Peck On Hall

ITINERARY OF A THOUGHT
STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES, AND THE UNRESOLVED

PROBLEM OF THE RELATION OF CULTURE TO NOT CULTURE
Janice Peck
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 Marxism, such metaphors, Hall said, no longer command assent. Rather
than mourning their demise, he suggested that cultural studies, having 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, 28788). Hall might have been
recounting his own intellectual travels, having embarked on his
career committed to the metaphors he now came to inter. This reversal in Halls 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 trajectory of cultural studies, from culturalism to structuralism to structuralist Marxism to poststructuralism and post-Marxism. This essay
critically assesses that journey by tracing Halls 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 conserving the economism and idealism that cultural studies set out to
surpass.
Cultural Critique 48Spring 2001Copyright 2001 Regents of the University of Minnesota
I TI N ER AR Y OF A THOUGHT
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 fields founding 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 Williamss The Long Revolution.
Applauding the books 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 explanation while segregating culture from politics and economics without establishing the manner according to which the systems are
related to each other (Thompson, Long Revolution, 31). He countered 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 formal 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 empirically distinct, while Williams was reaching toward a conception of
culture as integral to the social totalitywhat he would later term a
whole indissoluable practice (Marxism, 31). Indeed, he retrospectively 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)
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In taking up the question of the relation of culture to not culture and to the social totality, Thompson and Williams took on the
problem of reflectionthe 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 Stalins
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 materialism 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 Lukcs, various figures 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). Western Marxism can thus be seen as an ongoing effort to rethink the concept of the superstructure and the problem of reflectiona 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 (19691979) heading the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), the essay considered the fields future
by reflecting on its roots in the intersection of culturalism and structuralism. 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 existence. Structuralism (identified with Saussure, Lvi-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
structuralisms 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 Halls view: They are correct in insisting that this
questionwhich resumes all the problems of a non-reductive determinacyis 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). Joining the paradigms, he intimated, might provide a means of resolving the fields core problem of grasping the specificity of different
practices and the forms of articulated unity they constitute. Culturalism and structuralism were central to the future of cultural studies
because they confronteven if in radically different waysthe
dialectic between conditions and consciousness and pose the question 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
economismwhich 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 relationship 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: theres always
been something decentered about the medium of culture, about language, textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evades
the attempts to link it, directly and immediately, with other structures. In consequence, it has always been impossible in the theoretical field of Cultural Studies . . . to get anything like an adequate
account of cultures 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 dialectic 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 reformulation 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 common 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 Halls
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 surpassed 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 economy, 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
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, cultural 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 understanding 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 cultures. In Smiths assessment, Cultural studies is still at the stage
where it thinks of the realms of the economic, the civic, and the cultural as for all intents and purposes discrete (5960). The consequence of such analytical separation is to defuse the fields 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 production, as it reflects the divisions between the realms that it is the desperate 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
totalitya tendency that he says plagues the history of communication studies in general. For Schiller, this tendency derives from a
dualism in communication theory between the mental and the material, or intellectual and manual labor, resulting in a continuing
inability to integrate, or even to encompass, labor and communication within a single conceptual totality (xi).
All three critics link the failings of cultural studies to its abandonment of a materialist understanding of the relation of culture to
not culturein 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 Birmingham Centres appropriation of Marxism followed its embrace of
structuralism in the work of Barthes and Lvi-Strauss, the Marxism
that briefly achieved orthodoxy in cultural studies was the structuralist Marxism of Althusser. The fields subsequent move away
from Marxism followed from Althussers own weaknesses (71).
Schiller also faults the turn to structuralism that cultural studies
took, which isolated signification from the rest of practical activity: 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 truncated (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 impatient 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 trajectory 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 Halls guidance, cultural studies
tried to resolve the problem of reflection by separating culture from
not culturea move facilitated by structuralisms privileging of
linguistic form over substance, contingency over necessity, and
synchronic structure over diachronic development. This commitment to structuralism was decisive for the fields subsequent appropriation of Marxism via Althusser and Gramsci. Having adopted
structuralismwith its explicit Saussurean foundationsthe project of cultural studies was inherently vulnerable to destabilization
by the poststructuralist critique of those foundations. Halls journey from seeking to grasp the dialectic between conditions and
consciousness (Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms, 72) to his

admission that it is impossible to get anything like an adequate
account of cultures 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 commitment of cultural studies to Marxism.
Contra to the view that this trajectory constitutes a theoretical
advance, I suggest that it merely repeats the past. Halls solution to
the problem of reflectionmaking culture autonomouspreserved
not only the reflection/autonomy binary, but the autonomy of not
culture, which, by default, becomes the base or economy. Insofar 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 overcoming 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
Marxs early work, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Rediscovered 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 Stalinisms privileging of the productive
forces, Marxs 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
historythat 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 Halls 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, Lvi-Strauss
acknowledged the incontestable primacy of infrastructures, while
aiming to contribute to that theory of superstructures scarcely
touched upon by Marx (130). Barthess Mythologies employed Saussurean 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 specific effectivity of the superstructures that largely remains to be
elaborated (For Marx, 113). Indeed, Fredric Jameson has characterized 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 Saussures
achievement to undermine previous models that had viewed language 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
prior world of cognitive states represented by symbols, Saussure

suggested that words and ideas were born together through the operation of a linguistic system that, via principles of differentiation and
combination, imposed form on both thought and matter. In Saussures 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 identity of a particular element through its difference from all others,
Saussure held that a linguistic system is always already completea
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 language is itself a form not a substance (120) consisting of only differences without positive terms (118).
French structuralism arose through a strong interpretation of
Saussures 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 languages
referential dimensions, prioritization of langue over parole and synchrony over diachronystructuralism applied these to the study of
culture and society in a move that had profound implications across
the human sciences. Positing Saussures structure of language as
the blueprint for the study of society in general, structuralism proposed that the multiplicity of human practices could be understood
as differential articulations of signifying systems ruled by structural 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 prioritization 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 scientific 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 arbitrarywithout
substantial meaning of their ownbecause their significance is constituted 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 linguistics and the human sciences that have taken the linguistic turn was
determined by Saussures inaugural move through which he separates the external elements of linguistics from the internal elements. In imputing autonomy to language, structural linguistics
exercise[d] an ideological effect, presenting itself as the most natural 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 theoretically 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 functioning. 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 synchronic differentiation. From such a perspective, the diachronic is
reduced to mere repetition without meaningto a series of discontinuous sequential structures (Riordan, 7). Hence, structuralisms
rejection of any notion of historical necessity in favor of irreducible
contingency (Lvi-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
of static systems) as both the object and method of inquirya move

that paved the way for the abandonment of Marxism.
Given that cultural studies searched for a nonreflectionist conception 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 earlier than, any serious engagement with marxism (81). From 1969 to
1971, the Centre embarked on a search for an alternative problematic and method that included phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, structuralism and marxism (cited in Sparks, 81). This
period of theoretical reappraisal, which coincided with Halls rise to
Centre director, marked the beginning of culturalisms displacement
from dominant paradigm status. This shift is evident in Halls assessment of the two paradigms, where he sides with structuralisms
view of experience as an effect of structure, favors its notion of
the necessary complexity of the unity of a structure over culturalisms complex simplicity of an expressive causality (Cultural
Studies: Two Paradigms, 68), and grants it methodological superiority owing to its concepts with which to cut into the complexity of
the real (67).
Halls acceptance of structuralisms founding principles is evident in his treatment of Lvi-Strauss. The linguistic paradigm, Hall
argues, allowed Lvi-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 categories and frameworks in thought and language through which different societies classified out their conditions of existence. Further,
Lvi-Strauss thought of the manner and practice through which
these categories and mental frameworks were produced and transformed, largely on an analogy with the ways in which language
itselfthe principal medium of cultureoperated. For Hall, LviStrausss 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 cultureone in which
the causal logic of determinacy was abandoned in favour of a structuralist causalitya 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 Studies 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 discourse, 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 Halls description of media meanings and messages as
sign vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any form of communication 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, discourse is not the transparent representation of the real, but the
construction of knowledge through the operation of a code (29).
The influence of Lvi-Strauss and Barthes is evident in Halls
The Determinations of News Photographs. Patterned after
Barthess The Rhetoric of the Image, Halls 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 Halls Culture,
the Media, and the Ideological Effect. Thus, the founding principle
of structural linguisticsthat signification results from the purely
formal articulation of elements within a systemwas imported into
cultural studies and applied to the study of the media. For Hall,
structuralisms value for building a non-reductionist cultural theory
was its method for studying the systems of signs and . . . representations; 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 determinations (31). Here, in the language of practices and material conditions of signification, we encounter the influence of Althusser on
Halls thought. Although Lvi-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 Halls direction.7 Sparks contends that while the
Centres early forays into Marxism traversed a range of thinkers,
including Lukcs and Sartre, by 1973 Althussers structuralist Marxism had achieved orthodoxy (82). A chapter of Althussers For
MarxOn Contradiction and Overdeterminationwas particularly 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 reduction 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 structuralism, which at the time represented the theoretical cutting edge
in the human sciences. His Marxism was antieconomistic, antihumanist, and provided a philosophical rationale and method that
promised to pierce the opacity of the immediate (Althusser and
Balibar, 16). Althussers critique of economism followed from his
rejection of Hegelianisms 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 manifestation or reflection of a single principle. Althusser saw Stalinism as one
variant of this errorwhere 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 humanist Marxism saw itself as diametrically opposed to Stalinism, for
Althusser it was simply the flip side of the expressive totality mistake: humanism made alienation (and its negation) the single
principle of unity.
Althussers critique of the Hegelian residue in Stalinism and
socialist humanismindeed, his entire project to develop a Marxist
sciencecan 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 superstructure (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 phenomena of the forces of production and the superstructure the phenomenal 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 Hegelianism with the concept of overdetermination, where the concrete variations and mutations of a structured complexity such as
a social formation were understood as complexly-structurallyunevenly-determined (210, 209). A social formation was not, however, 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
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)
Althussers conception of ideologywhich became central for

cultural studiesderived from the structuralist premise that a given
domain of activity can be isolated and examined in terms of its internal logic and relations. Indeed, he argued that it was because each of
these levels possesses this relative autonomy that it can be objectively considered a partial whole, and become the object of a relatively independent scientific treatment (Philosophy, 6). Following
Spinoza, who distinguished between knowledge of imagination
(prereflective, commonsense awareness arising from practical experience) 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 representations, 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 systematicity, their mode of arrangement and combination, that gives them their
meaning; it is their structure that determines their meaning and function (26). That function was social reproduction: assuring the bond
among people in the totality of the forms of their existence, the relation 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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Althussers 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 Lvi-Strauss, who strove to create a science by which one could
identify the timeless universal grammars beneath the surface variations 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 attainable 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 determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation 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. Marxist 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 ideological (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 produce 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 concretereality, 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
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 discourse (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.
Significationboth the activity and product of this structuring
processwas 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 symbolization, 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 Ideology, 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 formations 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, 3132)
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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aware of the rules of systems of classification of an ideology when we

encounter an ideological statement. However, following structuralism 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 principle 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 precisely this notion of a generative foundationa structure with a
center and an outsidethat poststructuralism would steadily
erode, beginning with Derridas 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 ultimately 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 1960s 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 revivaldeveloped in the wake of
the events of 1968signaled a shift from pessimism to optimism
among left intellectuals who, having earlier placed their hopes in
Third World movements for national liberation, now envisioned
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 massively 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 Studies and the Centre, 36, 35). Gramsci also appeared compatible with
culturalism. In Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms, Hall argued that
culturalisms emphasis on the affirmative moment of the development 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, Halls 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 challenged Althussers 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 ideologys
role in producing common sense, and were committed to political
intervention. Hall and his coauthors concluded that the meeting of
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structuralist Marxism and Gramsci constituted one of the most

important encounters in the field of contemporary marxist theory
(5859). 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 Halls prior
engagement with structuralism, and structuralist Marxism in particular, was determinate for his encounter with Gramsci and subsequent
response to poststructuralism.11 Turning Gramsci into a protostructuralist meant that his key concepts could be integrated into the
already accepted principles of structuralism, an operation that began
in Halls first engagement with his thought. Working within an
Althusserian problematic, Hall, Lumley, and McLennan characterized Gramscis conception of social formations as comprising three
levelsthe economic, political, and ideologicalmirroring Althussers categories. For both theorists, they said, the economic was
determinate in the last instance, but the political and ideological 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 Althussers conception of a
social formation as a structured complex unity, Gramscis concept
of hegemony was credited with keep[ing] the levels of the social
formation distinct and held in combination (49). Althussers distinction between ideology and science was paralleled for Hall and
company in Gramscis 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 Gramscis view of ideology as an epistemological and
structural matter (46) in line with Althussers 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 Halls
antireductionist crusade. In Cultural Studies and the Centre, Hall

proposed that Gramscis work stands as a prolonged repudiation
of any form of reductionismespecially that of economism (35).12
Key for Hall were Gramscis 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 Halls appropriation, hegemony was defined as the
(temporary) mastery of a particular theatre of struggle and the articulation 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 Gramcis thinking 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
Althussers notion that ideology works by binding or cementing
together signs, interests, subjects, classes, and levels of the social formation, 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 ideology in and through language and discourse (Hall, Rediscovery
of Ideology, 80).
The concept of articulation became the linchpin of Halls 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 structures principle of
formation, which determines how elements (e.g., signifiers, signifieds, 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 Halls fusion of structuralist Marxism and

Gramsci, the concept of articulation undergoes a crucial revision. He
conserves the structuralist view of meaning as relational and arbitrary in his definition of articulation as
the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, 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 necessary belongingness. The unity which matters is a linkage between that articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can,
under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected. (Grossberg, Interview with Stuart Hall, 53)
However, rather than treating articulationas Althusser didas a

structural operation, Hall reconceives it as an activity of social subjects 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 producing a different meaning: breaking the chain in which they are
currently fixed (Whites of Their Eyes, 31).
This reconceptualization of ideology, in Halls view, helped
cultural studies understand how ideas of different kinds grip the
minds of masses, permitting a historical bloc to maintain its dominance 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 historical action against the prevailing system. Armed with this knowledge, cultural studies was equipped to comprehend and master the
terrain of struggle (29). From this perspective, challenging a particular 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 envisioned 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 economic forces and those forms of politics and ideology which might
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 recombining 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 structure itself. The question then becomes how, why, and under what circumstances a structure changes. From a classic structuralist position,
the answer is that, fundamentally, it doesnt: 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 structure. That is, he is forced to appeal to an outside of the structure (of
language, discourse, ideology) that would facilitate different practical inflections of meaning. It is on this problem of an outside that
both structuralism, and Halls attempt to fuse Gramsci and structuralist Marxism, founders.
In Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Derrida launched a definitive assault on structural linguistics
and structuralism. He zeroed in on fundamental problems in Saussurean linguistics: its notion of structure as a closed taxonomy and
belief that a structures 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 investigator), 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. Conversely, 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 Saussures 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 transformations (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) principle, be it god, nature, man, structure, or the forces of production.
The consequence of this critique was a progressive destabilization across the human sciences, including cultural studies. In
Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the PostStructuralist 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 necessary correspondence between one level of a social formation and
another. He also criticized what he erroneously took to be poststructuralisms declaration that there is necessarily no correspondence 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 guarantees 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 articulated together in any way or produce a social force capable for a time
of self-conscious unity in action, in a class struggle (9495). Hall

accused poststructuralism of privileging difference over unity. In
his view, signification might in theory be the perpetual motion of
diffrance, 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 statement reveals Halls 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 conditionsmeanings
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 paradigms, Hall proposed that these same subjects could not only identify the articulating principle (i.e., the center) of an ideological
discourse, but also personally dismantle it by consciously rearranging its elements. Thus, Halls third position salvaged the founding
paradigms of cultural studies by wedding structuralisms conception
of language with culturalisms 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 critique. In his early assessment of the two paradigms, Hall imagined
that cultural studies was poised to resolve the question of the relation 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
Halls synthesis of Althusser and Gramsci ultimately resolved
the problem of a reflection theory of culture by opting for its binary
oppositeautonomyand in so doing preserved that very polarity.
In effect, he spliced together structuralisms autonomous signifying
systems and culturalisms 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 conditions/economy into discrete objects or domains necessarily conserves economism because it treats the economic as autonomous,
external, and self-conditioning. Further, once these are deemed separate 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 structuralisms conception of language as
autonomous form, Hall conceived ideological struggle through the
logic of languageas 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). However, having rejected structuralisms notion that linguistic structures
also produce subjects on the grounds that this was another form
of reductionism (a reflection theory of consciousness), Halls 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
subjects whose actions derive from the force of arguments (ideologies) 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 conditions 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, interpolation 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 Halls view, Laclau had dismantled the validity
of any notion of a class determination of ideas (Problem of Ideology, 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 languageits relation to both is contingent 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 conditions: there is no necessary correspondence between the conditions of a social relation or practice and the number of different ways
it can be represented (Hall, Signification, Representation, Ideology, 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 Halls words: by
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generating discourses which condense a range of different connotations, the dispersed conditions of a practice of different social groups
can be effectively drawn together to make those social forces . . . capable 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 correspondence between conditions and consciousness reflects Halls apparent
concession to poststructuralisms critique of foundationalism. I suggest, however, that he fell prey to a common misunderstanding of
that critique by associating it with a modernistrather than poststructuralistview of foundationalism. Philip Wood contrasts the
modernist position, which conceives foundationalism as the opposite of self or autonomous legislation (i.e., the self as externally
legislated by god, nature, reason, etc.), to poststructuralisms critique 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
(16869). 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
subjectone contingently related to language and social conditions
who can be moved to engage in a political project through the practice of articulation.14
Which brings us to the third autonomy. If any correspondence
between peoples 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, versus those that maintain the hegemony of the power bloc and reconcile 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 studies to foster. One response to making the relation between language,
consciousness, and conditions purely arbitrary is a Humean conventionalism and relativism embraced by the likes of Rorty, Lyotard, and
Fish. Given Halls affinity for a Marxian position, he rejected this relativist option. But to assert that there are progressive and retrograde
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 variously construed as the real conditions of existence, the social formation, social relations, the prevailing system, structures,
and the economic, which he holds to exist independently of symbolic representation or subjective experience:
Social relations do exist. We are born into them. They exist independently of our will. They are real in their structure and tendency. We cannot 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, independent 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 particular 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 represented (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 Halls economism surfaces, despite his persistent attacks on economic reductionism.15
Before proceeding, Halls characterization of reductionism warrants closer examination. His criticism of a Marxism guaranteed by
the laws of history (Grossberg, Interview with Stuart Hall, 58) is a
recurring theme in Halls writings from the late 1950s to the early
1990s, where it serves as the other to cultural studiesthat 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 accurate. It is fair to say that none of the figures associated with western
Marxism (including Lukcs) 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 cannot 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 economics. Bettelheims criticism of economistic Marxismthat it bore
within itself . . . the premises . . . of bourgeois ideology (20)echoes
Marxs critique of classical political economy. Samir Amin argues
that Marxs 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).
Bourgeois political economy is founded on this understanding of

capitalism as the natural progression of productive capacity, the necessary outcome of a law of supply and demand, and the social
expression of innate human nature, i.e., individuals as Homo oeconomicus, naturally self-interested, competitive beings who seek to maximize 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 institution. 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 economys
view of the economy as the center stage upon which the rest of
society performs.
To the extent that Halls critique of reductionism has focused on
the culture-as-reflection problem without simultaneously interrogating the received notion of the economic as an unconditioned, external 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 Marxist 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 Halls 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 activitiesthe 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 general 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 relationships 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 reductionist, the issues it raised effectively established the agenda for cultural studies for the next three decades: the base/superstructure
(economy/culture) relationship; the relation of culture to not culture and consciousness to conditions; the problem of why the working 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, structuralist Marxism, and Gramsci provided new analytical concepts and
methods, and along the way gender and race were added as sites of
analysis, but Halls original questions endured. So did the tendency
to conceive the economic (or capitalism) as unconditioneda selfdriven force or thing. What changed are the terms in which Hall conceived 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 conditions of existence that were not reducible to the economic. However, 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
autonomous practices, and thus the sites of distinct forms of class

struggle, with their own objects of struggle, and exhibiting a relatively independent retroactive effect on the base. (Political and
the Economic, 56; emphasis added). The autonomy of the superstructural 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 secondary and retroactive. That is, the political, ideological, and
juridical do not produce the economicwhich appears to be selfgeneratedbut only respond to it after the fact.
Nine years later, after the Gramscian detour, this conception of
the economic persists, despite Halls claim to offer a new, nonreductionist 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 representation of the market as a system driven by the real and practical
imperatives of self-interest (34), this is a consequence of representation. 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 Halls
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 consciousness. Where does this adequate discourseas well as inadequate onescome 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 determinacy from reflection theory by privileging form over contentthe
structuralist solution. By providing the raw materials of experience (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 Althussers 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 Halls
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 correspondence 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 ideological inclination. Majorities have to be made and wonnot
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 versus the power bloc. False consciousness has also been jettisoned
usurped by identitiessince consciousness hinges on how our

real conditions of existence are articulated. Gone too is the claim
that peoples 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
Halls 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 characterised 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 postFordism, 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 epochalcomparable 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 leading edge of change, increasingly setting the tone of society and providing the dominant rhythm of cultural change (12). This is not far
removed from Halls 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 Halls 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 singular, 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 thingalmost 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. Halls view of the economic is precisely that held by economistic Marxism and bourgeois
economicswith 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 determinacy of the economic by positing the (relative) autonomy of language, 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 cultural 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
Gramscis displacement of Marxism has not yet been understood and

probably wont 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 fields theoretical pilgrimage was the linguistic turn, which had decentred and dislocated the settled path
presumably paved by Marxism (283). As Hall notes, the refiguring of theory, made as a result of having to think questions of culture through the metaphors of language and textuality, represents a
point beyond which cultural studies must now always locate itself
(28384). In Halls 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 flirtation with even a modified version of the base-superstructure
metaphor to a fully discourse-and-power conception of the ideological (297).17 The abandonment of the base/superstructure question 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 studies, relative autonomy had become simply autonomy; Althussers
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 Halls introduction to Formations of Modernity. He describes the textbook as an examination of
the four major social processes responsible for the transition to
modernitythe political, the economic, the social and the cultural (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 principal cause: the economic (10). In Halls 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 prominence 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, contingency (rather than necessity). He stops slightly short of advocating 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 themthey were articulated
with one another. But they werent inevitably harnessed together, all
moving or changing in tandem (9). If the ghost of Althusser lives
on in Halls terminology, it is a mere spectral presence as Hall assiduously distances himself from Marxism, which he presents as
irretrievably reductionist. In the wake of the passage to poststructuralism and post-Marxism, the economic is dethroned from a position 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 Halls new schemait
is now determinant in neither the first nor last instancethis does
not signal the death throes of economism. Hall describes Vivienne
Browns chapter on the economy as an examination of the formation 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. Europes economic development, Hall argues,
was driven by the expansion of trade and the market. The productive 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 relationsindeed, 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 geological 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 Halls statement that Modern capitalism sprang up in the interstices of the feudal economy
(8). Halls 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 description of the chapter on changing social structures, Hall states that
author Harriet Bradley
shifts the focus from economic processes to the changing social relations 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
fetishizationwhere the outcome of practical human activity is
taken to be a suprahuman thing. It was precisely Marxs aim in his
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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 economichis four processes are, naturally, articulated with one
anotherhe nonetheless reproduces the fetishized universe of bourgeois 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 organisational 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 determining priorities in it, where everything interacts with everything
else (Signification, Representation, Ideology, 91).
In 1973, in Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory, 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
static waysto treat it virtually as an object that unilaterally conditioned everything else (33). This, Williams asserted, was at odds
with Marxs own position, which located the origins of determination 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
Halls challenge to reflection theory moved inexorably in the direction 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
conventionala product of a particular articulation that temporarily interrupts and fixes the endless play of signification. In
resolving the problem of reflection by asserting cultures autonomy,
Hall thus opted for an analytical and neopositivistas opposed to
dialecticalmode 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 Modernity 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 worldhow
people actually behaved. Cultural processes, in contrast, deal with
less tangible thingsmeanings, values, symbols, ideas, knowledge,
language, ideology. Although he claims that language is the result
of social practices and material processeslike the economy and
politicsdepend on meaning for their effects (13), Hall nonetheless conceives the material and the discursive as separable areas
whose relation must be analytically posited, rather than as dialectical, 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 studies turned on finding a solution to the problems of a non-reductive
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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 Thompsons 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 strategy conserves both idealism and economismthose twin pillars
of modern thoughtby making culture the exclusive domain of
thought, language, and meaning, and turning the economic into a
realm of mute, nonsignifying materiality. Halls 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 material at hand. This trajectorywhich pitted the autonomy of the
symbolic against that of the subject and the economicprecluded the
possibility of surpassing either economism or idealism. Further, having chosen structuralism as the weapon with which to battle economistic 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 economismthe 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 unsatisfactory.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
from the failure of cultural studies to extricate itself from economism

or idealism, we might recall Williamss 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 language 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 economic. 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 Williamss 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; Colletti; 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
midtwentieth century; even Trotsky, typically hailed as Stalins 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 superstructure 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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superstructural phenomenona 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 fields task in terms of developing a
theory of culture and power (Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy).
4. Witness the title of Grossbergs 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 structuralism emerged contemporaneously with the work of Williams and Thompson.
Structuralisms 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 empiricism and a suspicion of anything French.
6. Foucaults 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 relationship, is a consequence of this devaluation of the diachronic.
7. The Centres 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
McLellans Marxs Grundrisse, which provided the first English translation of portions of the 1857 manuscript. Papers from the symposium were collected in Situating 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 Rancire, and Glucksmann; for the latter, Thompson (Poverty).
9. Mouffes introduction was translated by CCCSs Colin Mercer.
10. See, for example, Rancire; Hirst; and Thompson. Dworkin notes that
Althussers dominance within British cultural studies was already beginning to
recede in 1978 (232).
11. A powerful influence on Halls understanding of Althusser and move to
Gramsci was Ernesto Laclaus 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). Halls analysis of Thatcherismwhich he characterized as a hegemonic campaign to bind popular common sense to a conservative
political-economic agendais closely patterned on Laclaus reading of Peronism
in Politics and Ideology. Halls 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
Gramsci and with whom he would write Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. All three
came to Gramsci by way of structuralist Marxism. Mouffe argued for Gramscis
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 sideto articulate meanings and practices by creating or constructing those unities which favor a particular disposition of power; andon the other sideto disrupt or disarticulate
those constructed unities and to construct in their place alternative points of condensation 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 follows 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 herald of post-Marxism.
17. Hence, Halls growing affinity for a Foucauldian approach, from which
he had earlier maintained a critical distance (see Cultural Studies and the Centre 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 Dialectical Reason center precisely on rethinking the base/superstructure formulation
beyond the limitations of economistic Marxism and liberal humanism. Sartres
work is indispensable to developing a nonreductive materialist cultural theory
an argument I will explore in a subsequent essay.
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ITINERARY OF A THOUGHT

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES, AND THE UNRESOLVED

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

THE PROBLEM OF CULTURE AS REFLECTION

Although both figures would later be placed under the sign of

SUPERSEDING THE PAST, PROJECTING THE FUTURE

The earlier quest to comprehend culture in dialectical relation to the

and economism (720). The totalizing field of Marxist theory, she

Dan Schiller also criticizes the withdrawal of cultural studies from

consciousness (Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms, 72) to his

THE STRUCTURALIST TURN IN CULTURAL STUDIES

creativity in their arguments for the centrality of culture in the

prior world of cognitive states represented by symbols, Saussure

of static systems) as both the object and method of inquirya move

on cultural studies, he grants it was a formative intervention which

forces and relations of production was held to unilaterally cause

instance) insofar as it distributes effectivity between the instances

Althussers conception of ideologywhich became central for

Althussers argument that what is represented in ideology is not the

meaning to the level of code is an absolutely characteristic one

This implies that we can have no knowledge of our inscription

aware of the rules of systems of classification of an ideology when we

THE GRAMSCIAN TURN: THE SYNTHESIS OF THE PARADIGMS

If the history of Marxist theory during the 1960s can be characterised

In her introduction to Gramsci and Marxist Theory, Chantal Mouffe

possibilities of revolutionary transformations in the countries of

Gramsci thus promised to be an antidote to criticisms of Althusser, a

structuralist Marxism and Gramsci constituted one of the most

antireductionist crusade. In Cultural Studies and the Centre, Hall

process of articulation. In Halls fusion of structuralist Marxism and

However, rather than treating articulationas Althusser didas a

lead [the masses] in practice to intervene in history in a progressive

of self-conscious unity in action, in a class struggle (9495). Hall

COUNTERING REFLECTION WITH AUTONOMY:

ways of articulating the links between these domains is to presume a

would be to abandon the Marxist topography of the base and

Bourgeois political economy is founded on this understanding of

autonomous practices, and thus the sites of distinct forms of class

the economic aspect of capitalist production processes has real limiting

usurped by identitiessince consciousness hinges on how our

different forms of labour force (Local and the Global, 30); in

FROM POSTSTRUCTURALISM TO POST-MARXISM:

Gramscis displacement of Marxism has not yet been understood and

category, [the book] does not adopt a clear hierarchy or priority of

In this formulation, economic processes appear to emerge of their

critique of classical political economy and analysis of capitalism to

determinacy (Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms, 72). His solution

from the failure of cultural studies to extricate itself from economism

superstructural phenomenona problem that was conserved by cultural studies

Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989.

Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, 27794. London:

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