Hall, Stuart

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Hall, Stuart 1932-

Stuart Hall, a black Jamaican born in 1932, was schooled—in the English manner—for a future as a member of the colonial elite. As he recounted on many occasions subsequently, he quickly discovered that he was living in two worlds simultaneously: as a black native of the Caribbean and on the other in the imaginative world of the colonizers, well attuned to the finest nuances in the history and the literature of the English. This discrepant sense of his place in the colonial world was at first puzzling and painful, but he learned over many years to make it his own. What once had been a burden came, through an intellectual journey of impressive imaginative power, to become a resource and indeed a lifeline. This migrant’seye view of the center from the margins informed every aspect of Hall’s intellectual life. It underwrote, if only implicitly, the emergence in Great Britain of cultural studies, with which Hall himself became so closely identified. Later in life, this view explicitly defined his intellectual project.

Hall’s early experience as a colonial subject produced a political radicalism that remained with him through his life. In 1951 he arrived in Britain as a student at Oxford University. He experienced England not only in its idealized manifestations, but also in its raw everydayness, in which the dispositions of racial exclusion loomed large. Later in the 1950s he was drawn to the emergent New Left, alongside the slightly older generation of Raymond Williams (1921–1988) and Edward Palmer Thompson (1924–1993). Crucial to the political critique that came from this moment was the realization that culture was not only the preserve of the educated elite, but that it was also properly the inheritance of all. To later generations this may sound a truism, but at the time it served to shift the study of culture away from a restricted meaning, in which culture represented only the most elevated, to a broader, more anthropological reading of the cultural dimensions of the everyday, in which the relations of a society are embedded in their symbolic conditions of existence. It served, too, to highlight the connections between political power and culture. From this point on, the characteristic tenor of Hall’s interventions was to highlight his belief that the seemingly arcane practice of politics was in fact rooted in and fought out on the terrain of culture itself. More specifically, any politics of value needed to situate itself within the field of popular life, for it was there that political energies were generated and political causes won and lost.

Many of these ideas came together in the Universities and Left Review, with which Hall was associated, and then in its more famous successor, the New Left Review, which Hall edited for the first year of its existence, from 1960.

In 1964 Hall moved to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies based at the University of Birmingham under the leadership of Richard Hoggart (b. 1918). Here he was given the space to develop conceptually the ideas that he—and those around him—had pursued in more practical form in early works such as his study The Popular Arts (1964), written with Paddy Whannel. Hall became the presiding figure in the emergence of cultural studies in the United Kingdom. His migrant perspective was an essential element in his reading of the culture of the British, and from this position the erstwhile colonial subject could offer his own anthropology of the erstwhile colonizer. The passions and excitement of early cultural studies ran deep. A vast range of previously excluded or derided cultural forms burst into view: popular music, advertising, women’s magazines, youth fashion, movies, and television. All were taken as serious subjects for critical analysis and, collectively, as the site where (through many displacements) politics in its expanded sense occurred.

A decisive theoretical influence for Hall was the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). Gramsci’s insistence on the place of culture as a constituent element in political struggle offered an analytical framework that served Hall well. The field of cultural studies, in its early incarnations, sought to unravel the many determinations by which political power was exercised. From this period in the 1960s, Hall collaborated with others to produce a mesmerizing stream of work, interpreting the emergent cultures of the time. His readings of youth subcultures and of the media comprehensively recast the field of the social sciences.

As this work evolved it met much resistance, not least because it was perceived as overly theoretical and as prone to an abstract formalism. Hall himself was certainly influenced by the work of the great structuralist theorists of culture—Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908), Roland Barthes (1915–1980), and later Louis Althusser (1918–1990)—and was persuaded of the need to pitch his arguments, when the occasion demanded, at a high level of abstraction. But he also possessed a sharp sense of the movements of historical time. His analytical interpretations began from the chaos of the concrete realities of the everyday, and—although they often involved some theoretical detour—always returned to the concrete. Here especially the influence of Gramsci was profound. Often Hall described his own intellectual practice as one devoted to explaining the shifts and turns in the movement of political conjunctures.

This bid to bend formal structural analysis into a practice more alive to the movements of historical forces and cultural relations generated two classic essays in the early 1970s: his famous rumination on the workings of the mass media, “Encoding and Decoding in the Media Discourse” (1973), which set the conceptual frame of the emerging discipline of media studies for the next 30 years, and his more philosophically inspired (if modestly titled) “Marx’s Notes on Method” (1974) in which, in explicating Marx, he outlined the basis of his own commitment to “theorising” the concrete.

It was during this period, too, that Hall and his colleagues embarked upon a comprehensive account of the drift in Britain toward a more authoritarian politics. Crucial to this analysis was his insistence that race—the management of the black population who, like him, had come to settle in Great Britain after the end of World War II (1939–1945), and of their sons and daughters—was a central, defining feature of an increasingly conservative political reflex, in which recourse to authority dominated. His jointly authored volume, Policing the Crisis (1978), represented a landmark text, which in a bravura intellectual act brought into a single analytical frame the workings of high politics in Westminster with the emergent street politics of the new racialized ghettos.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Hall reworked and refined these early insights into a succession of inspirational articles that plotted the makings of Thatcherism, a term Hall employed even before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in May 1979. Hall argued that Thatcherism represented a new form of authoritarian populism that marked a decisive shift to the right in British politics.

The drama of these writings was driven by a clear sense of political urgency created by the success of the Thatcherite project. At the same time, Hall also delivered broadsides to the political left, insisting that its characteristic inability to modernize or to think in terms of the future rather than the past was contributing to the confidence of the right. Many on the left took exception. At this point, too, Hall—having earlier been condemned for his formalism—found himself under attack for being too historical and not formal enough. His critics believed that the concepts that animated his discussion—authoritarian populism, crisis of hegemony, war of position, and so on (all derived from Gramsci)—were too inconsistent to be of use to social scientists. Hall’s response was simply to insist on the necessity of conjunctural analysis. Less contentious, however, was Hall’s early prediction that, whatever the fate of Thatcher herself, Thatcherism as a broader political project would define what was politically possible for many years to come, in which respect he provided a prescient perspective on the subsequent years of the New Labour government.

Race was still a major part of Hall’s intellectual concern, and beginning in the 1970s it became ever more prominent in his theorizations. From his study of race— of blackness—he became ever more preoccupied with questions of identity and subjectivity, especially of those on the racialized margins of the former colonizing nations.

An important interlocutor for Hall at this time was his student, Paul Gilroy, the author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), which delivered a devastating critique of the racial encodings of the English nation. Gilroy learned much from Hall, though there remain significant political and intellectual differences between them, particularly in relation to their respective interpretations of the idea of black Britishness.

In 1997 Hall retired from his appointment as professor of sociology at the United Kingdom’s Open University, a position he had held since 1979. As his formal academic career came to an end, Hall moved into a new intellectual field: that of the visual arts. He believed it was here, among young black artists in the United Kingdom, that questions of race and identity were being addressed most fruitfully. As he came to discover, the artists he was interested in were, as he would say, “doing the theory for you.”

SEE ALSO Critical Theory; Cultural Studies; Culture; Foucault, Michel; Gramsci, Antonio; Habermas, Jürgen; Immigration; Left and Right; Marginalization; Popular Culture; Race; Racialization; Radicalism; Thompson, Edward P.; Visual Arts

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gilroy, Paul. 1987. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson.

Hall, Stuart. 1973. Encoding and Decoding in the Media Discourse. Stencilled paper No. 7, Birmingham, U.K.: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.

Hall, Stuart. [1974] 2003. Marx’s Notes on Method: A “Reading” of the “1857 Introduction.” Cultural Studies 17 (2): 113–149.