Kenneth Surin
For Steven Salaita
W
ith the death of Stuart Hall we have lost the last of the British, or British-based, Left-wing intellectuals who began their work in the decade or so after the end of the Second World War. The roll of honor of the departed is long, and it includes, in addition to Hall, Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, Raphael Samuel, Ralph Miliband, John Westergaard, Roy Pascal, Geoffrey de Ste Croix, George Rudé, Isaac Deutscher, Norman Geras, Chris Harman, and Tony Cliff (and these are only those I’m aware of). Of the succeeding generation, Terry Eagleton, David Harvey, Sheila Rowbotham, Perry Anderson, and Robin Blackburn endure in immensely productive ways, but we’ve also lost Ernesto Laclau, Peter Gowan, Gerry Cohen, and Andrew Glyn from this later generation. The prospects for a continued and vibrant British Marxism, combining intellectual activity with practice, are cer-tainly not sunny on the surface, but there is still before us the formi-dable, albeit posthumous, instance of Stuart Hall—an always-bracing presence, at all times combining a gravity in his analyses with an un -stoppable willingness to be up for the next battle, even as he was engaged in what seemed like two or three other concurrent battles as he was speaking or writing (and these included poor health, barely mentioned by him, involving long-term dialysis and an eventual kid-ney transplant, in the two decades before his death).an open-necked shirt and blue jeans, with a sports jacket reserved for cooler days—walk across the main quad between the Muirhead Tower and the faculty common room.1Hall was director of the Centre of
Contemporary Cultural Studies, whose remit was a source of puzzle-ment for those of us chained intellectually, and mostly unknowingly so, to the seminar tables of more traditional departments. “What do they do there?” some of us asked, a question to which even our fellow PhD students in English, naïvely presumed by the questioner to be interested in “culture,” seemed not to have an answer. In time this questioner got a vague sense that “they” worked on topics usually ignored by the academic mainstream, using a distinctive pedagogy involving team-based research and working groups.
A revolution in modal logic had taken place in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and some of it was deeply fascinating even for someone who was starting to become interested in other quite different things. But it was now dawning on me, with a sporadic but nonetheless unbending force—and in spite of the excruciatingly delightful logical itch that compelled someone like me to scratch this itch in the form of a tightly circumscribed dissertation on modal logic somehow capable of sur-viving the caprices of the British external examiner system—that not a single aspect of my PhD work addressed the social and political ques-tions pressing on me in what were the dying days of Jim Callaghan’s sclerotic Labour government.
Callaghan’s doomed Labour regime was soon to be supplanted by the upstart Margaret Thatcher. I’d of course been interested in many of these now burning social and political questions in simpler and more practical ways since I was in high school in Wales and subsequently an undergraduate at Keele and Reading. My political concerns at that time were largely in agreement with the late Tony Benn, viewed as being on the “extreme” Left of the Labour Party. Benn of course started to leave behind the official and increasingly watered-down Labour Party positions in the later stages of his political career. Like many of us on the extra-parliamentary Left, Benn firmly acknowledged that these official positions were framed, intellectually at any rate, entirely within the terms of a protection and retention of the postwar com-promise between labor and capital. Hall never made an explicit repu-diation of Benn’s militantly socialist platform, though it was clear from Hall’s close affiliation with the journal Marxism Todaythat he believed that this Bennite socialist platform, with its statist underpinnings, was already being superseded by the existing political conjuncture.2
1990 riots, most of these oppositions emerged in ways that Thatcher— with a typical combination of ruthlessness and sheer good fortune— was able to quell relatively easily. She was of course aided by crucial events and circumstances, primarily the Malvinas War (which already seems like one of those meaningless but seemingly unending British neocolonial enterprises condemned to be forgotten by the next gen-eration of Britons, many of whom would probably now say that the Falklands are somewhere off the coast of Scotland next to the Shet-lands) and major defections from an already-faltering Labour party, which led in a seemingly unstoppable way to the formation of the breakaway Social Democrats. These circumstances forged for Thatcher an increasingly manageable consensus sufficient to defeat or neutral-ize almost all of the oppositions confronting her.
With PhD in hand, but no academic job, I became a schoolteacher for seven years, did my best to continue publishing on the philosoph-ical aspects of theology, and having abandoned analytphilosoph-ical philoso-phy, was reading (in addition to a lot of theology), Marx, Gramsci, Althusser, Benjamin, Raymond Williams, the continental philosophers proscribed by the typical UK philosophy department, and, of course, much more Adorno. Thus, more through happenstance than any-thing else, I was able to acquire, after leaving Birmingham, some of the intellectual tools needed to engage in due course with the work of Stuart Hall.
As already indicated, the election of Thatcher as prime minister in 1979 was a decisive turning point for many of us on the Left. Her project—it was nothing less than this, as Hall was one of the first to realize—was aimed ultimately at a complete overturning of the postwar rapprochement between labor and capital. We were now forced willy-nilly into the position of looking for theoretical resources, most still to be summoned into some kind of public visibility, able in whatever way to augment our visceral opposition to Thatcher’s
also marked his own growth in prominence. He was of course by this time a full-fledged intellectual with a national audience, but Hall now soon acquired an international visibility, as it became clear that Thatcher and Reagan had embarked, with an increasingly confident single-mindedness, on a political project that was to be epochal in its ultimate reach.
With a barely concealed fervor, Thatcher and Reagan were sens-ing, in ways sometimes untidy and sheerly opportunistic even as they were always resolute in intent (Reagan with his actor’s smile, Thatcher with her teeth-clenching harshness), that they were launched on the business of undoing the economic and political paradigm of their polit-ical predecessors. The waning Keynesian accord that had prevailed since the end of the war was now being supplanted by an emerging neoliberalism, and Hall was its earliest theoretical cartographer.
Hall is of course credited with coining the emblematic term “Thatch erism” even before Thatcher was elected. He was soon rec-ognized as the foremost analyst of the intellectual-cultural forma-tion whose label is now indelibly associated with her name. The label “Thatcherism” designates a populism combining a then newfangled economic neoliberalism (the crackpot ideas of Milton Friedman— based on the premise that just about any macroeconomic problem could be resolved by tweaking the money supply—were being in -stalled in a position of official primacy where the economy was con-cerned, in the UK and United States, and not just in the Pinochet-ruled Chile admired by Friedman), along with an atavistic social authoritar-ianism, as evidenced by Thatcher’s braying refrain “We need a return to Victorian values,” and so on.4
coding, policing, implicit racism, “moral panics,” immigration, liberalism, and so on.
So what was distinctive about Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism? Using the Gramscian notion of hegemony as his primary reference point, Hall characterized her politics as an “authoritarian populism.” This right-wing populism mobilized consent through an integration of several fronts: primarily, racism (both explicit and implicit), the crude but effective rhetoric of “law and order,” and the generation of “moral panics” (these were created to stigmatize certain social and cultural groups for political advantage, hence she called the miners “the enemy within”);5there was a repeatedly stoked and media-driven
disquiet about crime involving inner-city youth, especially “mugging” (the very designation of which by Rupert Murdoch’s pro-Thatcher tabloids carried racial overtones) and an equally contrived alarm over “skiving” (i.e., shirking) strikers and welfare recipients.
Hall argued that this populism could not be overcome by a Left still attached to a statist political horizon, bent on using the instru-ments of the state to defend or advance interests based on class and class positions. Instead, he suggested, the Left had to promote a pop-ulism of its own, involving the marshaling of forces along a broad and diverse front not overwhelmingly dependent on state formations for its potential success. Hall was criticized for this proposal, on the one hand, by those who thought it too nebulously “utopian” (their argu-ment being that any expanded politics of the kind proposed by Hall would require bringing together heterogeneous groups and move-ments that were unlikely to cohere into any kind of effective longer-term bloc), and on the other hand, by stalwarts of the old Left who were dismayed by what they perceived as Hall’s demotion or aban-donment of “class” as an analytical category in what was ostensibly a Marxist assessment of Thatcher’s UK.6
as the postwar Keynesian compromise buckled under the weight of pressures its economic model could no longer resolve. In their quest for an adequate response to the collapse of the postwar settlement between capital and labor, Thatcher’s opponents always seemed one step behind her in the wretched but nonetheless crucial competition for the available forms of ideological primacy. Thatcher enveloped her economic agenda in a wrapping that contained carefully, and always opportunistically, selected components of British culture that could be ordered in ways that recomposed to her advantage the forms of oppo-sition confronting her. Her opponents, by contrast, seemed always to be in a fatal lag when it came to finding alternative resources for the task of hegemonic recomposition.
Hall always worked with an extensive and varied theoretical palette, as evinced by his analysis of Thatcherism. His range of inter-ests were correspondingly broad (indeed, too far-reaching to be dealt with adequately in the span of a single article such as this). He was also the foremost explorer of the phenomenon labeled “multicultur-alism,” a label much excoriated in the right-wing press because of its implied dilution or relativizing of a settled and robust English identity, an identity accompanied by largely unacknowledged and sometimes savage mechanisms of interpellation. These mechanisms interpellated the British people primarily by resorting to some version, whether mildly attenuated or full-blown, of the rebarbative fantasy of a Britain that was once populated by sturdy folk who talked like Miss Marple, and dressed like Margaret Thatcher with her hats, hand -bags, and decorous “costumes,” or Denis Thatcher in his Harris tweed jackets (the petty bourgeois Margaret Thatcher was once recorded on a leaked tape taking elocution lessons to make herself sound more like television’s Miss Marple)—the Miss Marple of this caricature who cycles decorously down the cobbled streets of antique and orderly villages, coupled with a yeoman working class that would tip its col-lective working-class cloth cap at Miss Marple as she cycled past these befittingly deferential representatives of England’s yeomanry. Somehow this was also portrayed as an England where food (anthro-pologists from Lévi-Strauss to Jack Goody have alerted us to the centrality of food as a decisive marker of cultural and social demar-cations and identifidemar-cations) was not “tainted” by such importations as curry, kebabs, and sushi, but consisted instead of wholesome roasts, pies and puddings, and cider or real ale, and involving routines such as the four o’clock afternoon tea with triangular cucumber sandwiches and scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream, all consumed by seemingly redoubtable English men and women still more or less in active touch with such “traditions” as Morris dancing, playing cricket on the village green, tending an allotment, and having a small wager on the Grand National.7
Hall of course had no truck with this cockeyed and anachronis-tic sentimentalism, which naturalized and concealed the very mech-anisms of interpellation served by such rose-hued invocations of a “merrie olde England.”8In acknowledging, correctly of course, that
troubled paths when dealing with questions of national and ethnic identity, Hall quickly decided that there is more than one species of multiculturalism.9The one that grabs the headlines—with its
some-times vacuous and politically correct slogans—was based typically on an identity politics propped up by the appropriate discourse of rights and liberal inclusivity. Hall, however, was about something much more challenging and hard-headed than the latter’s identity politics—namely, the question of how the dominant culture has an inbuilt insularity that can only be contested (“without guarantees,” his favorite phrase) if we manage to find real alternatives to it, with-out resorting to the self-defeating means espoused by single-issue con-stituencies using their self-identities as the only basis for this struggle against the prevailing order. Hall’s writings on this topic were really much more about the partial and selective ways in which allidentities are constructed by the dominant order—that is, he wrestled above all with the question of multiculturalism as a problematique,rather than simply being interested in championing a boutique multiculturalism where the picture of the fabled Miss Marple is expanded or supple-mented by the insertion of a smiling turbaned Sikh or beaming dread-locked Rastafarian.10
The above sketch is unavoidably incomplete, and vastly so. Noth-ing has been said here about Hall’s pivotal role in the inauguration of cultural studies, not just institutionally at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies but also in providing this field with its conceptual underpinnings.11Nothing has been said about the
unflag-ging energy and verve with which he inaugurated and sustained col-laborative projects, from giving the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies its distinctive approach both methodologically and pedagog-ically, to the founding editorship of the New Left Review,to his partic-ipation in several educational and artistic projects after his retirement from the Open University, to his lifelong political campaigning and activism, as well his numerous interventions (his involvement in The May Day Manifesto in 1967, his abundant contributions to ground-breaking collections, his association with Marxism Today,and, shortly before he died, his participation with Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin in the launching of The Kilburn Manifesto).12
a short time before). In 1977 I read James’s Beyond a Boundary for the first time, which marked the start of an engagement with the work of James that continues to this day. One of the highpoints of this interest for me was Hall’s marvelous 1985 television interview with James, dealing with cricket (of course), but also Trotskyism, Paul Robeson, and James’s life and writings.13Hall also wrote essays on James.14It would
be very easy to emphasize the affinities between Hall and James—the Anglo-Caribbean background, the colonial education that sought to replicate a constricted version of the English prototype, the domicile in the UK, the lifelong (but always probing) affiliation with the Marx-ist tradition, and a cosmopolitanism both intellectual and practical. But there were also differences: James was a prodigious autodidact, whereas Hall was a renowned university academic; and there were evident generational differences, marked by tastes in music (James’s love of the calypsonian Mighty Sparrow in possible contrast to Hall’s devotion to the jazz of Miles Davis); James’s persistent engagement with nationalist movements in the pan-African world, as opposed to Hall’s place in the world of neocoloniality; and so on. James inhabited the world of Marcus Garvey, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky; Hall’s world, a world marked decisively by the demise of actually existing social-ism, was peopled (though not exclusively!) by Thatcher, Tony Blair, and Rupert Murdoch. These were hugely different worlds, obviously, but responding to both required an indomitability and creativity with striking characteristics that overlapped, the differences between James and Hall notwithstanding.
A massive and irreplaceable force has departed, but Hall’s sheer density of influence is likely to endure, even in unpropitious times. And if it does not . . .
Kenneth Surinteaches in the literature program at Duke University. His most recent book is Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order.
Notes
of three or four, somehow served as a pretext for surveying the “action” around oneself. Edward Thompson, who was on the faculty at nearby Warwick while his wife Dorothy taught in Birmingham’s history department, was a frequent sight as he walked across the quad, his wonderful mane of silvery hair made even more glorious when caught by the sun. Also unforgettable for me, even though I had not read him then, was Nicos Poulantzas, invited by Hall in 1976 to give some lec-tures at the Centre, who loped across the quad wrapped in a heavy scarf seem-ingly in an attempt to keep even the warmish weather at bay. His face had a look of unsparing anguish, noticeable even to our small group of lighthearted sitters on the quad.
2. Marxism Today,which existed from 1977 to 1991, was widely regarded in old-Leftist circles as the purveyor of a watered-down and “reformist” version of Marxism; indeed, for many in these circles it marked the emergence of a British post-Marxism.
3. While analytical philosophy in the main avoided addressing questions of political and social import (hence the extraordinary attention given to Rawls’s
A Theory of Justice when it appeared in 1972, a tour de force certainly, but with premises and conclusions that were banal for anyone with a left-wing bone in their body), it should be stressed that analytical philosophers were politically engaged in the opposition to Thatcher in their individual capacities. If the Marxist historians (Thompson, Hobsbawm, Samuel) and the cultural and literary theorists (Williams, Eagleton, Hall) were prominent in their opposition to Thatcher, it should be remem-bered that well-known analytical philosophers were also at the forefront of oppo-sition to Thatcher—most notably Antony Kenny, Michael Dummett, and Simon Blackburn.
4. Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e., finance minis-ter) from 1983 to 1989, described Thatcherism in the following terms: “Free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, ‘Victorian values’ (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism” (64).
In reality, of course, Lawson’s phraseology failed to indicate that markets were “freed” precisely in order to be rigged by big businesses and the financial sector; that financial discipline was always selectively imposed (Lawson himself engineered a massive pre-election boom to enhance Thatcher’s electoral prospects); that tax cuts invariably favored the rich; and, of course, privatization provided repeated opportunities for privileged interests with the appropriate political con-nections to loot the Treasury coffers.
For Hall’s writings on Thatcherism, see his collection of essays in Hall 1988. Especially significant are the essays “The Great Moving Right Show,” “Popular-Democratic versus Authoritarian Populism,” and “Gramsci and Us.” Also impor-tant is Hall and Scraton.
aligning British trade unionists with the IRA gangs in the North of Ireland: “At one end of the spectrum are the terrorist gangs within our borders and the terrorist states which arm them. At the other are the hard left, operating inside our system, conspiring to use union power and the apparatus of local government to break, defy and subvert the laws. Now the mantle has fallen on us to conserve the very principle of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law itself” (qtd. in Scraton). 6. A flavor of this old-Left sentiment regarding the primacy of “class” is to be found in Alex Callinicos’s obituary of Hall. It should, however, be acknowl-edged that Callinicos is largely complimentary in his treatment of Hall, and that he does recognize that Hall’s refusal to make class the preeminent Marxist analytical category did not entail an accompanying rejection of economicdetermination—Hall was always resolute, albeit in ways subtle and carefully qualified, in his adherence to the latter.
7. Anyone in the United States who believes the above-mentioned to be too outlandish in its depiction of fantasies regarding English identity should spend several months watching Sunday evening’s Masterpiece Theateron the American PBS channel.
Of course, one person’s identification with a dish betokening a distinctive national or regional identity may have no such significance for an outsider. The former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who oversaw Germany’s reunification, would insist on serving saumagen (stuffed pork intestine) to an unreceptive Mrs Thatcher, who was of course a strenuous opponent of German reunification. See “How Kohl’s Favourite Pig Dish Turned Mrs T’s stomach,” at http://www.theweek .co.uk/people/37711/how-kohl%E2%80%99s-favourite-pig-dish-turned-mrs-t% E2%80%99s-stomach. Some maintain that this merely reflected the burly Kohl’s “provincialism” where food tastes were concerned, but the more appropriately cynical, mindful of the unconcealed mutual antipathy between Kohl and Thatcher, were ready to discern a seeming ulterior motive on Kohl’s part.
8. Hall was not alone in this. Raymond Williams, in his classic The Country and the City, uses countless historical and literary sources to demonstrate how this idealized vision of an English identity was manufactured in ways that were often hard-fought and largely exclusionary in their intent.
9. In Hall 2000, Hall identifies at least six multiculturalisms: conservative, liberal, pluralist, commercial, corporate, and a critical or ‘revolutionary’ multicul-turalism. Hall was of course a proponent of the last-mentioned (and none of the others).
10. For Hall’s work on multiculturalism and its cognate issues, see, in addi-tion to the article menaddi-tioned in the previous footnote, Hall 1986; 1992; 1993; 1996a; 1996b; 1996c. For the phrase “without guarantees,” see Hall 1996d.
11. For Hall’s writings on the theoretical bases of cultural studies, see Hall 1980 and 1996e.
13. For this interview, see Hall 1985.
14. For these essays (and one interview on James), see Hall 1992b; 1995; 1998.
Works Cited
Blackburn, Robin. 2014. “On Stuart Hall.” New Left Review86:75–93.
Callinicos, Alex. 2014. “Stuart Hall in Perspective,” International Socialism, no. 142 (April). http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=975&issue=142#stuarthall142_12. Chen, Kuan-Hsing, and David Morley, eds. 1996. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Gilbert, Jeremy. 2014. “A Tribute to Stuart Hall.” Open Democracy, February 10. http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jeremy-gilbert/tribute-to-stuart-hall.
Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media, Culture & Society
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———. 1985. “CLR James in Conversation with Stuart Hall,” New Left Project
(blog). http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/blog_comments/clr _james_in_conversation_with_stuart_hall.
———. 1986. “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Communication Inquiry10:5–27.
———. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. Lon-don: Verso.
———. 1992a. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” In Modernity and Its Futures.
Ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, and Anthony McGrew, 274–316. Cambridge: Polity Press.
———. 1992b. “C. L. R. James: A Portrait.” in C. L. R. James’s Caribbean.Ed. Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, 3–16. Durham: Duke University Press.
———. 1993. “Culture, Community, Nation.” Cultural Studies 7:349–63.
———. 1995. “A Conversation with C. L. R. James.” InRethinking C .L. R. James: A Critical Reader.Ed. Grant Farred, 14–44. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 1996a. “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” In Questions of Cultural Iden-tity.Ed. Stuart Hall and P. du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage.
———. 1996b. “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference.” In Becoming National. Ed. Geoff Eley and R. G. Suny, 339–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1996c. “New Ethnicities.” In Chen and Morley, 441–51.
———. 1996d. “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees.” In Chen and Morley, 24–45.
———. 1996e. “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies.” In Chen and Mor-ley, 262–75.
———. 1998. “Breaking Bread with History: C. L. R. James andThe Black Jacobins,
———. 2000. “Conclusion: The Multicultural Question.” In Un/Settled Multicul-turalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions.Ed. Barne Hesse, 209–41. London: Zed Books.
Hall, Stuart, and Phil Scraton. 1981. “Law, Class and Control.” In Crime and Society: Readings in History and Theory.Ed. Mike Fitzgerald, Gregor McLennan, and Jennie Pawson, 460–97. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Jeffries, Stuart. 2014. “Stuart Hall’s Cultural Legacy: Britain under the Microscope.”
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Lawson, Nigel. 1992. The View From No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical.London: Bantam.
Morley, David, and Bill Schwarz. 2014. “Stuart Hall Obituary: Influential Cultural Theorist, Campaigner and Founding Editor of the New Left Review.”
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Scraton, Phil. 2005. “The Authoritarian Within: Reflections on Power, Knowledge and Resistance.” Inaugural Professorial Lecture, Queen’s University. http:// www.statewatch.org/news/2005/nov/phil-scraton-inaugural-lecture.pdf. Wark, McKenzie. 2014. “RIP Stuart Hall.” Public Seminar, February 10. http://
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Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williamson, Marcus. 2014. “Professor Stuart Hall: Sociologist and Pioneer in the Field of Cultural Studies Whose Work Explored the Concept of Britishness.”
