Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Post-Marxist cultural studies: hegemony revisited 233
them away. However, the point is not simply to detail these conditions, to produce an
understanding of how these conditions generate a repertoire of commodities; what is
also required is an understanding of the many ways in which people select, appropriate
and use these commodities, and make them into culture. In other words, what is
needed is an understanding of the relationship between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. This
will not be achieved by abandoning one side of the relationship. Hall (1996d) is
undoubtedly right to suggest that a number of people working in cultural studies have
at times turned away from ‘economic’ explanations:
What has resulted from the abandonment of deterministic economism has been,
not alternative ways of thinking questions about the economic relations and their
effects, as the ‘conditions of existence’ of other practices . . . but instead a massive,
gigantic, and eloquent disavowal. As if, since the economic in the broadest sense,
definitely does not, as it was once supposed to do, ‘determine’ the real movement
of history ‘in the last instance’, it does not exist at all! (258).
Hall describes this as ‘a failure of theorisation so profound, and . . . so disabling, that
. . . it has enabled much weaker and less conceptually rich paradigms to continue to
flourish and dominate the field’ (ibid.). A return there must be to a consideration of
the ‘conditions of existence’, but it cannot be a return to the kind of analysis canvassed
by political economy, in which it is assumed that ‘access’ is the same as appropriation
and use, and that production tells us all we need to know about textuality and consumption.
Nor is it a matter of having to build bridges to political economy; what is
required, as McRobbie and others have canvassed, is a return to what has been, since
the 1970s, the most convincing and coherent theoretical focus of (British) cultural
studies – hegemony theory.
McRobbie accepts that cultural studies has been radically challenged as debates
about postmodernism and postmodernity have replaced the more familiar debates
about ideology and hegemony. She argues that it has responded in two ways. On the
one hand, there have been those who have advocated a return to the certainties of
Marxism. Whilst on the other, there have been those who have turned to consumption
(understood too exclusively in terms of pleasure and meaning-making). In some ways,
as she recognizes, this is almost a rerun of the structuralism/culturalism debate of the
late 1970s and early 1980s. It could also be seen as yet another performance of the
playing of one side of Marx’s (1977) dialectic against the other (we are made by history
/ we make history). McRobbie (1994) rejects a return ‘to a crude and mechanical
base–superstructure model, and also the dangers of pursuing a kind of cultural populism
to a point at which anything which is consumed and is popular is also seen as
oppositional’ (39). Instead, she calls for ‘an extension of Gramscian cultural analysis’
(ibid.); and for a return to ethnographic cultural analysis which takes as its object of
study ‘the lived experience which breathes life into [the]. . . inanimate objects [the
commodities supplied by the culture industries]’ (27).
Post-Marxist hegemony theory at its best insists that there is always a dialogue
between the processes of production and the activities of consumption. The consumer