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Stuart Hall
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[...] That is to say, unless and until one respects the necessary displacement of culture, and yet is always irritated by its failure to reconcile itself with other questions that matter, with other questions that cannot and can never be fully covered by critical textuality in its elaborations, Cultural Studies as a project, an intervention, remains incomplete. If you lose hold of the tension, you can do extremely fine intellectual work, but you will have lost intellectual practice as a politics. I offer this to you, not because that’s what Cultural Studies ought to be, or because that’s what the Centre managed to do well, but simply because I think that, overall, is what defines Cultural Studies as a project. Both in the British and the American context, Cultural Studies has drawn the attention itself, not just because of its sometimes dazzling internal theoretical development, but because it holds theoretical and political questions in an ever irresolvable but permanent tension. It constantly allows the one to irritate, bother, and disturb the other, without insisting on some final theoretical closure.
I’ve been talking very much in terms of a previous history. But I have been reminded of this tension very forcefully in the discussions on AIDS . AIDS is one of the questions which urgently brings before us our marginality as critical intellectuals in making real effects in the world. And yet it has often been represented for us in contradictory ways. Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point of Cultural Studies? What is the point of the study of representations, if there is no response to the question of what you say to someone who wants to know if they should take a drug and if that means they’ll die two days later or a few months earlier? At that point, I think anybody who is into Cultural Studies seriously as an intellectual practice must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we’ve been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don’t feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook. On the other hand, in the end, I don’t agree with the way in which this dilemma is often posed for us, for it is indeed a more complex and displaced question than just people dying out there. The question of AIDS is an extremely important terrain of struggle and contestation. In addition to the people we know who are dying, or have died, or will, there are the many people dying who are never spoken of. How could we say that the question of AIDS is not also a question of who gets represented and who does not? AIDS is the site at which the advance of sexual politics is being rolled back. It’s a site at which not only will people die, but desire and pleasure will also die if certain metaphors do not survive, or survive in the wrong way. Unless we operate in this tension, we don’t know what Cultural Studies can do, can’t, can never do; but also, what it has to do, what it alone has a privileged capacity to do. It has to analyze certain things about the constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death. Those are the things Cultural Studies can address.
HALL: When I said that part of what the Centre was about was trying to produce organic intellectual work, I of course had the question of pedagogy essentially in mind. I don’t think we can divorce theoretical work and pedagogy. At the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies there were only three academics, so the organic intellectuals we were trying to produce were not only ourselves but our students. So the question of pedagogy as a form of intellectual production is crucial. I agree with what I take to be an underlying criticism in your comment, namely that when we talk about the institutional position of Cultural Studies, we often fail to talk about questions of teaching and pedagogy. We talk about intellectual practice as if it is the practice of intellectuals in the library reading the right canonical texts or consulting other intellectuals at conferences or something like that. But the ongoing work of an intellectual practice for most of us, insofar as we get our material sustenance, our modes of reproduction, from doing our academic work, is indeed to teach. And I suppose my real silence was in not responding to Ros Brunt by saying that the first people we might make some connection with are our students. Before we invoke the great mass ranks out there, it might be quite important that our students are with us in the project and that we are helping them to conduct a little intellectual work. I’m sorry if I appeared to take that for granted.
- The essay works by means of what Weber calls an “elective affinity” between the structure of Puritan ideas (above all, of the Calvinist variant) and the structure of the rationalization of capital accumulation necessary to the development of capitalism. That is, it opposes any notion that economic change directly provides the content of capitalist ideas. Instead, it suggests that what is important is the “homology” between what capitalism needed in order to become a sanctioned system of regulated economic activity, and the impulse to planned and routinized “activity” in Puritanism. It adds to this a middle, mediating term: the Puritan/capitalist “character structure.” It is worth noting that the move from content to “homologies of structures” is the key theoretical advance represented in Goldmann’s Hidden God : and that the attention to “character structure” is an aspect to which both the “Frankfurt School” and Wilhelm Reich were, later, to pay considerable attention. 17 This approach, though radically departing from a Marxist theory of ideology, does not contest Marx’s proposition (in The German Ideology ) that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”: it suggests, rather, one way in which, historically, this may have come about.
“Irrationalism” constitutes the second line of descent. The “struggle over method” had polarized into two main camps—positivism and historicism. But historicism was itself a fusion of many different strands. It included German Romanticism, which had never been fully tamed by the efforts of figures like Dilthey to make the study of Objective Mind (the “beyond of Science”) orderly and, in its own way, “scientific.” Mannheim’s study of German “Conservative Thought” brings out clearly its irrationalist roots. And at the end of the century, this impulse surfaced again in European thought—this time in the form of Vitalism. For Nietzsche, who made himself its most forceful spokesman, there was no guiding philosophy or method left at all. There was only the general debunking of all ideas, and their savage reduction to the sordid interests masked within their high-flown generalities. “We live,” Nietzsche asserted, “only through illusions … the foundations of everything great and alive rest upon illusion. The pathos of truth leads to destruction.” 19 Nietzsche believed that the contradiction inside the notion of ideology had at last been dismantled: Reason was a ruse: all that was left was the naked power-struggle between illusions, between interests. The most successful illusion was that which evinced the greatest “will to power.” We know what Hitler and the skilled masters of illusion who gathered around him in the 1930s did with that idea. They translated Nietzsche’s fantasy into reality: they set about constructing a G ö tzend ä mmerung . When the Frankfurt School came, under the circumstances of fully empowered fascism, to examine the problem of “ideology,” they therefore had strong reasons to treat it as requiring not much more than the analysis of the mass manipulation of administered “illusions.” In their efforts to reconstruct how the Age of Reason had produced, as its result, the Destruction of Reason, Adorno and Horkheimer were forced to look back at the irrationalist element which, they argued, had always been present in the Enlightenment dream: they unearthed what they called “The Dialectic of Enlightenment.” 20
It is not possible to recapitulate Gramsci’s formulations about the state and the superstructures here. All that we can do is to indicate the direction of Gramsci’s thinking in this domain. Much of Gramsci’s work is directed in polemic against economic reductive theories of the superstructures. Hence he argued that the proper posing of the relation between base and superstructures was the seminal issue in a Marxist theory of politics. (See particularly “The Modern Prince,” which composes part of the Prison Notebooks .) Fundamental class relations always, under conditions of developing capitalist relations, extend themselves in and through the “complex spheres of the superstructures”; for only thus could the reproduction of the social relations of capitalism be carried through in such a way as, progressively, to draw civil, social, political, and cultural life into a larger conformity with capital and its needs. In developed capitalist social formations, this enlargement of capital’s sway throughout the social formation as a whole depended, precisely, on the development of the state and of civil society. Here, Gramsci paid close attention to the “ethical” function of the state, by which he meant the “work” which the state performs on behalf of capital in establishing a new level of civilization, creating a new kind of social individual appropriate to the new levels of material existence accomplished by the development of capitalism’s base. It was through the state, through its work in and with the family, the law, education, the multiplicity of private associations, the cultural apparatus, the church, the formation of new strata of the intelligentsia, the formation of political parties, and the development of public opinion—in short, in the complex sphere of the superstructures—that capitalism ceased to be simply a system of production and became a whole form of social life, conforming everything else to its own movement. This expansion of the conception of what it is the superstructures “do” for capital is Gramsci’s first contribution.
Each tendency exhibits something of its own rational core. Thus, it may not be possible to explain away race by reference to the economic relations exclusively. But the first tendency is surely correct when it insists that racial structures cannot be understood adequately outside the framework of quite specific sets of economic relations. Unless one attributes to race a single, unitary transhistorical character—such that wherever and whenever it appears it always assumes the same autonomous features, which can be theoretically explained perhaps by some general theory of prejudice in human nature (an essentialist argument of a classic type)—then one must deal with the historical specificity of race in the modern world. Here one is then obliged to agree that race relations are directly linked with economic processes: historically, with the epochs of conquest, colonization, and mercantilist domination, and currently, with the “unequal exchanges” which characterize the economic relations between developed metropolitical and “underdeveloped” satellite economic regions of the world economy. The problem here is not whether economic structures are relevant to racial divisions but how the two are theoretically connected. Can the economic level provide an adequate and sufficient level of explanation of the racial feature of these social formations? Here, the second tendency enters its caveat. Similarly, the second tendency is surely correct to draw attention to the specificity of those social formations which exhibit distinctive racial or ethnic characteristics. The critique of economic reductionism is also, certainly, to the point. The problem here is to account for the appearance of this “something else”—these extra-economic factors and their place in the dynamic reproduction of such social formations. But these “real problems” also help us to identify what weaknesses are obscured by the inversions which each paradigm practices on the other. If the dominant tendency of the first paradigm is to attempt to command all differences and specificities within the framework of a simplifying economic logic, then that of the second is to stop short with a set of plural explanations which lack an adequate theorization, and which in the end are descriptive rather than analytic. This, of course, is to state the differences in their sharpest and most oversimplified form. It is worthwhile, now, exploring some of the complex terrain and arguments which are contained by this simple binarism.
[...] Race is thus, also, the modality in which class is “lived,” the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and “fought through.” This has consequences for the whole class, not specifically for its “racially defined” segment. It has consequences in terms of the internal fractioning and division within the working class which, among other ways, are articulated in part through race. This is no mere racist conspiracy from above. For racism is also one of the dominant means of ideological representation through which the white fractions of the class come to “live” their relations to other fractions, and through them to capital itself. Those who seek, with effect, to disarticulate some of the existing syntaxes of class struggle (albeit of a corporatist or social-reformist kind) and to re-articulate class experience through the condensed interpellations of a racist ideological syntax are, of course, key agents in this work of ideological transformation. This is the ideological class struggle, pursued, precisely, through harnessing the dominated classes to capital by means of the articulation of the internal contradictions of class experience with racism. In Britain, this process has recently attained a rare and general pitch. But they succeed to the measure that they do, because they are practicing on real contradictions within and inside the class, working on real effects of the structure (however these may be “misrecognized” through racism)—not because they are clever at conjuring demons, or because they brandish swastikas and read Mein Kampf . Racism is, thus, not only a problem for blacks who are obliged to suffer it. Nor is it a problem only for those sections of the white working class and those organizations infected by its stain. Nor can it be overcome, as a general virus in the social body, by a heavy dose of liberal inoculation. Capital reproduces class relations, including their internal contradictions, as a whole, structured by race. It dominates the divided class, in part, through those internal divisions which have racism as one of its effects. It contains and disables representative class institutions, by neutralizing them, confining them to strategies and struggles which are race-specific, which do not surmount its limits, its barrier. Through racism, it is able to defeat the attempts to construct alternative means of representation which could more adequately represent the class as a whole, or which are capable of effecting the unity of the class as a result: that is, those alternatives which would adequately represent the class as a whole—against capitalism, against racism. The sectional struggles, articulated through race, instead, continue to appear as the necessary defensive strategies of a class divided against itself, face-to-face with capital. They are, therefore, also the site of capital’s continuing hegemony over it. This is certainly not to treat racism as, in any simply sense, the product of an ideological trick.
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[...] Springsteen is a phenomenon that can be read, with equal conviction, in at least two diametrically opposed ways. His audiences seem to be made up of people from five to fifty, busily reading him in different ways. The symbols are deeply American—populist in their ambiguity; he’s both in the White House and On The Road. In the 1960s you had to be one or the other. Springsteen is somehow both at the same time. That’s what I mean by fragmentation.
That is what Benjamin meant by saying that it isn’t only the new means of mechanical reproduction but the historical presence of the masses which interrupts history. He didn’t mean this as a guarantee that the masses are instantly going to take over the world and remake modern culture in their own image. He meant that they are now, irrevocably, on the historical stage and nothing can move any longer—including the dominant cultural industries—without taking that “presence” into account. Nothing can be constituted as high art without recognizing, in the existing distribution of educational practices, its relative divorce from the masses’ experience. Nothing can become popular which does not negotiate the experiences, the codes of the popular masses.
For something to become popular entails a struggle; it is never a simple process, as Gramsci reminded us. It doesn’t just happen. And that means there must be always some distance between the immediate practical consciousness or common sense of ordinary people, and what it is possible for them to become. I don’t think that history is finished and the assertion that it is, which lies at the heart of postmodernism, betrays the inexcusable ethnocentrism—the Eurocentrism—of its high priests. It is their cultural dominance, in the West, across the globe, which is historically at an end. The masses are like an irritant, a point that you have to pass through. And I think that postmodernism has yet to go through that point; it has yet to actually think through and engage the question of the masses. I think Baudrillard needs to join the masses for a while, to be silent for two-thirds of a century, just to see what it feels like. So, it is precisely at the site of the question of the political possibilities of the masses that my political objections to, and contestations with, postmodernism come through most sharply.