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.

Cultural Critique 48—Spring 2001—Copyright 2001 Regents of the University of Minnesota

ITINERARY OF A THOUGHT

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES, AND THE UNRESOLVED
PROBLEM OF THE RELATION OF CULTURE TO “NOT CULTURE”

Janice Peck

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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)

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

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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

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

Critics, in contrast, paint this movement as a regression. Colin

Sparks contends that having abandoned its original task of “under-
standing the determination of culture,” cultural studies has opted
for “an essentially textualist account” (98). Paul Smith suggests that
the field has chosen to collapse the political into the cultural or
place them “at a great distance from each other.” Both paths elide the
question of the relations between “the mode of production and the
formation of civic life and cultures” and “between civic life and cul-
tures.” In Smith’s assessment, “Cultural studies is still at the stage
where it thinks of the realms of the economic, the civic, and the cul-
tural as for all intents and purposes discrete” (59–60). The conse-
quence of such analytical separation is to defuse the field’s critical
practice:

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

Dan Schiller also criticizes the withdrawal of cultural studies from
thinking the relation of communication and culture to the social
totality—a tendency that he says plagues the history of communica-
tion studies in general. For Schiller, this tendency derives from a
dualism in communication theory between the mental and the mate-
rial, or intellectual and manual labor, resulting in a “continuing
inability to integrate, or even to encompass, ‘labor’ and ‘communi-
cation’ within a single conceptual totality” (xi).

All three critics link the failings of cultural studies to its aban-

donment of a materialist understanding of the relation of culture to
“not culture”—in other words, to its retreat from Marxism. Sparks
and Schiller see this retreat as the result of cultural studies turning to

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

Sparks comments that “the dominant view within the field today

is probably that in shedding its marxist husk, cultural studies has
empowered itself to address the real issues of contemporary cultural
analysis” (98). Indeed, many cultural studies practitioners seem
relieved to have shed outmoded theoretical frameworks and impa-
tient with those who have not freed themselves.

4

The implication is

that cultural studies has finally surpassed idealism and reductionism
and resolved “all the problems of a non-reductive determinacy” that
Hall once deemed “the heart of the matter.” It is precisely this
assumption that I wish to interrogate. I agree that the intellectual tra-
jectory of cultural studies is indelibly marked by its adoption of the
“structuralist paradigm” in the 1970s, with which it hoped to counter
a reflection theory of culture. Under Hall’s guidance, cultural studies
tried to resolve the problem of reflection by separating culture from
“not culture”—a move facilitated by structuralism’s privileging of
linguistic form over substance, contingency over necessity, and
synchronic structure over diachronic development. This commit-
ment to structuralism was decisive for the field’s subsequent appro-
priation of Marxism via Althusser and Gramsci. Having adopted
structuralism—with its explicit Saussurean foundations—the pro-
ject of cultural studies was inherently vulnerable to destabilization
by the poststructuralist critique of those foundations. Hall’s jour-
ney from seeking to grasp the “dialectic between conditions and

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consciousness” (“Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” 72) to his
admission that it is impossible “to get anything like an adequate
account of culture’s relations and effects” (“Cultural Studies and Its
Theoretical Legacies,” 284) reflects the passage from structuralism to
poststructuralism. A key casualty of that passage was the commit-
ment of cultural studies to Marxism.

Contra to the view that this trajectory constitutes a theoretical

advance, I suggest that it merely repeats the past. Hall’s solution to
the problem of reflection—making culture autonomous—preserved
not only the reflection/autonomy binary, but the autonomy of “not
culture,” which, by default, becomes the “base” or “economy.” Inso-
far as an autonomous economy or base is the defining feature of
economism, Hall thereby conserved the very specter that had
haunted cultural studies from the beginning. I will argue that over-
coming a reflection theory of culture involves refusing the analytical
separation of culture and “not culture” and their autonomy and
embarking on a long overdue investigation of the notion of the
“base.”

THE STRUCTURALIST TURN IN CULTURAL STUDIES

Culturalism emerged in post-WWII Europe in conjunction with
socialist or Marxist humanism and drew theoretical sustenance from
Marx’s early work, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Rediscov-
ered and published in German in 1932, French in 1933, and English in
1959, the work was introduced to Hall, Thompson, and others in the
British New Left by Charles Taylor, who served with Hall as editor of
Universities and Left Review (Dworkin, 62; Taylor). As Ali Rattansi
argues, “with their emphasis on a critique of human alienation in
capitalist society and the potential liberating realisation of the
human ‘essence’ under socialism,” the Manuscripts provided a means
of challenging the economism that had prevailed within Marxism
since the 1930s (1). Contra to Stalinism’s privileging of the productive
forces, Marx’s early work “urged the interpretation of human labour
as an act of self-creativity of which the development of productive
technology was only one moment” (2).

Williams and Thompson stressed this theme of essential human

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creativity in their arguments for the centrality of culture in the
historical process. Rejecting the view that consciousness and culture
were reflexes of economic forces, they sought to restore the place of
praxis in history. As Thompson argued, “It is the active process—
which is at the same time the process through which men make their
history—that I am insisting upon” (“Long Revolution,” 33). Williams
criticized the reflectionism of “orthodox” Marxism, whereby “art is
degraded as a mere reflection of the basic economic and political
process, on which it is thought to be parasitic.” For Williams, “the
creative element in man is the root both of his personality and his
society; it can neither be confined to art nor excluded from the
systems of decision [politics] and maintenance [economy]” (Long
Revolution, 115; see also Culture and Society).

If culturalism laid the foundation for cultural studies, its

hegemony, according to Hall, “was interrupted by the arrival on the
intellectual scene of the ‘structuralisms’” (“Cultual Studies: Two
Paradigms,” 64).

5

It was under Hall’s leadership that structuralism

achieved paradigmatic status in cultural studies. Like culturalism,
structuralism engaged with the problem of reflection and the
base/superstructure formulation. In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss
acknowledged “the incontestable primacy of infrastructures,” while
aiming to contribute to “that theory of superstructures scarcely
touched upon by Marx” (130). Barthes’s Mythologies employed Saus-
surean semiotics to “account in detail for the mystification which
transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature” (9).
Althusser challenged economism with his notion of the “relative
autonomy of the superstructures” and called for a “theory of the spe-
cific effectivity of the superstructures” that “largely remains to be
elaborated” (For Marx, 113). Indeed, Fredric Jameson has character-
ized the structuralist project as “the study of superstructures, or, in a
more limited way, of ideology” (101).

Structuralism mounted its challenge to reflection theory through

the appropriation of Saussurean linguistics. It was Saussure’s
achievement to undermine previous models that had viewed lan-
guage as “a reflection or an expression of a pre-existing meaning or
psychic impression, a re-presencing of something immaterial in the
material” by proposing a relational, rather than substantialist, theory
of language (Riordan, 4; see also Frank). Rejecting the existence of a

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prior world of cognitive states represented by symbols, Saussure
suggested that words and ideas were born together through the oper-
ation of a linguistic system that, via principles of differentiation and
combination, imposed form on both thought and matter. In Saus-
sure’s model, language was a closed taxonomy of signs that, as
binary relations of signifiers and signifieds, were articulated by an
invariant code that assigned to each signifier a unique signified. This
code allowed for the differentiation and recombination of elements
according to strict rules of formation, and the formulation of this
principle of formation constituted the “structure” of language.
Because in order to use language, a speaker must recognize the iden-
tity of a particular element through its difference from all others,
Saussure held that a linguistic system is always already complete—a
“synchronic (timeless) totality of interrelations” (Riordan, 5). In this
model, meaning is not a property of consciousness or of things, but
the effect of a formal schema of articulation that determines how
elements are distinguished and combined. Accordingly, the relation
of signs and referents is arbitrary (i.e., not a reflection of anything),
and the positive content of signs (ideas and phonic substances) is
subordinate to their function as formal values within the linguistic
structure (langue) that constitutes the conditions of possibility for
actual language use (parole). Thus, Saussure could argue that “lan-
guage is itself a form not a substance” (120) consisting of “only dif-
ferences without positive terms” (118).

French structuralism arose through a “strong interpretation” of

Saussure’s conception of language as form rather than substance
(Frank, 31). Appropriating key principles of Saussurean linguistics—
its conception of structure, nonrepresentational model of language,
doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign, indifference to language’s
referential dimensions, prioritization of langue over parole and syn-
chrony over diachrony—structuralism applied these to the study of
culture and society in a move that had profound implications across
the human sciences. Positing Saussure’s structure of language as
the blueprint for the study of society in general, structuralism pro-
posed that the multiplicity of human practices could be understood
as “differential articulations of signifying systems ruled by struc-
tural codes” (Riordan, 4). Thus, phenomena ranging from kinship
systems to eating habits to myth and literature could be conceived as

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manifestations of the same general principles. Through this prioriti-
zation of form over substance, structuralism made language “the
privileged object of thought, science, and philosophy,” the “‘key’ to
man and to social history,” and “the means of access to the laws of
societal functioning” (Kristeva, 3). As Julia Kristeva notes, “the sci-
entific knowledge of language was projected onto the whole of social
practice. . . . In this way were laid the bases of a scientific approach
to the vast realm of human actions” (4). Central to structuralism is
that the activities of individuals are “reduced to the level of phonic
material” (ibid.). That is, individual actions are arbitrary—without
substantial meaning of their own—because their significance is con-
stituted through their inscription within a schema of articulation
that preexists them. Thus, structuralism held that human beings are
“spoken by” the structure.

Pierre Bourdieu has argued that the “destiny of modern linguis-

tics” and the human sciences that have taken the linguistic turn was
“determined by Saussure’s inaugural move through which he sepa-
rates the ‘external’ elements of linguistics from the ‘internal’ ele-
ments.” In imputing autonomy to language, structural linguistics
“exercise[d] an ideological effect,” presenting itself as “the most nat-
ural of the social sciences by separating the linguistic instrument from
its social conditions of production and utilization” (33). This critique
holds for structuralism, which engaged in a double movement of the-
oretically isolating language from the rest of sociohistorical existence
so as to submit it to scientific analysis, and then projecting the rules
of operation of language back onto the “whole of social practice.”
It was only by means of this prior separation that language could be
made into the privileged mode of “access to the laws of societal func-
tioning.” Integral to this privileging of language was the demotion of
a diachronic (historical) understanding of meaning in favor of the
view that signification derived entirely from the operation of syn-
chronic differentiation. From such a perspective, the diachronic is
reduced to mere repetition without meaning—to a series of “discon-
tinuous sequential structures” (Riordan, 7). Hence, structuralism’s
rejection of any notion of historical necessity in favor of “irreducible
contingency” (Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, 477).

6

Laboring

under the shadow of Saussure, structuralism thus replaced history
(temporal development) with structure (the internal relational logic

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of static systems) as both the object and method of inquiry—a move
that paved the way for the abandonment of Marxism.

Given that cultural studies searched for a nonreflectionist con-

ception of culture, the allure of structuralism was predictable.
According to Sparks, semiotics and structuralism were introduced at
the Birmingham Centre in the late 1960s “independently of, and ear-
lier than, any serious engagement with marxism” (81). From 1969 to
1971, the Centre embarked on a “search for an alternative problem-
atic and method” that included “phenomenology, symbolic interac-
tionism, structuralism and marxism” (cited in Sparks, 81). This
period of theoretical reappraisal, which coincided with Hall’s rise to
Centre director, marked the beginning of culturalism’s displacement
from dominant paradigm status. This shift is evident in Hall’s assess-
ment of the “two paradigms,” where he sides with structuralism’s
view of “experience” as an effect of structure, favors its notion of
“the necessary complexity of the unity of a structure” over cultural-
ism’s “complex simplicity of an expressive causality” (“Cultural
Studies: Two Paradigms,” 68), and grants it methodological superior-
ity owing to its “concepts with which to cut into the complexity of
the real” (67).

Hall’s acceptance of structuralism’s founding principles is evi-

dent in his treatment of Lévi-Strauss. “The linguistic paradigm,” Hall
argues, allowed Lévi-Strauss to approach culture “not at the level
of correspondences between the content of a practice, but at the level
of their forms and structures,” and to conceive “‘culture’ as the cate-
gories and frameworks in thought and language through which dif-
ferent societies classified out their conditions of existence.” Further,
Lévi-Strauss “thought of the manner and practice through which
these categories and mental frameworks were produced and trans-
formed, largely on an analogy with the ways in which language
itself—the principal medium of ‘culture’—operated.” For Hall, Lévi-
Strauss’s emphasis on “the internal relations by means of which the
categories of meaning were produced” provided a new way to
conceptualize the relation of culture to “not culture”—one in which
“the causal logic of determinacy was abandoned in favour of a struc-
turalist causality—a logic of arrangement, of internal relations, of
articulation of parts within a structure” (65).

While Hall portrays structuralism as only one theoretical influence

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on cultural studies, he grants it was a “formative intervention which
coloured and influenced everything that followed” (“Cultural Stud-
ies and the Centre,” 29). Under that influence, Hall (and with him the
Birmingham Centre) made the move from meaning (as an activity of
human beings) to signification (as an operation of language). The
conceptual basis of his “encoding/decoding” model of media dis-
course, as he noted in a 1989 interview, “reflected the beginnings of
structuralism and semiotics and their impact on Cultural Studies.”
The encoding/decoding model was also “an argument with Marxism
. . . with the base/superstructure model, with the notion of ideology,
language and culture as secondary, not as constitutive but only as
constituted by socio-economic processes” (Angus et al., 254). An
understanding of signification in terms of the operation of language
guides Hall’s description of media “meanings and messages” as
“sign vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any form of commu-
nication or language, through the operation of codes within the
syntagmatic chain of a discourse” and “constituted within the rules
of ‘language’” (Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” 128). He adopts the idea
that linguistic systems precede and determine access to the “real”:
“Events can only be signified within the aural-visual forms of the
televisual discourse. In the moment when a historical event passes
under the sign of discourse, it is subject to all the complex formal
‘rules’ by which language signifies” (129). Thus, Hall argued, dis-
course is not “the ‘transparent’ representation of the ‘real,’” but the
construction of knowledge through “the operation of a code” (29).

The influence of Lévi-Strauss and Barthes is evident in Hall’s

“The Determinations of News Photographs.” Patterned after
Barthes’s “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Hall’s essay examines “the
codes which make signification possible” (176) in order to discern the
“hidden ‘deep structure’” (183) that functions as a “selection device”
(181) to “classify out the world” (186). This view of signification as a
process that constructs knowledge by assigning meaning to “‘raw’
events” (“Encoding/Decoding,” 129) is echoed in Hall’s “Culture,
the Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect.’” Thus, the founding principle
of structural linguistics—that signification results from the purely
formal articulation of elements within a system—was imported into
cultural studies and applied to the study of the media. For Hall,
structuralism’s value for building a “non-reductionist” cultural theory

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was its method for “studying the systems of signs and . . . representa-
tions”; its “emphasis on the specificity, the irreducibility, of the
cultural” (“Cultural Studies and the Centre,” 30); and its break with
“theoretical humanism” (31). Structuralism, he argues, “obliged us
really to rethink the ‘cultural’ as a set of practices: to think of the
material conditions of signification and its necessary determina-
tions” (31). Here, in the language of “practices” and “material condi-
tions of signification,” we encounter the influence of Althusser on
Hall’s thought. Although Lévi-Strauss had aspired to “a theory of the
superstructures” and Barthes had turned the lens of semiotics on
ideology, it was Althusser who would tie the knot of Marxism and
structuralism within cultural studies.

STRUCTURALISM

++

MARXISM

As with structuralism, the turn toward Marxism at the Birmingham
Centre began under Hall’s direction.

7

Sparks contends that while the

Centre’s early forays into Marxism traversed a range of thinkers,
including Lukács and Sartre, by 1973 Althusser’s structuralist Marx-
ism had achieved “orthodoxy” (82). A chapter of Althusser’s For
Marx—“On Contradiction and Overdetermination”—was particu-
larly formative for Hall, who as late as 1983 applauded the “richness
of its theoretical concepts” and deemed its achievement as having
begun “to think about complex kinds of determinacy without reduc-
tion to a simple unity” (“Signification, Representation, Ideology,”
94). Althusser won pride of place in British cultural studies in the
1970s because he offered an innovative merger of Marxism and struc-
turalism, which at the time represented the theoretical cutting edge
in the human sciences. His Marxism was antieconomistic, antihu-
manist, and provided a philosophical rationale and method that
promised to pierce “the opacity of the immediate” (Althusser and
Balibar, 16). Althusser’s critique of economism followed from his
rejection of Hegelianism’s notion of the social totality driven by “one
principle of internal unity” (For Marx, 183). Hence, he renounced a
Hegelian “expressive totality” in which every element is a manifesta-
tion or reflection of a single principle. Althusser saw Stalinism as one
variant of this error—where the “general contradiction” between the

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forces and relations of production was held to unilaterally “cause”
the superstructure as its phenomenal reflection. And while human-
ist Marxism saw itself as diametrically opposed to Stalinism, for
Althusser it was simply the flip side of the expressive totality mis-
take: humanism made “alienation” (and its “negation”) the single
principle of unity.

Althusser’s critique of the Hegelian residue in Stalinism and

socialist humanism—indeed, his entire project to develop a Marxist
“science”—can be understood as an effort to rethink the problem of
determination outside the orbit of Hegel. His end run around Hegel
was executed through Spinoza, according to Christopher Norris: “the
entire project of Althusserian Marxism comes down to this issue of
Spinoza versus Hegel, on the claims of a Marxist theoretical ‘science’
as opposed to a subject-centered dialectics of class consciousness,
alienation, ‘expressive causality’ and other such Hegelian residues”
(35). From Spinoza, Althusser developed the notion of “structural
causality” where the “social totality comprises the articulated
ensemble of the different levels . . . [of] the economic infrastructure,
the politico-juridical superstructure, and the ideological superstruc-
ture” (Althusser, Philosophy, 6). While each level possessed a degree
of autonomy and efficacy, it was also determined by the totality of
practices of all three instances. Althusser thereby rejected the twin
propositions that the relations of production were the “pure phe-
nomena” of the forces of production and the superstructure the phe-
nomenal expression of the base (For Marx, 100). He proposed instead
the “ever pre-givenness of a structured complex unity” (199) in
which “the mode of organization and articulation of the complexity
is precisely what constitutes its unity” (202).

Althusser thereby replaced the unitary determination of Hegel-

ianism with the concept of “overdetermination,” where the “con-
crete variations and mutations of a structured complexity such as
a social formation” were understood as “complexly-structurally-
unevenly-determined” (210, 209). A social formation was not, how-
ever, simply “an equality of interaction between all instances”
(Dews, 113), but “a structure articulated in dominance” (Althusser,
For Marx, 202). One level was dominant in every social formation
and the mode of production determined which level occupied that
position. Thus, the economic base was determinant (“in the last

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instance”) insofar as it “distributes effectivity between the instances
of a social formation” (Dews, 114). To posit a “relative autonomy” of
these different “levels” required a way of conceiving their relation
outside the constraints of reflection theory, as Althusser recognized:

Marx has given us the “two ends of the chain,” and has told us to find
out what goes on between them: on the one hand, determination in the
last instance by the economic (mode of production); on the other, the relative
autonomy of the superstructures and their specific effectivity. (For Marx, 111)

Althusser’s conception of ideology—which became central for

cultural studies—derived from the structuralist premise that a given
domain of activity can be isolated and examined in terms of its inter-
nal logic and relations. Indeed, he argued that “it was because each of
these levels possesses this ‘relative autonomy’ that it can be objec-
tively considered a ‘partial whole,’ and become the object of a rela-
tively independent scientific treatment” (Philosophy, 6). Following
Spinoza, who distinguished between “knowledge of imagination”
(prereflective, commonsense awareness arising from practical expe-
rience) and “adequate knowledge” or “understanding” (achieved
through the correct deployment of critical reason), Althusser
asserted a “crucial distinction and opposition between science . . .
and ideology” (22). While ideology was comprised of “representa-
tions, images, signs, etc.” (26), its unity and meaning did not derive
from those individual elements (content), but from their internal
organization and relations (form): “considered in isolation, [signs
and representations] do not compose ideology. It is their systematic-
ity, their mode of arrangement and combination, that gives them their
meaning; it is their structure that determines their meaning and func-
tion” (26). That function was social reproduction: “assuring the bond
among people in the totality of the forms of their existence, the rela-
tion of individuals to their task assigned by the social structure” (28).

Ideology was “opaque to the individuals who occupy a place in

the society determined by its structure” (ibid.) because it was the
hidden structuring principle that determined the way images and
representations were selected and combined. In this way, ideology
“hailed” or “interpellated” (i.e., produced) social subjects, even as it
appeared to individuals as their spontaneous “free” thought. Hence,

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Althusser’s argument that “what is represented in ideology is not the
system of real relations which govern the existence of individuals,
but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in
which they live” (Lenin, 155). Insofar as ideology is form rather than
content, it is eternal and transhistorical. However, as structure, it can
also be made “the object of an objective study” (Philosophy, 26). Thus,
like Lévi-Strauss, who strove to create a science by which one could
identify the timeless “universal grammars” beneath the surface vari-
ations in cultural practices, Althusser sought to establish scientific
knowledge of the objective structure of ideology out of which were
generated specific historical variants. Such knowledge was attain-
able through conceptual clarification or immanent critique, which
became political practice by establishing “the difference between the
imaginary and the true” (Althusser and Balibar, 17).

This critical clarification, or “theoretical practice,” constituted

the science and the political project of structuralist Marxism. For
Althusser, “practice” was “any process of transformation of a deter-
minate given raw material into a determinate product, a transforma-
tion effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate
means [of production]” (For Marx, 166). Practice was also divided
into “levels”: economic, political, ideological, and theoretical. Marx-
ist science was located on the level of theoretical practice, which
“works on raw material (representations, concepts, facts) which it is
given by other practices, whether ‘empirical,’ ‘technical,’ or ‘ideolog-
ical’” (167). At this level, the “means of production” are the concepts
employed, the method is the way concepts are used, and the product
is knowledge, or scientific truth. For Althusser, “To know is to pro-
duce the adequate concept of the object by putting to work means of
theoretical production (theory and method), applied to a given raw
material” (Philosophy, 15). Theoretical practice might contribute to
political practice by establishing the identity between “two different
concretes: the concrete-in-thought, which is a knowledge, and concrete-
reality, which is its object” (For Marx, 186).

8

Introducing Hall to an American audience, Grossberg and Slack

noted “the importance of the ‘Althusserian moment’ which moves
cultural studies onto a structuralist terrain” (88). From that terrain
emerged what Hall termed the “critical paradigm” in media studies,
in which the “move from content to structure or from manifest

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meaning to the level of code is an absolutely characteristic one”
(Hall, “Rediscovery of ‘Ideology,’” 71). For Hall, this “paradigm
shift” constituted a “theoretical revolution” in media studies, “at the
center of [which] was the rediscovery of ideology and the social and
political significance of language and the politics of the sign and dis-
course” (89). If the “Althusserian moment” marked the embrace of
Marxism by cultural studies, it also conserved the founding principle
of structuralism: that language/culture is not substance, but form.
Culture was not the content of expression or experience, but the
codes, inventories, taxonomies (i.e., the principles of formation) that
provided the frameworks and basis for thought/consciousness.
Signification—both the activity and product of this structuring
process—was therefore the proper object of cultural analysis.

In “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology,’” Hall states that having

“dethroned the referential notion of language,” structuralism had
definitively shown that “things in the real world do not contain or
propose their own, integral, single, and intrinsic meaning.” Rather,
“the world has to be made to mean” through “language and symbol-
ization,” which are “the means by which meaning is produced” (67).
Because there is no access to the “real” except through language and
“social relations have to be represented in speech and language to
acquire meaning” (Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology,”
98), it followed that “how people will act depends in part on how the
situations in which they act are defined” (Hall, “Rediscovery of ‘Ide-
ology,’” 65). Accordingly, Hall conceived ideology as a set of rules to
generate meanings that define situations for social action. Ideologies,
he argued,

pre-date individuals, and form part of the determinate social forma-
tions and conditions into which individuals are born. We have to
“speak through” the ideologies which are active in our society and
which provide us with the means of “making sense” of social relations
and our place in them. . . . ideologies “work” by constructing for their
subjects (individual and collective) positions of identification and
knowledge which allow them to “utter” ideological truths as if they
were their authentic authors. (“Whites of Their Eyes,” 31–32)

This implies that we can have no knowledge of our inscription

within an ideological discourse, as Hall notes: “We are not ourselves

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217

aware of the rules of systems of classification of an ideology when we
encounter an ideological statement.” However, following structural-
ism and Althusser, he maintained that ideologies, “like the rules of
language . . . are open to rational inspection and analysis by modes of
interpretation and deconstruction, which can open up a discourse to
its foundations and allow us to inspect the categories which generate
it” (“Signification, Representation, Ideology,” 106).

Such a project turns on the assumption that it is possible to stand

apart from a structure (of language, of ideology), identify its prin-
ciple of formation, and disengage from the practical awareness it
constructs for all of us. It presumes that one can be both “inside”
(determined by) and “outside” (free from) the structure, and thus
able to pierce the generative “foundations” of a discourse. It is pre-
cisely this notion of a generative foundation—a structure with a
“center” and an “outside”—that poststructuralism would steadily
erode, beginning with Derrida’s dissection of the metaphysical heart
of Saussurean linguistics. In the wake of that critical enterprise, the
commitment of cultural studies to a materialist (i.e., Marxist) account
of culture would of necessity capsize. Hall attempted, by way of
Gramsci, to sidestep the path that led through Marxism and “right
out the other side again” (“Problem of Ideology,” 28), but was ulti-
mately unable to reverse this “unstoppable philosophical slide”
(“Signification, Representation, Ideology,” 94) precisely because he
had already accepted the founding principles of structuralism.

THE GRAMSCIAN TURN: THE SYNTHESIS OF THE PARADIGMS

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

In her introduction to Gramsci and Marxist Theory, Chantal Mouffe
proposed that the Gramscian revival—“developed in the wake of
the events of 1968”—signaled a shift from pessimism to optimism
among left intellectuals who, having earlier placed their hopes in
Third World movements for national liberation, now envisioned

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“possibilities of revolutionary transformations in the countries of
advanced capitalism” (1).

9

Hall would be among those who made

that shift in the 1980s. Cultural studies turned toward Gramsci as
Althusser was coming under attack from friends and foes alike.

10

In

“Cultural Studies and the Centre,” Hall argued that “Gramsci mas-
sively corrects the ahistorical, highly abstract formal and theoreticist
level at which structuralist theories operate” and “provided, for us,
very much the ‘limit’ case for marxist structuralism” (“Cultural Stud-
ies and the Centre,” 36, 35). Gramsci also appeared compatible with
culturalism. In “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Hall argued that
culturalism’s emphasis “on the affirmative moment of the develop-
ment of conscious struggle . . . against its persistent downgrading in
the structuralist paradigm” had been further developed via Gramsci,
who

provided us with a set of more refined terms through which to link the
largely “unconscious” and given cultural categories of “common
sense” with the formation of more active and organic ideologies, which
have the capacity to intervene in the ground of common sense . . . to
organize masses of men and women. (69)

Gramsci thus promised to be an antidote to criticisms of Althusser, a
bridge to culturalism, and a possible path beyond the limitations of
both that might carry cultural studies into the future.

Ironically, Hall’s move to Gramsci was provoked by Althusser.

In Reading Capital, Althusser treated Gramsci as an important, but
historicist-tainted figure in Marxist thought. Painting Gramsci with
a Hegelian brush, Althusser implied that one could follow him or
Gramsci, but not both. Hall rejected that choice. In “Politics and
Ideology: Gramsci,” Hall, Bob Lumley, and Gregor McLennan chal-
lenged Althusser’s critique. Far from being incompatible with
Althusser, they argued, “Gramsci has played a generative role and
occupies a pivotal position in relation to the work of structuralist
marxism as a whole” (57). Making Gramsci a precursor to Althusser
was justified through their commonalities: both rejected economism,
stressed the importance of the superstructure, spoke of ideology’s
role in producing “common sense,” and were committed to political
intervention. Hall and his coauthors concluded that the meeting of

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219

structuralist Marxism and Gramsci constituted “one of the most
important encounters in the field of contemporary marxist theory”
(58–59). Thereafter, Gramsci would play a costarring role with
Althusser in the pantheon of seminal theorists in cultural studies.

Hall has insisted that Althusserianism in its “fully orthodox form

. . . never really existed for the Centre” (“Cultural Studies at the
Centre,” 35). Without rejecting this claim, I propose that Hall’s prior
engagement with structuralism, and structuralist Marxism in particu-
lar, was determinate for his encounter with Gramsci and subsequent
response to poststructuralism.

11

Turning Gramsci into a protostruc-

turalist meant that his key concepts could be integrated into the
already accepted principles of structuralism, an operation that began
in Hall’s first engagement with his thought. Working within an
Althusserian problematic, Hall, Lumley, and McLennan character-
ized Gramsci’s conception of social formations as comprising three
levels—the economic, political, and ideological—mirroring Alth-
usser’s categories. For both theorists, they said, the economic was
determinate “in the last instance,” but the political and ideolog-
ical levels enjoyed a significant autonomy. The political level, which
Hall et al. equated with “civil society,” was the “intermediary sphere
that includes aspects of the structure and superstructure” (47), while
the ideological level, solely superstructural, “serves to cement and
unify . . . classes and class fractions into positions of domination and
subordination” (48). Corresponding to Althusser’s conception of a
social formation as a “structured complex unity,” Gramsci’s concept
of hegemony was credited with “keep[ing] the levels of the social
formation distinct and held in combination” (49). Althusser’s dis-
tinction between ideology and science was paralleled for Hall and
company in Gramsci’s couplet of “common sense” and “systematic
thought” or “philosophy,” which could transform “good sense and
class instinct . . . into a coherent socialist perspective” (53). They also
characterized Gramsci’s view of ideology as “an epistemological and
structural matter” (46) in line with Althusser’s notion that ideology
“interpellates” social subjects. Just as “theoretical practice” was the
Althusserian key to unmasking ideologies, Gramsci seemed to imply
that radical intellectuals could denaturalize “common sense”
through the application of “systematic thought” (50).

Like Althusser before him, Gramsci was appended to Hall’s

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antireductionist crusade. In “Cultural Studies and the Centre,” Hall
proposed that Gramsci’s work “stands as a prolonged repudiation
of any form of reductionism—especially that of economism” (35).

12

Key for Hall were Gramsci’s concepts of “civil society,” seen as “the
terrain in which classes contest for power” (Hall, Lumley, and
McLennan, 47); the “war of position” and centrality of intellectuals
in seizing a leadership position; and hegemony, which “played a
seminal role in cultural studies” (Hall, “Cultural Studies and the
Centre,” 35). In Hall’s appropriation, hegemony was defined as “the
(temporary) mastery of a particular theatre of struggle and the artic-
ulation of that field into a tendency [to] create the conditions
whereby society and the state may be conformed in a larger sense to
certain formative national-historic tasks.” Because the outcome of
that process “always depends on the balance in the relations of
force,” Hall held that the concept of hegemony “rids Gramci’s think-
ing of any trace of a necessitarian logic and any temptation to ‘read
off’ political and ideological outcomes from some hypostatized
economic base” (36). Gramsci was deemed less reductive than
Althusser because he emphasized “ideological struggle.” Adopting
Althusser’s notion that ideology works by “binding” or “cementing”
together signs, interests, subjects, classes, and levels of the social for-
mation, Hall proposed that Gramsci enabled cultural studies to
understand how an ideology could “intervene in popular thinking
‘positively’ in order to recompose its elements and add new ones, or
‘negatively’ by setting the boundaries on its development” (Hall,
Lumley, and McLennan, 50). Combining Althusser and Gramsci
meant that cultural studies should focus on “the ‘articulation’ of ide-
ology in and through language and discourse” (Hall, “Rediscovery
of ‘Ideology,’” 80).

The concept of articulation became the linchpin of Hall’s attempt

to recast the two paradigms through a synthesis of Gramsci and
Althusser. As employed in structural linguistics and structuralist
Marxism, articulation is the enactment of a structure’s principle of
formation, which determines how elements (e.g., signifiers, signi-
fieds, signs, discursive or ideological propositions, levels of the social
formation, etc.) are differentiated and combined. That operation is
“arbitrary” insofar as the elements possess no prior substantial
meaning, but acquire significance relationally only through the

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

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

However, rather than treating articulation—as Althusser did—as a
structural operation, Hall reconceives it as an activity of social sub-
jects engaged in ideological struggle. Hence, he argued “one of the
ways in which ideological struggle takes place and ideologies are
transformed is by articulating the elements differently, thereby pro-
ducing a different meaning: breaking the chain in which they are
currently fixed” (“Whites of Their Eyes,” 31).

This reconceptualization of ideology, in Hall’s view, helped

cultural studies understand how “ideas of different kinds grip the
minds of masses,” permitting a historical bloc to “maintain its domi-
nance and leadership” and “reconcile the mass of the people to their
subordinate place.” It also shed light on how “new forms of
consciousness . . . arise, which move the masses of the people into his-
torical action against the prevailing system.” Armed with this knowl-
edge, cultural studies was equipped to “comprehend and master the
terrain of struggle” (29). From this perspective, challenging a partic-
ular ideology involved identifying its “articulating principle” or
rules of formation so as to recombine its elements and expose the
constructedness of its apparently natural unity. Thus, Hall envi-
sioned a “theoretically-informed political practice” that identified
the generative foundations of an ideological discourse in order to
“bring about or construct the articulation between social or eco-
nomic forces and those forms of politics and ideology which might

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lead [the masses] in practice to intervene in history in a progressive
way” (“Signification, Representation, Ideology,” 95).

13

This argument is riven by a contradiction, however. Once one

adopts the structuralist premise that individual elements (signs,
units of discourse, etc.) have no inherent (substantial) meaning
unless and until they are set into relation with each other by the
structure (the formulation of the principle of formation), the idea of
individuals effecting a different meaning by substituting or recom-
bining elements is nonsensical. Because meaning is always and only
inscribed by the logic of the structure, any change in the meaning of
individual elements arises only through a change within the struc-
ture itself. The question then becomes how, why, and under what cir-
cumstances a structure changes. From a classic structuralist position,
the answer is that, fundamentally, it doesn’t: structure is a priori,
timeless, and at every moment complete. Hence, structuralism
rejects diachrony (temporal development) in favor of synchrony (a
serial succession of structures). Within a structuralist paradigm,
then, one might identify the operating logic of a given structure, but
the idea of individuals changing that logic is illogical. For Hall to
argue that individuals might intervene in an ideology by rearranging
its components only makes sense if he assumes that those elements
do have a substantial (versus merely formal) meaning that derives
from something other than the principle of formation of the struc-
ture. That is, he is forced to appeal to an “outside” of the structure (of
language, discourse, ideology) that would facilitate different practi-
cal inflections of meaning. It is on this problem of an “outside” that
both structuralism, and Hall’s attempt to fuse Gramsci and struc-
turalist Marxism, founders.

In “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sci-

ences,” Derrida launched a definitive assault on structural linguistics
and structuralism. He zeroed in on fundamental problems in Saus-
surean linguistics: its notion of structure as a closed taxonomy and
belief that a structure’s unity could be grasped from the outside by
an investigator. Derrida argued that the principle of unity (principle
of formation) of a structure can be neither inside nor outside of it. If
the unity of meaning is outside (i.e., identifiable by an external inves-
tigator), then it can have no meaning, since meaning is by definition

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an effect of the differential relations of elements in a system. Con-
versely, if the principle of unity is inside the structure, then its own
meaning is determined by its difference from all other values in the
system, and it cannot be the unifying principle for that system. While
Derrida accepted Saussure’s “conception of a differential articulation
of the sign,” he rejected “the idea that this articulation takes place in
a theoretically comprehensive and enclosed system” (Frank, 25). He
thus concluded that a structure cannot be a closed system organized
by a unifying law; it must of necessity be forever open, without a
founding principle or an “outside,” and “subject to infinite transfor-
mations” (ibid.). Derrida thereby judged structuralism guilty of the
very metaphysics it imagined itself as transcending. This is the heart
of the poststructuralist critique, not only of structuralism, but of all
systems of thought that require a foundational (metaphysical) princi-
ple, be it god, nature, “man,” structure, or the forces of production.

The consequence of this critique was a progressive destabili-

zation across the human sciences, including cultural studies. In
“Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-
Structuralist Debates,” Hall responded to poststructuralism in an
attempt to salvage his synthesis of Gramsci and Althusser and avoid
the slide out of Marxism. He reiterated his rejection of “classical”
Marxism, which he characterized as relying on “the idea of a neces-
sary correspondence between one level of a social formation and
another.” He also criticized what he erroneously took to be post-
structuralism’s “declaration that there is ‘necessarily no correspon-
dence’” and its implication that “nothing really connects with
anything else” (94). Hall countered with a “third position” of “no
necessary correspondence” in which “there is no law which guaran-
tees that the ideology of a class is already and unequivocally given in
or corresponds to the position which that class holds in the economic
relations of capitalist production” (ibid.). He conceded that Derrida
was “correct in arguing that there is always a perpetual slippage of
the signifier, a continuous ‘deference’” (93), but asserted that his own
“claim of ‘no guarantee’ . . . also implies that there is no necessary
non-correspondence.” Therefore, he insisted, “there is no guarantee
that, under all circumstances, ideology and class can never be articu-
lated together in any way or produce a social force capable for a time

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of self-conscious ‘unity in action,’ in a class struggle” (94–95). Hall
accused poststructuralism of privileging difference over “unity.” In
his view, signification might in theory be the perpetual motion of
différance, but in practice it necessarily interrupted that movement
to construct unity or identity: “without some arbitrary ‘fixing,’ or
what I am calling ‘articulation,’ there would be no signification or
meaning at all. What is ideology but, precisely, this work of fixing
meaning through establishing, by selection and combination, a chain
of equivalences?” (93).

That Derrida would find nothing to disagree with in this state-

ment reveals Hall’s inadequate understanding of poststructuralism.
It also exposes a fundamental weakness in his attempt to bridge
structuralism (via Althusser) and culturalism (via Gramsci). From
the former, Hall accepted the view of ideology as a formal structure
that forges relations between elements to constitute the meaning
of social subjects and their relation to “real conditions”—meanings
that cannot exist independently of or prior to that suturing. From the
latter, he retained the notion that meaning is constituted by social
subjects in response to their lived conditions. Conflating the para-
digms, Hall proposed that these same subjects could not only iden-
tify the articulating principle (i.e., the “center”) of an ideological
discourse, but also personally dismantle it by consciously rearrang-
ing its elements. Thus, Hall’s “third position” salvaged the founding
paradigms of cultural studies by wedding structuralism’s conception
of language with culturalism’s conception of human subjects. These
positions are, first of all, incompatible. Further, neither (alone or in
combination) is capable of standing up to the poststructuralist cri-
tique. In his early assessment of the two paradigms, Hall imagined
that cultural studies was poised to resolve “the question of the rela-
tion between the logic of thinking and the ‘logic’ of historical
process” (“Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” 72). A dozen years later,
he stated that the “question of how to ‘think,’ in a non-reductionist
way, the relations between ‘the social’ and ‘the symbolic,’ remains the
paradigm question in cultural theory” (“For Allon White,” 287). The
inability of cultural studies to answer those questions, I suggest, lies
within its founding paradigms themselves, neither of which Hall has
relinquished nor surpassed.

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COUNTERING REFLECTION WITH AUTONOMY:

ECONOMISM CONSERVED

Hall’s synthesis of Althusser and Gramsci ultimately resolved

the problem of a reflection theory of culture by opting for its binary
opposite—autonomy—and in so doing preserved that very polarity.
In effect, he spliced together structuralism’s autonomous signifying
systems and culturalism’s autonomous subject, while retaining the
autonomy of the “economic” inherited from economistic Marxism
and bourgeois economics. This move of separating language/
culture/the symbolic, consciousness/subjectivity, and objective con-
ditions/economy into discrete objects or domains necessarily con-
serves economism because it treats the economic as autonomous,
external, and self-conditioning. Further, once these are deemed sepa-
rate entities, the problem becomes, as Grossberg puts it, “how one
thinks about the relationships or links between the different domains
(forms and structures of practices) of social life” (“Cultural Studies
vs. Political Economy,” 72). The absence of a “necessary” relation
between these domains requires something to link them together:
that something is signification/articulation.

Having adopted structuralism’s conception of language as

autonomous form, Hall conceived ideological struggle through the
logic of language—as the formal differentiation and combination of
elements that disrupted established meanings and created new ones.
The point of such signifying practice (or “articulation”) was to create
a link, for example, between class and ideology, so as to “move the
masses . . . into historical action” (“Problem of Ideology,” 29). How-
ever, having rejected structuralism’s notion that linguistic structures
also produce subjects on the grounds that this was another form
of reductionism (a reflection theory of consciousness), Hall’s model
required subjects who were somehow independent of and not
reducible to discourse or conditions. As he has stated, “people are
not cultural dopes. . . . they know something about who they are. If
they engage in a project it is because it has interpolated them, hailed
them, and established some point of identification with them” (Hall,
“Old and New Identities,” 59).

Although Hall employs Althusserian language, he imports a

humanist conception of human beings as self-aware, self-determining

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subjects whose actions derive from the force of arguments (ideolo-
gies) presented to them. Similarly, those who seek social leadership
(hegemony) by fashioning convincing arguments (ideologies) must
also be nonidentical with the structure of language and their condi-
tions of existence. In Althusser, the subject hailed by ideology is
inscribed in/spoken by the structure (form), but misrecognizes this
as the freely chosen content of her/his thought; for Hall, interpola-
tion and hailing are akin to persuasion. That is, people can be
“hailed” by an ideology only if it resonates with “who they are,” and
who they are must precede and be independent of that ideological
interpellation. In Hall’s view, Laclau had “dismantled” the validity
of any notion of a “class determination of ideas” (“Problem of Ideol-
ogy,” 39) and thereby made untenable the notion that people are
“irrevocably and indelibly inscribed with the ideas they ought to
think” or the politics they “ought to have” based on their position in
the social formation (“Signification, Representation, Ideology,” 96).
Thus, Hall argued, “there must always be some distance between the
immediate practical consciousness or common sense of ordinary
people, and what it is possible for them to become” (Grossberg,
“Interview with Stuart Hall,” 52). Consciousness was therefore given
neither by conditions nor by language—its relation to both is con-
tingent because some remainder of subjectivity always exceeds its
determinations.

This contingent subject is coupled with the contingency of the

symbolic: because “language by its nature is not fixed in a one-to-one
relation with its referent”; it “can construct different meanings
around what is apparently the same relation or phenomenon” (Hall,
“Problem of Ideology,” 36). The perpetual “slippage” of language
interferes with its ability to fully determine subjects; this instability
of language, combined with that of the subject, precludes their
perfect correspondence. Contingency is also extended to social con-
ditions: “there is ‘no necessary correspondence’ between the condi-
tions of a social relation or practice and the number of different ways
it can be represented” (Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideol-
ogy,” 104). Given the absence of any necessary, interior relation
between language, subjectivity, and conditions, any connection is
external and has to be created discursively to move people to hold
the ideas (and politics) they “ought to have.” In Hall’s words: “by

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generating discourses which condense a range of different connota-
tions, the dispersed conditions of a practice of different social groups
can be effectively drawn together to make those social forces . . . capa-
ble of intervening as a historical force” (104).

This conception of autonomous subjects who can be turned (and

turn others) into a social force by rhetorically forging a correspon-
dence between conditions and consciousness reflects Hall’s apparent
concession to poststructuralism’s critique of foundationalism. I sug-
gest, however, that he fell prey to a common misunderstanding of
that critique by associating it with a modernist—rather than post-
structuralist—view of foundationalism. Philip Wood contrasts the
modernist position, which conceives foundationalism as “the oppo-
site of self or autonomous legislation” (i.e., the self as externally
legislated by god, nature, reason, etc.), to poststructuralism’s cri-
tique of any foundation or “ground” of being. For the latter, “the very
ideals of ‘self,’ ‘autonomy,’ and even ostensibly anti-foundationalist
notions like ‘structure,’ which were expressly designed to shatter
notions of selfhood, all work with a secret assumption of a ground”
(168–69). In rejecting the notion that consciousness is an effect of
language or expression of material conditions, Hall defaulted to a
modernist ideal of freedom based on an autonomous, self-legislating
subject—one contingently related to language and social conditions
who can be moved to engage in a political project through the prac-
tice of articulation.

14

Which brings us to the third autonomy. If any correspondence

between people’s consciousness and their conditions of existence has
to be created by signifying practice, for Hall there are clearly better
and worse articulations: those that move the masses to challenge the
prevailing system and intervene in history in a progressive way, ver-
sus those that maintain the hegemony of the “power bloc” and rec-
oncile the “people” to their subordinate place. Thus, while there is no
necessary correspondence between signs, subjects, and circumstances,
there is a politically superior one, which it is the goal of cultural stud-
ies to foster. One response to making the relation between language,
consciousness, and conditions purely arbitrary is a Humean conven-
tionalism and relativism embraced by the likes of Rorty, Lyotard, and
Fish. Given Hall’s affinity for a Marxian position, he rejected this rel-
ativist option. But to assert that there are progressive and retrograde

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

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

Having rejected the idea that “social relations give their own

unambiguous knowledge to perceiving, thinking subjects,” Hall
maintained that we have no access to “the ‘real relations’ of a partic-
ular society outside of its cultural and ideological categories” (97).
This neo-Kantian formulation seems to grant determinative primacy
to the means of representation; indeed, this is a critique of Althusser
made by Paul Hirst, who suggested that this was simply another
species of reflection theory: “It is not too much to argue that once any
autonomy is conceded to these means of representation, it follows
necessarily that the means of representation determine the repre-
sented” (395). Responding to that critique, Hall proposed that Hirst
failed to appreciate the difference between “autonomy and relative
autonomy.” For Hall, the former resulted in “a theory of the absolute
autonomy of everything from everything else,” while the latter
allowed one to conceptualize “a ‘unity’ which is not a simple or
reductionist one” (“‘Political’ and the ‘Economic,’” 58). However, to
posit that everything is “relatively autonomous” from everything
else still begs the question of the nature of their relationship and
unity. In 1977, Hall located that unity in “the economic structure,”
which, in his view, Marx had conceived “as in some sense other than
a reductionist one, ‘determining’” (58). To do otherwise, he believed,

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would be to abandon the “Marxist ‘topography’ of the base and
superstructure” that constituted the “boundary limit for Marxism”
(59).

Thus, the basis upon which one might articulate a temporary

correspondence between representations and subjects ultimately
leads back to the economic, and it is here that Hall’s economism sur-
faces, despite his persistent attacks on economic reductionism.

15

Before proceeding, Hall’s characterization of “reductionism” war-
rants closer examination. His criticism of a Marxism “guaranteed by
the laws of history” (Grossberg, “Interview with Stuart Hall,” 58) is a
recurring theme in Hall’s writings from the late 1950s to the early
1990s, where it serves as the “other” to cultural studies—that which
the field came into being in order to vanquish. Indeed, his work
evinces a sense that economism is the special province of Marxism
and that no Marxist thought outside of cultural studies has gotten
beyond Stalinism (with the exception of Althusser, who was plagued
by other errors, and, of course, Gramsci). Neither implication is accu-
rate. It is fair to say that none of the figures associated with “western
Marxism” (including Lukács) held to this “automatic Marxism.” In
fact, their various projects were consciously opposed to it, as was
Maoism (including the French Maoists Nicos Poulantzas and Charles
Bettelheim), whose break with Soviet Marxism centered precisely on
rejecting its economistic privileging of the productive forces (see
Rossanda). One might take issue with other aspects of these thinkers’
work, even find traces of economism in their thought, but one can-
not accuse them of viewing history as the unfolding of some iron
economic law.

Further, to identify economism exclusively with Marxism is to

ignore the history of bourgeois political economy and modern eco-
nomics. Bettelheim’s criticism of economistic Marxism—that it “bore
within itself . . . the premises . . . of bourgeois ideology” (20)—echoes
Marx’s critique of classical political economy. Samir Amin argues
that Marx’s aim in Capital was to expose the economism at the heart
of liberal political economy: “to reveal the secret of capitalist society,
the logic that causes it to present itself as being directly under the
control of the economy, which occupies the center stage of society
and, in its unfolding, determines the other dimensions of society,
which appear to have to adjust themselves to its demands” (5).

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Bourgeois political economy is founded on this understanding of

capitalism as the natural progression of productive capacity, the nec-
essary outcome of a “law” of supply and demand, and the social
expression of innate human nature, i.e., individuals as Homo oeconom-
icus, naturally self-interested, competitive beings who seek to “max-
imize their satisfactions” (Godelier, xv). Far from being the exclusive
province of economistic Marxism, economism is the dominant mode
of explanation within bourgeois economics. Amin calls economism
the “dominant ideology” of capitalism itself, in which “economic
laws are considered as objective laws imposing themselves on society
as forces of nature . . . as forces outside of the social relationships
peculiar to capitalism” (7). That is, the economy is treated as an
autonomous, unconditioned, self-determining force, thing, or insti-
tution. Economistic Marxism conserved this conception even as it
saw itself as a radical critique of capitalism. Its understanding of
social relations, consciousness, and superstructures as reflections
of the forces of production parallels the liberal political economy’s
view of the economy as the “center stage” upon which the rest of
society performs.

To the extent that Hall’s critique of reductionism has focused on

the culture-as-reflection problem without simultaneously interrogat-
ing the received notion of the economic as an unconditioned, exter-
nal force or domain, he has also conserved economism. In “A Sense
of Classlessness” (1958), an early engagement with the question of
the relation of culture to “not culture,” Hall criticized “vulgar Marx-
ist interpretations” of the superstructure, suggested refining the
notion of the base, and called for a “freer play in our interpretation
between” the two (27). However, his analysis of post-WWII Britain
was squarely located within an economistic framework, complete
with a reflection theory of consciousness and culture. He referred to
a “shift in patterns of social life” that could be traced to changes in
“the rhythm and nature of work,” “technological innovations,” and
“growth in the volume of consumer goods” (26). In Hall’s view, these
factors had changed objectively and “subjectively, i.e., as they present
themselves to the consciousness of working people” (27), thereby
“giv[ing] rise to a different set of emotional responses” manifested in
a “new ‘class consciousness’” (28). Thus, apparently self-propelled
changes in the base were reflected in subjectivity. As Hall argued:

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The transformation of the technical base has done its work. . . . the
development of the means of production must in turn raise the level of
human consciousness, and may make possible, and in turn, create the
demand for greater participation in all the human activities—the “social
relations of production” associated with work. (28)

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

the material and technological means for complete human freedom are
almost to hand . . . [but] the structure of human, social and moral rela-
tionships are in complete contradiction and have to be set over against
our material advances, when we are reckoning them up. (31)

Although Hall would no doubt reject his early analysis as reduc-

tionist, the issues it raised effectively established the agenda for cul-
tural studies for the next three decades: the base/superstructure
(economy/culture) relationship; the relation of culture to “not cul-
ture” and consciousness to conditions; the problem of why the work-
ing class (or “the people”) did not/could not/would not recognize
their own domination; and the question of what critical intellectuals
might do about it. The journey through structuralism, structur-
alist Marxism, and Gramsci provided new analytical concepts and
methods, and along the way gender and race were added as sites of
analysis, but Hall’s original questions endured. So did the tendency
to conceive the economic (or capitalism) as unconditioned—a self-
driven force or thing. What changed are the terms in which Hall con-
ceived the relation of culture and consciousness to the economic.

Writing during the “Althusserian moment,” Hall countered

reductionism by conceiving the political and ideological as relatively
autonomous levels with their own structures, effects, and “condi-
tions of existence” that were “not reducible to ‘the economic.’” How-
ever, he continued to view their relation as linear, i.e., the economic
precedes the other “levels” conceptually and actually. The political,
juridical, and ideological, he argued, “are related but ‘relatively

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autonomous’ practices, and thus the sites of distinct forms of class
struggle, with their own objects of struggle, and exhibiting a rela-
tively independent retroactive effect on ‘the base.’” (“‘Political’ and
the ‘Economic,’” 56; emphasis added). The autonomy of the super-
structural levels facilitates “effects within what we have broadly
designated as the ‘economic’” (ibid.), but the economic still takes
precedence; its effect upon the other levels are primary, theirs are sec-
ondary and “retroactive.” That is, the political, ideological, and
juridical do not produce the economic—which appears to be self-
generated—but only respond to it after the fact.

Nine years later, after the Gramscian detour, this conception of

the economic persists, despite Hall’s claim to offer a new, nonreduc-
tionist determinacy. In “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without
Guarantees,” he argues that “the relations in which people exist are
the ‘real relations’ which the categories and concepts they use help
them to grasp and articulate in thought,” but the “economic relations
themselves cannot prescribe a single, fixed and unalterable way of
conceptualizing it [sic]” because “it can be expressed within different
ideological discourses” (38). If working people accept the representa-
tion of “the market” as a “system driven by the real and practical
imperatives of self-interest” (34), this is a consequence of representa-
tion. Thus, “a worker who lives his or her relation to the circuits of
capitalist production exclusively through the categories of a ‘fair
price’ and a ‘fair wage’” is not plagued by false consciousness, but
hindered by “inadequate” frameworks of knowledge. In Hall’s
words, “There is something about her situation which she cannot
grasp with the categories [of thought] she is using” (37).

By also insisting that the discourses within which “the process of

capitalist production and exchange” is represented “situate us as
social actors . . . and prescribe certain identities for us” (39), Hall risks
making the means of representation determinate. He sidesteps this
issue by asserting that the “real relations” can be known through
an “adequate” or “theoretical discourse,” thus implying that there
are true correspondences between language, conditions, and con-
sciousness. Where does this adequate discourse—as well as inade-
quate ones—come from? For Hall, they are ultimately supplied by
the economic:

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the economic aspect of capitalist production processes has real limiting
and constraining effects (i.e., determinacy), for the categories in which
the circuits of production are thought, ideologically, and vice versa. The
economic provides the repertoire of categories which will be used, in
thought. What the economic cannot do is (a) to provide the contents of the
particular thoughts of particular social classes or groups at any specific
time; (b) to fix or guarantee for all time which ideas will be made use of
by which classes. The determinacy of the economic for the ideological
can, therefore, be only in terms of the former setting limits for defining
the terrain of operations, establishing the “raw materials” of thought.
Material circumstances are the set of constraints, the “conditions of
existence,” for practical thought and calculation about society. (42)

Hall therefore distinguishes his conception of economic determi-

nacy from reflection theory by privileging form over content—the
structuralist solution. By providing the “raw materials” of experi-
ence (conceived here as the classificatory schema of thought), the
economic (i.e., “material circumstances”) determines the boundaries
(or principle of formation) of what it is possible to think, even if
it cannot command what any given individual actually does think.
It therefore continues to precede both thought and action as an
unconditioned external cause. Indeed, Hall suggested that Alth-
usser’s ill-fated “determination in the last instance” be replaced by
“determination by the economic in the first instance,” since “no
social practice or set of relations floats free of the determinate effects
of the concrete relations in which they are created” (43).

Both shifts and continuities are evident when comparing Hall’s

“A Sense of Classlessness” to his analysis of Thatcherism in the
1980s, culminating in the New Times project, where the synthesis
of Althusser, Gramsci, and Laclau and the “no necessary correspon-
dence” thesis are everywhere evident. In the conclusion to The Hard
Road to Renewal, Hall reiterates his view that “There is no automatic
correspondence between class position, political position and ideo-
logical inclination. Majorities have to be ‘made’ and ‘won’—not
passively reflected” (281). Class is no longer an organizing trope,
given the presumably discredited notion of any class determination
of consciousness. Working class and ruling class have been replaced,
via Laclau, by the theoretically amorphous notion of “the people” ver-
sus “the power bloc.” False consciousness has also been jettisoned—

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usurped by “identities”—since consciousness hinges on how our
“real conditions of existence” are articulated. Gone too is the claim
that people’s interests are given by their position within existing
social conditions, because “social interests are contradictory” and
must be marshaled by a hegemonizing project (ibid.).

These differences, however, belie an important continuity in

Hall’s treatment of the economic as a self-legislating foundation. In
their introduction to New Times, Hall and Martin Jacques argue that
the New Times project grew out of the fact that “the world has
changed,” that “advanced capitalist societies are increasingly charac-
terised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than
homogeneity, standardisation and the economies and organisations
of scale which characterised modern mass society” (11). “New
Times” are the result of the transition from “Fordism” to “post-
Fordism,” characterized by “the rise of ‘flexible specialisation’ in
place of the old assembly-line world of mass production. It is this,
above all, which is orchestrating and driving on the evolution of this
new world.” They deem this transition “epochal”—comparable to
the nineteenth-century passage “from the ‘entrepreneurial’ to the
advanced or organised stage within capitalism,” which “has shifted
the centre of gravity of the society and the culture markedly and
decisively in a new direction.” In sum, “post-Fordism is at the lead-
ing edge of change, increasingly setting the tone of society and pro-
viding the dominant rhythm of cultural change” (12). This is not far
removed from Hall’s claim in 1958 that “the transformation of the
technical base has done its work.” In both cases, the economic perks
along of its own volition and everything else (culture, consciousness,
politics, etc.) reacts to that external momentum.

This conception of the economic also traverses Hall’s writings on

race, ethnicity, and globalization in the 1980s. In two 1989 lectures,
Hall addresses a tension in globalization between homogenization
(identity) and specificity (difference). Although rejecting class as a
“master concept” (“Old and New Identities,” 46) and positioning
himself against a view of capitalism operating according to a “singu-
lar, unitary logic” (“Local and the Global,” 30), he retains a view of
the economic (i.e., capitalism) as an external, autogenerated force.
Capitalism is treated here as a thing—almost as a subject itself acting
of its own logic and volition: “Capitalism is constantly exploiting

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different forms of labour force” (“Local and the Global,” 30); “in
order to maintain its global position, capital has had to negotiate . . .
to incorporate and partly reflect the differences it was trying to
overcome” (32); “the more we understand about the development of
capital itself, the more we understand that . . . alongside the drive to
commodify everything, which is certainly part of its logic, is another
critical part of its logic which works in and through specificity” (29).

Within such a formulation, capitalism is external and prior to

thought, discourse, practices, and social relations. It is, in other
words, something like a force of nature to which human beings
respond after the fact, rather than a historically determinate system
of social relations within which, individually and collectively, we
daily produce and reproduce both the conditions of our existence
and ourselves through our practical activity. Hall’s view of the eco-
nomic is precisely that held by economistic Marxism and bourgeois
economics—with which reflection theory is eminently compatible—
where the economy (or productive forces) acts as the motor of history
that, “in its unfolding, determines the other dimensions of society,
which appear to have to adjust themselves to its demands” (Amin, 5).
Insofar as Hall conserved this conception, he countered the determi-
nacy of the economic by positing the (relative) autonomy of lan-
guage, consciousness, and culture. Thus, the power of the economic
was whittled down by making it only partially determinant, culture
was elevated by adopting a nonrepresentational model of language,
and human freedom was reinstated by reviving the modernist ideal
of the subject who always exceeds any external legislation.

FROM POSTSTRUCTURALISM TO POST-MARXISM:

REPEATING THE PAST

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

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

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Gramsci’s “displacement” of Marxism has not yet been understood and
probably won’t ever be reckoned with now we are entering the era of
post-Marxism. (“Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” 281)

16

Equally important in the field’s theoretical pilgrimage was the “lin-
guistic turn,” which had “decentred and dislocated the settled path”
presumably paved by Marxism (283). As Hall notes, “the refigur-
ing of theory, made as a result of having to think questions of cul-
ture through the metaphors of language and textuality, represents a
point beyond which cultural studies must now always locate itself”
(283–84). In Hall’s view, the earlier propensities of cultural studies
toward “class reductionism” (“For Allon White,” 295) and “simple
binary metaphors of cultural and symbolic transformations” (303)
had been cured by a “general theoretical shift from any lingering flir-
tation with even a modified version of the ‘base-superstructure’
metaphor to a fully discourse-and-power conception of the ideo-
logical” (297).

17

The abandonment of the base/superstructure ques-

tion and Marxian “metaphors of transformation” signals the wane
of the attempt of cultural studies to think the “dialectic between
conditions and consciousness.” Indeed, Hall favored replacing the
“metaphor” of “the dialectic of class antagonism” with that of the
“dialogic of multi-accentuality” (299). For post-Marxist cultural stud-
ies, relative autonomy had become simply autonomy; Althusser’s
“structure in dominance” had been replaced by a structure with no
center and no dominant, and historical necessity had bowed before
contingency.

This migration of thought is evident in Hall’s introduction to For-

mations of Modernity. He describes the textbook as an examination of
the “four major social processes” responsible for the “transition to
modernity”—“the political, the economic, the social and the cul-
tural” (1)—that constitute “the ‘motors’ of the formation” of modern
society (7). None are granted “explanatory priority” because all were
necessary, if not sufficient, for the emergence of modernity. The book
thus “adopts a multi-causal explanation” reflecting its opposition to
“teleological” accounts (specifically, Marxism and modernization
theory) that attributed “social development ultimately to one princi-
pal cause: the economic” (10). In Hall’s terms, “unlike many earlier
sociological accounts, which tended to privilege class as the ‘master’

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category, [the book] does not adopt a clear hierarchy or priority of
causes, and is generally critical of economic reductionism, in which
the economic base is assumed to be the determining force in history”
(11). In contrast, Formations of Modernity gives “much greater promi-
nence and weight to cultural and symbolic processes.” Culture is
granted “a higher explanatory status” because it is “considered to be,
not reflective, but constitutive of the modern world: as constitutive as
economic, political or social processes of change” (13).

This “pluralization of key concepts” (11), according to Hall,

marks an advance in knowledge. Modernity is now understood in
terms of “different temporalities,” events that “follow no rational
logic” (9), “diverse outcomes,” and “unevenness, contradiction, con-
tingency (rather than necessity).” He stops slightly short of advocat-
ing a view of history as “a series of purely random events” (11): “the
processes of formation were not autonomous and separate from each
other. There were connections between them—they were articulated
with one another. But they weren’t inevitably harnessed together, all
moving or changing in tandem” (9). If the ghost of Althusser lives
on in Hall’s terminology, it is a mere spectral presence as Hall assid-
uously distances himself from Marxism, which he presents as
irretrievably reductionist. In the wake of the passage to poststruc-
turalism and post-Marxism, the economic is dethroned from a posi-
tion of centrality to one among several “processes” that contributed
to something called modernity. Indeed, of the “four processes,” the
cultural, defined as the “symbolic dimension of social life” (13),
appears more decisive in that “the production of social meanings is a
necessary condition for the functioning of all social practices” (14).

Despite the demotion of the economic in Hall’s new schema—it

is now determinant in neither the first nor last instance—this does
not signal the death throes of economism. Hall describes Vivienne
Brown’s chapter on the economy as an examination of “the forma-
tion of a distinct sphere of economic life, governed by new economic
relations, and regulated and represented by new economic ideas.”
The “economic sphere” comprises “commerce and trade,” “the
expansion of markets, the new division of labour and the growth of
material wealth and consumption.” All were “consequent upon the
rise of capitalism in Europe and the gradual transformation of the
traditional economy.” Europe’s “economic development,” Hall argues,

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was driven by “the expansion of trade and the market.” The “pro-
ductive energies of the capitalist system” were “unleash[ed]” by
“laissez faire and the market forces of the private economy.” The
“engines of this development were the commercial and agrarian
revolutions” (3).

Such language represents the economy as a thing that operates

independently of social subjects and social relations—indeed, to
have given birth to itself, as the chapter title implies: “The Emergence
of the Economy.” This is akin to the language used to describe geo-
logical change. It is also the language of bourgeois economics, where
the market and capitalism are presented as arising spontaneously
from the natural order of things. Witness Hall’s statement that “Mod-
ern capitalism sprang up in the interstices of the feudal economy”
(8). Hall’s depiction of the economic as a distinct, self-generated
sphere echoes bourgeois economics identification of the economy as
“the market” operating independently from and setting the stage for
the rest of social existence.

The consequence of conceiving the economic in this way is to

desocialize and dehumanize it. The segregation of the economic from
something called “the social” is particularly telling. In his descrip-
tion of the chapter on “changing social structures,” Hall states that
author Harriet Bradley

shifts the focus from economic processes to the changing social rela-
tions and the new type of social structure characteristic of industrial
capitalist society. Her chapter is concerned with the emergence of new
social and sexual divisions of labour. She contrasts the class and gender
formations of pre-industrial, rural society with the rise of new social
classes, organized around capital and waged labour; the work patterns
associated with the new forms of industrial production; and the new
relations between men and women. (4)

In this formulation, “economic processes” appear to emerge of their
own accord and then provide the impetus for changes elsewhere in
“social relations,” which also exist separately from, and respond after
the fact to, self-initiated changes in “the economy.”

There is a term for this way of conceiving the economic—

fetishization—where the outcome of practical human activity is
taken to be a suprahuman thing. It was precisely Marx’s aim in his

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239

critique of classical political economy and analysis of capitalism to
expose this “fetishized economic universe” in which “the language
of labor and human life activity” was translated into “the language
of commodities” (McNally, 102, 103). Through that sleight of hand,
the “lived reality of labor” was reduced to its “alienated and abstract
form” (i.e., money) and capital proclaimed its “pure autonomy” from
its “other”: human labor. The task of bourgeois economics is to
enshrine this fetishized universe as fact and theory. As David
McNally argues,

the fetishized categories of vulgar economy thus constitute a bourgeois
myth of “self-birth.” . . . In vulgar economy, capital becomes a raging
Nietzschean, an insatiable will to power that denies all otherness, that
refuses to acknowledge its origin in labor, and that claims authorship of
all the conditions of its existence. (103)

Although Hall does not claim “pure autonomy” for the econo-

mic—his four “processes” are, naturally, “articulated with one
another”—he nonetheless reproduces the fetishized universe of bour-
geois economics and economistic Marxism by turning the economy
into an object independent of politics, culture, and social relations.
Further, treating each of these as distinct “spheres” or “organisa-
tional clusters” (Hall, introduction to Formations, 11) precludes the
possibility of thinking their “complex unity” and defaults to a view
of society as congeries of contingently related processes. In effect, the
post-Marxist Hall opts for a position he once explicitly rejected: a
“traditional, sociological, multifactoral approach which has no deter-
mining priorities in it,” where “everything interacts with everything
else” (“Signification, Representation, Ideology,” 91).

In 1973, in “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural The-

ory,” Raymond Williams criticized this very position because it
entailed “withdrawing from the claim that there is any process of
determination” (36). Williams observed that although the concept of
the superstructure had undergone many reformulations since Marx,
“what has not been looked at with equal care is the received notion
of the ‘base,’” which was “the more important concept to look at if
we are to understand the realities of cultural process.” He noted the
tendency to conceive the base in “essentially uniform and usually

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static ways”—to treat it “virtually as an object” that unilaterally con-
ditioned everything else (33). This, Williams asserted, was at odds
with Marx’s own position, which located the origins of determina-
tion in “the specific activities and relationships” of human beings (34).

I suggest Williams homed in on the core weakness of the attempt

of cultural studies to surpass a reflection theory of culture: it tried to
rethink the base/superstructure relationship by focusing all of its
energies on the latter and leaving the received notion of the former
essentially intact. Given this lopsided endeavor, it is no surprise that
Hall’s challenge to reflection theory moved inexorably in the direc-
tion of the autonomy of the superstructure while conserving the
autonomy of the base. Further, once these are deemed separate
domains, it is impossible to empirically establish a relation between
them of either necessity or freedom. They become instead a series of
objects, events, or “processes” whose relationship is external and
contingent. Any “unity” among them is then entirely subjective and
conventional—a product of a particular “articulation” that tem-
porarily interrupts and “fixes” the endless play of signification. In
resolving the problem of reflection by asserting culture’s autonomy,
Hall thus opted for an analytical and neopositivist—as opposed to
dialectical—mode of intelligibility, insofar as for the latter there is no
such thing as an autonomous object or fact.

18

This failure to question the autonomy of the base also conserves

the mental/material split Schiller criticizes. In Formations of Moder-
nity Hall states: “the processes of economic, political and social
development seem to have a clear, objective, material character. They
altered material and social organization in the ‘real world’—how
people actually behaved.” Cultural processes, in contrast, “deal with
less tangible things—meanings, values, symbols, ideas, knowledge,
language, ideology.” Although he claims that language is “the result
of social practices” and “material processes—like the economy and
politics—depend on ‘meaning’ for their effects” (13), Hall nonethe-
less conceives “the material’ and “the discursive” as separable areas
whose relation must be analytically posited, rather than as dialecti-
cal, mutually constituting moments of what Williams once termed “a
whole indissoluable practice” (Marxism and Literature, 31).

Two decades ago, Hall proposed that the future of cultural stud-

ies turned on finding a solution to “the problems of a non-reductive

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241

determinacy” (“Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” 72). His solution
was to parcel up the world into discrete spheres whose relation to
each other is external, contingent, and therefore indeterminate. In
effect, Hall reverted to Thompson’s early distinction between the
“raw material of life experience” and the “disciplines and systems”
that “‘handle,’ transmit or distort” it, but, contra to Thompson, treats
their relation as arbitrary rather than necessary. Ironically, this strat-
egy conserves both idealism and economism—those twin pillars
of modern thought—by making culture the exclusive domain of
thought, language, and meaning, and turning the economic into a
realm of mute, nonsignifying materiality. Hall’s theoretical itinerary
issues from the failure to rethink the base outside the limitations of
economistic Marxism and bourgeois economics; from the linguistic
turn, which isolated and privileged language and then projected it
back onto the whole of social practice; and from the resuscitation of
the modern subject who freely creates meanings from the “raw mate-
rial” at hand. This trajectory—which pitted the autonomy of the
symbolic against that of the subject and the economic—precluded the
possibility of surpassing either economism or idealism. Further, hav-
ing chosen structuralism as the weapon with which to battle econo-
mistic Marxism, cultural studies was inherently vulnerable to the
poststructuralist critique of both. Once on board the structuralist
train, without having done the necessary theoretical labor on the
problem of the base, Hall and cultural studies had little choice but to
go along for the ride through Marxism and “right out the other side
again” (Hall, “Problem of Ideology,” 28).

It is hardly scandalous to say that cultural studies has abandoned

Marxism when its most famous practitioners openly proclaim as
much. It is perhaps more provocative to suggest that the field has
thereby conserved economism—the very thing it sought to abolish
once and for all. British cultural studies is the most recent in a series
of twentieth-century efforts to formulate a nonreductive Marxian
cultural theory. Like its predecessors, it entered that project by way of
the superstructure. To the extent that they neglected to also critically
engage with the question of the base, these efforts have been unsatis-
factory.

19

The theoretical itinerary of Hall and the field he helped

institutionalize holds a lesson for those who remain committed to a
historical materialist understanding of culture. If we are to learn

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from the failure of cultural studies to extricate itself from economism
or idealism, we might recall Williams’s effort to conceive culture
within “a whole indissoluable practice.” From such a perspective,
neither the “superstructure” (culture) nor the “base” (“not culture”)
are autonomous. Both are the materialization of human practical
activity within a definite historical milieu and concrete ensemble of
social relations. Signification is not the exclusive property of lan-
guage nor the special province of culture, but is at once the practical
activity (praxis) of human beings and the material inscription of
those multiple past and present activities “in things and in the order
of things” that necessarily escape each of us, constitutes a field of
objective imperatives for all of us, and inscribes every one of us
within a system of social relations (Sartre, Search for a Method, 156).
Capitalism, in this view, is not restricted to a domain called “the eco-
nomic.” Nor is it a thing, process, or force. It is a dynamic, conflictual
system of social relations and as such is always a source, site, and
object of signification. If we wish to grasp culture in relation to the
social totality, we might heed Williams’s call to look again at the
received notion of the base that has so long evaded interrogation.
Perhaps there we might begin to discover “the realities of cultural
process” (“Base and Superstructure,” 33).

Notes

The title of this essay is inspired by that of an interview in New Left Review with
Sartre, who was asked to reflect on the development of his thought (“Itinerary”).
The author would like to thank Dan Schiller and especially Bill Riordan for their
valuable comments on early incarnations of this work.

1. For critiques of the Marxism of the Second International, see Arato; Col-

letti; and Jacoby. While this form of Marxism came to be closely identified with
Stalin, it infused the thought of European communist parties in the early to
mid–twentieth century; even Trotsky, typically hailed as Stalin’s antithesis, held
this view, as Bettelheim has documented. Among early theorists of Marxism,
only Lenin opposed this reading of Marxism and christened it “economism.”

2. Thus did this “automatic Marxism” (Jacoby) dispatch to the superstruc-

ture the social relations of production that, for Marx, had properly constituted
the “economic structure” of society (Marx, 20). A consequence of relegating the
social relations of production to the superstructure was to make class struggle a

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243

superstructural phenomenon—a problem that was conserved by cultural studies
in its conception of “ideological struggle.”

3. Lawrence Grossberg, a student of Hall and major figure in American

cultural studies, has similarly defined the field’s task in terms of developing a
theory of culture and power (“Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy”).

4. Witness the title of Grossberg’s retort to Nicholas Garnham: “Cultural

Studies vs. Political Economy: Is Anyone Else Bored with This Debate?”

5. This representation is somewhat misleading, given that French struc-

turalism emerged contemporaneously with the work of Williams and Thompson.
Structuralism’s late arrival in Britain was due to the lag in translation of key texts
and to the insularity of British intellectual culture, long dominated by empiri-
cism and a suspicion of anything French.

6. Foucault’s conception of history as a succession of discrete epistemes in

his structuralist “archeological” phase, or in his poststructuralist “genealogical”
mode as sequential ensembles of discourse/power with no necessary relation-
ship, is a consequence of this devaluation of the diachronic.

7. The Centre’s 1971 report noted that it “chose as a coherent theory one . . .

not previously analyzed, that of Karl Marx” (cited in Sparks, 81). That same year,
the CCCS sponsored a symposium titled “Situating Marx,” inspired by David
McLellan’s Marx’s Grundrisse, which provided the first English translation of por-
tions of the 1857 manuscript. Papers from the symposium were collected in Situ-
ating Marx, edited by Paul Walton and Hall.

8. For Althusser, “the process that produces concrete knowledge takes

place wholly in theoretical practice” (For Marx, 186). This makes him vulnerable
to charges of idealism, despite many critics’ claim that he was economistic and
reductive. For the former, see Rancière, and Glucksmann; for the latter, Thomp-
son (Poverty).

9. Mouffe’s introduction was translated by CCCS’s Colin Mercer.

10. See, for example, Rancière; Hirst; and Thompson. Dworkin notes that

Althusser’s dominance within British cultural studies “was already beginning to
recede” in 1978 (232).

11. A powerful influence on Hall’s understanding of Althusser and move to

Gramsci was Ernesto Laclau’s Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977). That
influence was personal as well; Hall notes in The Hard Road to Renewal that from
1982 to 1984 he participated in a discussion group organized by Laclau “around
the broad themes of expanding the concept of ‘hegemony’ and the analysis of the
present conjuncture” (160). Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism—which he character-
ized as a hegemonic campaign to bind popular “common sense” to a conservative
political-economic agenda—is closely patterned on Laclau’s reading of Peronism
in Politics and Ideology. Hall’s writings on Thatcherism, many of which first
appeared in Marxism Today and The New Socialist, are collected in his The Hard
Road to Renewal and New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, coedited
with Martin Jacques.

12. Here Hall follows Laclau, as well as Mouffe, who introduced Laclau to

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Gramsci and with whom he would write Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. All three
came to Gramsci by way of structuralist Marxism. Mouffe argued for Gramsci’s
“importance for a non-economistic refounding of Marxist philosophy” (8) that
avoided the “expressive totality” error of Hegelian Marxism; Laclau called for “a
rupture of the last traces of reductionism” in Marxist theory (12).

13. The acceptance of this understanding of ideological struggle is evident in

Grossberg and Slack, who characterize it as “on the one side—to articulate mean-
ings and practices by creating or constructing those ‘unities’ which favor a par-
ticular disposition of power; and—on the other side—to disrupt or ‘disarticulate’
those constructed unities and to construct in their place alternative points of con-
densation between practice and experience which enable alternative dispositions
of power and resistance to emerge and be empowered” (90).

14. Schwartz provides an interesting critique of the valorization by cultural

studies of the autonomous individual and the limited notion of politics that fol-
lows from this implicit individualist tendency.

15. This argument seems to contradict the many critics who accuse Hall of

undervaluing the place of the economic (e.g., Garnham; Jessop et al.; McGuigan;
Sparks). However, succumbing to economism and paying scant attention to
explicitly economic issues are not mutually exclusive categories.

16. Gramsci would be surprised, and likely dismayed, to learn he was a her-

ald of “post-Marxism.”

17. Hence, Hall’s growing affinity for a Foucauldian approach, from which

he had earlier maintained a critical distance (see “Cultural Studies and the Cen-
tre” and “Signification, Representation, Ideology”). His later “The West and the
Rest,” in contrast, relies entirely on Foucault.

18. Sartre contrasts a dialectical examination of history, which takes as its

object “the developmental unity of a single process,” to an analytical or positivist
approach that “attempt[s] to show several independent, exterior factors of which
the event under consideration is the resultant” (Critique of Dialectical Reason, 15).

19. The exception is Sartre, whose Search for a Method and Critique of Dialecti-

cal Reason center precisely on rethinking the base/superstructure formulation
beyond the limitations of economistic Marxism and liberal humanism. Sartre’s
work is indispensable to developing a nonreductive materialist cultural theory—
an argument I will explore in a subsequent essay.

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