I appreciated the segway back to Althusser in The Empire Strikes Back and The Great Moving Right Show. Here, we can see how state apparatuses are utilized for political gain. How can we identify Hall’s depiction of populism and Thatcherism through the lens of interpellation? I would appreciate clarification on the precursor to these political strategies and a conversation surrounding the concertedness of efforts regarding politicians of such influential movements. I am a little confused about the level of analysis that interpellation can/is applied to. Marx’s use of superstructure appeared to me as strictly macro. Yet, I’m still trying to grasp how the creation of state-nation ideology is impacted by the individualistic pursuit of state “actors” like Thatcher. Or, on the contrary, is it figures like Thatcher creating subjects individualistically and further - Thatcher’s interpellation → constructing a particular definition and interests “of the people?”
I ask this because, in The Great Moving Nowhere, the parallels between Thatcher and Reagan and the political strategies of “populism” in the 1980s were jarringly similar. From this piece, is the political use of interpellation a global-political ideological process of the West? Or is it distinct to certain nations? The power of the Thatcherism process reminds me a lot of Charles Mills’ depiction of racism as a global political system. Again, in the UK, these political strategies were shared amongst the conservative elites in a changing ecosystem. Even the politicians that follow these political regimes, e.g., Blair (after Thatcher) / Clinton (after Reagan) →, Obama after Bush, Biden after Trump, appear precisely similar to what Hall describes as these ideological parties inevitably “seduced by the neoliberal gospel” of the global market.
Nevertheless, I found the Blair project to be an interesting perspective on the current political climate of the United States, as Biden’s “project” appears also to be a historic endeavor to “adjust” to Trumpism. What will we see, politically, from a Post-Trump/Post-Biden project, and what new ideological shape will both parties take to cloak imperial aspirations?
From the Great Moving Right 1979
Thinking about Gramsci’s contribution to The Great Moving Right Show 1979 (p. 175) and Hall’s incorporation of organic phenomenon to show how incurable structural contradictions reveal themselves and the lengths forces will go to try to conserve and define the existing structure - reminds me of what I am finding in my dissertation about who is defending objectivity. Despite overwhelming support for its contradictory and idealistic-faux origins, a constellation of social forces - inside and outside of the newsroom provides strong critiques of the golden standard of journalism. Despite this, many of the journalistic intelligentsia, influential editors/publishers still publicly defend the use of objectivity, especially in response to the rise of white nationalist newspapers responding to the popularity of Trumpism, thus creating a conjuncture for “mainstream” newspapers to respond to audiences and stakeholders about what makes their practices different from “others.” This appears similar to the organizational interpellation of how “subjects' are created, All of which lead to a “new balance” of forces in this struggle for ideological power in this particular apparatus.
The conjuncture here of “protecting objectivity” is also illustrated in Hall’s Political Commitment of 1966 - it appears that the West has fallen within a trap: “Consequently, for all the refinement of measurement involved, the descriptions of our society accumulated in this way lack agency, historical perspective, existential meaning, or a proper subjectivity. Instead, what seems to reign as a dominant mood in the whole intellectual climate just at present is a spurious search for ‘objectivity,’ a bogus pseudo-scientism.” (p. 88). However, Hall elaborates that this is a false stance, as every methodological advance has its ideological roots. The politics of the “the news issues” is the politics of the nonpoliticized. Depoliticizing efforts used within science and journalism are dangerous because they further cloak issues and conflicts that arise from society. In thinking about science and journalism, have we reached a relatively significant moment of conjuncture in the United States? What other institutions/apparatuses are shifting to a degree as drastically as journalism or education?
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