Stuart Hall

James Procter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134504244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Stuart Hall is one of the biggest names in Cultural Studies and one of the most important thinkers of the latter twentieth century This is the first comprehensive account of Halls' thinking and legacy Stuart Hall is studied on English and cultural studies courses all over the world

1

DECONSTRUCTING THE ‘POPULAR’

Over the past forty years, Stuart Hall and the project of cultural studies have worked to disrupt traditional definitions of what consti- tutes culture, helping to transform popular culture into an area of serious, even ‘popular’ academic enquiry. Where the study of culture within universities was once notable for the extent to which it excluded the popular, the culture of cultural studies is almost entirely dedicated to the study of popular culture.

Before getting carried away with such neat inversions, however, it is important to temper them with Hall’s distinctive take on the popular, which is less about elevating popular culture to a high acad- emic status, than with unsettling the very distinction between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture. For Hall, popular culture is not a serious issue because of the ‘profound’ intellectual questions it raises but, first and foremost, because he believes popular culture is the site at which everyday struggles between dominant and subordinate groups are fought, won and lost. This, he has said, is ‘why popular culture matters. Otherwise to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it’ (NDP: 239).

In Hall’s view the popular is not a ‘thing’ we can confidently point to, like a can of Coke on the supermarket shelf; it can only be under- stood in relation to the cultural forces within which it is caught at any particular moment. This makes the popular an exceedingly difficult concept to define or pin down. As Hall has noted in this context, the term ‘popular’ raises nearly as many problems for him as ‘culture’, but when they are brought together ‘the difficulties can be pretty hor- rendous’ (NDP: 227). The two words seem to contradict and estrange one another. Culture is what we find in art galleries, museums and universities; the popular in shopping malls, on television or in the pub. Soap operas are popular culture; the opera is culture.

CULTURE

The Welsh literary critic Raymond Williams (see Chapter 2), once said that culture is ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (Williams 1977: 76). He went on to note that while it ori- ginally referred to the cultivation of crops and animals (as in agri-culture), since the late nineteenth century culture has referred primarily to the arts: literature, ballet, painting, theatre. In spite of their differences, both defin- itions share particular connotations. Cultivation is associated with improve- ment, taming, making civilised – qualities frequently associated with the arts: we don’t just read for pleasure, we do it because it ‘improves’ us. Of course many would argue it depends what we are reading. Stephen King might give us pleasure but he does not ‘cultivate’ us in the way Jane Austen does. Culture is not any old thing according to this perspective: it is short- hand for ‘high’ culture as opposed to popular culture.

This is how culture was understood by a number of influential conser- vative artists and critics in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with the ‘culture and civilization’ tradition: Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis. Broadly, these critics argued that culture needed defending from the popular cultural forms associated with the rise of industrial society and methods of mass production. The ‘culture and civilization’ tradition saw culture as, in Arnold’s phrase, ‘the best that had been thought and said’ and associated popular culture ominously with ‘anarchy’. While critics like Q.D. Leavis wrote about popular culture, they did so in order to condemn its debasement of an older, pre-industrial tradition, nostalgically evoked through the phrase ‘organic community’. As Hall has noted within this context, ‘High culture versus popular culture was, for many years, the classic way of framing the debate about culture– the terms carrying powerfully evaluative charge (roughly, high = good; popular = debased)’ (R: 2).

Such distinctions rely upon a conventional definition of the popular as the opposite of high culture. However, according to Hall, the pop- ular ‘can never be simplified or explained in terms of the simple binary oppositions that are still used to habitually map it out: high and low; resistance versus incorporation; authentic versus inauthentic, experi- ential versus formal; opposition versus homogenization’ (WTB: 470).

In order to understand how Hall unsettles such habitual opposi- tions now, we need to establish why the popular became the focus of his thinking in the first place. Hall’s earliest research was conducted as a PhD student at Oxford University where he began writing a thesis on the classic American novelist Henry James. Both his chosen insti- tution and research topic could hardly be further away from the popular forms – television, the tabloid press, cinema, photography, youth and black subcultures – which became the raw materials of his subsequent research and for which he is today famous. So what made Hall start to take something as apparently ‘light’ and superficial as popular culture so seriously? More importantly perhaps, why should we ? In order to answer these questions, this chapter traces the devel- opment of Hall’s thinking on popular culture from his earliest, ‘pre-cultural studies’ writings in New Left Review , through his first book, The Popular Arts (1964) to his more radical deconstruction of ‘the popular’ in the 1980s and early 1990s.

POSTWAR BRITAIN AND THE NEW LEFT

Transformations taking place in postwar British culture of the 1950s provide the single most important context for an understanding of Stuart Hall’s early thinking on popular culture. Improved technology and the revival of the economy after the Second World War saw a rapid expansion and development in popular forms such as cinema, radio and print culture. As the nation’s wealth and leisure time increased and the costs, due to mass production, decreased, people could afford television, radio, music, pulp fiction, magazines and films, on a level that would have been unimaginable before or during the war. Full employment and wage increases meant that the work- ing classes were among the main ‘beneficiaries’ of these cultural and economic changes. The primary producers within society were trans- formed by postwar capitalist society to become key consumers.

The new climate of consumerism in postwar Britain was a blow to the traditional Left. It challenged their faith in the idea that it would be the workers who would unite and rise up to create a socialist society. While the 1950s saw the Conservative Party thrive under a slogan that celebrated postwar prosperity (‘you’ve never had it so good’), the Labour Party, defeated in all three general elections of the 1950s, lost touch with its traditional constituency and the Left entered a period of crisis.

It was with this crisis that Hall engaged in the 1950s and 1960s through a series of articles on politics, literature and education published mainly in New Left Review. In these articles, Hall and the other contributors worked to subject the new consumer society, and the popular cultural forms and lifestyles associated with it, to serious analysis, rather than simply repudiate them, as the traditional Left had tended to do.

Though politically active (it shared strong links with the CND movement) and eager to attract ‘grassroots’ support (it opened 39 Labour clubs across Britain), the first New Left was, at times, criti-cised for being more of a cultural than a political movement. While there are grounds for such criticism, to suggest that the New Left rep-resented a retreat from politics into culture is, in a sense, to miss the point. One of the main aims and contributions of the New Left was to demonstrate that popular culture is itself political and that the refusal of the traditional Left to take so-called ‘cultural politics’ (that is, culture as politics) seriously, explained declining support for the Labour Party after the war.

Hall has outlined three reasons for wishing to place the analysis of culture at the centre of politics in the 1950s and early 1960s:

First, because it was in the cultural and ideological domain that social change appeared to be making itself most dramatically visible. Second, because the cultural dimension seemed to us not a secondary, but a constitutive dimension of society (this reflects part of the New Left’s long-standing quarrel with the reductionism and economism of the base– superstructure metaphor.) Third, because the discourse of culture seemed to us fundamentally necessary to any language in which socialism could be redescribed.

(FNL: 25)

THE NEW LEFT

Taking its name from the French nouvelle gauche movement, the New Left emerged in Oxford in 1956 with Stuart Hall as a founding member. The year 1956 is significant as it was the year in which the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and Britain invaded Suez: the movement was ‘new’ in terms of its decisive break with the communist and colonial politics asso- ciated with those two events. Hall has summed up his politics at this time as ‘anti-imperialist’ (FNL: 15) while noting elsewhere that, of the socialists who came together to form the New Left, ‘there was not an Englishman [ sic ] among us’ (TWI: 96; see also FNL: 19–20).

The New Left’s formation was the result of a merger between two former journals and intellectual groups: the Reasoner group (comprising ex-communists) and the Universities and Left Review group (co-edited by Hall and comprising Oxford University students). The result was a new bi-monthly journal, New Left Review , which Hall edited until his departure in 1961. The New Left brought into dialogue some of the key British intel- lectuals of the postwar period, many of whom would later be associated with cultural studies, such as E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Perry Anderson and Raphael Samuel. There was certainly no easy consensus of opinion within the New Left, and Hall’s departure was precipitated by differences with former Reasoner , E.P. Thompson. However, the move- ment shared a commitment to addressing economic changes after the war which had transformed working-class culture irrevocably, but which had been ignored by the Labour Party and the traditional Left.

After Hall’s departure, Perry Anderson became editor of the New Left Review and the journal took on a more theoretical/intellectual inflexion. The group began an important project of translation, making available the work of a range of now classic Marxist intellectuals (e.g. Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Theodor W. Adorno and György Lukács) for the first time within the New Left Books (later Verso) series. While Hall followed these New Left developments closely from the CCCS and contributed, with Williams and Thompson, to the seminal May Day Manifesto of 1968, he tends to distinguish his own early New Left participation by referring to it in terms of the ‘first’ New Left.

The prioritising of culture by Hall was founded upon a critique of Karl Marx’s base–superstructure metaphor, which reduced culture to a secondary reflection of economic conditions.

A SENSE OF CLASSLESSNESS

In New Left essays like ‘A sense of classlessness’ (1958), Hall rejected Marx’s reductive notion of culture as a passive, secondary, reflection in order to stress its active, primary, constitutive role in society. The essay considers the implications of the increased access to com- modities and consumerism within working-class culture following the postwar economic boom. The main thrust of Hall’s argument is that these popular cultural transformations have not seen class differences disappear, as was commonly assumed. Rather ‘classless- ness’ is an ideological effect of the new consumer culture, a sense that increasing access to commodities and consumer culture has released the working classes from a prior state of poverty:

The purpose of a great deal of advertising... is to condition the worker to the new possibilities for consumption, to break down the class resistances to consumer-purchase which became part of working class consciousness in an earlier period. This is known in the world of advertising as ‘sales resistance’. (‘When you buy your second car, make sure it’s a Morris’.)

(ASC: 29)

By appealing directly to a classless you , the Morris advert (and adver- tising in general) ‘conditions’, constructs or positions its reader as consumer. This ideological ‘positioning’ was later referred to by the French Marxist, Louis Althusser (see Chapter 2) as interpellation , a concept that describes how ideology works by making us feel we are free to choose while actually choosing on our behalf. A common-sense take on consumer society might be that it gives us greater freedom of choice, ‘will I buy a Morris, or something else?’. However, this freedom of choice is only granted if we take up the (ideological) posi- tion of ‘consumer’ in the first place. Hall suggests that such a position is far from innocent. The personal pronoun ‘you’ constructs the worker as a freely choosing individual rather than a communal member of the working class. Such adverts erode class alliances and, therefore, the possibility of resistance.

IDEOLOGY AND THE BASE–SUPERSTRUCTURE METAPHOR

German philosopher, Karl Marx (1818–83) argued that economics was the key determining factor in society. In his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) he used the, now famous, architectural metaphor, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ to argue the economy is ‘the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure’. The economic foundation, or ‘base’ (e.g. capitalism), determines the ‘super- structure’ (which includes cultural production such as film, literature and music). Cultural products are ‘ideological’ because they reflect or express the values of the economic base and, therefore, the dominant culture of society.

A weak definition of ideology might describe it as the shared beliefs and values of a particular community. Here, we might speak of the George Bush administration in the US in terms of those ideas, policies and polit- ical aspirations associated with his government. The problem with such a definition is that it implies ideology is a conscious position that we are freely capable of accepting or rejecting by, for example, voting or protesting against it. Marx suggests ideology is more like ‘false conscious- ness’ in that it conceals from us ‘our real conditions of existence’. Following Marx’s logic, the average Hollywood film might be said to repro- duce, at a superstructural level, ideologies determined by the capitalist economic base. Its strong emphasis on ‘closure’, the symbolic resolution of social tensions and differences at the film’s end, helps maintain the status quo by diverting our attention from the actual social tensions and inequalities produced by capitalism.

There are a number of problems with this orthodox Marxist reading of culture and ideology. It cannot explain why, for instance, a number of successful Hollywood films appear critical of prevailing economic condi- tions. Nor can it account for the fact that film audiences are not necessarily in a state of ‘false consciousness’, ‘tricked’ by the formulaic Hollywood ending: that they may be actively critical of such endings, or that their pleasure may derive from the very recognition of the Hollywood formula, for instance.

Crucially, however, Hall differs from Marx in his argument that popular cultural forms like advertising are not simply a secondary reflection of the economic base but, as he put it earlier, ‘constitutive of society’. The base is not singularly ‘economic’ according to ‘A sense of classlessness’, but is comprised of ‘constituent factors’ (cultural, social, political) none of which should be privileged and all of which help determine the superstructure. For Hall, the relation- ship between base and superstructure is not rigid or one way and he calls for a ‘freer play’ between them. The superstructure determines the base as much as the other way round.

In short, where the so-called ‘vulgar’ Marxist would argue eco- nomics determines cultural production (‘economic determinism’), Hall, along with other ‘New Left’ intellectuals, argues that cultural production also determines the social and economic climate...