by
Stuart Hall
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[...] If you go back to the early formulations of historical materialism, what Marx always talks about is the way in which social and cultural structures overdetermine the natural ones. Marx is aware that we remain natural beings, that we remain in nature. What he’s talking about is the elaborations of social and cultural organization which complete those natural structures. Our genetic constitution is extraordinarily open-ended and is thus a necessary but not sufficient way of becoming human. What is happening, historically, is the massive complexification of the social, the overdetermination of the natural by the social and cultural. So Nature can no longer stand as the ultimate guarantee of materialism. Already in the nineteenth century, Marx polemicized against that kind of vulgar materialism but there was, and still is, a sense in which orthodox Marxists think that something is ultimately only real when you can put your hands on it in Nature. We can’t be materialists in that way any longer. But I do think that we are still required to think about the way in which ideological/cultural/discursive practices continue to exist within the determining lines of force of material relations, and the expropriation of nature, which is a very different question. Material conditions are the necessary but not sufficient condition of all historical practice. Of course, we need to think material conditions in their determinate discursive form, not as a fixed absolute. I think the discursive position is often in danger of losing its reference to material practice and historical conditions.
The violent element in the narrative structure of the basic Western—shoot-out, brawl, ambush, bank raid, fistfight, wounding, duel, or massacre—like any other semantic unit in a structured discourse cannot signify anything on its own. It can only signify in terms of the structured meanings of the message as a whole. Further, its signification depends on its relation—or the sum of the relations of similarity and difference—with other elements or units. Olivier Burgelin has long ago, and definitively, reminded us that the violent or wicked acts of a villain only mean something in relation to the presence/absence of good acts:
We clearly cannot draw any valid inferences from a simple enumeration of his vicious acts (it makes no difference whether there are ten or twenty of them) for the crux of the matter obviously is: what meaning is conferred on the vicious acts by the fact of their juxtaposition with the single good action? … One could say that the meaning of what is frequent is only revealed by opposition to what is rare.… The whole problem is therefore to identify this rare or missing item. Structural analysis provides a way of approaching this problem which traditional content analysis does not.
Indeed, so tightly constructed was the rule-governed moral economy of the simple-structure Western that one good act by a “villain” not only could, but apparently had to , lead to some modification or transformation of his end. Thus, the presence of numerous bad-violent acts (marked)/absence of any good-redeeming act (unmarked) = unrepentant villain; this in turns means that he can be shot down, without excuse, in the final episode and makes a brief and “bad” or undistinguished death, provided that the hero does not shoot the villain in the back, or unawares, and does not draw first. But , the presence of bad-violent acts (marked)/presence of single good-redeeming act (marked) also can = possible salvation or regeneration of the villain, deathbed reconciliation with hero or former cronies, restitution to wronged community, at the very least, lingering and “good” death. What, we may now ask, is the meaning of “violence” when it only appears and signifies anything within the tightly organized moral economy of the Western?
We have been arguing (a) the violent act or episode in a Western cannot signify in isolation, outside the structured field of meanings which is the film or program; (b) it signifies only in relation to the other elements, and in terms of the rules and conventions which govern their combination. We must now add (c) that the meaning of such a violent act or episode cannot be fixed, single, and unalterable but must be capable of signifying different values depending on how and with what it is articulated. As the signifying element, among other elements, in a discourse, it remains polysemic. Indeed, the way it is structured in its combination with other elements serves to delimit its meanings within that specified field, and effects a “closure,” so that a preferred meaning is suggested. There can never be only one, single, univocal, and determined meaning for such a lexical item, but, depending on how its integration within the code has been accomplished, its possible meanings will be organized within a scale which runs from dominant to subordinate. And this of course has consequences for the other, the reception end of the communicative chain: there can be no law to ensure that the receiver will take the preferred or dominant meaning of an episode of violence in precisely the way in which it has been encoded by the producer.
[...] the practice of impartiality has several inescapable consequences.
(1) It leads broadcasting into the impasse of a false symmetry of issues. All controversial questions must have two sides, and the two sides are usually given a rough equality in weight. Responsibility is shared out between the parties: each side receives a measure of praise or censure. This symmetry of oppositions is a formal balance: it has little or no relevance to the quite unequal relative weights of the case for each side in the real world. If the workman asserts that he is being poisoned by the effluence from a noxious plant, the chairman must be wheeled in to say that all possible precautions are now being taken.… This symmetrical alignment of arguments may ensure the broadcaster’s impartiality, but it hardly advances the truth. Opposition has been neutralized in this maneuver: the political level and the class content of the conflict have been suppressed.
(4) Via impartiality, broadcasting is thus raised above the conflicts which it treats. It seems to stand outside the real play of interests on which it reports and comments. The men and women who produce programs are real social individuals in the midst of the conflicts which they report. But this “subjective” dimension is repressed in the “objectivity” of the program. The programs they produce are outside those conflicts—they reflect on and judge them, but they do not participate in them. As a recent pamphlet on Television and the State observes, “the identifications contained in programmes gain a mysterious validity as they are put forward as being the product of an analytical rationality from outside the society and separate from society and class conflict rather than as the product of a dialectic rationality which includes an understanding and knowledge of the involvements from where the ‘truth’ of the programme is created.” 1
What we have to be concerned with, in this definition, is not the question of the “authenticity” or organic wholeness of popular culture. Actually, it recognizes that almost all cultural forms will be contradictory in this sense, composed of antagonistic and unstable elements. The meaning of a cultural form and its place or position in the cultural field is not inscribed inside its form. Nor is its position fixed once and forever. This year’s radical symbol or slogan will be neutralized into next year’s fashion; the year after, it will be the object of a profound cultural nostalgia. Today’s rebel folksinger ends up, tomorrow, on the cover of the Observer color magazine. The meaning of a cultural symbol is given in part by the social field into which it is incorporated, the practices with which it articulates and is made to resonate. What matters is not the intrinsic or historically fixed objects of culture, but the state of play in cultural relations: to put it bluntly and in an oversimplified form—what counts is the class struggle in and over culture.
Almost every fixed inventory will betray us. Is the novel a “bourgeois” form? The answer can only be historically provisional: when? which novels? for whom? under what conditions?
We can be certain that other forces also have a stake in defining “the people” as something else: “the people” who need to be disciplined more, ruled better, more effectively policed, whose way of life needs to be protected from “alien cultures,” and so on. There is some part of both those alternatives inside each of us. Sometimes we can be constituted as a force against the power bloc: that is the historical opening in which it is possible to construct a culture which is genuinely popular. But, in our society, if we are not constituted like that, we will be constituted into its opposite: an effective populist force, saying “Yes” to power. Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture—already fully formed—might be simply “expressed.” But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why “popular culture” matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.
The welfare state was always a compromised social formation—corporate profits and the public good, privatized “affluence” and collective social provision pulling in opposite directions. It depended on the continuing growth of private capital to create the wealth that the state then redistributed. However, the redistributive impact of the welfare state cannot be underestimated: it proved one of the most successful peaceful social transformations of modern times. For this reason, it was seen by its conservative opponents as an unwarranted intrusion by the state into the prerogatives of capital, private property, and the “free” individual and as an attempt fundamentally to shift the balance of social forces toward the working classes and the poor. They determined to reverse this damaging initiative and to destroy the consensus that developed around it. Some would argue that this long vendetta is still working its way through the political system today.
[...] Balzac was intensely interested in psychological study, and his preoccupation with it is obvious in all his novels, but it is not the complexities and subtleties of men's minds, the discordant elements that fight for mastery in one human being, as the modern novelist sees them, that Balzac depicted. His characters are all of a piece, but represented with such power in their simplicity, or rather single-mindedness, that they become vehicles for the expression of universal truths, and the story of their lives has often an epic quality, or sometimes the direct working out of their apparently inevitable destiny seems to borrow from classical tragedy.
[...] Balzac's chief characters are capable of development, and visibly change under he impact of circumstances in the course of the novel, as people alter in real life. It is even possible to say that this development of the characters is one of the principal things the novels, and especially this novel, are 'about'. And yet all these characters in all the vicissitudes and changes through which they pass hold fast to their dominant idea, to the inner dream by which they live. In Grandet it is gold, in Madame Grandet God, in Eugenie her love of Charles. [...]