to poststructuralism's critique of foundationalism. I sug-gest, however, that he fell prey to a common misunderstanding ofthat critique by associating it with a modernist-rather than post-structuralist-view of foundationalism. Philip Wood contrasts themodernist position, which conceives foundationalism as the oppo-site of self or autonomous legislation (i.e., the self as externallylegislated by god, nature, reason, etc.), to poststructuralism's cri-tique of any foundation or ground of being. For the latter, the veryideals of 'self,' 'autonomy,' and even ostensibly anti-foundationalistnotions like 'structure,' which were expressly designed to shatternotions of selfhood, all work with a secret assumption of a ground(168-69). In rejecting the notion that consciousness is an effect oflanguage or expression of material conditions, Hall defaulted to amodernist ideal of freedom based on an autonomous, self-legislatingsubject-one contingently related to language and social conditionswho can be moved to engage in a political project through the prac-tice of articulation.14

Which brings us to the third autonomy. If any correspondencebetween people's consciousness and their conditions of existence hasto be created by signifying practice, for Hall there are clearly betterand worse articulations: those that move the masses to challenge theprevailing system and intervene in history in a progressive way, ver-sus those that maintain the hegemony of the power bloc and rec-oncile the people to their subordinate place. Thus, while there is nonecessarycorrespondence between signs, subjects, and circumstances,there is a politically superior one, which it is the goal of cultural stud-ies to foster. One response to making the relation between language,consciousness, and conditions purely arbitrary is a Humean conven-tionalism and relativism embraced by the likes of Rorty, Lyotard, andFish. Given Hall's affinity for a Marxian position, he rejected this rel-ativist option. But to assert that there are progressive and retrograde


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ways of articulating the links between these domains is to presume abasis upon which to make that judgement and appeal to the peopleto intervene in history. That is, Hall requires a truth that precedesany particular articulation. That truth resides in what he has vari-ously construed as the real conditions of existence, the social for-mation, social relations, the prevailing system, structures,and the economic, which he holds to exist independently of sym-bolic representation or subjective experience:

Social relations do exist. We are born into them. They exist indepen-dently of our will. They are real in their structure and tendency.We can-not develop a social practice without representing those conditions toourselves in some way or another; but the representations do notexhaust their effect. Social relations exist, independent of mind, inde-pendent of thought. And yet they can only be conceptualized inthought, in the head. (Hall, Signification,Representation, Ideology,105)

Having rejected the idea that social relations give their ownunambiguous knowledge to perceiving, thinking subjects, Hallmaintained that we have no access to the 'real relations' of a partic-ular society outside of its cultural and ideological categories (97).This neo-Kantian formulation seems to grant determinative primacyto the means of representation; indeed, this is a critique of Althussermade by Paul Hirst, who suggested that this was simply anotherspecies of reflection theory: Itis not too much to argue that once anyautonomy is conceded to these means of representation, it followsnecessarily that the means of representation determine the repre-sented (395). Responding to that critique, Hall proposed that Hirstfailed to appreciate the difference between autonomyand relativeautonomy. For Hall, the former resulted in a theory of the absoluteautonomy of everything from everything else, while the latterallowed one to conceptualize a 'unity' which is not a simple orreductionist one ( 'Political' and the 'Economic, ' 58). However, toposit that everything is relatively autonomous from everythingelse still begs the question of the nature of their relationship andunity. In 1977, Hall located that unity in the economic structure,which, in his view, Marx had conceived as in some sense other thana reductionist one, 'determining ' (58). To do otherwise, he believed,


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would be to abandon the Marxist 'topography' of the base andsuperstructure that constituted the boundary limit for Marxism(59).

Thus, the basis upon which one might articulate a temporarycorrespondence between representations and subjects ultimatelyleads back to the economic, and it is here that Hall's economism sur-faces, despite his persistent attacks on economic reductionism.15Before proceeding, Hall's characterization of reductionism war-rants closer examination. His criticism of a Marxism guaranteed bythe laws of history (Grossberg, Interview with Stuart Hall, 58) is arecurring theme in Hall's writings from the late 1950s to the early1990s, where it serves as the other to cultural studies-that whichthe field came into being in order to vanquish. Indeed, his workevinces a sense that economism is the special province of Marxismand that no Marxist thought outside of cultural studies has gottenbeyond Stalinism (with the exception of Althusser, who was plaguedby other errors, and, of course, Gramsci). Neither implication is accu-rate. It is fair to say that none of the figures associated with westernMarxism (including Lukacs) held to this automatic Marxism. Infact, their various projects were consciously opposed to it, as wasMaoism (including the French Maoists Nicos Poulantzas and CharlesBettelheim), whose break with Soviet Marxism centered precisely onrejecting its economistic privileging of the productive forces (seeRossanda). One might take issue with other aspects of these thinkers'work, even find traces of economism in their thought, but one can-not accuse them of viewing history as the unfolding of some ironeconomic law.

Further, to identify economism exclusively with Marxism is toignore the history of bourgeois political economy and modern eco-nomics. Bettelheim's criticism of economistic Marxism-that it borewithin itself ... the premises ... of bourgeois ideology (20)-echoesMarx's critique of classical political economy. Samir Amin arguesthat Marx's aim in Capitalwas to expose the economism at the heartof liberal political economy: to reveal the secret of capitalist society,the logic that causes it to present itself as being directly under thecontrol of the economy, which occupies the center stage of societyand, in its unfolding, determines the other dimensions of society,which appear to have to adjust themselves to its demands (5).


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The transformation of the technical base has done its work.... thedevelopment of the means of production must in turn raise the level ofhuman consciousness, and may make possible, and in turn, create thedemand for greaterparticipationin all the humanactivities-the socialrelations of production associated with work. (28)

This demand from below was not inevitable, however, because a newform of capitalism based in consumption (29) had created a gen-eral sense of class confusion ... resulting in a false consciousness inworking class people (30). Thus, Hall cautioned,

the material and technological means for complete human freedom arealmostto hand ... [but] the structure of human, social and moral rela-tionships are in complete contradiction and have to be set over againstour materialadvances, when we are reckoningthem up. (31)

Although Hall would no doubt reject his early analysis as reduc-tionist, the issues it raised effectively established the agenda for cul-tural studies for the next three decades: the base/superstructure(economy/culture) relationship; the relation of culture to not cul-ture and consciousness to conditions; the problem of why the work-ing class (or the people ) did not/could not/would not recognizetheir own domination; and the question of what critical intellectualsmight do about it. The journey through structuralism, structur-alist Marxism, and Gramsci provided new analytical concepts andmethods, and along the way gender and race were added as sites ofanalysis, but Hall's original questions endured. So did the tendencyto conceive the economic (or capitalism) as unconditioned-a self-driven force or thing. What changed are the terms in which Hall con-ceived the relation of culture and consciousness to the economic.

Writing during the Althusserian moment, Hall counteredreductionism by conceiving the political and ideological as relativelyautonomous levels with their own structures, effects, and condi-tions of existence that were not reducible to 'the economic.' How-ever, he continued to view their relation as linear, i.e., the economicprecedes the other levels conceptually and actually. The political,juridical, and ideological, he argued, are related but 'relatively


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autonomous' practices, and thus the sites of distinct forms of classstruggle, with their own objects of struggle, and exhibiting a rela-tively independent retroactiveeffect on 'the base.' ( 'Political' andthe 'Economic,' 56; emphasis added). The autonomy of the super-structural levels facilitates effects within what we have broadlydesignated as the 'economic ' (ibid.), but the economic still takesprecedence; its effect upon the other levels are primary, theirs are sec-ondary and retroactive. That is, the political, ideological, andjuridical do not produce the economic-which appears to be self-generated-but only respond to it after the fact.Nine years later, after the Gramscian detour, this conception ofthe economic persists, despite Hall's claim to offer a new, nonreduc-tionist determinacy. In The Problem of Ideology: Marxism withoutGuarantees, he argues that the relations in which people exist arethe 'real relations' which the categories and concepts they use helpthem to grasp and articulate in thought, but the economic relationsthemselves cannot prescribe a single, fixed and unalterable way ofconceptualizing it [sic] because it can be expressed within differentideological discourses (38). If working people accept the representa-tion of the market as a system driven by the real and practicalimperatives of self-interest (34), this is a consequence of representa-tion. Thus, a worker who lives his or her relation to the circuits ofcapitalist production exclusively through the categories of a 'fairprice' and a 'fair wage ' is not plagued by false consciousness, buthindered by inadequate frameworks of knowledge. In Hall'swords, There is something about her situation which she cannotgrasp with the categories [of thought] she is using (37).

By also insisting that the discourses within which the process ofcapitalist production and exchange is represented situate us associal actors ... and prescribe certain identities for us (39), Hall risksmaking the means of representation determinate. He sidesteps thisissue by asserting that the real relations can be known throughan adequate or theoretical discourse, thus implying that thereare true correspondences between language, conditions, and con-sciousness. Where does this adequate discourse-as well as inade-quate ones-come from? For Hall, they are ultimately supplied bythe economic:


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ITINERARYOF A THOUGHTI 235usurped by identities -since consciousness hinges on how ourreal conditions of existence are articulated. Gone too is the claimthat people's interests are given by their position within existingsocial conditions, because social interests are contradictory andmust be marshaled by a hegemonizing project (ibid.).These differences, however, belie an important continuity inHall's treatment of the economic as a self-legislating foundation. Intheir introduction to New Times,Hall and Martin Jacques argue thatthe New Times project grew out of the fact that the world haschanged, that advanced capitalist societies are increasingly charac-terised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather thanhomogeneity, standardisation and the economies and organisationsof scale which characterised modern mass society (11). NewTimes are the result of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, characterized by the rise of 'flexible specialisation' inplace of the old assembly-line world of mass production. It is this,above all, which is orchestrating and driving on the evolution of thisnew world. They deem this transition epochal -comparable tothe nineteenth-century passage from the 'entrepreneurial' to theadvanced or organised stage within capitalism, which has shiftedthe centre of gravity of the society and the culture markedly anddecisively in a new direction. In sum, post-Fordism is at the lead-ing edge of change, increasingly setting the tone of society and pro-viding the dominant rhythm of cultural change (12). This is not farremoved from Hall's claim in 1958 that the transformation of thetechnical base has done its work. In both cases, the economic perksalong of its own volition and everything else (culture, consciousness,politics, etc.) reacts to that external momentum.This conception of the economic also traverses Hall's writings onrace, ethnicity, and globalization in the 1980s. In two 1989 lectures,Hall addresses a tension in globalization between homogenization(identity) and specificity (difference). Although rejecting class as amaster concept ( Old and New Identities, 46) and positioninghimself against a view of capitalism operating according to a singu-lar, unitary logic ( Local and the Global, 30), he retains a view ofthe economic (i.e., capitalism) as an external, autogenerated force.Capitalism is treated here as a thing-almost as a subject itself actingof its own logic and volition: Capitalism is constantly exploiting


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different forms of labour force ( Local and the Global, 30); inorder to maintain its global position, capital has had to negotiate ...to incorporate and partly reflect the differences it was trying toovercome (32); the more we understand about the development ofcapital itself, the more we understand that ... alongside the drive tocommodify everything, which is certainly part of its logic, is anothercritical part of its logic which works in and through specificity (29).Within such a formulation, capitalism is external and prior tothought, discourse, practices, and social relations. It is, in otherwords, something like a force of nature to which human beingsrespond after the fact, rather than a historically determinate systemof social relations within which, individually and collectively, wedaily produce and reproduce both the conditions of our existenceand ourselves through our practical activity. Hall's view of the eco-nomic is precisely that held by economistic Marxism and bourgeoiseconomics-with which reflection theory is eminently compatible-where the economy (or productive forces) acts as the motor of historythat, in its unfolding, determines the other dimensions of society,which appear to have to adjust themselves to its demands (Amin, 5).Insofar as Hall conserved this conception, he countered the determi-nacy of the economic by positing the (relative) autonomy of lan-guage, consciousness, and culture. Thus, the power of the economicwas whittled down by making it only partially determinant, culturewas elevated by adopting a nonrepresentational model of language,and human freedom was reinstated by reviving the modernist idealof the subject who always exceeds any external legislation.

FROMPOSTSTRUCTURALISMTO POST-MARXISM:REPEATINGTHE PAST

The 1990s marked the dawn of post-Marxism and the break of cul-tural studies with a Marxian problematic. Ironically, this eclipse,according to Hall, was initiated through Gramsci, whose importancefor cultural studies

is precisely the degree to which he radically displaced some of theinheritances of Marxism in cultural studies. The radical character of


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Gramsci's displacement of Marxism has not yet been understood andprobably won't ever be reckoned with now we are entering the era ofpost-Marxism. ( Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies, 281)16

Equally important in the field's theoretical pilgrimage was the lin-guistic turn, which had decentred and dislocated the settled pathpresumably paved by Marxism (283). As Hall notes, the refigur-ing of theory, made as a result of having to think questions of cul-ture through the metaphors of language and textuality, represents apoint beyond which cultural studies must now always locate itself(283-84). In Hall's view, the earlier propensities of cultural studiestoward class reductionism ( For Allon White, 295) and simplebinary metaphors of cultural and symbolic transformations (303)had been cured by a general theoretical shift from any lingering flir-tation with even a modified version of the 'base-superstructure'metaphor to a fully discourse-and-power conception of the ideo-logical (297).17The abandonment of the base/superstructure ques-tion and Marxian metaphors of transformation signals the waneof the attempt of cultural studies to think the dialectic betweenconditions and consciousness. Indeed, Hall favored replacing the

metaphor of the dialectic of class antagonism with that of thedialogic of multi-accentuality (299). For post-Marxist cultural stud-

ies, relative autonomy had become simply autonomy; Althusser'sstructure in dominance had been replaced by a structure with nocenter and no dominant, and historical necessity had bowed beforecontingency.

This migration of thought is evident in Hall's introduction to For-mationsofModernity.He describes the textbook as an examination ofthe four major social processes responsible for the transition tomodernity - the political, the economic, the social and the cul-tural (1)-that constitute the 'motors' of the formation of modernsociety (7). None are granted explanatory priority because all werenecessary, if not sufficient, for the emergence of modernity. The bookthus adopts a multi-causal explanation reflecting its opposition to

teleological accounts (specifically, Marxism and modernizationtheory) that attributed social development ultimately to one princi-pal cause: the economic (10). In Hall's terms, unlike many earliersociological accounts, which tended to privilege class as the 'master'


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category, [the book] does not adopt a clear hierarchy or priority ofcauses, and is generally critical of economic reductionism, in whichthe economic base is assumed to be the determining force in history(11). In contrast, Formationsof Modernitygives much greater promi-nence and weight to cultural and symbolic processes. Culture isgranted ahigher explanatory status because it is considered to be,not reflective, but constitutiveof the modern world: as constitutive aseconomic, political or social processes of change (13).This pluralization of key concepts (11), according to Hall,marks an advance in knowledge. Modernity is now understood interms of different temporalities, events that follow no rationallogic (9), diverse outcomes, and unevenness, contradiction, con-tingency (rather than necessity). He stops slightly short of advocat-ing a view of history as a series of purely random events (11): theprocesses of formation were not autonomous and separate from eachother. There were connections between them-they were articulatedwith one another. But they weren't inevitably harnessed together, allmoving or changing in tandem (9). If the ghost of Althusser liveson in Hall's terminology, it is a mere spectral presence as Hall assid-uously distances himself from Marxism, which he presents asirretrievably reductionist. In the wake of the passage to poststruc-turalism and post-Marxism, the economic is dethroned from a posi-tion of centrality to one among several processes that contributedto something called modernity. Indeed, of the four processes, thecultural, defined as the symbolic dimension of social life (13),appears more decisive in that the production of social meanings is anecessary condition for the functioning of all social practices (14).

Despite the demotion of the economic in Hall's new schema-itis now determinant in neither the first nor last instance-this doesnot signal the death throes of economism. Hall describes VivienneBrown's chapter on the economy as an examination of the forma-tion of a distinct sphere of economic lif

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