Cultural Studies, and the Unresolved Problem of the Relation of Culture to Not - Stuart Hall.pdf - Culture - lady_kitty

ITINERARY OF A THOUGHT

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES, AND THE UNRESOLVED

PROBLEM OF THE RELATION OF CULTURE TO “NOT CULTURE”

Janice Peck

I n a 1992 memorial for Allon White, Stuart Hall eulogized the

passing of his friend and of the “metaphors of transformation” that

had 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.” Rather

than mourning their demise, he suggested that cultural studies, hav-

ing “moved decisively beyond such dramatic simplifications and

binary reversals,” required a new metaphor “for imagining a cultural

politics” and thinking “the relations between ‘the social’ and ‘the

symbolic’” (“For Allon White,” 287–88). Hall might have been

recounting his own intellectual travels, having embarked on his

career committed to the metaphors he now came to inter. This rever-

sal in Hall’s thought parallels the theoretical itinerary of the field

with which his name has become synonymous. Insofar as Hall is

“largely responsible for developing and articulating [its] theoretical

positions” (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 essay

critically assesses that journey by tracing Hall’s engagement with

these bodies of thought as he sought to resolve the problem of a

reflection theory of culture. His solution, I will argue, necessarily

resulted in abandoning a materialist theory of culture while conserv-

ing the economism and idealism that cultural studies set out to

surpass.

ITINERARY OF A THOUGHT 201

THE PROBLEM OF CULTURE AS REFLECTION

Cultural studies is predicated on the belief that culture must be

understood on its own terms and in relation to other aspects of social

life (i.e., “not culture”). In the early 1960s, two of the field’s “found-

ing” figures were engaged in thinking that relation. Two years before

the appearance of his The Making of the English Working Class , E. P.

Thompson reviewed Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution .

Applauding the book’s accomplishments, Thompson concluded that

Williams had fallen short of his claim to provide “a theory of culture

as the study of the relationship between elements of a whole way of

life” (Williams, Long Revolution, 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 are

related to each other” (Thompson, “Long Revolution,” 31). He coun-

tered that “any theory of culture must include the concept of the

dialectical interaction of culture and something that is not culture”

and 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, articulate

and inarticulate, formalised in institutions or dispersed in the least for-

mal ways, which “handle,” transmit or distort this raw material to be at

the other. (33)

Although both figures would later be placed under the sign of

“culturalism,” 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 of

culture as integral to the social totality—what he would later term a

“whole indissoluable practice” ( Marxism, 31). Indeed, he retrospec-

tively described The Long Revolution as

the attempt to develop a theory of social totality . . . to find ways of

studying structure, in particular works and periods, which could stay in

touch with and illuminate particular art works and forms, but also forms

and relations of more general social life. (“Literature and Sociology,” 10)

202

JANICE PECK

In taking up the question of the relation of culture to “not cul-

ture” and to the social totality, Thompson and Williams took on the

problem of “reflection”—the dominant understanding of culture in

Western thought that posited it as a reflection of a more primordial

mental or material process. In dialogue with the intellectual force

field of Marxism, the version of reflection theory they addressed was

that of the “orthodox” Marxism that emerged within the Second

International, was appropriated by the various European communist

parties, and solidified under the Third International and Stalin’s

reign in the Soviet Union. 1 This “congealed and simplistic conception

of Marxism” (Bettelheim, 19) identified the “base” with the state of

development of the productive forces. All other aspects of existence,

including culture, were relegated to the “superstructure” and treated

as a reflection of the demands of the base, which was considered

autonomous, unconditioned, and self-determining. 2

Thompson and Williams challenged this mechanistic material-

ism and its reflection theory of culture that had informed Marxist

literary criticism in Britain since the 1930s (Mulhern; Higgins). They

were not alone in the endeavor. Beginning with Lukács, various fig-

ures gathered under the rubric of “Western Marxism” also engaged

the problem of reflection that lurked within the base/superstructure

formulation (e.g., Bloch, Brecht, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin,

Gramsci, Sartre, Goldmann). As Martin Jay notes, despite their many

differences, these thinkers shared an “utter repudiation of the legacy

of the Second International” and a preoccupation with the “critical

role 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 project

that Hall and cultural studies would continue.

SUPERSEDING THE PAST, PROJECTING THE FUTURE

OF CULTURAL STUDIES

The centrality of the problem of reflection was acknowledged by Hall

in “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Published shortly after his

decade (1969–1979) heading the Birmingham Centre for Contempo-

rary Cultural Studies (CCCS), the essay considered the field’s future

ITINERARY OF A THOUGHT 203

by reflecting on its roots in the intersection of culturalism and struc-

turalism. The former, identified with Thompson, Williams, and Richard

Hoggart, 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, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes,

and Althusser) was also concerned with culture as meaning, but from

a 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 that

preceded and determined individual experience. For structuralism,

experience was not the source of signification, but its effect. Here

structuralism’s antihumanism collided with the humanist inclinations

of culturalism.

Hall noted this tension as well as a key point of convergence:

both paradigms were critical encounters with the base/superstructure

relation and rejections of reflection theory. If each paradigm was “a

radical break with the base/superstructure metaphor” (“Cultural

Studies: Two Paradigms,” 65), both “make a constant, if flawed,

return” to it; in Hall’s view: “They are correct in insisting that this

question—which resumes all the problems of a non-reductive deter-

minacy—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” (72). Join-

ing the paradigms, he intimated, might provide a means of resolv-

ing the field’s “ core problem ” of grasping “the specificity of different

practices and the forms of articulated unity they constitute.” Cultur-

alism and structuralism were central to the future of cultural studies

because they “confront—even if in radically different ways—the

dialectic between conditions and consciousness” and “pose the ques-

tion of the relation between the logic of thinking and the ‘logic’ of

historical process” (72).

A decade later, Hall reconsidered the future of the field in light of

its origins. This time he argued that the project of cultural studies

begins, and develops through the critique of a certain reductionism and

economism—which I think is not extrinsic but intrinsic to Marxism; a

contestation with the model of base and superstructure, through which

204

JANICE PECK

sophisticated and vulgar Marxism alike had tried to think the relation-

ship between society, economy and culture. (“Cultural Studies and Its

Theoretical Legacies,” 279)

The earlier quest to comprehend culture in dialectical relation to the

social totality now seemed to Hall naive and tenuous: “there’s always

been something decentered about the medium of culture, about lan-

guage, textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evades

the 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 adequate

account of culture’s relations and its effects.” Practitioners must

learn to live with this “displacement of culture” and its “failure to

reconcile itself with other questions that matter, with other questions

that cannot and can never be fully covered by critical textuality”

(284). In the course of a decade, then, the terms of theoretical inquiry

had changed. In his memorial for White, Hall refers not to the dialec-

tic of “conditions and consciousness,” but sees the core problem of

cultural studies as “the relationship of the social and the symbolic,

the ‘play’ between power and culture” (“For Allon White,” 288). 3 It

thus 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 its

founding paradigms and their concern with the base/superstructure

relation. Such theoretical evolution is to be expected, in Hall’s

view, given that “we are entering the era of post-Marxism” (“Cultural

Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” 281). This stance is echoed

elsewhere. 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 to

describe” (76). Angela McRobbie notes that if the “two paradigms”

arose in engagement with Marxism, “from the start Cultural Studies

emerged as a form of radical inquiry which went against reductionism

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