Hall again makes clear in these readings that he is interested in culture insofar as it is one arena of class struggle. Much of his writing is making the basic argument (against economic reductionism) that culture is indeed such a medium. In his essay on popular culture, he argues “there [is] no intrinsic guarantee within the cultural sign or form itself.” Quoting a Marxist scholar, he relates that however much the “ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign,” a sign may be used and appropriated by different classes and interests, and it is this that gives the sign its dynamism. “Sign becomes an arena of class struggle.”
Even in nostalgia and tradition (when youth wear their grandparents’ jackets or cook their recipes), there is little that is fixed or stable in those resurrected forms and practices. “These symbols and bits and pieces are profoundly ambiguous. A thousand lost cultural causes could be summoned up through them.”
Even the swastika, worn on the chain of a teenager, does not guarantee its wearer will be or is a fascist: “What this sign means will ultimately depend, in the politics of youth culture, less on the intrinsic cultural symbolism of the thing in itself, and more on the balance of forces between, say, the Natl Front and the Anti-Nazi League, between White Rock and the the Two Tone Sound.”
This seems to me an extremely useful point: the way "retro" cultural forms develop new meanings, though not independently of their old meanings and, moreover, that no sign ever has a singular meaning as it is always a site of class struggle. I am a bit confused about what he means by "cultural imperialism," but my understanding is that it is the "power-bloc" attempting to rule by entrenching their meaning of the sign. But how is this done? How are codes forced upon the populace? Is this different from what Marx says about the ruling class controlling ideology or simply specifying the process of this occurring?
In Hall's "What is the 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" he critiques the strategy of "strategic essentialism," suggesting its weakness may be to naturalize and de-historicize, among other things, race into a biological category. I am unfamiliar with hooks and Spivak's arguments for essentialism, but I am wondering what they were referring to, since Hall seems to be critical of whatever premise that essentialism will not always lead to de-contextualization.
Does the above discussion of naturalization have anything to do with the idiom for naturalization in "Encoding Decoding": the obfuscation of the process whereby the sign is articulated with its referent, to instead posit a direct relationship between representation and object? If so, it would seem that essentialism is less about de-historicizing or de-contextualizing than it is about manipulating histories/contexts––here: signs (the "fragments of ideology").
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