4	Marxisms
Classical Marxism
Marxism is a difficult and contentious body of work. But it is also more than this: it is
a body of revolutionary theory with the purpose of changing the world. As Marx
(1976b) famously said: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
ways; the point is to change it’ (65). This makes Marxist analysis political in a quite
specific way. But this is not to suggest that other methods and approaches are apolitical;
on the contrary, Marxism insists that all are ultimately political. As the American
Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson (1981) puts it, ‘the political perspective [is] the
absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation’ (17).
The Marxist approach to culture insists that texts and practices must be analysed
in relation to their historical conditions of production (and in some versions, the
changing conditions of their consumption and reception). What makes the Marxist
methodology different from other ‘historical’ approaches to culture is the Marxist conception
of history. The fullest statement of the Marxist approach to history is contained
in the Preface and Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Here
Marx outlines the now famous ‘base/superstructure’ account of social and historical
development. In Chapter 1, I discussed this formulation briefly in relation to different
concepts of ideology. I shall now explain the formulation in more detail and demonstrate
how it might be used to understand the ‘determinations’ that influence the production
and consumption of popular culture.
Marx argues that each significant period in history is constructed around a particular
‘mode of production’: that is, the way in which a society is organized (i.e. slave, feudal,
capitalist) to produce the material necessaries of life – food, shelter, etc. In general
terms, each mode of production produces: (i) specific ways of obtaining the necessaries
of life; (ii) specific social relationships between workers and those who control the
mode of production, and (iii) specific social institutions (including cultural ones). At
the heart of this analysis is the claim that how a society produces its means of existence
(its particular ‘mode of production’) ultimately determines the political, social and
cultural shape of that society and its possible future development. As Marx explains,
‘The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual
life process in general’ (1976a: 3). This claim is based on certain assumptions about
Chapter 4 Marxisms62
the relationship between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. It is on this relationship – between
‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ – that the classical Marxist account of culture rests.
The ‘base’ consists of a combination of the ‘forces of production’ and the ‘relations
of production’. The forces of production refer to the raw materials, the tools, the technology,
the workers and their skills, etc. The relations of production refer to the class
relations of those engaged in production. That is, each mode of production, besides
being different, say, in terms of its basis in agrarian or industrial production, is also
different in that it produces particular relations of production: the slave mode produces
master/slave relations; the feudal mode produces lord/peasant relations; the capitalist
mode produces bourgeois/proletariat relations. It is in this sense that one’s class position
is determined by one’s relationship to the mode of production.
The ‘superstructure’ (which develops in conjunction with a specific mode of production)
consists of institutions (political, legal, educational, cultural, etc.), and ‘definite
forms of social consciousness’ (political, religious, ethical, philosophical, aesthetic,
cultural, etc.) generated by these institutions. The relationship between base and
superstructure is twofold. On the one hand, the superstructure both legitimates and
challenges the base. On the other, the base is said to ‘condition’ or ‘determine’ the
limits of the content and form of the superstructure. This relationship can be understood
in a range of different ways. It can be seen as a mechanical relationship (‘economic
determinism’) of cause and effect: what happens in the superstructure is a passive
reflection of what is happening in the base. This often results in a vulgar Marxist ‘reflection
theory’ of culture, in which the politics of a text or practice are read off from, or reduced
to, the material conditions of its production. The relationship can also be seen as
the setting of limits, the providing of a specific framework in which some developments
are probable and others unlikely. However we view the relationship, we will not
fully understand it if we reduce the base to an economic monolith (a static economic
institution) and forget that for Marx the base also include social relations and class
antagonisms.
After Marx’s death in 1883, Frederick Engels, friend and collaborator, found himself
having to explain, through a series of letters, many of the subtleties of Marxism to
younger Marxists who, in their revolutionary enthusiasm, threatened to reduce it to a
form of economic determinism. Here is part of his famous letter to Joseph Bloch:
According to the materialist conception of history [Marxism], the ultimately determining
element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither
Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Therefore if somebody twists this into
saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he is transforming
that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. The economic situation
is the basis, but the various components of the superstructure  .  .  .  also exercise their
influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases determine
their form.  .  .  .  We make our own history, but, first of all, under very definite
assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately
decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt
human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one (2009: 61).
	
Classical Marxism 63
What Engels claims is that the base produces the superstructural terrain (this terrain
and not that), but that the form of activity that takes place there is determined not just
by the fact that the terrain was produced and is reproduced by the base (although this
clearly sets limits and influences outcomes), but by the interaction of the institutions
and the participants as they occupy the terrain. Therefore, although texts and practices
are never the ‘primary force’ in history, they can be active agents in historical change or
the servants of social stability.
A brief discussion of ideology should make the relationship between base and
superstructure a little clearer. Marx and Engels (2009) claim that, ‘The ideas of the
ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material
force in society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’ (58). What they mean
by this is that the dominant class, on the basis of its ownership of, and control over,
the means of material production (the mode of production), is virtually guaranteed to
have control over the means of intellectual production. However, this does not mean
that the ideas of the ruling class are simply imposed on subordinate classes. A ruling
class is ‘compelled  .  .  .  to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members
of society  .  .  .  to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the
only rational, universally valid ones’ (59). Unless we include both formulations (ruling
ideas and compulsion, and especially the way the second qualifies the first), we arrive
at a very simplified notion of power: one in which class struggle is replaced by social
control; where power is simply something imposed rather than something for which
men and women have to struggle. During periods of social transformation ideological
struggle becomes chronic: as Marx (1976a) points out, it is in the ‘ideological forms’ of
the superstructure (which include the texts and practices of popular culture) that men
and women ‘become conscious of  .  .  .  conflict and fight it out’ (4).
A classical Marxist approach to popular culture would above all else insist that to
understand and explain a text or practice it must always be situated in its historical
moment of production, analysed in terms of the historical conditions that produced it.
There are dangers here: historical conditions are reduced to the mode of production
and the superstructural becomes a passive reflection of the base. It is crucial, as Engels
and Marx warn, and, as Thompson demonstrates (see Chapter 3), to keep in play
a subtle dialectic between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’. For example, a full analysis of
nineteenth-century stage melodrama (one of the first culture industries) would have
to weave together into focus both the changes in the mode of production that made
stage melodrama’s audience a possibility and the theatrical traditions that generated its
form. The same also holds true for a full analysis of music hall (another early culture
industry). Although in neither instance should performance be reduced to changes in
the material forces of production, what would be insisted on is that a full analysis of
stage melodrama or music hall would not be possible without reference to the changes
in theatre attendance brought about by changes in the mode of production. It is these
changes, a Marxist analysis would argue, that ultimately produced the conditions of
possibility for the performance of a play like My Poll and My Partner Joe1
and for the
emergence and success of a music hall performer like Marie Lloyd. In this way, then, a
Marxist analysis would insist that ultimately, however indirectly, there is nevertheless
Chapter 4 Marxisms64
a real and fundamental relationship between the emergence of stage melodrama and
music hall and changes that took place in the capitalist mode of production. I have
made a similar argument about the invention of the ‘traditional’ English Christmas in
the nineteenth century (Storey, 2008, 2010a, 2016).
The English Marxism of William Morris
William Morris, according to E.P. Thompson (1976), is the first English Marxist.
Although best known as a designer and poet, Morris was, in his later life, also a revolutionary
socialist. He joined the first British Marxist party, the Democratic Federation,
in 1883. The following year he formed the Socialist League (other founding members
included Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx). His commitment to
the cause was total, and he involved himself in all aspects of its work, from political
campaigns to editing and selling its newspaper, The Commonweal. Morris’s contribution
to Marxist thought is extensive. Here I shall discuss only one aspect, his critique of
capitalist society in terms of art and alienation and how this provides an implicit
commentary on what is popular culture.        
Like Marx and Engels, Morris argued that creative labour is not just an activity to be
enjoyed or avoided: it is an essential part of what makes us human. Industrial capitalism,
with its repetition, its long hours and its denial of creativity, engenders what Marx
called the alienation of labour. As Marx explained, the worker ‘does not fulfil
himself in his work . . . does not develop freely a physical and mental energy,
but is physically exhausted and mentally debased’ (1963: 177). This situation is
compounded by the fact that work ‘is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a
means for satisfying other needs’ (177; original emphasis). Lacking the ability to
find herself (i.e. express her natural creativity) in her work, she is forced to seek it
outside her work. ‘The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure,
whereas at work he feels homeless’ (177). In other words, she works to earn money in
order to express her natural creativity (denied to her in industrial work) in patterns of
consumption (see Storey 2017).
On the basis of this analysis, making art is seen as an ideal model of how work should
be experienced. Accordingly, Morris’s definition of art is not the narrow definition as,
for example, used in traditional forms of art history; for Morris it includes all creative
human production. ‘I use the word art in a wider sense than is commonly used.  .  .  .  To
a Socialist a house, a knife, a cup, a steam engine, or  .  .  .  anything  .  .  .  that is made by man
and has form, must either be a work of art or destructive to art’ (1979: 84). Ultimately,
for Morris, art is ‘the expression of pleasure in the labour of production’ (84). Under
the conditions of industrial capitalism, ‘founded on the art-lacking or unhappy labour
of the greater part of men’ (85), only the artist can achieve such pleasure. A fundamental
part of the promise of socialism is that it will extend this pleasure to all humankind.
Rejecting assembly line methods of production (‘Fordism’), labour under socialism will
use ‘the whole of a man for the production of a piece of goods, and not small portions
	
The English Marxism of William Morris 65
of many men’ (87). Art, therefore, is not for Morris an ornamental addition to everyday
life; it is the very substance of what makes us truly human.
In a non-alienated world of communist social relations, the worker is returned to
herself (i.e. to an ability to express his natural creativity in his labour). Like Morris,
Marx and Engels understand this in terms of popular art: ‘The exclusive concentration
of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which
is bound up with this, is a consequence of division of labour.  .  .  .  In a communist
society there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other
activities’ (1974: 109). The end of capitalism means the end of the division of labour.
‘In communist society  .  .  .  nobody has an exclusive area of activity and each can train
himself in any branch he wishes  .  .  .  making it possible for me to do one thing today
and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle
in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I like without ever becoming a hunter, a
fisherman, a herdsman, or a critic’ (quoted in McLellan, 1982: 36).
In other words, in a non-alienated, communist society all men and women will
work like artists: all work will in effect produce popular art, because all work will be
creative. As Morris insisted, ‘What business have we with art at all unless all can share
it? (1986: 139). Moreover, ‘The absence of popular art from modern times is more
disquieting and grievous to bear for this reason than for any other, that it betokens that
fatal division of men into the cultivated and the degraded classes which competitive
commerce [capitalism] has bred and fosters’ (139). The end of alienation will mean the
end of the distinction between culture and popular culture.
Morris’s (2003) [1890] novel News From Nowhere describes a twenty-first-century,
post-revolutionary England. Guest, the novel’s main character, falls asleep in the 1880s
and wakes up in the twenty-first century to discover that England has undergone a
revolution in 1952–54 and is now a non-alienated, communist society. Goods made
to sell for profit have been replaced by goods produced to the satisfaction of the worker
and to meet the needs of the community. In similar fashion, private ownership has
been replaced by common use. Moreover, art as a separate category has disappeared,
as art and creativity are now fully integrated into the routines of everyday life.
The novel should not be read as a literal picture of a future society. Rather, it should
be read as a political incitement to make the society Guest finds in twenty-first-century
England. The aim of the novel is ‘the education of desire’ (Thompson, 1976): that is,
to make men and women aware of the possibility of a non-alienated society and to
educate their desire to make such a society. As Morris observed, capitalism ‘has reduced
the workman to such a skinny and pitiful existence, that he scarcely knows how to
frame a desire for any life much better than that which he now endures’ (1986: 37).
Morris wishes to educate the desire for a ‘life much better’, hoping that to allow
men and women to think of such a life is to create the desire for them to make such
a life (see Storey 2018).
News From Nowhere provides a beautiful example of what Morris, Marx and Engels
had in mind when they envisaged a non-alienated, communist society. The novel
depicts a world a million miles away from the authoritarian horrors of the Stalinism of
the Soviet Union; moreover, it is a society in which the distinction between culture and
popular culture, and the corresponding divisions of social class, no longer exist.
Chapter 4 Marxisms66
The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School is the name given to a group of German intellectuals associated
with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. The Institute was
established in 1923. Following the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party
in 1933, it moved to New York, attaching itself to the University of Columbia. In 1949
it moved back to Germany. ‘Critical Theory’ is the name given to the Institute’s critical
mix of Marxism and psychoanalysis. The Institute’s work on popular culture is mostly
associated with the writings of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer,
Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse.
In 1944 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1979) coined the term ‘culture
industry’ to designate the products and processes of mass culture. The products of the
culture industry, they claim, are marked by two features: homogeneity, ‘film, radio and
magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part  .  .  .  all mass
culture is identical’ (120–1); and predictability:
As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be
rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music [popular music], once the trained
ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel
flattered when it does come.  .  .  .  The result is a constant reproduction of the same
thing (125, 134).
While Arnold and Leavisism had worried that popular culture represented a threat
to cultural and social authority, the Frankfurt School argue that it actually produces the
opposite effect: it maintains cultural and social authority. Where Arnold and Leavis saw
‘anarchy’, the Frankfurt School see only ‘conformity’: a situation in which ‘the deceived
masses’ (133) are caught in a ‘circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the
unity of the system grows ever stronger’ (121). Here is Adorno reading an American
situation comedy about a young schoolteacher who is both underpaid (some things
do not change), and continually fined by her school principal. As a result, she is
without money and therefore without food. The humour of the storyline consists in
her various attempts to secure a meal at the expense of friends and acquaintances. In
his reading of this situation comedy, Adorno is guided by the assumption that while
it is always difficult, if not impossible, to establish the unmistakable ‘message’
of a work of ‘authentic’ culture, the ‘hidden message’ of a piece of mass culture is
not at all difficult to discern. According to Adorno (1991a), ‘the script implies’ that:
If you are humorous, good natured, quick witted, and charming as she is, do not
worry about being paid a starvation wage.  .  .  .  In other words, the script is a shrewd
method of promoting adjustment to humiliating conditions by presenting them as
objectively comical and by giving a picture of a person who experiences even her
own inadequate position as an object of fun apparently free of any resentment
(143–4).
	 The Frankfurt School 67
This is one way of reading this TV comedy. But it is by no means the only way. The
German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht might have offered another way of reading,
one that implies a less passive audience. Discussing his own play, Mother Courage and
Her Children, Brecht (1978) suggests, ‘Even if Courage learns nothing else at least the
audience can, in my view, learn something by observing her’ (229). The same point can
be made against Adorno with reference to the schoolteacher’s behaviour. It is only by
starting with the assumption that the text dictates its meaning to a passive audience
that he can be so certain about the meaning of the TV comedy.
Leo Lowenthal (1961) contends that the culture industry, by producing a culture
marked by ‘standardisation, stereotype, conservatism, mendacity, manipulated consumer
goods’ (11), has worked to depoliticize the working class – limiting its horizon
to political and economic goals that could be realized within the oppressive and
exploitative framework of capitalist society. He maintains that, ‘Whenever revolutionary
tendencies show a timid head, they are mitigated and cut short by a false fulfilment
of wish-dreams, like wealth, adventure, passionate love, power and sensationalism in
general’ (ibid.). In short, the culture industry discourages the ‘masses’ from thinking
beyond the confines of the present. As Herbert Marcuse (1968a) claims in One
Dimensional Man:
the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry [the culture
industry] carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and
emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the
producers and, through the latter, to the whole. The products indoctrinate and
manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its false-
hood  .  .  .  it becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life – much better than before
– and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change. Thus emerges a
pattern of one-dimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas, aspirations, and
objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse
and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe (26–7).
In other words, by supplying the means to the satisfaction of certain needs, capitalism
is able to prevent the formation of more fundamental desires. The culture industry thus
stunts the political imagination.
As with Arnold and Leavisism, art or high culture is seen to be working differently.
It embodies ideals denied by capitalism. As such it offers an implicit critique of capitalist
society, an alternative, utopian vision. ‘Authentic’ culture, according to Horkheimer (1978),
has taken over the utopian function of religion: to keep alive the human desire for a
better world beyond the confines of the present. It carries the key to unlock the prisonhouse
established by the development of mass culture by the capitalist culture industry
(5). But increasingly the processes of the culture industry threaten the radical potential
of ‘authentic’ culture. The culture industry increasingly flattens out what remains of
the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the
oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of
Chapter 4 Marxisms68
which it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of twodimensional
culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the ‘cultural
values’, but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order,
through their reproduction and display on a massive scale (Marcuse, 1968a: 58).
Therefore, the better future promised by ‘authentic’ culture is no longer in contradiction
with the unhappy present – a spur to make the better future; culture now confirms
that this is the better future – here and now – the only better future. It offers ‘fulfilment’
instead of the promotion of ‘desire’. Marcuse holds to the hope that the ‘most advanced
images and positions’ of ‘authentic’ culture may still resist ‘absorption’ and ‘continue
to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth’ in a better tomorrow
(60). He also hopes that one day those on the margins of society, ‘the outcasts and
outsiders’ (61), who are out of reach of the full grasp of the culture industry, will undo
the defeats, fulfil the hopes, and make capitalism keep all its promises in a world
beyond capitalism. Or, as Horkheimer (1978) observes,
One day we may learn that in the depths of their hearts, the masses  .  .  .  secretly
knew the truth and disbelieved the lie, like catatonic patients who make known
only at the end of their trance that nothing had escaped them. Therefore it may
not be entirely senseless to continue speaking a language that is not easily understood
(17).
But, as Adorno (1991b) points out, mass culture is a difficult system to challenge:
Today anyone who is incapable of talking in the prescribed fashion, that is of
effortlessly reproducing the formulas, conventions and judgments of mass culture
as if they were his own, is threatened in his very existence, suspected of being an
idiot or an intellectual (79).
The culture industry, in its search for profits and cultural homogeneity, deprives
‘authentic’ culture of its critical function, its mode of negation – ‘[its] Great Refusal’
(Marcuse, 1968a: 63). Commodification (sometimes understood by other critics as
‘commercialization’) devalues ‘authentic’ culture, making it too accessible by turning it
into yet another saleable commodity.
The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest
against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley
and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition
of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again,
that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics,
they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic
force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. The intent
and function of these works have thus fundamentally changed. If they once stood
in contradiction to the status quo, this contradiction is now flattened out (63–4).
	 The Frankfurt School 69
It is not difficult to think of examples of this process (whether or not we read them
in quite the same way, leftist or neo-conservative). In the 1960s, a bedsit without
a poster of Che Guevara was hardly furnished at all. Was the poster a sign of a commitment
to revolutionary politics or a commitment to the latest fashion (or was it
a complicated mixture of both)? Bennett (1977) provides a telling example of an
advertisement inserted in The Times in 1974:
an advertisement which consisted of a full page colour reproduction of Matisse’s
Le Pont, below which there appeared the legend: ‘Business is our life, but life isn’t
all business.’ Profoundly contradictory, what was ostensibly opposed to economic
life was made to become a part of it, what was separate became assimilated since
any critical dimension which might have pertained to Matisse’s painting was
eclipsed by its new and unsolicited function as an advertisement for the wares of
finance capital (45).
We might also think of the way opera and classical music are used to sell anything
from bread to expensive motorcars (for examples see Table 4.1). Is it possible, for
instance, to hear the second movement from Antonin Leopold Dvoqák’s New World
Symphony without conjuring up an image of Hovis bread?
It is not that Marcuse or the other members of the Frankfurt School object to the
‘democratization’ of culture, only that they believe that the culture industry’s ‘assimilation
is historically premature; it establishes cultural equality while preserving domination’
(Marcuse, 1968a: 64). In short, the democratization of culture results in the blocking
of the demand for full democracy; it stabilizes the prevailing social order.
According to the Frankfurt School, work and leisure under capitalism form a compelling
relationship: the effects of the culture industry are guaranteed by the nature of
work; the work process secures the effects of the culture industry. The function of the
culture industry is therefore, ultimately, to organize leisure time in the same way as
industrialization has organized work time. Work under capitalism stunts the senses;
the culture industry continues the process: ‘The escape from everyday drudgery which
the whole culture industry promises  .  .  .  [is a] paradise  .  .  .  [of] the same old drudgery  .  .  .  
escape  .  .  .  [is] predesigned to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the
resignation which it ought to help to forget’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979: 142). In
short, work leads to mass culture; mass culture leads back to work. Similarly, art or
‘authentic’ culture circulated by the culture industry operates in the same way. Only
‘authentic’ culture operating outside the confines of the culture industry could ever
hope to break the cycle.
To make more concrete these general points, I shall now examine a specific example
of the Frankfurt School’s approach to popular culture – Adorno’s (2009) essay, ‘On
popular music’. In the essay he makes three specific claims about popular music. First, he
claims that it is ‘standardized’. ‘Standardization’, according to Adorno, ‘extends from
the most general features to the most specific ones’ (64). Once a musical and/or lyrical
pattern has proved successful it is exploited to commercial exhaustion, culminating in
‘the crystallisation of standards’ (ibid.). Moreover, details from one popular song can
Chapter 4 Marxisms70
be interchanged with details from another. Unlike the organic structure of ‘serious
music’, where each detail expresses the whole, popular music is mechanical in the
sense that a given detail can be shifted from one song to another without any real effect
on the structure as a whole. In order to conceal standardization, the music industry
engages in what Adorno calls ‘pseudo-individualization’: ‘Standardisation of song hits
Table 4.1  Depriving ‘authentic’ culture of its critical function.
The use of opera and classical music in advertisements
Bach: Suite No. 3 in D – Hamlet cigars
Bach: Sleepers Awake! – Lloyds Bank
Bach: Harpsichord Concerto in F minor –
NASDAQ
Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 in F – Blueband
margarine
Beethoven: Für Elise – Heinz spaghetti/Uncle
Ben’s rice
Bellini: Norma – Ford Mondeo
Boccherini: Minuet – Save and Prosper building
society
Britten: Simple Symphony Opus 4 – Royal Bank
of Scotland
Debussy: Suite Bergamasque – Boursin cheese
Delibes: Lakmé – British Airways/basmati rice/
Ryvita/IBM computers/Kleenex tissues
Delibes: Coppelia – Jus-Rol pastry
Dukas: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – Fiesta
kitchen towels/Sun Liquid/Royal Bank of
Scotland/Philips DCC
Dvocák: New World Symphony – Hovis bread
Fauré: Requiem Opus 48 – Lurpak butter
Gluck: Orfeo ed Euridice – Comfort fabric
softener
Grieg: Peer Gynt – Nescafé/AEG/Alton Towers
Handel: Serse – Rover cars
Handel: Solomon – Woolworths
Holst: The Planet Suite – Dulux Weathershield
Khachaturian: Spartacus – Nescafé
Mascagni: Cavalleria rusticana – Kleenex
tissues/Stella Artois/Baci chocolates
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 21 – Aer Lingus
Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro – Citroën ZX
Mozart: Cosí Fan Tutte – Mercedes-Benz
Mozart: Horn Concerto No. 4 – Vauxhall Carlton
Mussorgsky: Night on a Bare Mountain –
Maxell tapes
Offenbach: Tales of Hoffmann – Bailey’s Irish
Cream
Offenbach: Orpheus in the Underworld – Bio
Speed Weed
Orff: Carmina Burana – Old Spice/Carling Black
Label/Fiat Marea
Pachelbel: Canon in D – Thresher wines
Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf – Vauxhall Astra
Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet – Chanel L’Egoiste
Puccini: Madama Butterfly – Twinings tea/Del
Monte orange juice
Puccini: Gianni Schicchi – Philips DCC
Puccini: La Bohème – Sony Walkman
Puccini: Tosca – FreeServe
Ravel: Boléro – Ryvita
Rimsky-Korsakov: Tsar Saltan – Black and
Decker
Rossini: The Barber of Seville – Ragu pasta
sauce/Fiat Strada/Braun cordless shavers
Saint-Saëns: Carnival of the Animals – Tesco
Satie: Gymnopédie No. 3 – Bournville
chocolate/Strepsils lozenges
Schumann: Scenes from Childhood – Chocolate
Break
Smetana: Má Vlast – Peugeot 605
J. Strauss: Morning Papers Waltz – TSB
Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker Suite – Reactolite
sunglasses/Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut/
Hellmann’s mayonnaise
Verdi: Aida – Diet Pepsi/Michelob/Egypt
Verdi: Il Trovatore – Ragu pasta sauce
Verdi: La Forza del Destino – Stella Artois
Verdi: Nabucco – British Airways
Verdi: Rigoletto – Ragu pasta sauce/Little
Caesar’s pizza
Vivaldi: The Four Seasons – Chanel No. 19
perfume/Kingsmill bread/Citroën BX/Braun
	 The Frankfurt School 71
keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudoindividualization,
for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they
listen to is already listened to for them, or “pre-digested”’ (69).
Adorno’s second claim is that popular music promotes passive listening. As already
noted, work under capitalism is dull and therefore promotes the search for escape, but,
because it is also dulling, it leaves little energy for real escape – the demands of ‘authentic’
culture. Instead refuge is sought in forms such as popular music – the consumption
of which is always passive, and endlessly repetitive, confirming the world as it is. While
‘serious’ music (Beethoven, for example) plays to the pleasure of the imagination,
offering an engagement with the world as it could be, popular music is the ‘non-productive
correlate’ (70) to life in the office or on the factory floor. The ‘strain and boredom’ of
work lead men and women to the ‘avoidance of effort’ in their leisure time (ibid.).
Adorno makes it all sound like the hopeless ritual of a heroin addict (as taken from the
detective genre he detested so much). Denied ‘novelty’ in their work time, and too
exhausted for it in their leisure time, ‘they crave a stimulant’ – popular music satisfies
the craving.
Its stimulations are met with the inability to vest effort in the ever-identical.
This means boredom again. It is a circle which makes escape impossible. The
impossibility of escape causes the widespread attitude of inattention toward
popular music. The moment of recognition is that of effortless sensation. The
sudden attention attached to this moment burns itself out instanter and relegates
the listener to a realm of inattention and distraction (71).
Popular music operates in a kind of blurred dialectic: to consume it demands inattention
and distraction, while its consumption produces in the consumer inattention and
distraction.
Adorno’s third point is the claim that popular music operates as ‘social cement’
(72). Its ‘socio-psychological function’ is to achieve in the consumers of popular music
‘psychical adjustment’ to the needs of the prevailing structure of power (ibid.).
This ‘adjustment’ manifests itself in ‘two major socio-psychological types of mass
behaviour  .  .  .  the “rhythmically” obedient type and the “emotional” type’ (ibid.). The
first type of listener dances in distraction to the rhythm of his or her own exploitation
and oppression. The second type wallows in sentimental misery, oblivious to the real
conditions of existence.
There are a number of points to be made about Adorno’s analysis. First, we must
acknowledge that he is writing in 1941. Popular music has changed a great deal
since then. However, having said that, Adorno never thought to change his analysis
following the changes that occurred in popular music up until his death in 1969. Is
popular music as monolithic as he would have us believe? For example, does pseudoindividualization
really explain the advent of rock’n’roll in 1956, the emergence of the
Beatles in 1962, the music of the counterculture in 1965? Does it explain punk rock
and Rock Against Racism in the 1970s, acid house and indie pop in the 1980s, rave and
hip hop in the 1990s?
Chapter 4 Marxisms72
Moreover, is the consumption of popular music as passive as Adorno claims? Simon
Frith (1983) provides sales figures that suggest not: ‘despite the difficulties of the
calculations  .  .  .  most business commentators agree that about 10 per cent of all records
released (a little less for singles, a little more for LPs) make money’ (147). In addition
to this, only about another 10 per cent cover their costs (ibid.). This means that about
80 per cent of records actually lose money. Moreover, Paul Hirsch has calculated that
at least 60 per cent of singles released are never played by anyone (cited in Frith, 1983:
147). This does not suggest the workings of an all-powerful culture industry, easily able
to manipulate its consumers. It sounds more like a culture industry trying desperately
to sell records to a critical and discriminating public. Such figures certainly imply that
consumption is rather more active than Adorno’s argument suggests. Subcultural use
of music is clearly at the leading edge of such active discrimination, but is by no means
the only example.
Finally, does popular music really function as social cement? Subcultures or music
taste cultures, for instance, would appear to consume popular music in a way not too
dissimilar to Adorno’s ideal mode for the consumption of ‘serious music’. Richard
Dyer (1990) argues that this is certainly the case with regard to the gay consumption
of disco. He detects a certain romanticism in disco that keeps alive a way of being that
is always in conflict with the mundane and the everyday. As he explains, ‘Romanticism
asserts that the limits of work and domesticity are not the limits of experience’ (417).
The analysis offered by the majority of the Frankfurt School works with a series of
binary oppositions held in place by the supposed fundamental difference between
culture and mass culture (Table 4.2).
Walter Benjamin’s (1973) essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’
is much more optimistic about the possibility of a revolutionary transformation
of capitalism. He claims that capitalism will ‘ultimately  .  .  .  create conditions which
would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself’ (219). Benjamin believes that
changes in the technological reproduction of culture are changing the function of culture
in society: ‘technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations
which would be out of reach for the original itself’ (222). Reproduction thus challenges
what Benjamin calls the ‘aura’ of texts and practices.
Table 4.2  ‘Culture’ and ‘mass culture’ according to the Frankfurt School.
Culture Mass culture
Real False
European American
Multi-dimensional One-dimensional
Active consumption Passive consumption
Individual creation Mass production
Imagination Distraction
Negation Social cement
	 The Frankfurt School 73
One might generalise by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the
reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it
substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction
to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates
the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of
tradition  .  .  .  Their most powerful agent is film. Its social significance, particularly
in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect,
that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage (223).
The ‘aura’ of a text or practice is its sense of ‘authenticity’, ‘authority’, ‘autonomy’
and ‘distance’. The decay of the aura detaches the text or practice from the authority
and rituals of tradition. It opens them to a plurality of reinterpretation, freeing them to
be used in other contexts, for other purposes. No longer embedded in tradition, significance
is now open to dispute; meaning becomes a question of consumption, an active
(political), rather than a passive (for Adorno: psychological) event. Technological
reproduction changes production: ‘To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced
becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility’ (226). Consumption is also
changed: from its location in religious ritual to its location in the rituals of aesthetics,
consumption is now based on the practice of politics. Culture may have become mass
culture, but consumption has not become mass consumption.
Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art.
The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive
reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterised by the
direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of
the expert (236).
Questions of meaning and consumption shift from passive contemplation to
active political struggle. Benjamin’s celebration of the positive potential of ‘mechanical
reproduction’, his view that it begins the process of a move from an ‘auratic’ culture to
a ‘democratic’ culture in which meaning is seen no longer as unique, but as open to
question, open to use and mobilization, has had a profound (if often unacknowledged)
influence on cultural theory and popular culture. Susan Willis (1991) describes
Benjamin’s essay thus: ‘This may well be the single most important essay in the development
of Marxist popular culture criticism’ (10). While Adorno locates meaning in
the mode of production (how a cultural text is produced determines its consumption
and significance), Benjamin suggests that meaning is produced at the moment of consumption;
significance is determined by the process of consumption, regardless of the
mode of production. As Frith points out, the ‘debate’2
between Adorno and Benjamin
– between a socio-psychological account of consumption combined with an insistence
on the determining power of production, against the argument that consumption is
a matter of politics – continues to be argued in contemporary accounts of popular
music: ‘Out of Adorno have come analyses of the economics of entertainment  .  .  .  [and
the] ideological effects of commercial music making.  .  .  .  From Benjamin have come
Chapter 4 Marxisms74
subcultural theories, descriptions of the struggle  .  .  .  to make their own meanings in
their acts of consumption’ (57).
Despite its Marxist sophistication and admirable political intent, the approach of
the Frankfurt School to popular culture (with the exception of Benjamin) would in
some respects fit easily into the ‘culture and civilization’ tradition discussed in Chapter
2. Like the perspective developed by Arnold, Leavisism and some of the American mass
culture theorists, the Frankfurt School perspective on popular culture is essentially a
discourse from above on the culture of other people (a discourse of ‘us’ and ‘them’).
It is true that the Frankfurt School are very critical of conservative cultural critics who
bemoaned the passing of, or threat to, a ‘pure’ autonomous culture for its own sake.
Adorno, as J.M. Bernstein (1978) points out, ‘regards the conservative defence of high
culture as reflecting an unreflective hypostatization of culture that protects the economic
status quo’ (15). Nevertheless, it remains the case that there are certain similarities
between the focus of the ‘culture and civilization’ tradition and that of the Frankfurt
School. They condemn the same things, but for different reasons. The ‘culture and
civilization’ tradition attack mass culture because it threatens cultural standards and
social authority, the Frankfurt School attack mass culture because it threatens cultural
standards and depoliticizes the working class, and thus maintains the iron grip of
social authority: ‘obedience to the rhythm of the iron system  .  .  .  the absolute power of
capitalism’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979: 120; my italics). It is very difficult to imagine
the possibility of political agency in a situation of absolute power.
Althusserianism
The ideas of Louis Althusser have had an enormous influence on cultural theory and
popular culture. As Hall (1978) suggests, ‘Althusser’s interventions and their consequent
development are enormously formative for the field of cultural studies’ (21). Althusser’s
most significant contribution to the field is his different attempts to theorize the concept
of ideology. I shall therefore restrict discussion to this aspect of his work.
Althusser begins by rejecting mechanistic interpretation of the base/superstructure
formulation, insisting instead on the concept of the social formation. According to
Althusser (1969), a social formation consists of three practices: the economic, the
political and the ideological. The relationship between the base and the superstructure
is not one of expression, i.e. the superstructure being an expression or passive reflection
of the base, but rather the superstructure is seen as necessary to the existence of the
base. The model allows for the relative autonomy of the superstructure. Determination
remains, but it is determination in ‘the last instance’. This operates through what he
calls the ‘structure in dominance’; that is, although the economic is always ultimately
‘determinant’, this does not mean that in a particular historical conjuncture it will
necessarily be dominant. Under feudalism, for example, the political was the dominant
level. Nevertheless, the practice that is dominant in a particular social formation will
	Althusserianism 75
depend on the specific form of economic production. What he means by this is that
the economic contradictions of capitalism never take a pure form: ‘the lonely hour of
the last instance never comes’ (113). The economic is determinant in the last instance,
not because the other instances are its epiphenomena, but because it determines which
practice is dominant. In volume one of Capital, Marx (1976c) makes a similar point
in response to criticisms suggesting definite limits to the critical reach of Marxist
analysis:
[Marxism, so its critics say,] is all very true for our own time, in which material
interests are preponderant, but not for the Middle Ages, dominated by Catholicism,
nor for Athens and Rome, dominated by politics.  .  .  .  One thing is clear: the Middle
Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor could the ancient world on politics. On
the contrary, it is the manner in which they gained their livelihood which explains
why in one case politics, in the other case Catholicism, played the chief part.  
.  .  .  And then there is Don Quixote, who long ago paid the penalty for wrongly
imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economic forms of society
(176).
Althusser produced three definitions of ideology, two of which have proved particularly
fruitful for the student of popular culture. The first definition, which overlaps in
some ways with the second, is the claim that ideology – ‘a system (with its own logic
and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts)’ (1969: 231) – is a
‘practice’ through which men and women live their relations to the real conditions of
existence. ‘By practice  .  .  .  I  .  .  .  mean 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”)’ (166). Therefore, as
the economic, the historically specific mode of production, transforms certain raw
materials into products by determinate means of production, involving determinate
relations of production, so ideological practice shapes an individual’s lived relations to
the social formation. In this way, ideology dispels contradictions in lived experience.
It accomplishes this by offering false, but seemingly true, resolutions to real problems.
This is not a ‘conscious’ process; ideology ‘is profoundly unconscious’ (233) in its
mode of operation.
In ideology men  .  .  .  express, not the relation between them and their conditions
of existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions
of existence: this presupposes both a real relation and an ‘imaginary’, ‘lived’
relation. Ideology  .  .  .  is the expression of the relation between men and their
‘world’, that is, the (overdetermined) unity of the real relation and the imaginary
relation between them and their real conditions of existence (233–4).
The relationship is both real and imaginary in the sense that ideology is the way we
live our relationship to the real conditions of existence at the level of representations
(myths, concepts, ideas, images, discourses): there are real conditions and there are the
Chapter 4 Marxisms76
ways in which we represent these conditions to ourselves and to others. This applies to
both dominant and subordinate classes; ideologies do not just convince oppressed
groups that all is well with the world, they also convince ruling groups that exploitation
and oppression are really something quite different: acts of universal necessity.
Only a ‘scientific’ discourse (Althusser’s Marxism) can see through ideology to the real
conditions of existence.
Because ideology is for Althusser a closed system, it can only ever set itself such
problems as it can answer; that is, to remain within its boundaries (a mythic realm
without contradictions), it must stay silent on questions that threaten to take it beyond
these boundaries. This formulation leads Althusser to the concept of the ‘problematic’.
He first uses the concept to explain the ‘epistemological break’ that he claims occurs in
Marx’s work in 1845. Marx’s problematic, ‘the objective internal reference system  .  .  .  
the system of questions commanding the answers given’ (67), determines not only the
questions and answers he is able to bring into play, but also the absence of problems
and concepts in his work.
According to Althusser a problematic consists of the assumptions, motivations,
underlying ideas, etc., from which a text (say, an advert) is made. In this way, it is
argued, a text is structured as much by what is absent (what is not said) as by what is
present (what is said). Althusser argues that if we are to fully understand the meaning
of a text, we have to be aware of not only what is in a text but also the assumptions
that inform it (which may not appear in the text itself in any straightforward way
but exist only in the text’s problematic). One way in which a text’s problematic is
supposedly revealed is in the way a text may appear to answer questions it has not
formally posed. Such questions, it is argued, have been posed in the text’s problematic.
The task of an Althusserian critical practice is to deconstruct the text to reveal the
problematic. To do this is to perform what Althusser calls a ‘symptomatic reading’.
In Reading Capital, Althusser characterizes Marx’s method of reading the work of
Adam Smith as ‘symptomatic’ in that
it divulges the undivulged event in the text it reads, and in the same movement
relates it to a different text, present as a necessary absence in the first. Like his first
reading, Marx’s second reading presupposes the existence of two texts, and the
measurement of the first against the second. But what distinguishes this new
reading from the old is the fact that in the new one the second text is articulated
with the lapses in the first text (Althusser and Balibar, 1979: 67).
Through a symptomatic reading of Smith, Marx is able to construct for analysis ‘the
problematic initially visible in his writings against the invisible problematic contained
in the paradox of an answer which does not correspond to any question posed’ (28). Marx
(1951) himself says this of Smith, ‘Adam Smith’s contradictions are of significance
because they contain problems which it is true he does not solve, but which he reveals
by contradicting himself’ (146).
To read a text symptomatically, therefore, is to perform a double reading: reading
first the manifest text, and then, through the lapses, distortions, silences and absences
	
Althusserianism 77
(the ‘symptoms’ of a problem struggling to be posed) in the manifest text, to produce
and read the latent text. For example, a symptomatic reading of the film Taxi Driver
would reveal a problematic in which answers are posed to questions it can hardly
name: ‘How does the veteran return home to America after the imperial horrors of
Vietnam?’ At the heart of the film’s problematic are questions relating to real historical
problems, albeit deformed and transformed into a fantasy quest and a bloody resolution.
A symptomatic reading of Taxi Driver, reading the ‘symptoms’ for evidence of an
underlying disease, would construct from the film’s contradictions, its evasions, its
silences, its inexplicable violence, its fairy-tale ending, the central and structuring
absence – America’s war in Vietnam.
Another example can be seen in the number of recent car advertisements that situate
vehicles isolated in nature (for example, see Photo 4.1). This mode of advertising, I
would argue, is a response to the growing body of negative publicity that car ownership
has attracted (especially in terms of pollution and road congestion). To prevent this
publicity having an adverse effect on car sales these criticisms have to be countered. To
confront them in a direct way would always run the risk of allowing the criticisms to
come between the car being advertised and any potential buyer. Therefore, showing
cars in both nature (unpolluted) and space (uncongested) confronts the claims without
the risk of giving them a dangerous and unnecessary visibility. In this way, the criticisms
are answered without the questions themselves having been formally posed. The
emphasis placed on nature and space is, therefore, a response to the twin questions
(which remain unasked in the advertisements themselves but exist in the assumptions
that organize the adverts – in the text’s ‘problematic’): does buying a car increase both
pollution and road congestion? The answer given, without the question being asked, is
that these cars, as if by magic, neither pollute nor contribute to, or experience, road
congestion.
Pierre Macherey’s (1978) A Theory of Literary Production is undoubtedly the most
sustained attempt to apply the technique of the Althusserian symptomatic reading to
cultural texts. Although, as the book’s title implies, Macherey’s main focus is on literary
production, the approach developed in the book is of great interest to the student of
popular culture.
In his elaboration of Althusser’s method of symptomatic reading, he rejects what he
calls ‘the interpretative fallacy’: the view that a text has a single meaning, which it is the
task of criticism to uncover. For him the text is not a puzzle that conceals a meaning;
it is a construction with a multiplicity of meanings. To ‘explain’ a text is to recognize
this. To do so it is necessary to break with the idea that a text is a harmonious unity,
spiralling forth from a moment of overwhelming intentionality. Against this, he claims
that the literary text is ‘decentred’; it is incomplete in itself. To say this does not mean
that something needs to be added in order to make it whole. His point is that all literary
texts are ‘decentred’ (not centred on an authorial intention) in the specific sense
that they consist of a confrontation between several discourses: explicit, implicit, present
and absent. The task of critical practice is not, therefore, the attempt to measure and
evaluate a text’s coherence, its harmonious totality, its aesthetic unity, but instead to
explain the disparities in the text that point to a conflict of meanings.
Chapter 4 Marxisms78
This conflict is not the sign of an imperfection; it reveals the inscription of an
otherness in the work, through which it maintains a relationship with that which
it is not, that which happens at its margins. To explain the work is to show that,
contrary to appearances, it is not independent, but bears in its material substance
the imprint of a determinate absence which is also the principle of its identity. The
book is furrowed by the allusive presence of those other books against which it is
elaborated; it circles about the absence of that which it cannot say, haunted by the
absence of certain repressed words which make their return. The book is not
	 Photo 4.1	 Advertising as an example of the ‘problematic’.
Source: Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives
	Althusserianism 79
the extension of a meaning; it is generated from the incompatibility of several
meanings, the strongest bond by which it is attached to reality, in a tense and ever
renewed confrontation (79–80; my italics).
A text may seek to control the production of meaning, but there is always a surplus of
signification; that is, other meanings threatening to dislodge the authority of the primary
meaning. It is this conflict of several meanings that structures a text: it displays this conflict
but cannot speak it – its determinate absence. Traditionally, criticism has seen its role as
making explicit what is implicit in the text, to make audible that which is merely a whisper
(i.e. a single meaning). For Macherey, it is not a question of making what is there speak
with more clarity so as to be finally sure of the text’s meaning. Because a text’s meanings
are ‘both interior and absent’ (78), to simply repeat the text’s self-knowledge is to fail
to really explain the text. The task of a fully competent critical practice is not to make
a whisper audible, nor to complete what the text leaves unsaid, but to produce a new
knowledge of the text: one that explains the ideological necessity of its silences, its
absences, its structuring incompleteness – the staging of that which it cannot speak.
The act of knowing is not like listening to a discourse already constituted, a mere
fiction which we have simply to translate. It is rather the elaboration of a new
discourse, the articulation of a silence. Knowledge is not the discovery or reconstruction
of a latent meaning, forgotten or concealed. It is something newly raised
up, an addition to the reality from which it begins (6).
Borrowing from Sigmund Freud’s work on dreams (see Chapter 5), Macherey contends
that in order for something to be said, other things must be left unsaid. It is the
reason(s) for these absences, these silences, within a text that must be interrogated.
‘What is important in the work is what it does not say’ (87). Again, as with Freud,
who believed that the meanings of his patients’ problems were not hidden in their
conscious discourse, but repressed in the turbulent discourse of the unconscious,
necessitating a subtle form of analysis acute to the difference between what is said and
what is shown, Macherey’s approach dances between the different nuances of telling
and showing. This leads him to the claim that there is a ‘gap’, an ‘internal distanciation’,
between what a text wants to say and what a text actually says. To explain a text it is
necessary to go beyond it, to understand what it ‘is compelled to say in order to say
what it wants to say’ (94). It is here that the text’s ‘unconscious’ (Macherey’s term for
Althusser’s problematic) is constituted. And it is in a text’s unconscious that its relationship
to the ideological and historical conditions of its existence is revealed. It is
in the absent centre, hollowed out by conflicting discourses, that the text is related to
history – to a particular moment in history and to the specific ideological discourses
that circulate in that moment. The text’s unconscious does not reflect historical contradictions;
rather, it evokes, stages and displays them, allowing us not a ‘scientific’
knowledge of ideology, but an awareness of ‘ideology in contradiction with itself’;
breaking down before questions it cannot answer, failing to do what ideology is supposed
to do: ‘ideology exists precisely in order to efface all trace of contradiction’ (130).
Chapter 4 Marxisms80
In a formal sense, a text always begins by posing a problem that is to be solved.
The text then exists as a process of unfolding: the narrative movement to the final
resolution of the problem. Macherey contends that between the problem posed and the
resolution offered, rather than continuity, there is always a rupture. It is by examining
this rupture that we discover the text’s relationship with ideology and history: ‘We
always eventually find, at the edge of the text, the language of ideology, momentarily
hidden, but eloquent by its very absence’ (60).
All narratives contain an ideological project: that is, they promise to tell the ‘truth’
about something. Information is initially withheld on the promise that it will be
revealed. Narrative constitutes a movement towards disclosure. It begins with a truth
promised and ends with a truth revealed. To be rather schematic, Macherey divides the
text into three instances: the ideological project (the ‘truth’ promised), the realization
(the ‘truth’ revealed), and the unconscious of the text (produced by an act of symptomatic
reading): the return of the repressed historical ‘truth’. ‘Science’, he claims, ‘does away
with ideology, obliterates it; literature challenges ideology by using it. If ideology is
thought of as a non-systematic ensemble of significations, the work proposes a reading
of these significations, by combining them as signs. Criticism teaches us to read these
signs’ (133). In this way, Machereyan critical practice seeks to explain the way in which,
by giving ideology form, the text displays ideology in contradiction with itself.        
In a discussion of the work of the French science fiction writer Jules Verne, he demonstrates
how Verne’s work stages the contradictions of late nineteenth-century French
imperialism. He argues that the ideological project of Verne’s work is the fantastic
staging of the adventures of French imperialism: its colonizing conquest of the
earth. Each adventure concerns the hero’s conquest of nature (a mysterious island, the
moon, the bottom of the sea, the centre of the earth). In telling these stories, Verne is
‘compelled’ to tell another: each voyage of conquest becomes a voyage of rediscovery,
as Verne’s heroes discover that either others have been there before or are there
already. The significance of this, for Macherey, lies in the disparity he perceives between
‘representation’ (what is intended: the subject of the narrative) and ‘figuration’ (how
it is realized: its inscription in narrative): Verne ‘represents’ the ideology of French
imperialism, while at the same time, through the act of ‘figuration’ (making material
in the form of a fiction), undermines one of its central myths in the continual staging of
the fact that the lands are always already occupied (similarly, the first edition of this
book was written in the middle of a discursive avalanche of media – and other – claims
that America was discovered in 1492, ignoring the fact that people had lived there for
more than 15,000 years.). ‘In the passage from the level of representation to that of
figuration, ideology undergoes a complete modification . . . perhapsbecauseno ideology
is sufficiently consistent to survive the test of figuration’ (194–5). Thus by giving
fictional form to the ideology of imperialism, Verne’s work – ‘to read it against the
grain of its intended meaning’ (230) – stages the contradictions between the
myth and the reality of imperialism. The stories do not provide us with a ‘scientific’
denunciation (‘a knowledge in the strict sense’) of imperialism, but by an act of
symptomatic reading ‘which dislodges the work internally’, they ‘make us see’, ‘make
us perceive’, ‘make us feel’, the terrible contradictions of the ideological discourses
from which each text is constituted: ‘from which it is born, in which it bathes, from
	
Althusserianism 81
which it detaches itself  .  .  .  and to which it alludes’ (Althusser, 1971: 222). Verne’s
science fiction, then, can be made to reveal to us – though not in the ways intended
– the ideological and historical conditions of its emergence.
In the nineteenth century there were a great number of books written to advise young
women on appropriate conduct. Here, for example, is an extract from Thomas Broadhurst’s
Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind and Conduct of Life (1810):
She who is faithfully employed in discharging the various duties of a wife and
daughter, a mother and a friend, is far more usefully occupied than one who,
to the culpable neglect of the most important obligations, is daily absorbed by
philosophic and literary speculations, or soaring aloft amidst the enchanted
regions of fiction and romance (quoted in Mills, 2004: 80).
Rather than see this as a straightforward sign of women’s oppression, a Machereyan
analysis would interrogate the extent to which this text is also an indication of the
refusal of women to occupy positions traditionally demanded of them. In other words,
if women were not engaging in philosophic and literary speculation, there would be
no need to advise them against it. Women actually engaging in literary and philosophic
speculation (and probably so much more) is, therefore, the determinate absence of
the text. Similarly, Sara Mills (2004) points out how women’s travel writing in the
nineteenth century had to continually address a discourse of femininity that suggested
that travel was something beyond a woman’s strength and commitment. For example,
in Alexandra David-Neel’s account of her travels in Tibet we read, ‘For nineteen hours we
had been walking. Strangely enough, I did not feel tired’ (quoted in Mills, 2004: 90).
It is the phrase ‘strangely enough’ that points to a determinate absence: a masculine
discourse of disbelief that haunts the unconscious of the text.
Finally, Photo 4.2 shows two figures on an otherwise empty beach; they look cold
and uncomfortable. When trying to decide what this photograph signifies, it is very
likely that our understanding may well be organized and shaped by a historically
specific determinate absence: a normative expectation of a beach as a place of holidaymakers,
relaxed and enjoying themselves. It is this determinate absence that locates the
‘meaning’ of the photograph in a specific historical moment: before the rise of the
seaside holiday in the 1840s, this normative expectation would have been unavailable
as an interpretative framework. In other words, the meaning we make is both historical
and structured by absence.
In Althusser’s second formulation, ideology is still a representation of the imaginary
relationship of individuals to the real conditions of existence, only now ideology is seen
no longer as only a body of ideas, but as a lived, material practice – rituals, customs,
patterns of behaviour, ways of thinking taking practical form – reproduced through
the practices and productions of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs): education,
organized religion, the family, organized politics, the media, the culture industries, etc.
According to this second definition, ‘all ideology has the function (which defines it) of
“constructing” concrete individuals as subjects’ (2009: 309). Ideological subjects are
produced by acts of ‘hailing’ or ‘interpellation’. Althusser uses the analogy of a police
Chapter 4 Marxisms82
officer hailing an individual: ‘Hey, you there!’ When the individual hailed turns in
response, he or she has been interpellated; has become a subject of the police officer’s
discourse. In this way, ideology is a material practice that creates subjects who are in
turn subjected to its specific patterns of thought and modes of behaviour.
This definition of ideology has had a significant effect on the field of cultural studies
and the study of popular culture. Judith Williamson (1978), for example, deploys
Althusser’s second definition of ideology in her influential study of advertising,
Decoding Advertisements. She argues that advertising is ideological in the sense that it
represents an imaginary relationship to our real conditions of existence. Instead of class
distinctions based on our role in the process of production, advertising continually
suggests that what really matters are distinctions based on the consumption of particular
goods. Thus social identity becomes a question of what we consume rather than what
we produce. Like all ideology, advertising functions by interpellation: it creates subjects
who in turn are subjected to its meanings and its patterns of consumption. The consumer
is interpellated to make meaning and ultimately to purchase and consume and
purchase and consume again. For example, when I am addressed in terms such as
‘people like you’ are turning to this or that product, I am interpellated as one of a
group, but more importantly as an individual ‘you’ of that group. I am addressed as an
individual who can recognize myself in the imaginary space opened up by the pronoun
	 Photo 4.2	 Two figures on a beach.
	
Hegemony 83
‘you’. Thus I am invited to become the imaginary ‘you’ spoken to in the advertisement.
But such a process is for Althusser an act of ideological ‘misrecognition’: first, in the sense
that in order for the advert to work it must attract many others who also recognize
themselves in the ‘you’ (each one thinking they are the real ‘you’ of its discourse).
Second, it is misrecognition in another sense: the ‘you’ I recognize in the advert is in
fact a ‘you’ created by the advertisement. As Slavoj yizek (1992) points out, interpellation
works like this: ‘I don’t recognise myself in it because I’m its addressee, I become
its addressee the moment I recognise myself in it’ (12). Advertising, then, according to
this perspective, flatters us into thinking we are the special ‘you’ of its discourse and
in so doing we become subjects of and subjected to its material practices: acts of consumption.
Advertising is thus ideological both in the way it functions and in the effects
it produces.
One of the problems with Althusser’s second model of ideology, and its application
in cultural theory, is that it seems to work too well. Men and women are always
successfully reproduced with all the necessary ideological habits required by the capitalist
mode of production; there is no sense of failure, let alone any notion of conflict,
struggle or resistance. In terms of popular culture, do advertisements, for example,
always successfully interpellate us as consuming subjects? Moreover, even if interpellation
works, previous interpellations may get in the way of current interpellations (contradict
and prevent from working). Put simply, if I know that racism is wrong, a racist
joke will fail to interpellate me. It was against this background of concerns that many
working within the field of cultural studies turned to the work of the Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci.
Hegemony
Central to the cultural studies appropriation of Gramsci is the concept of hegemony.
Hegemony is for Gramsci a political concept developed to explain (given the exploitative
and oppressive nature of capitalism) the absence of socialist revolutions in the
Western capitalist democracies. The concept of hegemony is used by Gramsci (2009)
to refer to a condition in process in which a dominant class (in alliance with other classes
or class fractions) does not merely rule a society but leads it through the exercise of
‘intellectual and moral leadership’ (75). Hegemony involves a specific kind of consensus:
a social group seeks to present its own particular interests as the general interests of the
society as a whole. In this sense, the concept is used to suggest a society in which, despite
oppression and exploitation, there is a high degree of consensus, a large measure of
social stability; a society in which subordinate groups and classes appear to actively
support and subscribe to values, ideals, objectives, cultural and political meanings,
which bind them to, and ‘incorporate’ them into, the prevailing structures of power.
For example, throughout most of the course of the twentieth century, general elections
in Britain were contested by what are now the two main political parties, Labour and
Chapter 4 Marxisms84Conservative.
On each occasion the contest circled around the question, who best
can administer capitalism (usually referred to by the less politically charged term
‘the economy’) – less public ownership, more public ownership, less taxation, more
taxation, etc. And on each occasion, the mainstream media concurred. In this sense,
the parameters of the election debate are ultimately dictated by the particular needs
and interests of capitalism, presented as the interests and needs of society as a whole.
Once the election is won the new prime minister will be accompanied on all official
overseas visits by a large group of capitalists, each hoping that new business opportunities
will be forthcoming. Similarly, new government policies will be justified and scrutinized
in terms of how ‘the markets’ (i.e. capitalism in general) will respond. This is
clearly an example of a situation in which the interests of one powerful section of
society have been ‘universalized’ as the interests of the society as a whole. The situation
seems perfectly ‘natural’, virtually beyond serious contention. But it was not always like
this. Capitalism’s hegemony is the result of profound political, social, cultural and
economic changes that have taken place over a period of around 500 years. Until as late
as the second part of the nineteenth century, capitalism’s position was still uncertain.3
It is only in the twenty-first century that the system seems to have won, or at least
to be winning, especially with the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe, and the introduction of the ‘Open Door’ policy and ‘market
socialism’ in China. Capitalism is now, more or less, internationally hegemonic.
Although hegemony implies a society with a high degree of consensus, it should not
be understood to refer to a society in which all conflict has been removed. What the
concept is meant to suggest is a society in which conflict is contained and channelled
into ideologically safe harbours; that is, hegemony is maintained (and must be
continually maintained: it is an ongoing process) by dominant groups and classes
‘negotiating’ with, and making concessions to, subordinate groups and classes. For
example, consider the historical case of British hegemony in the Caribbean. One of the
ways in which Britain attempted to secure its control over the indigenous population,
and the African men, women and children it had transported there as slaves, was by
means of the imposition of a version of British culture (a standard practice for colonial
regimes everywhere): part of the process was to institute English as the official language.
In linguistic terms, the result was not the imposition of English, but, for the majority
of the population, the creation of a new language. The dominant element of this new
language is English, but the language itself is not simply English. What emerged was a
transformed English, with new stresses and new rhythms, with some words dropped
and new words introduced (from African languages and elsewhere). The new language
is the result of a ‘negotiation’ between dominant and subordinate cultures, a language
marked by both ‘resistance’ and ‘incorporation’: that is, not a language imposed from
above, nor a language that had spontaneously arisen from below, but a language
that is the result of a hegemonic struggle between two language cultures – a dominant
language culture and a mix of subordinate language cultures, involving both ‘resistance’
and ‘incorporation’.
Hegemony is never simply power imposed from above: it is always the result of
‘negotiations’ between dominant and subordinate groups, a process marked by both
	Hegemony 85
‘resistance’ and ‘incorporation’. There are of course limits to such negotiations and
concessions. As Gramsci makes clear, they can never be allowed to challenge the
economic fundamentals of class power. Moreover, in times of crisis, when moral and
intellectual leadership is not enough to secure continued authority, the processes of
hegemony are replaced, temporarily, by the coercive power of the ‘repressive state
apparatus’: the army, the police, the prison system, etc.
Hegemony is ‘organized’ by those whom Gramsci designates ‘organic intellectuals’.
According to Gramsci, intellectuals are distinguished by their social function. That is to
say, all men and women have the capacity for intellectual endeavour, but only certain
men and women have in society the function of intellectuals. Each class, as Gramsci
explains, creates ‘organically’ its own intellectuals:
one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness
of its own function not only in the economic sphere but also in the social and
political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur [for example] creates alongside himself
the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organisers of a
new culture, of a new legal system, etc. (2009: 77).
Organic intellectuals function as class organizers (in the broadest sense of the term).
It is their task to shape and to organize the reform of moral and intellectual life. I have
argued elsewhere4
that Matthew Arnold is best understood as an organic intellectual,
what Gramsci identifies as one of ‘an elite of men of culture, who have the function of
providing leadership of a cultural and general ideological nature’ (Storey, 1985: 217;
Storey, 2010a). Gramsci tends to speak of organic intellectuals as individuals, but the
way the concept has been mobilized in cultural studies, following Althusser’s barely
acknowledged borrowings from Gramsci, is in terms of collective organic intellectuals
– the so-called ‘ideological state apparatuses’ of the family, television, the press, education,
organized religion, the culture industries, etc.
Using hegemony theory, popular culture is what men and women make from
their active consumption of the texts and practices of the culture industries. Youth
subcultures are perhaps the most spectacular example of this process. Dick Hebdige
(1979) offers a clear and convincing explanation of the process (‘bricolage’) by
which youth subcultures appropriate for their own purposes and meanings the commodities
commercially provided. Products are combined or transformed in ways not
intended by their producers; commodities are re-articulated to produce ‘oppositional’
meanings. In this way, and through patterns of behaviour, ways of speaking, taste
in music, etc., youth subcultures engage in symbolic forms of resistance to both
dominant and parent cultures. Youth cultures, according to this model, always
move from originality and opposition to commercial incorporation and ideological
diffusion as the culture industries eventually succeed in marketing subcultural resistance
for general consumption and profit. As Hebdige explains: ‘Youth cultural styles
may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must end by establishing new
sets of conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old
ones’ (96).
Chapter 4 Marxisms86
The concept of hegemony allows students of popular culture to free themselves from
the disabling analysis of many of the previous approaches to the subject. Popular culture
is no longer a history-stopping, imposed culture of political manipulation (the Frankfurt
School); nor is it the sign of social decline and decay (the ‘culture and civilization’
tradition); nor is it something emerging spontaneously from below (some versions of
culturalism); nor is it a meaning-machine imposing subjectivities on passive subjects
(some versions of structuralism). Instead of these and other approaches, hegemony
theory allows us to think of popular culture as a ‘negotiated’ mix of what is made both
from ‘above’ and from ‘below’, both ‘commercial’ and ‘authentic’; a shifting balance of
forces between resistance and incorporation. This can be analysed in many different
configurations: class, gender, generation, ethnicity, ‘race’, region, religion, disability,
sexuality, etc. From this perspective, popular culture is a contradictory mix of competing
interests and values: neither middle nor working class, neither racist nor non-racist,
neither sexist nor non-sexist, neither homophobic nor homophilic  .  .  .  but always a
shifting balance between the two – what Gramsci calls ‘a compromise equilibrium’
(2009: 76). The commercially provided culture of the culture industries is redefined,
reshaped and redirected in tactical acts of selective consumption and productive acts of
reading and articulation, often in ways not intended or even foreseen by its producers.
Post-Marxism and cultural studies
As Angela McRobbie (1992) observes, Marxism is no longer as influential in cultural
studies as it has been in the past:
Marxism, a major point of reference for the whole cultural studies project in the
UK, has been undermined not just from the viewpoint of the postmodern critics
who attack its teleological propositions, its meta-narrative status, its essentialism,
economism, Eurocentrism, and its place within the whole Enlightenment project,
but also, of course, as a result of the events in Eastern Europe, with the discrediting
of much of the socialist project (719).
What is certain, as she explains, is that ‘the return to a pre-postmodern Marxism
as marked out by critics like Fredric Jameson (1984) and David Harvey (1989) is
untenable because the terms of that return are predicated on prioritizing economic
relations and economic determinations over cultural and political relations by positioning
these latter in a mechanical and reflectionist role’ (ibid.). But more than this,
there is a real sense in which cultural studies was always-already post-Marxist. As Hall
(1992) points out,
There was never a prior moment when cultural studies and Marxism represented
a perfect theoretical fit. From the beginning  .  .  .  there was always-already the
	 Post-Marxism and cultural studies 87
question of the great inadequacies, theoretically and politically, the resounding
silences, the great evasions of Marxism – the things that Marx did not talk about or
seem to understand which were our privileged object of study: culture, ideology,
language, the symbolic. These were always-already, instead, the things which had
imprisoned Marxism as a mode of thought, as an activity of critical practice – its
orthodoxy, its doctrinal character, its determinism, its reductionism, its immutable
law of history, its status as a metanarrative. That is to say, the encounter between
British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement
with a problem – not a theory, not even a problematic (279).
Post-Marxism can mean at least two things. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
(2001) point out in their deeply influential contribution to post-Marxism, Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, ‘if our intellectual project in
this book is post-Marxist, it is evidently also post-Marxist’ (4). To be post-Marxist is to
leave behind Marxism for something better, whereas to be post-Marxist is to seek to
transform Marxism, by adding to it recent theoretical developments from, especially,
feminism, postmodernism, post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Laclau and
Mouffe are more post-Marxist than they are post-Marxist. They envisage a partnership
between Marxism and the ‘new feminism, the protest movements of ethnic, national
and sexual minorities, the anti-institutional ecology struggles waged by marginalized
layers of the population, the anti-nuclear movement, the atypical forms of social
struggle in countries on the capitalist periphery’ (1). In my view, cultural studies is
post-Marxist in the positive sense advocated by Laclau and Mouffe.
The concept of discourse is central to the development of post-Marxism. As Laclau
(1993) explains, ‘The basic hypothesis of a discursive approach is that the very possibility
of perception, thought and action depends on the structuration of a certain
meaningful field which pre-exists any factual immediacy’ (431). To explain what they
mean by discourse Laclau and Mouffe (2009) give an example of two people building
a wall. The first person asks the second to pass him/her a brick. On receiving the brick,
the second person adds it to the wall. The totality of this operation consists in a linguistic
moment (the request for a brick) and a non-linguistic moment (adding the
brick to the wall). Discourse, according to Laclau and Mouffe, consists in the totality
of the linguistic and non-linguistic. In other words, they use the term discourse ‘to
emphasize the fact that every social configuration is meaningful. If I kick a spherical
object in the street or if I kick a ball in a football match, the physical fact is the same,
but its meaning is different. The object is a football only to the extent that it establishes
a system of relations with other objects, and these relations are not given by the mere
referential materiality of the objects, but are, rather, socially constructed. This systematic
set of relations is what we call discourse’ (159).
Moreover,
the discursive character of an object does not, by any means, imply putting its
existence into question. The fact that a football is only a football as long as it is
integrated within a system of socially constructed rules does not mean that it ceases
Chapter 4 Marxisms88
to be a physical object.  .  .  .  For the same reason it is the discourse which constitutes
the subject position of the social agent, and not, therefore, the social agent which
is the origin of discourse – the same system of rules that makes that spherical
object into a football, makes me a player (159).
To understand this we have to differentiate between objectivity (the supposed ability to
judge without context or interest) and the objective world, which exists independent of
our experiences of it or our thoughts about it. In other words, objects exist independently
of their discursive articulation, but it is only within discourse that they can exist as meaningful
objects. For example, earthquakes exist in the real world, but whether they are
constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the wrath of God’,
depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such
objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could
constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive condition of emergence
(Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 108).
As Gramsci (2007) points out, ‘East and West  .  .  .  never cease to be “objectively real”
even though when analysed they turn out to be nothing more than a “historical” or
“conventional construct”’ (175).
It is obvious that East and West are arbitrary and conventional (historical) constructions,
since every spot on the earth is simultaneously East and West. Japan is
probably the Far East not only for the European but also for the American from
California and even for the Japanese himself, who, through English political
culture might call Egypt the Near East.  .  .  .  Yet these references are real, they
correspond to real facts, they allow one to travel by land and by sea and to arrive
at the predetermined destination (176).
In other words, East and West are historical constructions, directly connected to the
imperial power of the West. However, they are forms of signification that have been
realized and embedded in social practice: cultural constructs they may be, but they do
designate real geographic locations and guide real human movement.
As Gramsci’s example makes clear, meanings produced in discourse inform and
organize social action. It is only in discourse, for example, that ‘a relation of subordination’
can become ‘a relation of oppression’, and thereby constitute itself as a site of
struggle (Laclau and Mouffe 153). Someone may be ‘objectively’ oppressed but unless
they recognize their subordination as oppression, it is unlikely that this relation will
ever become antagonistic and therefore open to the possibility of change. Hegemony works,
as Laclau (1993) explains, by the transformation of antagonism into simple difference.
A class is hegemonic not so much to the extent that it is able to impose a uniform
conception of the world on the rest of society, but to the extent that it can articulate
different visions of the world in such a way that their potential antagonism is
neutralised. The English bourgeoisie of the 19th century was transformed into a
	 Post-Marxism and cultural studies 89
hegemonic class not through the imposition of a uniform ideology upon other
classes, but to the extent that it succeeded in articulating different ideologies to its
hegemonic project by an elimination of their antagonistic character (161–2).
‘Articulation’ is a key term in post-Marxist cultural studies. ‘The practice of articulation’,
as Laclau and Mouffe (2001) explain, ‘consists in the  .  .  .  partial fix[ing] of meaning’
(113). Hall (1996b) has developed the concept to explain the ways in which
culture is a terrain of ideological struggle. Like Laclau and Mouffe, he argues that texts
and practices are not inscribed with meaning; meaning is always the result of an act of
articulation. As he points out, ‘Meaning is a social production, a practice. The world
has to be made to mean’ (2009a: 121). He also draws on the work of the Russian theorist
Valentin Volosinov (1973). Volosinov argues that texts and practices are ‘multi-accentual’:
that is, they can be ‘spoken’ with different ‘accents’ by different people in different
discourses and different social contexts for different politics. When, for example, a
black performer uses the word ‘nigger’ to attack institutional racism, it is ‘spoken’ with
an ‘accent’ very different from the ‘accent’ given the word in, say, the racist discourse of
a neo-Nazi. This is, of course, not simply a question of linguistic struggle – a conflict
over semantics – but a sign of political struggle about who can claim the power and
the authority to (partially) fix the meaning of social reality.
An interesting example of the processes of articulation is the reggae music of
Rastafarian culture. Bob Marley, for example, had international success with songs
articulating the values and beliefs of Rastafari. This success can be viewed in two ways.
On the one hand, it signals the circulation of the ‘message’ of his religious convictions
to an enormous audience worldwide; undoubtedly for many of his audience the music
had the effect of enlightenment, understanding and perhaps even conversion to, and
bonding for those already convinced of, the principles of the faith. On the other hand,
the music has made and continues to make enormous profits for the music industry
(promoters, Island Records, etc.). What we have is a paradox in which the anti-capitalist
politics of Rastafari are being articulated in the economic interests of capitalism: the
music is helping to reproduce the very system it seeks to condemn; that is, the politics
of Rastafari are being expressed in a form that is ultimately of financial benefit to
the dominant culture (i.e. as a commodity that circulates for profit). Nevertheless, the
music is an expression of an oppositional (religious) politics, and it may circulate as
such, and it may produce certain political and cultural effects. Therefore, Rastafarian
reggae is a force for change that paradoxically stabilizes (at least economically) the very
forces of power it seeks to overthrow.
Another example, in some ways more compelling than that of reggae, is the music
of the American counterculture. It inspired people to resist the draft and to organize
against Amerika’s (spelling used by political sections of the counterculture, intended to
imply, by use of the Germanic ‘k’, that the USA was fascist) war in Vietnam; yet, at the
same time, its music made profits (over which it had no control) that could then be
used to support the war effort in Vietnam. The more Jefferson Airplane sang ‘All your
private property/Is target for your enemy/And your enemy/Is We’,5
the more money
RCA Records made. The proliferation of Jefferson Airplane’s anti-capitalist politics
Chapter 4 Marxisms90
increased the profits of their capitalist record company. Again, this is an example of
the process of articulation: the way in which dominant groups in society attempt to
‘negotiate’ oppositional voices on to a terrain which secures for the dominant groups
a continued position of leadership. The music of the counterculture was not denied
expression (and there can be little doubt that this music produced particular cultural
and political effects), but what is also true is that this music was also articulated in the
economic interests of the war-supporting capitalist music industry.6
As Keith Richards
of the Rolling Stones discovered,
We found out, and it wasn’t for years that we did, that all the bread we made for
Decca was going into making black boxes that go into American Air Force bombers
to bomb fucking North Vietnam. They took the bread we made for them and put
it into the radar section of their business. When we found that out, it blew our
minds. That was it. Goddam, you find out you’ve helped kill God knows how
many thousands of people without really knowing it (quoted in Storey, 2010a:
28–9).
In Chapter 3 we examined Williams’s (2009) social definition of culture. We
discussed it in terms of how it broadens the definition of culture: instead of culture
being defined as only the ‘elite’ texts and practices (ballet, opera, the novel, poetry),
Williams redefined culture to include as culture, for example, pop music, television,
cinema, advertising, going on holiday, etc. However, another aspect of Williams’s
social definition of culture has proved even more important for cultural studies,
especially post-Marxist cultural studies – the connection he makes between meaning
and culture.
There is the ‘social’ definition of culture, in which culture is a description of a
particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and
learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour. The analysis of culture,
from such a definition, is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit in a
particular way of life (32; my italics).
The importance of a particular way of life is that it ‘expresses certain meanings
and values’. Cultural analysis from the perspective of this definition of culture
‘is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit in a particular way of life’.
Moreover, culture as a signifying system is not reducible to ‘a particular way of life’;
rather, it is fundamental to the shaping and holding together of a particular way
of life. This is not to reduce everything ‘upwards’ to culture as a signifying system, but
it is to insist that culture, defined in this way, should be understood ‘as essentially
involved in all forms of social activity’ (Williams, 1981: 13). While there is more to life
than signifying systems, it is nevertheless the case that ‘it would  .  .  .  be wrong to
suppose that we can ever usefully discuss a social system without including, as a central
part of its practice, its signifying systems, on which, as a system, it fundamentally
depends’ (207).
	
Post-Marxism and cultural studies 91
Following this definition, and the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, post-Marxist
cultural studies defines culture as the production, circulation and consumption of
meanings. As Hall (1997a), for example, explains, ‘Culture  .  .  .  is not so much a set
of things – novels and paintings or TV programmes and comics – as a process, a set of
practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings
– the giving and taking of meaning’ (2). According to this definition, cultures do not
so much consist of, say, books; cultures are the shifting networks of signification in
which, say, books are made to signify as meaningful objects. For example, if I pass a
business card to someone in China, the polite way to do it is with two hands. If I pass
it with one hand I may cause offence. This is clearly a matter of culture. However, the
‘culture’ is not simply in the social act, nor is it just in the materiality of the card; it is
in the ‘realized’ meaning of both act and card. In other words, there is nothing
essentially polite about using two hands; using two hands has been made to signify
politeness. Nevertheless, signification has become embodied in a material practice, which
may, in turn, produce material effects (I shall say more about this in Chapter 11).
Similarly, as Marx (1976c) observed, ‘one man is king only because other men stand
in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects
because he is king’ (149). This relationship works because they share a culture in which
such relations are meaningful. Outside such a culture this relationship would seem
meaningless. Being a king, therefore, is not a gift of nature but something constructed
in culture. It is culture and not nature that gives the relation meaning.
To share a culture, therefore, is to interpret the world – make it meaningful and
experience it as meaningful – in recognizably similar ways. So-called ‘culture shock’
happens when we encounter radically different networks of meaning: when our ‘natural’
or our ‘common sense’ is confronted by someone else’s ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’.
However, cultures are never simply shifting networks of shared meanings. On the
contrary, cultures are always both shared and contested networks of meanings:
culture is where we share and contest meanings of ourselves, of each other and of
the social worlds in which we live.
Post-Marxist cultural studies draws two conclusions from this way of thinking about
culture. First, although the world exists in all its enabling and constraining materiality
outside culture, it is only in culture that the world can be made to mean. In other words,
culture constructs the realities it appears only to describe. Second, because different
meanings can be ascribed to the same ‘text’ (anything that can be made to signify),
meaning making (i.e. the making of culture) is always a potential site of struggle and/
or negotiation. For example, masculinity has real material conditions of existence,
which we think of as ‘biological’, but there are different ways of representing masculinity
in culture, different ways of ‘being masculine’. Moreover, these different ways do not
all carry the same claims to ‘authenticity’ and ‘normality’. Masculinity, therefore, may
depend on biological conditions of existence, but what it means, and the struggle
over what it means, always takes place in culture. This is not a question of semantic
difference – a simple question of interpreting the world differently – it is about relations
of culture and power; about who can claim the power and authority to define
social reality; to make the world (and the things in it) mean in particular ways.
Chapter 4 Marxisms92
Culture and power is the primary object of study in post-Marxist cultural studies. As
Hall (1997a: 4) explains, ‘Meanings [i.e. cultures]  .  .  .  regulate and organize our conduct
and practices – they help to set the rules, norms and conventions by which social life
is ordered and governed. They are  .  .  .  , therefore, what those who wish to govern and
regulate the conduct and ideas of others seek to structure and shape.’ Meanings have
a ‘material’ existence, in that they help organize practice; they establish norms of
behaviour, as we recognized in the examples of different masculinities and the passing
of a business card in China.
In other words, then, dominant ways of making the world meaningful, produced by
those with the power to make their meanings circulate in the world, can generate the
‘hegemonic discourses’, which may come to assume an authority over the ways in
which we see, think, communicate and act in the world and become the ‘common
sense’ which directs our actions or become that against which our actions are directed.
However, although post-Marxist cultural studies recognizes that the culture industries
are a major site of ideological production, constructing powerful images, descriptions,
definitions, frames of reference for understanding the world, it rejects the view that ‘the
people’ who consume these productions are ‘cultural dupes’, victims of ‘an up-dated
form of the opium of the people’. As Hall (2009b) insists,
That judgment may make us feel right, decent and self-satisfied about our
denunciations of the agents of mass manipulation and deception – the capitalist
cultural industries: but I don’t know that it is a view which can survive for long
as an adequate account of cultural relationships; and even less as a socialist perspective
on the culture and nature of the working class. Ultimately, the notion
of the people as a purely passive, outline force is a deeply unsocialist perspective
(512).
Post-Marxist cultural studies is informed by the proposition that people make popular
culture from the repertoire of commodities supplied by the culture industries. Making
popular culture (‘production in use’) can be empowering to subordinate and resistant
to dominant understandings of the world. But this is not to say that popular culture is
always empowering and resistant. To deny the passivity of consumption is not to deny
that sometimes consumption is passive; to deny that consumers are cultural dupes is not
to deny that the culture industries seek to manipulate. But it is to deny that popular culture
is little more than a degraded landscape of commercial and ideological manipulation,
imposed from above in order to make profit and secure social control. Post-Marxist
cultural studies insists that to decide these matters requires vigilance and attention to
the details of the production, distribution and consumption of the commodities from
which people may or may not make popular culture. These are not matters that can be
decided once and for all (outside the contingencies of history and politics) with an
elitist glance and a condescending sneer. Nor can they be read off from the moment of
production (locating meaning, pleasure, ideological effect, the probability of incorporation,
the possibility of resistance, in, variously, the intention, the means of production
or the production itself): these are only aspects of the contexts for ‘production in use’;
	
Further reading 93
and it is, ultimately, in ‘production in use’ that questions of meaning, pleasure, ideological
effect, incorporation or resistance can be (contingently) decided.
Notes
1.	 See Storey 1992 and 2010a.
2.	 See New Left Review (1977).
3.	 See Stedman Jones (1998).
4.	 See Storey (1985 and 2010a).
5.	 ‘We Can Be Together’, from the album Volunteers (1969).
6.	 See Storey (2010a and 2009).
Further reading
Storey, John (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edn, Harlow:
Pearson Education, 2009. This is the companion volume to the previous edition of this
book. A fully updated 5th edition containing further readings is due for publication in
2018. An interactive website is also available (www.routledge.com/cw/storey), which
contains helpful student resources and a glossary of terms for each chapter.
Barrett, Michele, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault, Cambridge: Polity Press,
1991. An interesting introduction to ‘post-Marxism’.
Bennett, Tony, Formalism and Marxism, London: Methuen, 1979. Contains helpful
chapters on Althusser and Macherey.
Bennett, Tony, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (eds), Culture, Ideology and Social
Process, London: Batsford, 1981. Section 4 consists of extracts from Gramsci and
three essays informed by hegemony theory. The book also contains similar sections
on culturalism and structuralism.
Hebdige, Dick, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Methuen, 1979. The seminal
account of youth subcultures: an excellent introduction to hegemony theory and
popular culture.
Laing, Dave, The Marxist Theory of Art: An Introductory Survey, Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1978. A very readable introduction to Marxist theories of
culture. Contains an interesting section on popular culture.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, On Literature and Art, St Louis: Telos, 1973. A useful
selection of the writings by Marx and Engels on matters cultural.
Nelson, Cary and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
London: Macmillan, 1988. An interesting collection of essays on Marxism and culture.
Chapter 4 Marxisms94
Showstack Sassoon, Anne (ed.), Approaches to Gramsci, London: Writers and Readers,
1982. A collection of essays on Gramsci. Contains a useful glossary of key terms.
Sim, Stuart (ed.), Post-Marxism: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
Interesting collection of essays on the question of post-Marxism.
Simon, Roger, Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction, London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1982. A very readable introduction to Gramsci.
Slater, Phil, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School: A Marxist Perspective, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. The book provides a critical overview of the work of
the Frankfurt School. Chapter 4, on the culture industry, is of particular interest to
the student of popular culture.
Storey, John, Culture and Power in Cultural Studies: The Politics of Signification, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2010. A collection of essays examining culture from the
Wayne, Mike, Marxism and Media Studies, London: Verso. An excellent overview of what
should be the focus of Marxist media studies.
perspective of Gramscian cultural studies.
Storey, John, Utopian Desire, London: Routledge, forthcoming. The book explores radical
utopianism from the perspective of a Gramscian cultural studies.