The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 72
‘text’.) As such, the author is neither to be regarded as the origin of his or her work, nor the owner of it, nor the ultimate authority on what it could or should mean. Thus, contrary to the way that many people and institutions
tend to approach works, Barthes argues that ‘the author’ is neither the origin nor the owner of nor the authority on his or her productions. Their works
are, in other words, not theirs. For these productions are constructed from pre-existing references, allusions, citations, cultural traces and materials, and are disseminated widely and received unpredictably and diversely. So,
people who read works with one eye on the question of ‘finding’ the ‘proper interpretation’ are, according to the Barthesian critique, inadvertently subordinating themselves to ‘authority’ – the authority of the critic. As such, there is a sustained micro-political focus in the textual approach to literature, culture and reading – a focus which deepens and intensifies the concerns of earlier cultural theorists such as Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Althusser
or Barthes’ contemporary, Foucault. This is so even though Barthes would
often focus on questions of pleasure, desire, enjoyment, emotions and tex-
tual details, rather than telegraphically announced ‘political’ matters.
The General T-shirt of Force and Signification
Despite this investment in undisciplined productivity and creativity, Barthes was initially and most widely received in Anglophone academia as a key
figure of the discipline of semiotics. His name remains to this day indelibly attached to the extremely widespread study of processes of signification in culture. This is because of the influence of his early work Mythologies (1957), in which, through journalistic cultural criticism, Barthes offers an account of the way that ‘ideology’ may be rethought not as a monolithic entity, but rather as something that happens through ongoing productive and inventive practices of ‘myth-making’. In the collected case studies that make
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newspaper headlines, adverts, cover images, and the relations between image and text in conventional combinations like captions and photographs, as
well as in various other forms of popular cultural practices and institutions (Hollywood film conventions, wrestling, strip-tease, tourist and cookery
guides, even arguments in courts of law), all rework repositories of cultural
‘myths’ in order to produce or reproduce social meanings. According to
Barthes, signifiers become transformed into ‘myths’ by virtue of the power
of the connotations that certain stock images, formations and formulations
hold in certain cultural contexts.
Mythologies contained a long final chapter which sought to clarify the technical operation of mythical language. Employing the terminology of
Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics, Barthes constructed what
became the famous diagram of first- and second-order signification (denota-
tion and connotation), and in doing so offered the world a clear and compelling framework for the analysis of all sorts of signs and signifying systems. As such, in the wake of this influential early work, Barthesian semiotics travelled widely through cultural and humanistic disciplines such as literature, art, anthropology and sociology; and to this day, Barthesian semiotics maintains its palpable presence across a wide range of disciplines, from those using the most empirical and empiricist of approaches in the analysis of culture and
society to those using the most literary, textual, theoretical, rhetorical and philosophical. This range exists because Barthes’ other works are considerably less formalisable and considerably more complex than the enduringly
popular Mythologies, and they focus on linguistic, literary, rhetorical and often highly technical aspects of cultural phenomena and practices, such
as listening to music, the significance of vinyl recordings and photography.
However, the semiotics of Mythologies is undoubtedly much easier to grasp, formalise, teach and communicate than Barthes’ other texts, and this surely accounts for its more widespread influence.
In the UK context, Barthes’ work on myth and on the signifying power
of almost any cultural material was picked up in the immediate prehistory of the establishment of the messy field of cultural studies. According to Stuart Hall, the key ingredients that went into the establishment and institution
of British cultural studies were the class analyses and the ambivalent and
critical relations to Marxism that could be found in literary studies and
sociology. But cultural studies – as a named institution – was established
in the UK in 1962, with the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies as a postgraduate programme in Birmingham University.
Much has been written about the institutional history of cultural studies
as a discipline, but here it need primarily be mentioned that, under the
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directorship of Stuart Hall, cultural studies self-consciously and deliber-
ately sought to tackle ‘theory’.
As Hall wrote in a 1992 retrospective on cultural studies and its ‘theoretical legacies’, there was a sense that there should be ‘no theoretical limits’ from which cultural studies should turn back (Hall 1992). This is because, according to Hall, cultural studies was always both an academic endeavour and a
political project: a politicised academic endeavour which sought to engage
rigorously, comprehensively, unrelentingly with all aspects of culture, power, structures, processes, formations, deformations and transformations. In his interpretation of this endeavour, Hall regarded theory – and poststructuralism in particular – to be of fundamental and foundational importance.
Hall notes that poststructuralism was crucial to cultural studies because
one of the formative problematics of cultural studies was the matter of
critiquing, overcoming and surpassing Marxian economism – or, that is,
escaping the stranglehold of interpretations, such as ‘crude Marxism’ which reductively regard the economy as determinant in the last instance of social relations (Hall 1996: 148–9). According to Jennifer Daryl Slack, both cultural studies and the post-Marxist theory that was developed by thinkers
like Ernesto Laclau during the 1970s amounted to the ‘struggle to substitute the reduction that didn’t work’ – namely Marxist economic reductionism
and structuralist theory’s reductionism – ‘with … something’. The problem
with theories saturated in economic or structuralist determinism is that they are fatalistic or even anti-political in that they have often decided in advance that individuals, groups, agents, and indeed culture and politics in their
entirety are epiphenomenal and inconsequential. This, says Jennifer Slack,
pointed to the need to retheorise processes of determination. The work
of cultural theorists in the 1970s and early 1980s, especially the work of
Stuart Hall, opened up that space by drawing attention to what reduc-
tionist conceptions rendered inexplicable. It is as though a theoretical
lacuna develops, a space struggling to be filled … In theorising this space, a number of Marxist theorists are drawn on: most notably Althusser
(who drew on Gramsci and Marx), Gramsci (who drew on Marx) and, of
course, Marx. Its principal architects have been Laclau and Hall. (Slack
1996: 117)
Slack finds it remarkable that ‘in spite of the importance of Laclau’s formulations, he has been excluded – as has Mouffe – from most of the popular
histories of cultural studies’ (Slack 1996: 120–1). Rather than this, Slack emphasises the founding importance of the poststructuralist post-Marxist
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theory of Laclau and Mouffe for cultural studies (Laclau and Mouffe 1985).
As do Morley and Chen, for instance, who begin their ‘Introduction’ to
Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies by reminding us that
‘back in the mid-1980s, as an alternative to formalist and positivist para-
digms in the humanities and social sciences, British cultural studies, and
Stuart Hall’s work in particular, began to make an impact across national
borders, especially in the American academy’ (Morley and Chen 1996: 1).
Immediately after making this contextualising point, the very first point that they mention – the very first book, the very first problematic, and the very first orientating discussion within cultural studies that they mention – is Stuart Hall’s discussion of Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘seminal book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (a key statement of postmodern political theory)’ (Morley and Chen 1996: 1). They conclude: ‘When we look at it retrospectively’,
this engagement ‘can be seen as a starting-point’ (2), a constitutive cultural studies engagement with the ‘postmodern’ political theory of post-Marxism. However, Morley and Chen are perhaps too swiftly prepared to deem
this encounter with post-Marxist poststructuralism something ‘from which
cultural studies moved on, through another round of configuration’ (2). But Stuart Hall himself was never prepared to do this. For him, the problematic established by this encounter with poststructuralist post-Marxist political theory is constitutive, and hence ineradicable. Indeed, Morley and Chen also deem Laclau and Mouffe’s theory to be ‘ seminal’, like Stuart Hall. But Hall insists on the need to maintain fidelity and reference to this ‘starting-point’, arguing:
one cannot ignore Laclau and Mouffe’s seminal work on the constitution
of political subjects and their deconstruction of the notion that political subjectivities flow from the integrated ego, which is also the integrated
speaker, the stable subject of enunciation. The discursive metaphor [cen-
tral to post-Marxist theory] is thus extraordinarily rich and has massive
political consequences. For instance, it allows cultural theorists to realise that what we call ‘the self ’ is constituted out of and by difference, and
remains contradictory, and that cultural forms are, similarly, in that way, never whole, never fully closed or ‘sutured’. (Hall 1996: 145)
Hall even declares, ‘if I had to put my finger on the one thing which constitutes the theoretical revolution of our time, I think that it lies in that metaphor’ (Hall 1996: 145): the metaphor of ‘discourse’. For Stuart Hall, then, the question of the political, of intervention and responsibility that comes to light in the cultural studies engagement or encounter with post-Marxism is
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not something that will – or should be permitted to – simply go away. This
is why, after some qualifications and caveats, Hall maintains that he remains a post-Marxist and a poststructuralist, because those are the two discourses I feel most constantly engaged with. They are central to my formation and
I don’t believe in the endless, trendy recycling of one fashionable theorist after another, as if you can wear new theories like T-shirts. (Hall 1996:
148–9)
Cultural Studies and ‘Theory’
In this formation, then, cultural studies is, was, should be or should have been hospitable to poststructuralism. Certainly, key poststructuralist
categories, such as text, context, intertextuality and discourse were appropriated within cultural studies (and much more widely, besides… Indeed,
which disciplines in the arts and humanities today do not make use of the
initially poststructuralist concepts of text and discourse?). But, as Hall’s point about ‘trendy recycling’ suggests, there was always a hesitation, in
the work of prominent thinkers associated with UK or Birmingham Centre
Cultural Studies, to welcome ‘theory’ tout court with open arms or with unconditional hospitality. Rather than this, one finds in the writings of the most theoretically informed or theoretically alert thinkers of cultural studies a regular caveat: one should certainly not retreat from theory, but theory
should be approached always with at least one eye, if not a firm focus, on the question of its political point, purpose, orientation or utility.
Reciprocally, given its messiness, its newness, its eclectic character and its incorporation of poststructuralism, cultural studies was not welcomed with
open arms into the university. Stuart Hall’s account of the experiences of
the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University
can be taken to exemplify many of the initial, initiating and ongoing sorts of reactions to and receptions of cultural studies. Hall writes:
On the day of [The Centre for Cultural Studies at Birmingham
University’s] opening, we received letters from the English department
saying that they couldn’t really welcome us; they knew we were there,
but they hoped we’d keep out of their way while they got on with the
work they had to do. We received another, rather sharper letter from the
sociologists saying, in effect, ‘… we hope you don’t think you’re doing
sociology, because that’s not what you’re doing at all’. (Hall 1990: 13)
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These reactions arose because of the new combinations of poststructur-
alist theory and various modifications and manipulations of method and
practice that were emerging in cultural studies. In different times, places, incarnations and orientations, work in cultural studies has experimented
with various methodological options and orientations. This is why in much
cultural studies work one finds strongly poststructuralist language and
categories, but employed within very heavily empiricist endeavours – often
kinds of empirical work that one would normally regard as anathema to the
poststructuralist questioning and problematisation of positivist, empiricist and otherwise ‘naïve’ ontologies. Nevertheless, where both Derrida and
Foucault, for instance, had each argued for the necessity of prioritising the philosophical or theoretical as the only way to avoid falling into what they both regarded as clumsy, naïve or indeed ‘incompetent’ empiricism, many
working within cultural studies would never follow Derrida or Foucault very far down this line, fearing that poststructuralism’s hyper-academic and excessively philosophical approach would have ‘depoliticising’ consequences, and preferring instead to employ selected poststructuralist theoretical insights in empirical, sociological, anthropological, social science or ethnographic studies of ‘obviously’ political issues.
Of course, it is equally the case that many academics and intellectuals
working within cultural studies and related disciplines refused to accept
either the subordination of theory to ‘obviously’ political issues or ‘obviously political’ ends (Hall 2002), and of course poststructuralism was dis-
seminated extremely broadly across and incorporated very diversely into
Anglophone disciplines in the UK, USA and elsewhere. But it was in the
disciplinary contexts of literary theory, comparative literature, cultural
studies, and then media studies and film studies, that poststructuralism was most prominently ‘tackled’ and negotiated in Anglophone contexts. Some
of these fields selected only the choicest morsels of poststructuralism,
while others arguably morphed into scenes dominated by the problematics
of poststructuralism. But this negotiation never took place univocally or
entirely in any one disciplinary context. For disciplinary borders are always shifting, contested, and cross-fertilised or pollinated in unpredictable ways and from disparate sources. Moreover, in every discipline there have always been ‘divides’, disputes, disagreements and schools of thought at odds with each other. But it is important to note that in Anglophone contexts at least, the name of the main structuring divide of the arts and humanities disciplines has long been ‘Theory’ (Hall 2002; Hall and Birchall 2008).
‘Theory’ has, since the 1970s. been the enduring name of the disagree-
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what this or that discipline actually ‘is’, ‘does’ or ‘should be’ (Bowman 2007).
And the term ‘Theory’ of course refers, ultimately, to poststructuralism,
whether it has travelled under this or another alias, such as, depending
on the discipline: deconstruction, Continental philosophy, postmodern-
ism, poststructuralism, French theory, the textual approach, the discourse
approach, post-Marxism, or some other similar term.
Feminist (Language) Differences
Poststructuralism was transported by various key carriers. Feminism was
one key carrier, Foucault another and the critique of structuralism, Marxist orthodoxy or the status quo per se, another. We could add more. The point is, however, it is difficult to isolate, pin down or specify a single ‘cause’ of or for poststructuralism’s widespread reception. It is possible to connect poststructuralism to several different post-war critiques of various kinds of institutions, such as countercultural movements, civil rights and anti-racist movements,
