Abstract
Throughout his long career Stuart Hall has personified a shifting range of political-intellectual positionalities, responding to the changing historical conjuncture in the West since the late 1950s. From his engagement with the New Left to the generation of new spaces for critical intellectual intervention in the 1970s (as embodied by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) to the tightening up of such spaces as a consequence of the neoliberal ascendancy (which Hall himself theorized through his analysis of Thatcherism) from the 1980s onwards, the role of the intellectual/academic has changed significantly throughout this period, as universities have become increasingly corporatized. This article tracks this evolution by tracing the paradoxical fate of cultural studies as an intellectual project and academic formation, and Hall’s ultimate distancing from it at the end of his life.
It would have been some time in the mid-1980s. Stuart Hall was visiting Amsterdam, where I worked as a young lecturer at that time. I had just published Watching Dallas (Ang, 1985), which was my Master’s thesis, and had started to think about doing a PhD. This was a time when acquiring a doctorate was not yet considered an essential requirement for an academic career – up till then university professors in Europe were not expected to obtain a PhD until later in their career path, if at all – but times were changing and I knew that if I wanted to climb the academic ladder, I needed to get the ‘Doctor’ title. So I had begun to search for a supervisor. I gathered all my courage and asked Stuart whether he would be willing to supervise me – the idea of working under his guidance was deeply attractive to me. He listened to me with interest, but ultimately declined. ‘Why don’t you write another book?’, he said in the friendliest possible way. ‘That’s much better than wasting your time working on a PhD thesis.’
This vignette encapsulates Stuart Hall’s attitude towards academic culture. It is an attitude of deep ambivalence, which in itself – as I will elaborate shortly – has become entrenched as a key characteristic of cultural studies. Hall’s advice to me – to write a book rather than a PhD thesis – was informed by a profound scepticism towards the formal hierarchies and rigid credentialism of university life. By exhorting me to write a book instead of a thesis, he articulated the point of view that it was far more important for us – as intellectuals – to engage in the public sphere of society at large, rather than dwell on the purely academic and esoteric exercise of doctoral research.
Of course, Hall himself never did a PhD. He was appointed Professor of Sociology at the Open University in 1979 without the need of formal proof of his academic worth (in the form of a degree), as his reputation as the charismatic leader of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) had already preceded him. Even then, Hall was already an intellectual celebrity. The work of the CCCS attracted passionate interest and had become influential among many students, not only in the UK but internationally, who looked up to him as ‘founding father’ of a new field of inquiry: cultural studies. As a result, he didn’t need a PhD to demonstrate that he was deserving of a professorship; he could get away with not adhering to the established academic protocols and still be accepted into the ranks of that establishment, at least formally.
Indeed, over time – when his celebrity status had reached stratospheric proportions – he was said to have been inundated with tempting offers of lucrative chairs at US universities (Jaggi, 2000). Yet he chose to stay in Britain. His reasoning, when asked about it, was that he preferred to be on the margins than in the centre of global power: ‘America is an imperial culture now; it’s what Rome must have felt like, or England in the 19th century. But I feel better taking a sighting on the world from the periphery than the centre’ (quoted in Jaggi, 2000). One might quibble that a post-imperial Britain in decline is still not ‘the periphery’ in a world-wide sense, but Hall’s comment reflects his life-long self-positioning, even in Britain itself where he rose to command enormous authority as one of the country’s most important left intellectuals, as always speaking from a peripheral point of view. Although he lived in Britain all his adult life he never felt comfortably British, and his outlook on British society (and the world at large) was strongly shaped by his position as a black colonial outsider who had come ‘home’ – a homecoming, however, which was never settled. As he once said, he couldn’t ‘disappear into Englishness. I understand Britain; but I’m only British in a hyphenated way’ (Jaggi, 2000). I would argue that this existential unsettledness of identity has been a core determinant in Hall’s engagement with the politics of culture right to the end of his life.
Hall’s comment about America as an imperial culture also needs to be considered in relation to his more specific observations (and reservations) about the nature of US academic life. In ‘Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies’, Hall (1992) reflects on the differences between British cultural studies and American cultural studies by referring to what he saw as the ‘rapid professionalization and institutionalization’ of cultural studies in the US, compared with the difficulties he experienced in setting up ‘a marginalized Centre in a university like Birmingham’ (1992: 286). One consequence of the rapid uptake of cultural studies within ‘this highly ratified and enormously elaborated and well-funded professional world of American academic life’ (1992: 286) was the ‘theoretical fluency of cultural studies in the United States’ (1992: 287). Hall found this development not only astonishing, but also dangerous. As he put it:
There is no moment now, in American cultural studies, where we are not able, extensively and without end, to theorize power-politics, race, class, and gender, subjugation, domination, exclusion, marginality, Otherness, etc. There is hardly anything in cultural studies which isn’t so theorized. And yet, there is the nagging doubt that this overwhelming textualization of cultural studies’ own discourses somehow constitutes power and politics as exclusively matters of language and textuality itself … [where] power [is constituted] as an easy floating signifier which just leaves the crude exercise and connections of power and culture altogether emptied of any signification. (Hall, 1992: 287)
The danger Hall spotted was not just that the discourses of cultural studies circulating within the American academy had become overly theoretically sophisticated, but that theoretical sophistication had become an end in itself. This pursuit of theory for theory’s sake was (or is) possible in the US because of the enormous capacity of the American university system to absorb new intellectual trends within its dense frameworks of professional scholarly production, especially through its expansive infrastructure of graduate schools. In this context, ever more complex and proficient talk of power, race, class, gender, otherness, etc. could go on and on feeding on itself indefinitely, without ever having to be grounded within, or connected to, actual practices outside the walls of academia. For Hall, this kind of academism, with all its radical posturing and erudite display, falls far short of his own vision of cultural studies as an intellectual and political practice. Key here is the critical distinction Hall makes between intellectual work and academic work: ‘they overlap, they abut each other, they feed off one another, the one provides you with the means to do the other. But they are not the same thing’ (Hall, 1992: 287).
It is clear that for Hall, it is intellectual work that matters. Despite his own success within the academic world, he was ultimately dismissive of it. As he quipped in a relatively recent interview, reflecting on his career: ‘I was going to be – dirty word – an intellectual. Academia was just how I made my money’ (quoted in Williams, 2012). His commitment to intellectual work as a political project was unwavering throughout his working life: it was an indelible part of his personal and public identity. Starting with early activities such as editing the New Left Review and teaching film and media, including lecturing on westerns in a prison (Jaggi, 2000), Hall conceived of intellectual work, not as the production of knowledge as the will to truth, but ‘as a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect’ (Hall, 1992: 286). Academic work, on the other hand, was merely the necessary means by which the pursuit of intellectual work was made possible: it was what allowed you to make a living and provided you with an income, but it was not worth pursuing in and of itself.
It is for this reason that Hall recommended me to write a book rather than do a PhD. He wanted me to do intellectual work, not academic work. I understood his argument, and to a certain extent I accepted it. After all, it was precisely the critical nature of the work of the CCCS at that time that attracted me to his guidance in the first place. Like so many others in those years, I was experimenting with new ways of doing intellectual work, both inside and outside the university. In my student years I participated in numerous study groups reading Gramsci, Althusser, Freud and Lacan, Foucault and many others. I was an active member of the feminist movement. I wrote about television and popular culture for a Dutch magazine for film criticism, Skrien, hugely inspired by the exciting and innovative work in film, television and cultural studies that came from the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. It was these activities that formed the background and the resources which led me to write Watching Dallas: to me, this was an intellectual project motivated primarily by a desire to intervene in public debate, not by a drive for academic recognition. Yet, as the book received positive responses from all kinds of corners, mostly from other young lecturers or postgraduate students like myself, I realized how important the academic recognition was, not only to make me eligible for an academic job in the first place, but because academic recognition opened doors: to speak at conferences, to publish in journals and, last but not least, to be treated as an authority. In other words, I realized how the academic world was an essential context which made the intellectual work possible. I knew that whatever else I was going to do, I needed to secure my place in that academic world if I wanted to continue with the kind of intellectual work I was passionate about; that is, if I wanted to continue doing cultural studies. It is for this reason that I was convinced that I had to do a PhD, despite Hall’s advice. A PhD was a passport to the academic ranks, and I needed it.
Institutionalization and its discontents
The relationship between intellectual work and academic work, then, is more complex than Hall allowed for. It is a relationship characterized by friction, to be sure, but I would argue that just as we have to acknowledge the ‘deadly seriousness’ of intellectual work, as Hall (1992: 287) contends, we cannot afford not to take academic work seriously. This is especially the case for those of us who are committed to cultural studies. One of the central elements of cultural studies as an intellectual project, according to Hall (1992: 285), is that ‘it holds theoretical and political questions in an ever irresolvable but permanent tension. It constantly allows the one to irritate, bother, and disturb the other, without insisting on some final theoretical closure’. I would argue that the tension between intellectual work and academic work in cultural studies can be described in a similar way. The two are in an irresolvable and permanent tension, the one constantly irritating, bothering, and disturbing the other, for which there is no final closure.
The history of the Birmingham centre itself can illuminate what this means, and it relates strongly to the question of institutionalization, which Hall has discussed in terms of its ‘danger’ or risks. Institutionalization, he stressed, is ‘a moment of profound danger’ (Hall, 1992: 286). At the same time, however, with his typical penchant for embracing paradox, he underlined that ‘dangers are not places you run away from but places that you go towards’. The Birmingham centre was one such dangerous place, but in more senses than one. In Hall’s own logic, the centre had to face the danger of becoming too institutionalized, which would risk turning cultural studies into a ‘mere’ academic enterprise. During the centre’s heyday in the 1970s, when Hall himself was director of the centre, this risk seemed negligible: as Angela McRobbie has recounted, this was a time when ‘the traditional hierarchies of the academy were overwhelmingly abandoned’ and when ‘the question of what kind of degree was being pursued was subordinate to the real issue, which was that of doing research that could be combined with political work’ (2000: 215). Thus, although the CCCS occupied an institutional space within the academy, its intellectual work was not, for Hall and for many of the students who converged at the centre at that time, oriented towards achieving academic goals; its drivers were, instead, political. For Hall, drawing on Gramsci, the politics of the centre’s work was the production of ‘organic intellectuals’ – intellectuals who, somehow, would align with an ‘emerging historical movement’ (Hall, 1992: 282) in society at large, even though even then, Hall conceded, it was difficult to pinpoint precisely where the locus of this emerging historical movement was.
But we should not forget that the 1970s were a time when this articulation of the intellectual and the political was not only plausible, but also entirely practicable. Coming closely after the revolutionary upheavals of 1968, the 1970s were a time pregnant with imaginations and desires of radical social change; and it was a time when diverse manifestations of what we now call ‘cultural politics’ – think the youth movement, feminism, movements for ethnic and racial recognition, to name just the most influential – had begun to proliferate. Much of the work of the CCCS at that time was closely aligned with, contributed to, and formed interventions within these radical cultural-political movements, blurring the boundaries between the academic institution and its outside. As Hall recalls, these were ‘heady days’. ‘We made the curriculum up. It was the inauguration of, not of a discipline, but a field of inquiry that, unlike fine art, is interested in how culture organizes everyday life’ (quoted in Jaggi, 2000).
Hall’s role in this period was, by all accounts, that of a charismatic leader whose authority rested on his ability to keep the debate as open as possible, on a style of theorizing that was profoundly dialogic and collaborative. Charlotte Brunsdon, who like McRobbie was a student at CCCS at that time, conjures up the image of Hall arriving at CCCS seminars with a huge pile of books, which he would put on the table at the beginning of the seminar. What he was doing, says Brunsdon (2014: 95), ‘was bringing with him, making available, what might be useful in the coming discussion. And he had to bring lots of books because, depending on the way the discussion went, different scholarship would be relevant.’
This image of Hall’s eclectic pile of books encapsulates the transdisciplinary excess and ‘interdisciplinary promiscuity’ (Brunsdon, 2014: 95), which are now recognized as the hallmarks of cultural studies as a field of inquiry. It also reflects the importance Hall attaches to the continuing process of intellectual work, to keep oneself permanently open to external influences as they make their presence felt, without which, for Hall, cultural studies cannot possibly thrive. As Hall memorably put it, ‘I am not interested in Theory, I am interested in going on theorizing’ (in Grossberg, 1996: 150).
This insistence on valuing and embracing the fundamental open-endedness of intellectual work resonates strongly with a subject position which is used to and accepting of being unsettled; a decentred, diasporic position which profoundly informs Hall’s style of engaging with the world, not just personally but also intellectually and politically. As David Scott (2005: 8) has remarked, what matters for Hall is ‘how to intervene in an existing predicament to expand or revise (or both together) the cognitive terrain on which an ethics of action can be conducted’. In this regard Hall’s relationship to existing authoritative theories and disciplines is wilfully exploratory and experimental: ‘the only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off’, he once said (Hall, 1992: 286). But it is easy to see how this kind of intellectual ethos would ultimately clash with the requirements of the academic institution, where the lack of closure associated with ‘going on theorizing’ was becoming increasingly unsustainable. In this sense, one could argue that CCCS was a dangerous place not because it was too institutionalized, but because it was not institutionalized enough. Its position within the University of Birmingham had always been precarious, and this precarity met its dramatic apotheosis with the eventual shutting down of the Department of Cultural Studies (into which the CCCS had morphed by then) in 2002. This marked the abolition of the CCCS legacy at the university and, as Ann Gray (2003) has argued, marked the increasing impossibility of the kind of critical intellectualism which Hall spearheaded. The CCCS, in short, had become incompatible with the contemporary university.
Brunsdon (1996) recalls that very few students, especially women, completed a PhD at the CCCS in the 1970s and 1980s, and that key reasons for this were the political and social attractions of collective intellectual work and the sense that earning a qualification was not the main purpose of their enrolment within the CCCS. Much in the image of the organic intellectual, the priority lay in political engagement with different groups and social movements outside. Today, however, we know only too well how important it is for students to succeed in getting their qualifications. Successful completions are imperative, not only for the students themselves, given that their individual futures depend on it, but also for the universities, for whom completion rates are determinants of revenue and reputation. In general, the overwhelming focus in universities today, in both teaching and research, is on measurable outputs and outcomes. Needless to say, this instrumentalist orientation towards knowledge and education, which has become the dominant tenet of the neoliberal academy in the 21st century, is decidedly at odds with the critical intellectual ethos nurtured by Hall at the CCCS. Institutional survival within the academy today requires adherence to strict ‘performance criteria’ imposed by an increasingly imposing audit culture: indeed, the termination of Birmingham’s Department of Cultural Studies came after the department received a disappointing score in Britain’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 2001, which gave the university management an incentive to shut it down (Gray, 2003). This was, of course, many years after Stuart Hall had left the CCCS.
The academic turn
The damaging impact of neoliberal managerialism on the institution of the university and on academic life are issues that have already received extensive attention (e.g. Gill, 2009; Readings, 1996). I suspect that Hall himself would have been dismayed by the turn of events at Birmingham. What arguably would have been a more urgent issue for him, however, is to what extent and how the kind of critical intellectual work that CCCS represented could continue in new circumstances. Is there still space for such work within the university? Is it still possible to practise cultural studies in these neoliberal times? These questions are as important in 2015 as they were in 2003.
Obviously, we cannot simply answer ‘no’ to these questions, if only because so many of us have become academics and scholars who have a stake in the active presence of cultural studies as a recognized field within the academy. And this is one of the paradoxes of Stuart Hall’s legacy: even though he himself cared little about the academic institutionalization of cultural studies (and even found it dangerous), what he has inspired – through the work of the CCCS in particular – is the emergence of a whole range of cultural studies institutions – academic programmes, research centres, professional organizations, and so on – world-wide. As Ted Striphas has remarked, each of these institutional presences would have adopted their own ‘strategies by which they have gone about institutionalizing’ and their own responses to ‘the challenges that institutionalizing brings’ (Striphas, 1998: 454). In the process, different modalities and forms of institutionalization, involving different configurations of ‘cultural studies’, have been able to take shape, depending on context and actors involved. Yet, irrespective of these differences, what institutionalization in general terms makes possible is the creation of organizational spaces where the practice of cultural studies, however defined, can be pursued. It is in its context-specific institutional expressions that we can discern the practicability of multiple ‘glocalizations’ of cultural studies in different parts of the world.
Speaking personally, I can testify to the significance of cultural studies’ institutionalization in my own career. In 1991, I decided to relocate from the Netherlands to Australia to take up an academic position at Murdoch University (Perth). An important reason for this was that I found at Murdoch an institutional context where ‘cultural studies’ was recognized as a core part of the teaching programme in communication studies, unlike at Amsterdam where positivist and quantitative communication research ruled at that time. By contrast, cultural studies was already a thriving intellectual enterprise in Australia. Together with John Hartley, I organized a conference playfully titled ‘Dismantle Fremantle’, the aim of which was ‘to make a breach in what some see as rapidly solidifying orthodoxies within cultural studies’ (Ang, 1992: xi). The conference brought together a great group of prominent Australian and international cultural studies intellectuals, confirming the dynamism of the field at this historical juncture in Australia. 1 In 1996, I took up a position as Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) – one of the country’s first designated professorships in the field. Throughout the 1990s, cultural studies was central to national debates on the renewal of the Humanities disciplines in Australia, culminating in the establishment of a Cultural and Communication Studies section within the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998. This meant that Cultural Studies now sat next to traditional disciplines such as History, Philosophy, English and others within this elite institution of learned academicians. Since 2008, Cultural Studies has also had bestowed on it its own Field of Research code within the Australian and New Zealand Research Classification framework, a new system for the categorization and measurement of research and development activity in Australia and New Zealand. 2 These developments signify the steady institutionalization of cultural studies not just within university programmes, but within the national research system as a whole. The upshot is that cultural studies is now firmly ensconced as a distinct academic field or discipline in Australia.
This formal status of being a discipline has been an enormously enabling factor in the growth of institutional spaces for cultural studies across universities in Australia. I myself took up the opportunity and the assignment of institution-building at UWS, where university management gave me the resources to establish a research centre in the field, the Centre for Cultural Research (CCR), which since 2012 has become the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), a name chosen to evoke Raymond Williams’ (1961) classic book and his endeavour to think ‘culture’ and ‘society’ together. In contemporary institutional understanding, this signalled a transdisciplinary joining together of the humanities and the social sciences, which is of course what has precisely been a key feature of cultural studies as an intellectual and academic project.
But institution-building involves tasks that are very different from that which we generally associate with intellectual work, even though it is an essential part of academic work: far from engaging with the intricacies of cultural theorizing, it includes forming a suitable and shareable vision, developing apposite strategic plans, envisaging feasible projects, recruiting and managing staff, establishing appropriate working protocols and governance structures, and, of course, devising approaches to financial viability. All this requires both advocacy and diplomacy: convincing the university that you are worth supporting, negotiating with administrators, assembling alliances and collaborators, and so on, enacting what Meaghan Morris and Mette Hjort (2012: 1) call ‘the art of the possible in academic life’. Thus, the ICS (and previously the CCR) is an assemblage of overlapping, yet quite heterogeneous intellectual interests and approaches, joined together by the unifying enterprise of a shared institutionalizing project which worked within the context of the UWS. As I have elaborated elsewhere, our work within the institute can be described as a kind of ‘post-cultural studies’, building on the orientations and aspirations of the ‘original’ cultural studies project but adapting it to the academic exigencies of our time, including the now mandatory requirement for ‘community engagement’ (see Ang, 2006). The art of the possible, in short, requires accommodations to actually existing formations and contingencies.
Ultimately, the politics of institution-building revolves around the creation of a sustainable organized environment where valuable intellectual work can be done; where collective critical agendas can be pursued and collaborative networks and communities are formed in relative autonomy from the academic institution (the university) at large. However, in order to survive university-based institutes such as the ICS cannot escape the rules of neoliberal rationality which dominate higher education today. Recognition as a distinct discipline or field of research is an advantage in this regard: it imparts institutional realness to ‘cultural studies’ as a specialist domain of expert knowledge, and it makes it possible for our work to be judged on our own terms. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Ang, 2013), the fact that cultural studies is coded as a distinct Field of Research in Australia’s research system means that academic researchers can make their research activity count as cultural studies, and gives universities the ability to assess and measure their performance within this particular field. On balance, then, the institutionalization of cultural studies has effected the steady consolidation of cultural studies as a community of scholars, providing them a viable professional identity and a secure space for internal deliberation and debate.
However, the constraints imposed by the neoliberal audit regime, which was introduced by the Thatcher government in the 1980s and since then has spread around the world, have fundamentally altered the conditions within which intellectual work can be done. 3 As the focus within the academy is now so overwhelmingly on the competitive pursuit of ‘excellence’, Hall’s idea of intellectual work as radically open-ended, as profoundly dialogic and collaborative, as a matter of ‘going on theorizing’, is very difficult to sustain. Brunsdon notes that cultural studies as practised in Birmingham in the 1970s ‘did not have a single content, it did not have a single aim, it could not be theorized tidily, and it resisted recruitment into the contemporary bureaucratic definitions of “impact”’ (2014: 96). It was intellectual work that thrived on being principally ‘undisciplined’, constantly searching, resisting premature closures, spurred by an open responsiveness to the contingency of the present. Looking back, we know that the conditions of possibility for such work – the relative freedom from administrative accountability, the ability to indulge in experimenting with ideas without the need to deliver a measurable product – had started to erode only a decade later, when Thatcherism became a dominant force. Against this background, the institutionalizations of cultural studies, as I have described above, were necessary strategic attempts to create spaces for cultural studies work within the neoliberal academy. Without such institutionalizations we simply would not have cultural studies today. But institutionalization has also come with losses: the close relationship with the social and political struggles outside and the emphasis on collaborative experimentation has diminished, and the focus has turned, inevitably, to the production of academically sanctioned knowledge. This doesn’t mean that cultural studies today, as an academic field, does not churn out interesting, important or insightful works, many of which exhibit significant theoretical fluency and innovative interdisciplinary research, but it is a far cry from the ‘heady days’ of open-ended experimentation and exploration in the 1970s. It is this contradictory reality that we have to live with as academics working within universities today: here, the tension between intellectual work and academic work comes into sharp relief. 4
Beyond cultural studies
Although the kind of cultural studies being produced in the academy today still benefits from, and may still be inspired by Stuart Hall’s legacy, Hall himself, towards the end of his public career, seemed to have lost interest in it. When asked by Laurie Taylor in an interview in 2006 whether he still cared about cultural studies, he answered: ‘Yes, I do want to go on thinking about cultural studies. But not as a field. I never defended it as a field. I think that as a field it contains a lot of rubbish’ (quoted in Taylor, 2006: 17). This is a very strong statement against the conception of cultural studies as a discipline or academic field, and it articulates once again how, for Hall, what matters is the practice of cultural studies as a radical intellectual project to understand and intervene in the social and cultural struggles of the day, driven by an ineluctable longing for a better world. I think that Hall had given up on the institutional space of the university as a site for the kind of critical intellectual work he favoured. Although he himself had made his living as an academic Professor, this institutional context was no more than a convenient arrangement which enabled him to pursue what was of true importance to him. This is not to criticize Hall, nor to suggest that he did not take his university positions seriously. But it is to highlight that, for Hall, it was his practice as a public intellectual that really mattered.
Indeed, it is notable that in John Akomfrah’s absorbing and moving documentary film about Hall, The Stuart Hall Project (2013), almost no attention is paid to his academic work. Instead, the film is composed almost entirely from fragments of Hall’s extensive radio and television appearances through which his public intellectualism was most powerfully articulated, from his role as a spokesperson of the CND in the late 1950s to his Open University TV lectures in the 1990s. To be sure, although the Open University was of course an academic environment, what was important for Hall about his appointment there was not the academic consolidation of cultural studies as a field, but the opportunity it provided him to engage in public pedagogy: ‘My instincts were towards widening access to adult education. Birmingham was an intellectual elite, whereas the average age at the OU was 40, who’d not been in a classroom since 16. It was an intellectual challenge’ (quoted in Jaggi, 2000). Here again, Hall’s commitment to intellectual work as ‘going on theorizing’ is confirmed.
If, by the time he retired in the late 1990s, there was little space left for this intellectual vocation in the context of the academy, it was also increasingly difficult to maintain such a space within the mass media. In his introduction to The Stuart Hall Project, Mark Fisher (2013: 2) remarks that the film is a reminder of how we have now lost a media landscape where Hall could be a regular face and voice on mainstream media, ‘a kind of broadcasting infrastructure – which included elements of the BBC, Channel 4, the Open University – that gave him a space to speak to a mass audience’. Today, public service broadcasting too is beholden to competition for short-term ratings success; it is no longer a hospitable site for the patient, thoughtful and long-term educational work that Hall’s media engagements embodied. Of course we should be mindful that Hall’s exposure to mass media audiences was limited to the British media context; elsewhere, including Australia, this was never the case. Nor, for that matter, did cultural studies as such ever get much airplay in Australian media: the circulation of its discourses remained more or less limited within the academic world. This in itself accounts for the fact that, in Australia and elsewhere, there was never much doubt that the appropriate place for cultural studies was in the academy; inroads into the public realm were (and are) rare and exceptional.
By the early 21st century, Hall admitted to being deeply politically disillusioned (Taylor, 2006). He also felt he was no longer in touch with the world he lived in. ‘I think for the first time I feel like a dinosaur…. The points of reference that organised my political world and my political hopes are not around anymore’ (Taylor, 2006: 17). But, as Taylor noted, he was disillusioned but not defeated. Perhaps this is one reason why, late in life, he turned towards a much more personal engagement with the arts, especially with the work of young diasporic artists of Afro-Caribbean and Asian backgrounds (such as Akomfrah) who have come to the fore since the 1980s, and for whom Hall’s own work on cultural identity, race and diaspora has been intensely formative and influential. Hall’s notion of identities as fluid rather than fixed, as the ‘unstable point where personal lives meet the narrative of history’, as ‘an endless, ever unfinished conversation’, were, as Jaggi (2000) observes, instrumental in freeing artists from the burden of representation, to speak from, but not for black experiences. This engagement seemed to be very satisfying for Hall: ‘I was writing about identity and they were practising it…. It made me more alert to the way artistic work is exploratory space in which ideas work themselves out’ (in Jaggi, 2000).
Contemporary art is perhaps one of the few cultural domains today which operates as ‘a zone of freedom’, allowing artists to explore ideas in circumstances ‘set apart from the mundane and functional character of everyday life, and from its rules and conventions’ (Stallabrass, 2006: 1). This is not to suggest that the art world is insulated from the neoliberal imperatives which now govern culture and society, on the contrary. But artistic identities tend to thrive on being unsettled, on being open to a multiplicity of influences. And, by its nature, artistic creativity is still, ideologically and materially, sanctioned by the prerogative of being ‘undisciplined’, to be protected from external institutional pressures, hence able to maintain a space for free experimentation. This is reminiscent of the intellectual space occupied by the CCCS in the 1970s. But I can’t help feeling that Hall’s resorting to the art world was also an acknowledgement on his part that he no longer saw an opening for the kind of critical intellectual intervention which his approach to cultural studies was capable of achieving in more socially accessible institutional contexts, be it the university or the mass media. While these are explicitly pedagogical institutions, contemporary art tends to have a much more tenuous relationship to the work of public pedagogy. In art ideas matter less for their intellectual content than for their aesthetic form; taken up in an art world context, the political significance of Hall’s practice of cultural studies will almost inevitably be overshadowed by the aesthetic performance of the art work, its impact limited to the relatively marginalized but elite context of the art gallery. This is not to say that the politics of artistic representation doesn’t matter, but to my mind, this was not the kind of space Hall had envisaged his main field of intervention to be.
‘I think things are stuck. I am not so disillusioned as to think that history is finished. But I do think that what Gramsci would call the balance of social forces are very powerfully against hope’, he told Taylor (2006: 17). In this deep pessimism of the intellect, it may be difficult for us to maintain an optimism of the will. To honour Stuart Hall’s legacy, however, we could do worse than continue to follow his lead in resisting ‘the solace of closure’ and working against ‘the violations that grow out of complacent satisfactions, secure doctrines, congealed orders, sedimented identities’ (Scott, 2005: 1). This is still, in my view, the task of cultural studies, even in academia. It is for this reason that for me, personally and professionally, simply opposing the neoliberal academic instrumentalism of the contemporary university is not an option. For better or worse, we need to continue working within the interstices which are still available to create and nurture institutional spaces where Hall’s notion of ‘going on theorizing’ and engaged intellectual work can be pursued within the restrictions imposed on us. The Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney, which I had the opportunity to establish, is only one example of the multitude of spaces belonging to the dispersed cultural studies endeavour in the 21st century. I did not know back in the 1980s, when I asked Hall to be my supervisor, that things would turn out this way. But I know now that getting a PhD was essential for me, and moving to Australia.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.