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Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms" From: Contemporary LIterary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. New York: Longman, 1991 In serious, critical
intellectual work, there are no "absolute beginnings" and
few unbroken continuities. Neither the endless unwinding of "tradition,"
so beloved on the History of Ideas, nor the absolutism of the "epistemological
rupture," punctuating Thought into its "false" and "correct"
parts, once favoured by the Althussereans, will do. What we find, instead,
is an untidy but characteristic unevenness of development. What is important
are the significant breaks-where old lines of thought are disrupted,
older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped
around a different set of premises and themes. Changes in a problematic
do significantly transform the nature of the questions asked, the forms
in which they are proposed, and the manner in which they can be adequately
answered. Such shifts in perspective reflect, not only the results of
an internal intellectual labour, but the manner in which real historical
developments and transformations are appropriated in thought, and provide
Thought, not with its guarantee of "correctness" but with
its fundamental orientations, its conditions of existence. It is because
of this complex articulation between thinking and historical reality,
reflected in the social categories of thought, and the continuous dialectic
between "knowledge" and "power," Cultural Studies,
as a distinctive problematic, emerges from one such moment, in the mid-1950s.
It was certainly not the first time that its characteristic questions
had been put on the table. Quite the contrary. The two books which helped
to stake out the new terrain- Hoggart's Uses of Literacy and
Williams's Culture and Society--were both, in different ways,
works (in part) of recovery. Hoggart's book took its reference from
the "cultural debate," long sustained in the arguments around
"mass society" and in the tradition of work identified with
Leavis and Scrutiny. Culture and Society reconstructed
a long tradition which Williams defined as consisting, in sum, of "a
record of a number of important and continuing reactions to ... changes
in our social, economic and political life" and offering "a
special kind of map by means of which the nature of the changes can
be explored" (p. 16). The books looked, at first, simply like updating
of these earlier concerns, with reference to the post-war world. Retrospectively,
their "breaks" with the traditions of thinking in which they
were situated seem as important, if not more so, than their continuity
with them. The Uses of Literacy did set out-much in the spirit
of "practical criticism"-to "read" working class
culture for the values and meanings embodied in its patterns and arrangements:
as if they were certain kinds of "texts." But the application
of this method to a living culture, and the rejection of the terms of
the "cultural debate" (polarized around the high/low culture
distinction) was a thorough-going departure. Culture and Society--in
one and the same movement-constituted a tradition (the "culture-and-society"
tradition), defined its "unity" (not in terms of common positions
but in its characteristic concerns and the idiom of its inquiry), itself
made a distinctive modem contribution to it--and wrote its epitaph.
The Williams book which succeeded it--The Long Revolution--clearly
indicated that the "culture-and-society" mode of reflection
could only be completed and developed by moving somewhere else-to a
significantly different kind of analysis. The very difficulty of some
of the writing in The Long Revolution-with its attempt to "theorize"
on the back of a tradition resolutely empirical and particularist in
its idiom of thought, the |
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[611] experiential "thickness"
of its concepts, and the generalizing movement of argument in it-stems,
in part, from this determination to move on (Williams's work, right
through to the most recent Politics And Letters, is exemplary
precisely in its sustained developmentalism). The "good" and
the "bad" parts of The Long Revolution both arise from
its status as a work "of the break." The same could be said
of E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, which
belongs decisively to this "moment," even though, chronologically
it appeared somewhat later. It, too, had been "thought" within
certain distinctive historical traditions: English marxist historiography,
Economic and "Labour" History. But in its foregrounding of
the questions of culture, consciousness and experience, and its accent
on agency, it also made a decisive break: with a certain kind of technological
evolutionism, with a reductive economism and an organizational determinism.
Between them, these three books constituted the caesura out of which-among
other things-"Cultural Studies" emerged. They were, of course,
seminal and formative texts. They were not, in any sense, "textbooks"
for the founding of a new academic sub-discipline: nothing could have
been farther from their intrinsic impulse. Whether historical or contemporary
in focus, they were, themselves, focused by, organized through and constituted
responses to, the immediate pressures of the time and society in which
they were written. They not only took "culture" seriously--as
a dimension without which historical transformations, past and present,
simply could not adequately be thought. They were, themselves, "cultural"
in the Culture and Society sense. They forced on their readers'
attention the proposition that "concentrated in the word culture
are questions directly raised by the great historical changes which
the changes in industry, democracy and class, in their own way, represent,
and to which the changes in art are a closely related response"
(p. 16). This was a question for the 1960s and 70s, as well as the 1860s
and 70s. And this is perhaps the point to note that this line of thinking
was roughly coterminous with what has been called the "agenda "
of the early New Left, to which these writers, in one sense or another,
belonged, and whose texts these were. This connection placed the "politics
of intellectual work" squarely at the centre of Cultural Studies
from the beginning-a concern from which, fortunately, it has never been,
and can never be, freed. In a deep sense, the "settling of accounts"
in Culture and Society, the first part of The Long Revolution,
Hoggart's densely particular, concrete study of some aspects of working-class
culture and Thompson's historical reconstruction of the formation of
a class culture and popular traditions in the 1790-1830 period formed,
between them, the break, and defined the space from which a new area
of study and practice opened. In terms of intellectual bearings and
emphases, this was-if ever such a thing can be found-Cultural Studies
moment of "refounding." The institutionalization of Cultural
Studies-first, in the Centre at Birmingham, and then in courses and
publications from a variety of sources and places-with its characteristic
gains and losses, belongs to the 1960s and later. "Culture"
was the site of the convergence. But what definitions of this core concept
emerged from this body of work? And, since this line of thinking has
decisively shaped Cultural Studies, and represents the most formative
indigenous or "native" tradition, around what space was its
concerns and concepts unified? The fact is that no single, unproblematic
definition of "culture" is to be found here. The concept remains
a complex one-a site of convergent interests, rather than a logically
or conceptually clarified idea. This "richness" is an area
of continuing tension and difficulty in the field. It might be useful,
therefore, briefly to resume the characteristic stresses and emphases
through which the concept has arrived at its present state of (in)-determinacy.
(The characterizations which follow are necessarily crude and over-simplified,
synthesizing rather than carefully analytic.) Two main problematics
only are discussed. Two rather different
ways of conceptualizing "culture" can be drawn out of the
many suggestive formulations in Raymond Williams's Long Revolution.
The first relates "culture" to the sum of the available descriptions
through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences.
This definition takes up the earlier stress on "ideas", but
subjects it to a thorough reworking. The conception of "culture"
is itself democratized and socialized. It no longer consists of the
sum of the "best that has been thought and said," regarded
as the summits of an achieved civilization-that ideal of perfection
to which, in earlier usage, all aspired. Even "art"-assigned
in the earlier framework a privileged position, as touchstone of the
highest values of civilization-is now redefined as only one, special,
form of a general social process: the giving and taking of meanings,
and the slow development of "common" meanings-a common culture:
"culture," in this special sense, "is ordinary"
(to borrow the title of one of Williams's earliest attempts to make
his general position more widely accessible). If even the highest, most
refined of descriptions offered in works of literature are also "part
of the general process which creates conventions and institutions, through
which the meanings that are valued by the community are shared and made
active" (p. 55), then there is no way in which this process can
be hived off or distinguished or set apart from the other practices
of the If this first emphasis
takes up and re-works the connotation of the term "culture"
with the domain of "ideas," the second emphasis is more deliberately
anthropological, and emphasizes that aspect of "culture" which
refers to social practices. It is from this second emphasis that the
somewhat simplified definition-"culture is a whole way of life"-has
been rather too neatly abstracted. Williams did relate this aspect of
the concept to the more "documentary"-that is, descriptive,
even ethnographic-usage of the term. But the earlier definition seems
to me the more central one, into which "way of life" is integrated.
The important point in the argument rests on the active and indissoluble
relationships between elements or social practices normally separated
out. It is in this context that the "theory of culture" is
defined as "the study of relationships between elements in a whole
way of life." "Culture" is not a practice; nor is it
simply the descriptive sum of the "mores and folkways" of
societies-as it tended to become in certain kinds of anthropology. It
is threaded through all social practices, and is the sum of their inter-relation
ship. The question of what, then, is studied, and how, resolves itself.
The "culture" is those patterns of organization, those characteristic
forms of human energy which can be discovered as revealing themselves-in
"un- [613] expected identities
and correspondences" as well as in "discontinuities of an
unexpected kind" (p. 63)-within or underlying all social practices.
The analysis of culture is, then, "the attempt to discover the
nature of the organization which is the complex of these relationships."
It begins with "the discovery of patterns of a characteristic kind."
One will discover them, not in the art, production, trading, politics,
the raising of families, treated as separate activities, but through
"studying a general organization in a particular example"
(p. 61). Analytically, one must study "the relationships between
these patterns." The purpose of the analysis is to grasp how the
interactions between all these practices and patterns are lived and
experienced as a whole, in any particular period, This is its "structure
of feeling." It is easier to
see what Williams was getting at, and why he was pushed along this path,
if we understand what were the problems he addressed, and what pitfalls
he was trying to avoid. This is particularly necessary because The
Long Revolution (like many of Williams's work[s]) carries on a submerged,
almost "silent" dialogue with alternative positions, which
are not always as clearly identified as one would wish. There is a clear
engagement with the "idealist" and "civilizing"
definitions of culture-both the equation of "culture" with
ideas, in the idealist tradition; and the assimilation of culture to
an ideal, prevalent in the elitist terms of the "cultural debate." But there is also
a more extended engagement with certain kinds of Marxism, against which
Williams's definitions are consciously pitched. He is arguing against
the literal operations of the base/superstructure metaphor, which in
classical Marxism ascribed the domain of ideas and of meanings to the
"superstructures," themselves conceived as merely reflective
of and determined in some simple fashion by "the base"; without
a social effectivity of their own. That is to say, his argument is constructed
against a vulgar materialism and an economic determinism. He offers,
instead, a radical interactionism: in effect, the interaction of all
practices in and with one another, skirting the problem of determinacy.
The distinctions between practices is overcome by seeing them all as
variant forms of praxis--of a general human activity and energy. The
underlying patterns which distinguish the complex of practices in any
specific society at any specific time are the characteristic "forms
of its organization" which underlie them all, and which can therefore
be traced in each. There have been
several, radical revisions of this early position: and each has contributed
much to the redefinition of what Cultural Studies is and should be.
We have acknowledged already the exemplary nature of Williams's project,
in constantly rethinking and revising older arguments--in going on thinking.
Nevertheless, one is struck by a marked line of continuity through these
seminal revisions. One such moment is the occasion of his recognition
of Lucien Goldmann's work, and through him, of the array of marxist
thinkers who had given particular attention to superstructural forms
and whose work began, for the first time, to appear in English translation
in the mid-1960s. The contrast between the alternative marxist traditions
which sustained writers like Goldman and Lukacs, as compared with Williams's
isolated position and the impoverished Marxist tradition he had to draw
on, is sharply delineated. But the points of convergence-both what they
are against, and what they are about-are identified in ways which are
not altogether out of line with his earlier arguments. Here is the negative,
which he sees as linking his work to Goldmann's: "I came to believe
that I had to give up, or at least to leave aside, what I knew as the
Marxist tradition: to attempt to develop a theory of social totality;
to see the study of culture as the study of relations between elements
in a whole way of life; to find ways of studying structure. ..which
could stay in [614] touch with and
illuminate particular art works and forms, but also forms and relations
of more general social life; to replace the formula of base and superstructure
with the more active idea of a field of mutually if also unevenly determining
forces" (New Left Review 67, May-June 1971). And here is
the positive-the point where the convergence is marked between Williams's
"structure of feeling" and Goldmann's "genetic structuralism":
"I found in my own work that I had to develop the idea of a structure
of feeling. ..But then I found Goldmann beginning. ..from a concept
of structure which contained, in itself, a relation between social and
literary facts. This relation, he insisted, was not a matter of content,
but of mental structures: "categories which simultaneously organize
the empirical consciousness of a particular social group, and the imaginative
world created by the writer." By definition, these structures are
not individually but collectively created. The stress there on the interactivity
of practices and on the underlying totalities, and the homologies between
them, is characteristic and significant. "A correspondence of content
between a writer and his world is less significant than this correspondence
of organization, of structure." A second such "moment"
is the point where Williams really takes on board E. P. Thompson's critique
of The Long Revolution (cf. the review in NLR 9 and 10)--that
no "whole way of life" is without its dimension of struggle
and confrontation between opposed ways of life-and attempts to rethink
the key issues of determination and domination via Gramsci's concept
of "hegemony." This essay ("Base
and Superstructure," NLR 82, 1973) is a seminal one, especially
in its elaboration of dominant, residual and emergent cultural practices,
and its return to the problematic of determinacy as "limits arid
pressures." None the less, the earlier emphases recur, with force:
"we cannot separate literature and art from other kinds of social
practice, in such a way as to make them subject to quite special and
distinct laws." And, "no mode of production, and therefore
no dominant society or order of society, and therefore no dominant culture,
in reality exhausts human practice, human energy, human intention."
And this note is carried forward-indeed, it is radically accentedin
Williams's most sustained and succinct recent statement of his position:
the masterly condensations of Marxism and Literature. Against the structuralist
emphasis on the specificity and "autonomy" of practices, and
their analytic separation of societies into their discrete instances,
Williams's stress is on "constitutive activity" in general,
on "sensuous human activity, as practice," from Marx's first
"thesis" on Feuerbach; on different practices conceived as
a "whole indissoluble practice"; on "totality".
"Thus, contrary to one development in Marxism, it is not 'the base'
and 'the superstructure' that need to be studied, but specific and indissoluble
real processes, within which the decisive relationship, from a Marxist
point of view, is that expressed by the complex idea of'determination'"
(M & L, pp. 30-31, 82). At one level, Williams's and Thompson's work can only be said to converge around the terms of the same problematic through the operation of a violent and schematically dichotomous theorization. The organizing terrain of Thompson's work--classes as relations, popular struggle, and historical forms of consciousness, class cultures in their historical particularity-is foreign to the more reflective and "generalizing" mode in which Williams typically works. And the dialogue between them begins with a very sharp encounter. The review of The Long Revolution, which Thompson undertook, took Williams sharply to task for the evolutionary way in which culture as a "whole way of life" had been conceptualized; for his tendency to absorb conflicts between class cultures into the terms of an extended "conversation"; for his [615] impersonal tone-above
the contending classes, as it were; and for the imperializing sweep
of his concept of "culture" (which, heterogeneously, swept
everything into its orbit because it was the study of the interrelationships
between the forms of energy and organization underlying all practices.
But wasn't this--Thompson asked--where History came in?) Progressively,
we can see how Williams has persistently rethought the terms of his
original paradigm to take these criticisms into account-though this
is accomplished (as it so frequently is in Williams) obliquely: via
a particular appropriation of Gramsci, rather than in a more direct
modification. Thompson also operates with a more "classical"
distinction than Williams, between "social being" and "social
consciousness" (the terms he infinitely prefers, from Marx, to
the more fashionable "base and superstructure"). Thus, where Williams
insists on the absorption of all practices into the totality of "real,
indissoluble practice," Thompson does deploy an older distinction
between what is "culture" and what is "not culture."
"Any theory of culture must include the concept of the dialectical
interaction between culture and something that is not culture."
Yet the definition of culture is not, after all, so far removed from
Williams's: "We must suppose the raw material of life experience
to be at one pole, and all the infinitely complex human disciplines
and systems, articulate and inarticulate, formalised in institutions
or dispersed in the least formal ways, which 'handle,' transmit or distort
this raw material to be at the other." Similarly, with respect
to the commonality of "practice" which underlies all the distinct
practices: "It is the active processwhich is at the same time the
process through which men make their history-that I am insisting upon"
(NLR 9, p. 33, 1961). And the two positions come closer together
around-again-certain distinctive negatives and positives. Negatively,
against the "base/superstructure" metaphor, and a reductionist
or "economistic" definition of determinacy. On the first:
"The dialectical intercourse between social being and social consciousness-or
between 'culture' and 'not culture'-is at the heart of any comprehension
of the historical process within the Marxist tradition. ...The tradition
inherits a dialectic that is right, but the particular mechanical metaphor
through which it is expressed is wrong. This metaphor from constructional
engineering. ..must in any case be inadequate to describe the flux of
conflict, the dialectic of a changing social process. ...All the metaphors
which are commonly offered have a tendency to lead the mind into schematic
modes and away from the interaction of being-consciousness." And
on "reductionism": "Reductionism is a lapse in historicallogic
by which political or cultural events are 'explained' in terms of the
class affiliations of the actors. ...But the mediation between 'interest'
and 'belief' was not through Nairn's 'complex of superstructures' but
through the people themselves" ("Peculiarities of the English,"
Socialist Register, 1965, pp. 351-352). And, more positively-a
simple statement which may be taken as defining virtually the whole
of Thompson's historical work, from The Making to Whigs and
Hunters, The Poverty of Theory and beyond--"capitalist
society was founded upon forms of exploitation which are simultaneously
economic, moral and cultural. Take up the essential defining productive
relationship. ..and turn it round, and it reveals itself now in one
aspect (wage labour), now in another (an acquisitive ethos), and now
in another (the alienation of such intellectual faculties as are not
required by the worker in his productive role)" (ibid., p. 356). Here, then, despite the many significant differences, is the outline of one significant line of thinking in Cultural Studies-some would say, the dominant paradigm. It stands opposed to the residual and merely-reflective [616] role assigned to
"the cultural." In its different ways, it conceptualizes culture
as interwoven with all social practices; and those practices, in turn,
as a common form of human activity: sensuous human praxis, the activity
through which men and women make history. It is opposed to the base-superstructure
way of formulating the relationship between ideal and material forces,
especially where the "base" is defined as the determination
by "the economic" in any simple sense. It prefers the wider
formulation--the dialectic between social being and social consciousness:
neither separable into its distinct poles (in some alternative formulations,
the dialectic between "culture" and "non-culture").
It defines "culture" as both the meanings and values which
arise amongst distinctive social groups and classes, on the basis of
their given historical conditions and relationships, through which they
"handle" and respond to the conditions of existence; and as
the lived traditions and practices through which those "understandings"
are expressed and in which they are embodied. Williams brings together
these two aspects--definitions and ways of life around the concept of
"culture" itself. Thompson brings
the two elements-consciousness and conditions-around the concept of
"experience." Both positions entail certain difficult fluctuations
around these key terms. Williams so totally absorbs "definitions
of experience" into our "ways of living," and both into
an indissoluble real material practice-in-general, as to obviate any
distinction between "culture" and "not-culture." Thompson sometimes
uses "experience" in the more usual sense of consciousness,
as the collective ways in which men "handle, transmit or distort"
their given conditions, the raw materials of life; sometimes as the
domain of the "lived," the mid-term between "conditions"
and "culture"; and sometimes as the objective conditions themselves-against
which particular modes of consciousness are counterposed. But, whatever
the terms, both positions tend to read structures of relations in terms
of how they are "lived" and "experienced." Williams's
"structure of feeling" with its deliberate condensation of
apparently incompatible elements--is characteristic. But the same is
true of Thompson, despite his far fuller historical grasp of the "givenness"
or structuredness of the relations and conditions into which men and
women necessarily and involuntarily enter, and his clearer attention
to the determinacy of productive and exploitative relations under capitalism.
This is a consequence of giving culture-consciousness and experience
so pivotal a place in the analysis. The experiential pull in this paradigm,
and the emphasis on the creative and on historical agency, constitutes
the two key elements in the humanism of the position outlined. Each,
consequently accords "experience" an authenticating position
in any cultural analysis. It is, ultimately, where and how people experience
their conditions of life, define them and respond to them, which, for
Thompson defines why every mode of production is also a culture, and
every struggle between classes is always also a struggle between cultural
modalities; and which, for Williams, is what a "cultural analysis,"
in the final instance, should deliver. In "experience,"
all the different practices intersect; within "culture" the
different practices interact--even if on an uneven and mutually determining
basis. This sense of cultural totality-of the whole historical process--over-rides
any effort to keep the instances and elements distinct. Their real interconnection,
under given historical conditions, must be matched by a totalizing movement
"in thought," in the analysis. It establishes for both the
strongest protocols against any form of analytic abstraction which distinguishes
practices, or which sets out to test the "actual historical movement"
in all its intertwined complexity and particularity by any more sustained
logical or analytical operation. These positions, especially in their
more concrete historical
rendering (The Making, The Country and the City) are the
very opposite of a Hegelian search for underlying Essences. Yet, in
their tendency to reduce practices to praxis and to find common and
homologous "forms" underlying the most apparently differentiated
areas, their movement is "essentialising." They have a particular
way of understanding the totality-though it is with a small "t,"
concrete and historically determinate, uneven in its correspondences.
They understand it "expressively." And since they constantly
inflect the more traditional analysis towards the experiential level,
or read the other structures and relations downwards from the vantage
point of how they are "lived," they are properly (even if
not adequately or fully) characterized as "culturalist" in
their emphasis: even when all the caveats and qualifications against
a too rapid "dichotomous theorizing" have been entered. (Cf.
for "culturalism," Richard Johnson's two seminal articles
on the operation of the paradigm: in "Histories of Culture/Theories
of Ideology," Ideology and Cultural Production, eds. M.
Barrett, P. Corrigan et al., Croom Helm, 1979; and "Three Problematics"
in Working Class Culture: Clarke, Critcher and Johnson, Hutchinsons
and CCCS, 1979. For the dangers in "dichotomous theorizing,"
cf. the Introduction, "Representation and Cultural Production,"
to Barrett, Corrigan et al.) The "culturalist" strand in Cultural Studies was interrupted by the arrival on the intellectual scene of the "structuralisms." These, possibly more varied than the "culturalisms," nevertheless shared certain positions and orientations in common which makes their designation under a single title not altogether misleading. It has been remarked that whereas the "culturalist" paradigm can be defined without requiring a conceptual reference to the term "ideology" (the word, of course, does appear: but it is not a key concept), the "structuralist" interventions have been largely articulated around the concept of "ideology": in keeping with its more impeccably Marxist lineage, "culture" does not figure so prominently. Whilst this may be true of the Marxist structuralists, it is at best less than half the truth about the structuralist enterprise as such. But it is now a common error to condense the latter exclusively around the impact of Althusser and all that has followed in the wake of his interventions-where "ideology" has played a seminal, but modulated role: and to omit the significance of Levi-Strauss. Yet, in strict historical terms, it was Levi-Strauss, and the early semiotics, which made the first break. And though the Marxist structuralisms have superseded the latter, they owed, and continue to owe, an immense theoretical debt (often fended off or down-graded into footnotes, in the search for a retrospective orthodoxy) to his work. It was Levi-Strauss's structuralism which, in its appropriation of the linguistic paradigm, after Saussure, offered the promise to the "human sciences of culture" of a paradigm capable of rendering them scientific and rigorous in a thoroughly new way. And when, in Althusser's work, the more classical Marxist themes were recovered, it remained the case that Marx was "read"-and reconstitutedthrough the terms of the linguistic paradigm. In Reading Capital, for example, the case is made that the mode of production-to coin a phrase-could best be understood as if "structured like a language" (through the selective combination of invariant elements). The a-historical and synchronic stress, against the historical emphases of "culturalism," derived from a similar source. So did a preoccupation with "the social, sui generis"used not adjectivally but substantively: a usage Levi-Strauss derived, not from Marx, but from Durkheim (the Durkheim who analysed the social categories of thoughte.g. in Primitive Classification--rather than the Durkheim of The Division of Labour, who became the founding father of American structural- functionalism). Levi-Strauss worked
consistently with the term"culture." He regarded "ideologies"
as of much lesser importance: mere "secondary rationalizations."
Like Williams and Goldmann, he worked, not at the level of correspondences
between the content of a practice, but at the level of their fonus and
structures. But the manner in which these were, conceptualized were
altogether at variance with either the "culturalism" of Williams
or Goldmann's "genetic structuralism." This divergence can
be identified in three distinct ways. First, he conceptualized "culture"
as the categories and frameworks in thought and language through which
different societies classified out their conditions of existence-above
all (since Levi-Strauss was an anthropologist), the relations between
the human and the natural worlds. Second, he thought of the manner and
practice through which these categories and mental frameworks were produced
and transfonued, largely on an analogy with the ways in which language
itself-the principal medium of "culture"-operated. He identified
what was specific to them and their operation as the "production
of meaning": they were, above all, signi./jling practices. Third,
after some early flirtations with Durkheim and Mauss's social categories
of thought, he largely gave up the question of the relation between
signifying and non-signifying practices-between "culture"
and "not-culture," to use other terms-for the sake of concentrating
on the internal relations within signifying practices by means of which
the categories of meaning were produced. This left the question of detenuinacy,
of totality, largely in abeyance. The causal logic of detenuinacy was
abandoned in favour of a structuralist causality--a logic of arrangement,
of internal relations, of articulation of parts within a structure.
Each of these aspects is also positively present in Althusser's work
and that of the Marxist structuralists, even when the terms of reference
had been regrounded in Marx's "immense theoretical revolution."
In one of Althusser's seminal fonuulations about ideology-defined as
the themes, concepts and representations through which men and women
"live," in an imaginary relation, their relation to their
real conditions of existence-we can see the skeleton outline of Levi-Strauss's
"conceptual schemes between praxis and practices." "Ideologies"
are here being conceptualized, not as the contents and surface forms
of ideas, but as the unconscious categories [619] through which conditions
are represented and lived. We have already commented on the active presence
in Althusser's thinking of the linguistic paradigm--the second element
identified above. And though, in the concept of "over-determination"--one
of his most seminal and fruitful contributions--Althusser did return
to the problems of the relations between practices and the question
of determinacy (proposing, incidentally, a thoroughly novel and highly
suggestive reformulation, which has received far too little subsequent
attention), he did tend to reinforce the "relative autonomy"
of different practices, and their internal specificities, conditions
and effects at the expense of an "expressive" conception of
the totality, with its typical homologies and correspondences. Aside from the
wholly distinct intellectual and conceptual universes within which these
alternative paradigms developed, there were certain points where, despite
their apparent overlaps, culturalism and structuralism were starkly
counterposed. We can identify this counterposition at one of its sharpest
points precisely around the concept of "experience," and the
role the term played in each perspective. Whereas, in "culturalism,"
experience was the ground-the terrain of "the lived"--where
consciousness and conditions intersected, structuralism insisted that
"experience" could not, by definition, be the ground of anything,
since one could only "live" and experience one's conditions
in and through the categories, classifications and frameworks of the
culture. These categories, however, did not arise from or in experience:
rather, experience was their "effect." The culturalists
had defined the forms of consciousness and culture as collective. But
they had stopped far short of the radical proposition that, in culture
and in language, the subject was "spoken by" the categories
of culture in which he/she thought, rather than "speaking them."
These categories were, however, "Ideology
is indeed a system of 'representations,' but in the majority of cases
these representations have nothing to do with 'consciousness': ...it
is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of
men, not via their 'consciousness' ...it is within this ideological
unconsciousness that men succeed in altering the 'lived' relation between
them and the world and acquiring that new form of specific unconsciousness
called 'consciousness' " (For Marx, p. 233). It was, in this sense,
that "experience" was conceived, not as an authenticating
source but as an effect: not as a reflection of the real but as an "imaginary
relation." It was only a short step--the one which separates For
Marx from the "Ideological State Apparatuses" essay--to
the development of an account of how this "imaginary relation"
served, not simply the dominance of a ruling class over a dominated
one, but (through the reproduction of the relations of production, and
the constitution of labour-power in a form fit for capitalist exploitation)
the expanded reproduction of the mode of production itself. Many of
the other lines of divergence between the two paradigms flow from this
point: the conception of "men" as bearers of the structures
that speak and place them, rather than as active agents in the making
of their own history; the emphasis on a structural rather than a historical
"logic"; the preoccupation with the constitution--in "theory"--of
a non-ideological, scientific discourse; and hence the privileging of
conceptual work and of Theory as guaranteed; the recasting of history
as a march of the structures (cf. passim, The Poverty of Theory):
the structuralist "machine". ... There is no space
in which to follow through the many ramifications which have [620] Without suggesting
that there can be any easy synthesis between them, it might usefully
be said at this point that neither "culturalism" nor "structuralism"
is, in its present manifestation, adequate to the task of constructing
the study of culture as a conceptually clarified and theoretically informed
domain of study. Nevertheless, something fundamental to it emerges from
a rough comparison of their respective strengths and limitations. The great strength
of the structuralisms is their stress on "determinate conditions."
They remind us that unless the dialectic really can be held, in any
particular analysis, between both halves of the propositionthat "men
make history. ..on the basis of conditions which are not of their making"--the
result will inevitably be a naive humanism, with its necessary consequence:
a voluntarist and populist political practice. The fact that "men"
can become conscious of their conditions, organize to struggle against
them and in fact transform themwithout which no active politics can
even be conceived, let alone practised--must not be allowed to override
the awareness of the fact that, in capitalist relations, men and women
are placed and positioned in relations which constitute them as agents.
"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" is a better
starting point than a simple heroic affirmation. Structuralism does
enable us to begin to think--as Marx insisted--of the relations of a
structure on the basis of something other than their reduction to relationships
between "people." This was Marx's privileged level of abstraction:
that which enabled him to break with the obvious but incorrect starting
point of "political economy"--bare individuals. But this connects with a second strength: the recognition by structuralism not only of the necessity of abstraction as the instrument of thought through which "real relations" are appropriated, but also of the presence, in Marx's work, of a continuous and complex movement between different levels of abstraction. It is, of course, the case--as "culturalism" argues--that, in historical reality, practices do not appear neatly distinguished out into their respective instances. However, to think about or to analyse the complexity of the real, the act of practice of thinking is required; and this necessitates the use of the power of abstraction and analysis, the formation of concepts with which to cut into the complexity of the real, in order precisely to reveal and bring to light relationships and structures which cannot be visible to the naive naked eye, and which can neither present nor authenticate themselves: "In the analysis of economic forms, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both." Of course, structuralism has frequently taken this proposition to its extreme. Because thought is impossible without "the power of abstraction," it has confused this with giving |
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[621] an absolute primacy
to the level of the formation of concepts-and at the highest, most abstract
level of abstraction only: Theory with a capital "T" then
becomes judge and jury. But this is precisely to lose the insight just
won from Marx's own practice. For it is clear in, for example, Capital,
that the method, whilst, of course, taking place "in thought"
(as Marx asked in the 1857 Introduction, where else?)--rests, not on
the simple exercise of abstraction but on the movement and relations
which the argument is constantly establishing between different levels
of abstraction: at each, the premises in play must be distinguished
from those which--for the sake of the argument--have to be held constant.
The movement to another level of magnification (to deploy the microscope
metaphor) requires the specifying of further conditions of existence
not supplied at a previous, more abstract level: in this way, by successive
abstractions of different magnitudes, to move towards the constitution,
the reproduction, of "the concrete in thought" as an effect
of a certain kind of thinking. This method is adequately represented
in neither the absolutism of Theoretical Practice, in structuralism,
nor in the anti-abstraction "Poverty of Theory" position into
which, in reaction, culturalism appears to have been driven or driven
itself. Nevertheless it is intrinsically theoretical, and must be. Here,
structuralism's insistence that thought does not reflect reality, but
is articulated on and appropriates it, is a necessary starting point.
An adequate working through of the consequences of this argument might
begin to produce a method which takes us outside the permanent oscillations
between abstraction/anti-abstraction and the false dichotomies of Theoreticism
vs. Empiricism which have both marked and disfigured the structuralism/culturalism
encounter to date. Structuralism has
another strength in its conception of "the whole." There is
a sense in which, though culturalism constantly insists on the radical
particularity of its practices, its mode of conceptualizing the "totality"
has something of the complex simplicity of an expressive totality behind
it. Its complexity is constituted by the fluidity with which practices
move into and out of one another: but this complexity is reducible,
conceptually, to the "simplicity" of praxis-human activity,
as such-in which the same contradictions constantly appear, homologously
reflected in each. Structuralism goes too far in erecting the machine
of a "Structure," with its selfgenerating propensities (a
"Spinozean eternity," whose function is only the sum of its
effects: a truly structuralist deviation), equipped with its distinctive
instances. Yet it represents an advance over culturalism in the conception
it has of the necessary complexity of the unity of a structure (over-determination
being a more successful way of thinking this complexity than the combinatory
invariance of structuralist causality). Moreover, it has the conceptual
ability to think of a unity which is constructed through the differences
between, rather than the homology of, practices. Here, again, it has
won a critical insight about Marx's method: one thinks of the complex
passages of the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse where Marx
demonstrates how it is possible to think of the "unity" of
a social formation as constructed, not out of identity but out of difference.
Of course, the stress on difference can-and has-led the structuralisms
into a fundamental conceptual heterogeneity, in which all sense of structure
and totality is lost. Foucault and other post-Althussereans have taken
this devious path into the absolute, not the relative, autonomy of practices,
via their necessary heterogeneity and "necessary non correspondence."
But the emphasis on unity-in-difference, on complex unity--Marx's concrete
as the "unity of many determinations"--can be worked in another,
and ultimately more fruitful direction: towards the problematic of relative
autonomy and "over-determination," and the study of articulation.
Again, articulation contains the danger of a high foffilalism. But it
also has the considerable advantage of enabling us to think of how specific
practices (articulated around contradictions which do not all arise
in the same way, at the same point, in the same moment), can nevertheless
be thought together. The structuralist paradigm thus does-if properly
developedenable us to begin really to conceptualize the specificity
of different practices (analytically distinguished, abstracted out),
without losing its grip on the ensemble which they constitute. Culturalism
constantly affiffils the specificity of different practices-"culture"
must not be absorbed into "the economic": but it lacks an
adequate way of establishing this specificity theoretically. The third strength
which structuralism exhibits lies in its decentering of "experience"
and its seminal work in elaborating the neglected category of "ideology."
It is difficult to conceive of a Cultural Studies thought within a Marxist
paradigm which is innocent of the category of "ideology."
Of course, culturalism constantly makers] reference to this concept:
but it does not in fact lie at the centre of its conceptual universe.
The authenticating power and reference of "experience" imposes
a barrier between culturalism and a proper conception of "ideology."
Yet, without it, the effectivity of "culture" for the reproduction
of a particular mode of production cannot be grasped. It is true that
there is a marked tendency in the more recent structuralist conceptualisations
of "ideology" to give it a functionalist reading-as the necessary
cement of the social foffilation. From this position, it is indeed impossible-as
culturalism would correctly argue-to conceive either of ideologies which
are not, by definition, "dominant": or of the concept of struggle
(the latter's appearance in Althussex:'s famous ISA's article being-to
coin yet another phrase-largely "gestural"). Nevertheless,
work is already being done which suggests ways in which the field of
ideology may be adequately conceptualized as a terrain of struggle (through
the work of Gramsci, and more recently, of Laclau), and these have structuralist
rather than culturalist bearings. Culturalism's strengths
can almost be derived from the weaknesses of the structuralist position
already noted, and from the latter's strategic absences and silences.
It has insisted, correctly, on the affirmative moment of the development
of conscious struggle and organization as a necessary element in the
analysis of history, ideology and consciousness: against its persistent
down-grading in the structuralist paradigm. Here, again, it is largely
Gramsci who has provided us with a set of more refined teffils through
which to link the largely "unconscious" and given cultural
categories of "common sense" with the foffilation of more
active and organic ideologies, which have the capacity to intervene
in the ground of common sense and popular traditions and, through such
interventions, to organize masses of men and women. In this sense, culturalism
properly restores the dialectic between the unconsciousness of cultural
categories and the moment of conscious organization: even if, in its
characteristic movement, it has tended to match structuralism's over-emphasis
on "conditions" with an altogether too-inclusive emphasis
on "consciousness." It therefore not only recoversas the necessary
moment of any analysisthe process by means of which classes-inthemselves,
defined primarily by the way in which economic relations position "men"
as agents-become active historical and political forces-for-themselves:
it also-against its own anti-theoretical good sense-requires that, when
properly developed, each moment must be understood in terms of the level
of abstraction at which the analysis is operating. Again, Gramsci has
begun to point a way through this false polarization in his discussion
of "the passage between the struc ture and the sphere of the complex
superstructures,"
and its distinct forms and moments. We have concentrated
in this argument largely on a characterization of what seem to us to
be the two seminal paradigms at work in Cultural Studies. Of course,
they are by no means the only active ones. New developments and lines
of thinking are by no means adequately netted with reference to them.
Nevertheless, these paradigms can, in a sense, be deployed to measure
what appear to us to be the radical weaknesses or inadequacies of those
which offer themselves as alternative rallying-points. Here, briefly,
we identify three. The first is that
which follows on from Levi Strauss, early semiotics and the terms of
the linguistic paradigm, and the centering on "signifying practices,"
moving by way of psychoanalytic concepts and Lacan to a radical recentering
of virtually the whole terrain of Cultural Studies around the terms
"discourse" and "the subject." One way of understanding
this line of thinking is to see it as an attempt to fill that empty
space in early structuralism (of both the Marxist and non-Marxist varieties)
where, in earlier discourses, "the subject" and subjectivity
might have been expected to appear but did not. This is, of course,
precisely one of the key points where culturalism brings its pointed
criticisms to bear on structuralism's "process without a subject."
The difference is that, whereas culturalism would cotTect for the hyper-structuralism
of earlier models by restoring the unified subject (collective or individual)
of consciousness at the centre of "the Structure," discourse
theory, byway of the Freudian concepts of the unconscious and the Lacanian
concepts of how subjects are constituted in language (through the entry
into the Symbolic and the Law of Culture), restores the decentered subject,
the contradictory subject, as a set of positions in language and knowledge,
from which culture can appear to be enunciated. This approach clearly
identifies a gap, not only in structuralism but in Marxism itself. The
problem is that the manner in which this "subject" of culture
is conceptualized is of a trans-historical and "universal"
character: it addresses the subject-in-general, not historically-determinate
social subjects, or socially determinate particular languages. Thus
it is incapable, so far, of moving its in-general propositions to the
level of concrete historical analysis. The second difficulty is that
the processes of contradiction and struggle-lodged by early structuralism
wholly atn the level of "the structure"--are now, by one of
those persistent minor-inversions, lodged exclusively at the level of
the unconscious processes of the subject. It may be, as culturalism
often argues, that the "subjective" is a necessary moment
of any such analysis. But this is a very different proposition from
dismantling the whole of the social processes of particular modes of
production and social formations, and reconstituting them exclusively
at the level of unconscious psychoanalytic processes. Though important
work has been done, both within this paradigm and to define and develop
it, its claims to have replaced all the terms of the earlier paradigms
with a more adequate set of concepts seem wildly over-ambitious. Its
claims to have integrated Marxism into a more adequate materialism are,
largely, a semantic rather than a conceptual claim. A second development is the attempt to return to the terms of a more classical "political economy" of culture. This position argues that the concentration on the cultural and ideological aspects has been wildly over-done. It would restore the older terms of "base/superstructure," finding, in the last-instance determination of the cultural-ideological by the economic, that hierarchy of determinations which both alternatives appear to lack. This position insists that the economic processes and structures of cultural production are more significant than their cultural-ideological aspect: and that these are quite adequately [624] caught in the more
classical terminology of profit, exploitation, surplus-value and the
analysis of culture as commodity. It retains a notion of ideology as
"false consciousness." There is, of course,
some strength to the claim that both structuralism and culturalism,
in their different ways, have neglected the economic analysis of cultural
and ideological production. All the same, with the return to this more
"classical" terrain, many of the problems which originally
beset it also reappear. The specificity of the effect of the cultural
and ideological dimension once more tends to disappear. It tends to
conceive the economic level as not only a "necessary" but
a "sufficient" explanation of cultural and ideological effects.
Its focus on the analysis of the commodity form, similarly, blurs all
the carefully established distinctions between different practices,
since it is the most generic aspects of the commodity-form which attract
attention. Its deductions are therefore, largely, confined to an epochal
level of abstraction: the generalizations about the commodity-form hold
true throughout the capitalist epoch as a whole. Very little by way
of concrete and conjunctural analysis can be derived at this high-level
"logic of capital" form of abstraction. It also tends to its
own kind of functionalism-a functionalism of "logic" rather
than of "structure" or history. This approach, too, has insights
which are well worth following through. But it sacrifices too much of
what has been painfully secured, without a compensating gain in explanatory
power. The third position
is closely related to the structuralist enterprise, but has followed
the path of "difference" through into a radical heterogeneity.
Foucault's work currently enjoying another of those uncritical periods
of discipleship through which British intellectuals reproduce today
their dependency on yes- I have said enough
to indicate that, in my view, the line in Cultural Studies which has
attempted to think forwards from the best elements in the structuralist
and culturalist enterprises, by way of some of the concepts elaborated
in Gramsci's work, comes closest to meeting the requirements of the
field of study. And the
reason for that should by now also be obvious. Though neither structuralism
nor culturalism will do, as self-sufficient paradigms of study, they
have a centrality to the field which all the other contenders lack because,
between them (in their divergences as well as their convergences) they
address what must be the core problem of Cultural Studies. They constantly
return us to the terrain marked out by those strongly coupled but not
mutually exclusive concepts culture/ ideology. They pose, together,
the problems consequent on trying to think both the specificity of different
practices and the forms of the articulated unity they constitute. They
make a constant, if flawed, return to the basel superstructure metaphor.
They are correct in insisting that this question-which resumes all the
problems of a non-reductive determinacy-is the heart of the matter:
and that, on the solution of this problem will turn the capacity of
Cultural Studies to supercede the endless oscillations between idealism
and reductionism. They confront-even if in radically opposed ways-the
dialectic between conditions and consciousness. At another level, they
pose the question of the relation between the logic of thinking and
the "logic" of historical process. They continue to hold out
the promise of a properly materialist theory of culture. In their sustained
and mutually reinforcing antagonisms they hold out no promise of an
easy synthesis. But, between them, they define where, if at all, is
the space, and what are the limits, within which such a synthesis might
be constituted. In Cultural Studies, theirs are the "names of the
game". NOTE |