After the Postcolonial Caribbean by Meeks Brian;

Author:Meeks, Brian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

HALL’S CORE

I begin by suggesting that unlike positions taken by Chris Rojek and certainly Charles Mills in his critique of Hall’s approach to race,13 and despite recognizing an evolution, particularly a shift from an earlier more Gramscian inflection to a later, more discursive approach, there is an evident and consistent14 core to Hall’s oeuvre that includes the following elements.

1. Unlike some post-Marxian perspectives, Hall continues to place critical importance on capital and of “material conditions” generally, in the shaping of the contemporary world. Thus in his 1988 essay “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” while recognizing that there is no “univocal” way in which class interests are expressed, Hall nonetheless underlines that “class interest, class position, and material factors are useful, even necessary, starting points in the analysis of any ideological formation.”15 And in his 2007 interview with Colin MacCabe, Hall reminds him of the importance of the tendencies in capital to concentrate wealth and shape intellectual expression: “global capitalism is an incredibly dynamic system. And it’s capable of destroying one whole set of industries in order to create another set. Incredible. This is capitalism in its most global, dynamic form, but it is not all that secure. It’s standing on the top of huge debt and financial problems. And I can’t believe those problems won’t come eventually to find their political, critical, countercultural, intellectual expression. We’re just in the bad half of the Kondratiev cycle!”16

2. Nonetheless, he discounts the mechanical notion of any direct cause-and-effect relationship between material conditions and so-called superstructural spheres. Social and cultural life, Hall has consistently argued, is not only mediated and articulated away from the “forces of production,” but particularly in the contemporary era of intensified media engagement, the internet, and the image, this autonomy is even more enhanced. “This approach replaces the notion of fixed ideological meanings and class-ascribed ideologies with the concepts of ideological terrains of struggle and the task of ideological transformation. It is the general movement in this direction, away from an abstract general theory of ideology, and towards the more concrete analysis of how, in particular historical situations, ideas ‘organize human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle etc.’”17

3. Specifically, in relation to classes and organized systems of domination, he opposes the mechanical approach inherent in certain Marxisms, which assume an automatic connection, for instance, between working classes and socialist ideas, or ruling classes and ruling ideas. Hegemony, Hall insists, emerges through complex processes of articulation and interpellation:

Ideas only become effective if they do, in the end, connect with a particular constellation of social forces. In that sense, ideological struggle is part of the general social struggle for mastery and leadership—in short for hegemony. But “hegemony” in Gramsci’s sense requires, not the simple escalation of a whole class to power, with its fully formed “philosophy”, but the process by which a historical bloc is constructed and the ascendancy of that bloc is secured. So, the way we conceptualize

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