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modern societies the realm of ideas and beliefs and values have their
own materiality and are embedded and activated in practices and insti-
tutions. Articulation provides Hall with a specific way of understanding
social change, in that it shows how bundles of meaning can be attached
and re-attached; they can be transplanted and they can, as it were, land
in new unexpected places. New formations of meaning converging
together can adhere, they can become consolidated blocks which then
become the terms by which people understand themselves and the
world around them. If the left can work at this level, and seek to create
its own convergences of meaning, a margin of hope appears, as cultural
practices become possible dynamics in this politics of meaning. The
three key components of Hall s analysis of Thatcherism are: (1) the use
of Gramsci; (2) the concept of authoritarian populism; and (3) the les-
sons to the left (learning from Thatcherism). The way in which these
each contribute to the inventiveness of cultural studies will be examined
in the sections that follow.
The collection of Hall s writing, The Hard Road to Renewal (1988) com-
prises, in the main, relatively short articles written by Hall from 1978
onwards, many of which appeared in the monthly magazine Marxism
Today. The wider and non-specialist readership of this journal means
that the tone of the writing is particularly accessible, even when Hall is
engaging with complex arguments, for example, in his use of Gramsci
Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 23
Stuart Hall and the Inventiveness of Cultural Studies 23
to understand the dynamics of the Thatcher government and to revise
aspects of Marxist orthodoxy in a bid to renew or modernise the left.
The key elements of Gramsci s work which Hall draws on are hege-
mony, the terrain and duration of struggle and, finally, the importance
of the popular. Hegemony refers to the way in which consent on the
part of the people or electorate is sought through a sustained attempt to
create a new ethics, a new moral order, a new kind of subject. This
forcefulness, which is also non-coercive, requires ideological work so
that the ground is prepared for a new kind of commonsense. With
Thatcherism this entailed dismantling many of the assumptions about
the underpinnings of British post-war society, hence the emphasis on
breaking the spell of the welfare state . Hegemony is therefore a kind of
active reach-out-and-touch mechanism of power, it involves decon-
structing some previously fixed positions (for example, working-class
support of social housing) and then attaching the same social group to
a new and unexpected set of ideas (for example, home-ownership and
the property-owning democracy). This requires effort at every level of
political society from the think-tanks and university departments, where
the ideas are brokered, to the popular media and tabloids who turn
these ideas into a popular idiom. The reach mechanism of hegemony,
in the case of the sale of council houses, shows the politicians reaching
out over the heads of the local authorities, the voices of traditional
working-class representation and also moving beyond the socialist prin-
ciples of collective ownership, and saying to the people, this new way of
being, this new subject position, is available to you and we now seek your
consent to this new kind of society . Hegemony, therefore, indicates a
practice of power and leadership based on changing the whole land-
scape of popular belief.
Hall s account of Thatcherism is an excellent example of how social
transformation can take place in front of our eyes. Hall s analysis, yet
again, conveys something of his own effort to trace how such transfor-
mation actually happens: these work-in-progress signs are not hidden
away, as they would be in a conventionally magisterial work. He focuses
on the many manifestations of privatisation as it takes shape within a
political culture which has been accustomed to, and proud of, its public
sector. In her determination to eradicate traces of the old Labour collec-
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