Stuart Hall.
About a year and a half ago I participated as chair of a session on culture and media in one of the many events held to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto. Despite the theme of the conference, the often-lyrical and prophetic voice of the Manifesto was all but drowned out by breathless discussions of contemporary social struggles. Politically engaged as they were, such discussions scarcely touched upon the Manifesto itself. Ironically, the very profound and continuing impact of the Manifesto is itself concrete testimony that ideas, literally, matter. Recall, for instance, Marx's notion that when they grip the masses, ideas can become like a material force. The failure to recognize this side of the tradition that Marx and Engels inspired is often a scarcely disguised anti-intellectualism, which, while appealing to the left's critique of elitism, actually secretly keeps elitism in place. Ideas? The working class doesn't want ideas! It wants control over the means of production!No contemporary thinker has done more than Stuart Hall to emphasize the concrete importance of ideas, in the form of politics, ideology and culture more generally. The tremendous influence of Hall's pioneering work can be discerned in a number of disciplines and fields it has touched: from the more arcane reaches of film and art, through communications and media, social science to ethnic studies. Hall also directly addressed the public through his involvement with New Left Review and the heterodox magazine Marxism Today.
That Hall should have such an impact hardly comes as a surprise given that his own biography intersects in crucial ways with some of the most important events of the last half of the last century.
Born into an ethnically diverse, middle-class family in Jamaica, Hall became involved in the emerging anti-colonial politics in his home country In 1951, he would make a journey that would become familiar in the formation of anti-colonial intellectuals. He went to Oxford University to study on a scholarship named after that paragon of colonialism, Cecil Rhodes. Ironically, Hall would later become, intellectually, the Empire's worst nightmare. Unlike most of his anticolonial peers, who, upon graduating, usually in the social sciences, went back to political and academic careers back home, Hall stayed on in Britain.
While at Oxford he met a number of independent leftists, that is, those who were not formally members of the British Communist Party, including Perry Anderson and Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Indeed, in collaboration with Taylor, he studied Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. With the invasion of Hungary in 1956, and the mass exodus of many radicals from the Communist Party, the New Left was born and Hall was one of the principal actors. Along with Taylor, English historian Raphael Samuel and Gabriel Pierson, Hall became an editor of the Universities and Left Review, later to become New Left Review.
In 1964, Hall moved to the University of Birmingham where he and a number of colleagues at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies invented the field of cultural studies by building on the ground that had already been prepared by Richard Hoggarth and Raymond Williams. It was during this period that Hall did some of his most penetrating and ground-breaking work on subcultures, leisure, communications, the hysteria around "mugging" and its relationship to the socio-economic "crisis," and much more. Upon leaving Birmingham, Hall moved to the Open University, which provided him with an opportunity to take his work in cultural studies to a non-academic audience.
Understanding How Thatcherism Works
The guiding question of Hall's best work was the following: How is it that people can become consciously and unconsciously convinced to participate in producing their own alienation? This question was first articulated during the catastrophe of Thatcherism, one that still persists in Britain, as elsewhere. Demonstrating brilliant foresight, Hall argued that problems of identity -- in particular, race, nationality, ethnicity -- played a pivotal role in Thatcherism's ability to stage a hegemonic project in the midst of the most significant crisis in post-war British society.
Thatcherism, therefore, was much more than a code word for supply-side or "trickle-down" economics. Rather, it was what Hall called "authoritarian populism" -- a contradictory ideology comprised principally of neoliberalism and traditionalism. Indeed, because it was so contradictory, the only way its various elements could be held together was through the use of a language explosively charged with race and ethnicity. Thatcherism could not be understood, therefore, outside of the creation of particular identities -- for instance, "Englishness" -- which delimited who belonged and who did not belong to the nation. These forms of identity lay at the heart of the social and economic crisis that made them possible in the first place.
The lesson to be learned from Thatcherism, and from other forms of authoritarian populism -- a term that incidentally might have a particular value in understanding the appeal of Reform in this country -- is that politics and ideology (or "discourse") do not simply mirror economic structures. Rather, discourse can only come to define a hegemonic project by a translation of the language of class into a distinctively cultural idiom possessing its particular emotional weight.
Hall shows how Thatcherism effectively transformed the contradiction between capital and labour into one between the "powerbloc" and the "people." Through its insistence upon the law of the marketplace, it was able to pose itself as the defender of the people against a supposedly "bureaucratic," "unresponsive" and therefore illegitimate welfare state. Far from comprising everybody, the "people" was defined negatively, and often violently, in opposition to the "enemy within," such as, for instance, the "black mugger." The "people," therefore, comes to mean "respectable," white, English ratepayers.
Hall's emphasis on discourse, however, was risky and perhaps explains the politically disastrous fate of cultural studies today. The flip-side of the analysis of Thatcherism's racist dimension was that it strategically opened up numerous places within society, such as youth subcultures, that were what Hall called sites of contradiction ant struggle. However, it also made possible an understanding of the formation of such identities increasingly on their own terms. Thus, black or Asian identities could be understood exclusively in terms of the logic of domination specific to it -- that is, racism -- with little or no reference to other forms of social domination -- that is, class.
The waning fortunes of the left created a vacuum that increasingly came to be filled by a destructive identity politics from which we have yet to recover. In the end, however, this was simply one possibility amongst others within a politics with neither historical certainties nor guarantees.
In understanding questions of identity as lying at the heart of a materialist analysis and socialist strategy, Hall insists that culture without political economy is blind, and political economy without culture is empty. What we see today is the standoff between a blind cultural studies, which imprisons itself in texts, and an often-empty political economy that understands discourse as something unimportant. Hall's contribution lies in precisely showing how a genuine radical-democratic project can and must bridge this gap.
In the process, Hall did as much as anybody to disabuse the Left of the idea that the triumph of socialism was inevitable, that it was simply a matter of distilling the "facts" about capitalism, stirring in just the right amount of moral indignation, and garnishing it with a call to rally the troops, and, surely enough, this heady elixir would ensure that the promised land would be at hand. Amidst the intoxicated nature of much leftist discussion, Hall's was undoubtedly a voice of sobriety. Hall reminds us that a radical-democratic project must possess a redoubled realism; it must take seriously and actively contest the "already existing" political discourse and its common sense. Only by taking such political discourse seriously would it be possible to transform it in the direction of an as yet unrealized future.
Stuart Hall's central insight, then, is this: We no longer live in a world (if ever, in fact, we did) in which culture can be treated as subordinate to the critique of political economy. Through greater concentrations of capital in technology and "infotainment," culture has become political economy.
Like many of Marx's works, particularly the Manifesto, Hall is self conscious of participating in the very history he is writing. Here we find a history of the present written from the inside out -- a history that can perhaps only be written by someone from the outside.
It is perhaps best to end this profile with the closing words of a book (Policing the Crisis) Hall wrote on the brink of the "state of emergency" that would become Thatcherism. In their staccato urgency, they eerily evoke our own situation 22 years later:
"The state has won the right, indeed has inherited the duty, to move swiftly, to stamp fast and hard, to listen in, discreetly to survey, to saturate and swamp, to charge or to hold without charge, to act on suspicion, and to hustle and shoulder, in order to keep society on the straight and narrow. Democracy, that last back-stop against arbitrary power, is in retreat. It is suspended. The times are exceptional. The crisis is real. We are inside the 'law-and-order' state."
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| Author: | GANDESHA, SAMIR |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Canadian Dimension |
| Geographic Code: | 4EUUK |
| Date: | May 1, 2000 |
| Words: | 1527 |
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