Learning from ‘SH’: 1974-1979,2012-14

Introduction

Stuart Hall’s engagement with contemporary culture and politics was so wide-ranging, sustained and rich and that commentators have difficult choices to make about where to begin.

In this paper, I focus on two periods in which my engagement with Stuart’s ¹ work was intense. In 1974, as a new recruit to the tiny staff of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), I was, just like its newest postgraduate students, learning to do cultural studies from Stuart and his colleague Michael Green. Students already at the Centre knew more about the emerging field than I. My early years at CCCS were the most exciting, accelerated period of learning in my life. Such lessons stay with you.

A second period of engagement is happening forty years later. In 2004, I retired from Nottingham Trent University, liberated from a neoliberalised institution to spend more time on ‘politics’. It takes time to learn campaigning skills and recognise the political limits of ‘single issue’ movements. It is also easy to leave your intellectual self behind in the daily work of organisation. I began, however, to re-read political theory with sharper, practical aims, though not SH’s work at first, because peace and anti-war issues rarely figure there. Then, in 2011, we corresponded about the setting up of a CCCS archive at Birmingham University. He sent me a fifty-page document – a source text for an article in Soundings (2011), and also perhaps for the co-authored Kilburn Manifesto (Hall, Massey and Rustin 2013). I drafted a reply on ‘Hegemony and hope’, also partly published in Soundings (Johnson 2013). We met and discussed agreements and disagreements: his pessimism about politics, and my own reaching for hope. After he died, widespread interest in his legacy and my involvement in Left Unity made me return to his political writings.

CCCS 1975-1979

Because CCCS was a genuinely collaborative project, it is hard to unscramble the dialectics of learning and teaching there. That I learned cultural studies from Stuart is undeniable, but I also taught and learned with him, and we all learned from each other in the process of group work. For example, we were in two Marx reading groups together. They were exemplary of his ‘Marxism without guarantees’ (see Worth, this issue), but also of collaborative learning. We took turns to present Marx texts – mainly his political writings. I choose the Eighteenth Brumaire for its ‘historian’s’ complexity. For Stuart’s own take on this work, see his formative account of Marx’s theory of classes, first delivered at a conference of the Sociology Group of the Communist Party in November 1976 (Hall 1977).

Too biographical a view of CCCS distorts the radical educational alternative that was attempted there, while retrospective accounts have often succumbed to the discourses of academic stardom. Actually, students themselves innovated in many lines of research, and insisted on the inclusion of new theories, especially when the concerns of social movements were not represented in the formal and informal curricula. Feminist theory, research and intellectual practice and early encounters with versions of post-structuralism and psychoanalysis were examples of student insurgencies of this kind. But Stuart was the quickest, most subtle, most agile and most politically consistent scholar among us, and he was, even more than Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, the teacher of the teachers of cultural studies. He eschewed the formal power of an academic directorship (though not its responsibilities) in favour of a post-1968 empowerment of students and colleagues; but he led us by the virtue of his intellectual ability, commitment and wonderful gift of presentation. Part of his role was to gather up initially disparate strands of theory and make a syncretic unity from them. In the 1980s, he would develop this intellectual vision into guidelines for a new kind of politics, reviving an earlier New Left project.

A key locus for his teaching was the theory course of the Cultural Studies MA, which began in 1975, based on an earlier theory seminar. ² Students attended this even if they were registered for Ph.D. studies. The course centred on the different frameworks within which culture or equivalent objects had been explored. Although the conventional view – that SH ‘read Gramsci through Althusser’ – is largely true, the course, when I took it, was an extended dialogue between many positions, including for instance the literary-critical origins of the ‘culture’ agenda in Britain; the work of Hoggart, Williams and E. P. Thompson; Weber’s sociology of religion; Sartre’s Marxist existentialism; Barthes’s structuralism (and moves towards post-structuralism); the Frankfurt School; Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology; and Berger and Luckman’s ‘social construction of reality’. Later, versions of discourse theory and language also figured. These positions were brought into dialogue with one another, and there was always something valuable – ‘a rational kernel’ – to be said about each.

This open, dialogic reading of theories was different from 1970s polemics on theory and from older Marxist habits. It allowed different appropriations, though it also inevitably constructed certain terms of debate. When new demands arose, the inclusions and exclusions became a focus for opposition. We were always watching to see what would be there next time. Psychoanalysis? Feminist theory? There was also a good deal of (self-) mockery about ‘Centre language’. Many of our shared keywords derived from SH’s stunning performances: the terms ‘mapping’ and ‘unpacking’ for instance.

‘Mapping’ (or ‘mapping the field’) meant taking account of the range of paradigms that could frame a topic. This went beyond ‘literature review’ and was a kind of argumentative setting out of options: the different problematics in play. This was an encouragement to acknowledge our own premises, including of course SH’s own premises. Moreover, mapping allowed syncretic theoretical activity, so that we could not only argue across paradigms, but also combine elements from them. So, for instance, it was possible to take clarifying distinctions and some complex categories (like ‘conjuncture’) from Althusser, despite his tendency to formalism, without being ‘Althusserians’. There was certainly a developed ‘theoretical practice’ here, but not (in my view) an overvaluation of theory. Indeed, mapping discourages dogmatic pronouncements or the univocal inhabitation of one framework. This anti-dogmatism is one way of summing up SH’s mode of intellectual work: his attitude to Marxism, structuralism, socialism and everything else.

‘Unpacking’ was the method for analysing particular cultural forms: theories, but also photographs and other images (an early and abiding interest), media forms, and, of course, political ideologies. There was a bias in SH’s own work towards public rather than private or local forms of culture: towards media and political discourse, rather than everyday beliefs, though these were incorporated in his political thinking as ‘common sense’. This bias may have affected his later political work and his ready take-up of discourse theory. Unpacking involvedthe ‘close reading’ of texts, but also the noting of absences and silences. This differed from ‘deconstruction’ in that it was always concerned to see what was ‘positive’, what worked, or what had ideological effects, rather than only focusing on misrecognitions, elisions or conflations. It also differed from dominant versions of Marx’s theory of ideology in seeing ideologies as constitutive, not ‘false’. Rather, SH followed another reading of Marx in which ideology can be true to real but partial appearances (e.g. Hall 2007 [1973]). Thus, when it came to analysing Thatcherism as ideology, he could show the political effectivity of figures like ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’, and also how a more hopeful, left representation of the future might be deployed, if political will and cultural understanding allowed.

This subtle and open method allowed us to appropriate theory in different ways in individual and group work. For students grounded in a literary tradition, it offered the opportunity of deepening textual analysis with new literary-cultural theory, or of combining text-based skills with a sociological or social-historical view of culture (e.g. Unauthored 2007 [1973]; Batsleer et al. 1985) For those of us moved by The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart 1957) and committed to everyday culture, it offered forms of ethnographic work while insisting on the structural aspects of power (e.g. Willis 1977). Some of us took to theoretical work ourselves, or came from more philosophical backgrounds, and thus copied or extended theory-course threads. We could also apply recognition of theoretical difference to concrete practices like history writing (e.g. CCCS 1982). Some of us applied cultural theory to education itself: as a class and gendered experience, as ideologically driven policy, or as educational practice (e.g. CCCS Education Group 1980).

Was there a privileged form of study at CCCS in the 1970s? It is easy to overlook the variety, especially if we include theses and dissertations. But it is important to note the significance of contemporary or conjunctural history-writing, exemplified by Paper Voices (Smith, Blackwell and Immirzi 1975) and Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978); but also by the studies of education policy; the immediately post-war conjuncture (Cultural History Group 2007 [1975]); the 1880-1920s (Langan and Schwarz 1985); and the evolution of ‘women’s genres’, especially magazines (e.g. Winship 2007). If there was a common object, it was 1970s transitions and their social-liberal and social-democratic antecedents in culture and politics – a transition marked politically by Mrs Thatcher’s accession to the leadership of the Conservative Party, and by Labour’s first new turn under Callaghan. In other words, in one way or another, we studied ‘the times’.

Reading for political practice: 2004-2014

The standpoint of being a movement activist significantly changed my way of reading SH’s political writing, as well as my relation to cultural studies generally. This focus on ‘what to do next’ sharpened further with the foundation of Left Unity in 2013. I became involved in drafting its foreign policy (nationally), and in advocating a more cultural model of local campaigning.

You can read SH’s explicitly political writing mainly as a critique of Thatcherism (e.g. Hall and Jacques 1983), and of its neoliberal successor governments (e.g. Hall 2011); but also as a very persevering advocacy for a new politics for Labour and a generic or imagined left. He itemises the increasingly deep and extensive effects of the neoliberal deformation on the one hand, and urges an alternative hegemonic project for the left on the other. This dual address was a key feature of the 1980s: in the loosely collaborative project (Hall and Jacques 1989) and in a series of essays written between 1981 and 1988, published in SH’s own The Hard Road to Renewal (‘HRR’, Hall 1988). His characteristic position is easier to detect in HRR than in the co-edited collection. His later work, including the first instalment of the Kilburn Manifesto, seems less concerned with pointing to alternatives. An exception is a Soundings piece with Alan O’Shea on ‘common sense’ (Hall and O’Shea 2013). This has suggestive leads on how to intervene in the politics of popular discourse, although it is an updating of a much earlier essay. Perhaps, with the Blair/Brown governments, which he opposed, and the accession of key Marxism Today writers to New Labour, it was harder to find an appropriate political agency to address. In the 1980s, he named the small Communist and Trotskyite parties as the ‘hard left’, and criticised them harshly. He often uses ‘party’ in the wider Gramscian sense of ‘political agencies’, but he did not appear to anticipate the emergence of new broad left formations.

New Times 1989

SH’s adoption of the economic New Times/post-Fordism arguments extended his earlier work on Thatcherism as a political-ideological formation. The volume hums with worthwhile individual political arguments and suggestions. I agree with Angela McRobbie that many of the criticisms of New Times, at the time of its publication and later, have been misplaced, especially those, in Capital & Class for instance, that returned to the economistic reductions SH and the larger CCCS project had always sought to correct (McRobbie 1996).

Still, I felt from the beginning that there was something wrong with the broad architecture of the project, and with the way theoretical dissonances were being handled – over-determined, perhaps – by the splits in the Communist Party. There was, in short, a failure to combine problematics. The technical, organisational and social changes associated with the new capitalist strategies were taken as relatively neutral developments to which left politics must now adjust. Everything must change according to a new modernity, a (sub-)epochal shift, no less. This new ground was being exploited by Thatcherism, with Labour and the left far behind. This modernisers’ credo shaped the overall tendency of the volume, certainly the way others and I read it (for a similar sympathetic criticisms, see Clarke 1991 and Rustin 1989). The project also worked with radically dispersed theories of power, recognising (rightly of course) multiple political identities, but not seeking to analyse how they are related. Worst of all, socialist traditions, class theories and class-related politics were sidelined. This did raise the question of whose side(s) the authors were on, a question reinforced by the absence (except in some of the more particular chapters, Bea Campbell’s especially) of empathetic engagement with what was happening to working-class people on the ground.

As Mike Rustin argued – in the same volume – what was missing here was the recognition that post-Fordism itself was a class response to previous forms of class struggle. It is true that even in our extensively globalised and intensively commodified world, class struggle is far from explaining every major transition, and nor do capital’s dynamics describe the whole social formation; but making class so hard to name must radically disable our own strategic thinking. Similarly, a notion of infinitely multiplied power relations and the loss of notions of even complex determinations, with some relations conjuncturally more formative than others, disable collective opposition. This applies as much to the unequal, shifting gender order and the changing forms of racism and white western hegemony (that rather wobbly ‘full spectrum dominance’) as to relations of class.

Thatcherism did not just accommodate itself better to socio-economic changes (as was argued), but rather it was aligned to them, and enabled them from its beginnings. What was missing here, too, was some analysis of neoliberal politics as associated with the work of a larger power block or alliance. The naturalisation of the figures of choice, freedom and even fairness have gone along, for instance, with the economic strategy of first marketising, then privatising public services, thus allowing capital to make profits from them. To counter this, more than an ideological re-articulation is needed: rather, an entirely different economic and institutional strategy and methods of struggle towards such a future is required. From one point of view, neoiberalism is class war waged on one side only, with only, so far, the most marginal, partial, spontaneous, and therefore corporate and non-hegemonic of responses.

Regarded as a work of theory, New Times fails the Stuart Hall test of theoretical openness. In its postmodern stress, it reciprocated an opposed dogmatism. Stuart always argued not only for taking all frameworks seriously, but also for recognising that powerful ideas – Marxism, for instance – were not so much surpassed as ‘repositioned’. Certainly, we need to re-think the way classes are being unmade and remade nationally and globallyl; but the apparent sidelining of Marxist or Marx-like analysis, not so long after it acquired the theoretical capacity to take account of diversity and of culture, was tragically paradoxical.

The practical perils of the lacuna are more obvious today, leaving aside the contributions to Blairism. Far from greater class fragmentation, there has been a deepening and extension of structural class relations: a polarisation between the very rich and the majority of the population from whom resources, time and the means of a secure and pleasurable life are being stolen. More and more people globally face conditions of employment that are proletarian, insecure and low paid, whether in newly privatised public services, or in the shift of poor peasants to the cities of India and China; in the systematic dependence of younger workers on the short-term needs of employers; or, in Britain, the destruction of the ‘safety net’ of benefits and the social fund (Johnson 2013). Of course, we have to think of class in relation to gender and other social relations in their conjuncturally specific ensembles – through Campbell’s ‘neoliberal neo-patriarchy’, for instance (Campbell 2014) – and of course, our cultural knowledge remains central in this.

The hard road to renewal, 1988

There is much more to inspire in this single authored collection. The most important argument – for taking culture seriously – has large and continuing practical ramifications for left political practice. In these essays, SH sums up and gives a political shape to much of the work on culture carried out in Birmingham and elsewhere.

We might start with the rethinking of class, which involves, via Gramsci, an old Marxist distinction, elaborated in different ways in cultural Marxisms, between class as a social relation to capital, and class as a cultural formation and political agency. SH’s key anti-reductive move is, however, not only to make this distinction, but also to refuse any automatic relation between structure and culture. There is no automatic relay between the proletarian position and the creation of a collective desire and political will for a new, more equal and sustainable world. Rather, to activate class as agency requires detailed cultural work, both as an aspect of political organisation and as a more general and shared ‘educative’ process.

It is important to note that in these essays, and in later writing, SH overcomes the 1980s tendency to place the new political identities constructed by 1960-70s social movements side by side, or even in competition. Rather, the implication is that the rethinking of political agency must grasp the extent to which identity is always syncretic. This is clearest in his treatments of ‘new ethnicities’ in the 1990s (e.g. Hall 1996), but also in the ways gender and class are engaged with in the 1980s essays. Here he writes, for instance, of the need to ‘feminize’ a patriarchal left, and also to socialise feminism; that is, to draw it ‘directly into the terrain of the struggle for general, economic, social and cultural change’ (1988: 243).

Taking culture seriously does not only mean dialoguing with specialist producers – with visual artists for instance – as SH did in his important work with black and ethnic minority artists. It also means attending very closely to language and discourse – to words and larger ideological constructions in general. It involves contesting ‘root ideas’ like the definitions of the people-nation as carried in anti-immigration discourse; or engaging with the neoliberal figure of freedom, understanding its popular appeal as against statist traditions, but showing how equality is its twin, not its opposite. It is always necessary to understand how neoliberal ideology works to create consent or at least powerlessness and acquiescence, and how it establishes itself as the common sense of the age. I would add something that is not always so strong in SH’s work: that we need to recognise that acquiescence – the absence of hope that there is some alternative – co-exists with reservation, suspicion, anger, and a wish for something much better. This is especially true today.

Because of its own times and also because of its still mainly academic location and standpoint, SH’s most political writings hover on the edge of being a practical prescription or a programme. Despite the eloquence and the political intelligence of his speech and writing, I do not think it surpasses the limits of the academy, or of critical scholarship, if you like: it does not break through to an activist perspective, a perspective of acting under the discipline of success or failure in some urgent and immediate struggle. Within the academy, conclusions can always be deferred, because other action is not required. There are more detailed illustrations of SH’s general arguments – in a case study, for example – of how to campaign around the NHS; but generally, he calls for a left political strategy without specifying one, except in broad theoretical, that is Gramscian, terms. ‘By framework we mean a perspective on what is happening to society now, a vision of the future, a capacity to articulate these vividly through a few clearly enunciated themes and principles, a new conception of politics’ (1988:271).

Despite its gestures and policymaking labours, even today the Labour Party is far from elaborating a political alternative of this kind. The full programme of taking culture seriously (about which there is much more to say) also remains a challenge to the left political movements and parties which are now springing up. It is really up to us – both as producers of really conjunctural knowledge and as thinking political activists – to follow the broad paths Stuart signposted, and to map and track the practical routes we need to take from there.