Understanding Stuart Hall

Helen Davis

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781446226063
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Antropología cultural y social

?This is the most lucid and engaged account of Stuart Hall?s work. Meticulously, and with an exemplary generosity, Helen Davis patiently unravels the threads of Hall?s intellectual history. The result is a most useful and thoughtful book, which could prove to be indispensable for students of cultural studies?

- Graeme Turner, University of Queensland

Understanding Stuart Hall traces the development of one of the most influential and respected figures within cultural studies.

Focusing on Stuart Hall?s writings over a period of nearly fifty years, this volume offers students and academics a cogent and exploratory route through complex and overlapping areas of analysis. In her critical assessment of Hall?s most important contributions to academic and public debate, Davis shows the extent to which his analyses of race and ethnicity have been informed by early studies of Marxism, class and ?societies structured in dominance?. Davis offers fresh insight into the formation of one of the most prolific, charismatic and controversial intellectuals of his generation.

Despite having been branded a ?cultural pessimist?, Stuart Hall has long been associated with encouraging new, cutting-edge scholarship within the field. This volume concludes with a discussion of Hall?s most recent political and academic interventions and his continuing commitment to innovation within the visual arts.

1

encountering the mother country

The story in my family which was always told as a joke, was that when I was born, my sister, who was much fairer than I, looked into the crib and she said, ‘where did you get this coolie baby from?’ (Hall, quoted in Morley and Chen, 1996: 485)

introduction

Stuart Hall was born in 1932 into a middle-class family living in the suburbs of Kingston, Jamaica. The youngest of three children he was noticeably ‘blacker’ than his siblings. This marker of difference within the family was an early signal for Hall that his family was not a straightforward homogenous entity. As with many families of Hall’s generation it was not unusual for members of the same family to have different skin tones. The marriage of different classes resulted in an intermixing of plantation-colonial and Jamaican blood. The idea of pure Jamaican ancestry however is a misnomer since the lower middle-class origins of his father described by Hall were distilled from many ethnic backgrounds such as Portuguese, Indian, African and Jewish. Race and class are not therefore encountered by Hall as foundational or distinct categories for identification. Hall instead experienced Jamaica as a hybrid culture that was highly race and class conscious. The tensions between the local, largely black and impoverished population and the middle-classes did not necessarily broker an understanding of their shared colonised situation, particularly as the middle-class families tended to identify with the colonising powers. Hall describes his growing-up in Kingston as a series of continuing negotiations of these different cultural spaces.

negotiating class and colour

As a young adult, Hall had no wish to kowtow to the colonial establishment. This provoked arguments with his father who was keen for his son to benefit from mixing with the expatriate community. ‘My father wanted me to play sport . . . He was negotiating his way into this world. He was accepted on sufferance by the English. I could see the way they patronised him’ (Morley and Chen, 1996: 485). Committed to the politics of an independent Jamaica, Hall’s choice of friends did not please his parents but they were at least agreed on him making the journey to England in 1951 to study at Oxford. In the fifties, a Jamaican student had to travel to Britain or the United States to gain a university education. Hall was a bright student. The scholarship to Merton College was an enormous privilege. For his mother in particular this move away was a kind of home-coming since she always harboured deep feelings for England as the ‘mother-country’. Hall’s experience of Oxford, however, confirmed in him a sense of familiar disjunction. Though English culture was well known to him, Hall understood he was not, and never could be, English. This experience is what he has termed ‘diasporic’, suggesting a continual negotiation between the situation of exile/loss and arrival/acceptance. Hall’s experience of Merton College confirmed his sense of unease with the dominant culture of the university.

Hall took refuge in the society of friends and colleagues whose interests lay beyond the scope of college life. His first three years were devoted to studies of literature and the pursuit of Caribbean politics. Yet rather than return home, he chose to remain, becoming increasingly involved in the origins of a movement in British politics that would have profound effects on the evolution of radical and left-wing politics in general. This movement became known as the New Left. Hall’s close circle of friendships with fellow black students intent on reform and Caribbean independence was further enlarged by his contact with fellow Rhodes scholars, the Labour Club, and people within the Communist Party. Though never a member himself, Hall met to debate interpretations of Marxism with Communist members, while continuing to oppose imperialism and Stalinism. It was during this time that Hall met, among others, Raymond Williams, Raphael Samuel, Richard Hoggart and Charles Taylor. Williams encouraged Hall to get involved in the adult education movement in Oxford and as a result Hall taught extra-mural classes for many years. These friendships were intensely formative for Stuart Hall and provided him with a strong supportive community beyond the scope of college life. Many years later, on the occasion of Raphael Samuel’s untimely death, Hall wrote movingly of his friend’s passionate intellect and political activism. Hall describes spending ‘many long hours together reading proofs and arguing in the kitchen’ (1997: 122) in the house in Jericho he shared with Samuel, and attributes many of the early New Left initiatives to his friend. Their student house became the nerve centre of the first New Left. With art students from Ruskin lodged in the attic and a jazz band in the basement, this was an alternative space far removed from the formalities of high table and official college activities.

Having won a second scholarship that would enable him to undertake postgraduate work, Hall was soon to be shaken by the world political events that were unfolding. In the summer of 1956, Russia invaded Hungary. Later the same year, an Anglo-French force was despatched to Egypt to regain control of the Suez canal. Hall had travelled down to Cornwall with some friends for the summer. Williams had given him a couple of chapters of Culture and Society to read as Hall was planning to write a book with Alan Hall about the changing face of British culture. All that changed however when news broke of events in Hungary. The enormity of the situation could not go unacknowledged. It now became imperative for Hall and his peers to find a way of mounting an oppositional stance. ‘The world turned. That was the formation, the moment of the New Left’ (Morley and Chen, 1996: 493). British Communists were confronted by the appalling truth that Russia was in fact realising its own imperial aims in the most bloody and overt manner. The Suez crisis provoked international outrage and condemnation. Britain was forced to withdraw and renounce its claims to Egyptian territory. It was a blow to the Empire. It was also the moment when the New Left was born.

the new left

The New Left was formed as a response to the deepening crisis facing socialists, communists and other leftwing activists. When Khruschev addressed the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, he spoke of the Stalinist purges that had been an integral feature of communist rule. The shock was profound, though for many communists it did not come entirely as a surprise. The system, which had appeared to offer Eastern Europeans a radical alternative to Capitalism, had instead been an instrument of repression and terror. This realisation, coupled with Russia’s territorial claim on Hungary, led to a deep political and moral crisis for Communists everywhere. Hall had never been a member of the Communist Party and was therefore spared much of the disillusionment and confusion that beset many of his friends and colleagues at the time. But he was profoundly sensitive to their predicament and the political ramifications of these events.

When Britain and France tried to reclaim the Suez Canal from the newly independent Egypt, the United States joined with the rest of the world in condemning this imperial act of aggression. These world events engendered in Hall, Thompson, Williams and others, a radical reappraisal of the realities of the post-war settlement. How could socialism function in the modern world? What new subject positions were emerging as a result of national and international politics? What was the role and function of the British Labour Party in the midst of such upheaval? How could socialism best serve the interests of so many disparate and newly enfranchised groups within society? Though their primary focus was Britain, the New Left were also internationalists, drawing their ideas, theories and examples from a broad range of perspectives.

Encouraged by Raphael Samuel,¹ Hall, Samuel, Taylor, and Pearson set up the journal Universities and Left Review, one of the precursors to New Left Review. The publication was energetic and eclectic, pulling together both new and established writers and commentators. Hall introduced Raymond Williams to Richard Hoggart, thereby initiating an important debate concerning the post-war conditions of working-class education and leisure.² ULR emerged under the watchful eye of the other New Left journal, the New Reasoner. Edward Thompson, the editor of the New Reasoner, was suspicious of ULR’s approach and content. Unlike the New Reasoner, the editors and writers of ULR were more concerned to adopt and adapt new and existing models in order to explore socialism’s relationship to contemporary culture. Having broken with Stalinist Communism, Thompson was intent on reconstructing a socialism which was both historically materialist and ethical. There is no doubt that the ethical intentions of both journals constituted a consensual approach across the New Left. However, it was the theoretical differences between the two journals that would provoke debate and uncertainty.

By 1957 Hall had given up his thesis on Henry James and left Oxford to teach in south London. On their removal to London, the over-subscribed meetings of the Universities and Left Review club inspired the Club’s committee to create links up and down the country. Hall’s memories of some of Raphael’s initiatives give a vivid insight to the New Left counter-culture which started to evolve at that time.

The idea of calling a meeting of journal readers in London to hear [Issac] Deutscher speak – the beginning of the New Left Club movement – was also his [Samuel], as was the layout of the room we hired for the occasion in a Bloomsbury hotel: casually arranged for informal political exchange around tables for about sixty people, in a style, he assured us, somewhere between the Parisian Left Bank café and the inter-war Berlin cabaret scene. When we returned from a leisurely Indian meal, 700 people were standing impatiently in a queue outside. (Hall, 1997: 121)

In the face of such overwhelming demand, Hall and his colleagues committed themselves to the establishment of regional centres, which would help to recruit new readers and organise local groups. The journal sought to unite political activism with popular culture by hosting and advertising music and dance events. Thus the journal’s editors envisaged leftwing activism as firmly embedded within ordinary social and cultural practice. In addition, they thought it was imperative to maintain a critical intellectual outlook. The editors were young and eschewed any sense of hierarchy. The number of activities organised and promoted by the journal escalated as the New Left gained increasing momentum. At one stage they even started up a ‘postespresso left-wing coffee house’ in Carlisle Street as a means of financing Soho premises for the journal. Raphael was in charge of the food; ‘Old-fashioned pea soup ... Borscht... Irish peasant stew ... Baked Yorkshire ham with sauce Cumberland.... Boiled Surrey Fowl with parsley sauce and Patna rice [ ] Apple dumplings with hot lemon sauce ... Whitechapel cheese-cake and pastries ... Vienna coffee.... café filtre ... Russian tea.’ (Hall, 1997: 122).

During this time Hall travelled all over Britain attending New Left club events, sleeping on friends’ sofas and talking politics till the early hours. His friendship with Edward and Dorothy Thompson resulted in many visits to their house in Halifax, en route to meetings up and down the country. Hall even joined the Labour Party, attending regular meetings of the Clapham Branch. However he found canvassing extremely difficult. ‘I couldn’t say “we”. I couldn’t speak from inside the experience’.³ As a middle-class Jamaican, Hall was struck by the absurdity of his situation. He had no desire to return to the middle-class role awaiting him in Jamaica.⁴ Nor could he in all conscience try and re-invent himself as a member of the British working class. His vision of socialism was much more broad and inclusive than that being proffered by Labour at that time and he was frustrated by the absence of genuine analytical debate within the Party. By contrast, the New Left engendered debate and controversy that impacted on Labour Party policies, yet was mercifully free from the bureaucracy of electioneering. Hall allowed his membership to lapse in 1964 on his move to Birmingham.

Meanwhile the editors of The New Reasoner had concerns for the future of their journal. Edward Thompson and John Saville were suffering from chronic overload. Thompson felt that ULR ignored many of the centrally important issues concerning the re-articulation of a core Socialist philosophy governed by Marxist theory. It seemed to him that the eclectic and broadly Socialist agenda of ULR seemed to undermine that endeavour. The Universities and New Left Review was also facing an economic crisis of its own. Over the next two years, the editorial boards of both journals debated the prospect of a new journal which would satisfy the needs and vision of all concerned. Amid much prevarication and mutual suspicion, the New Left Review was launched in December 1959 with Hall as editor.

Within an increasingly fractious and divisive environment, Hall edited the journal virtually single-handed from 1959 to 1960, cycling from school into Soho of an evening. He also commuted to Tunbridge Wells every Friday night to teach evening classes in literature. Within six months of his appointment, Hall was looking to quit his role as editor. Subjected to increasing criticisms from certain members of the editorial board and some vocal representatives from the regional clubs, Hall found himself in an impossible situation. Frustration gave way to exhaustion and exasperation. From the beginning, Thompson expressed disappointment in the content and style of the journal. Following a debacle at the journal’s joint conference in 1961, Hall set about trying to design a new structure to suit everybody. However, at the next editorial meeting, Saville resigned from the board. Hall resigned and an emergency ‘caretaker’ team comprising Raphael Samuel, Dennis Butt and Perry Anderson took on editorial responsibility. Anderson would subsequently go on to edit the journal for many years, taking it into a wholly different terrain, bitterly contested by Thompson. By 1962 however, Hall was immersed in teaching at Chelsea Arts College. He also continued to work within adult education during this period, commuting to Maidstone in Kent on a weekly basis.

a sense of classlessness

Though Hall’s early work from these years is less well known than his later analyses, it does warrant close examination. Given the contemporary nature of Cultural Studies, it can be tempting sometimes to eschew events and issues that have become part of the historical backdrop. To adopt such a position may result from two inter-related assumptions. First that the modern reader is totally familiar with the background, and second that the issues or events are already so well rehearsed, that further analytic excavation is completely unnecessary. I agree with Kenny however, who argues that in the case of Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams, ‘this period in their intellectual careers has generally been underplayed’ (1995: 2). Kenny (1995) offers an extremely readable and incisive history of the New Left’s formation as well as its impact and the legacies of New Left thinking in British politics. Central to Kenny’s analysis is the importance of the New Left in re-orienting British Labour politics away from its more traditional Communist and Labourist roots towards a more inclusive leftwing politics.

In particular, scant attention has been paid to the possibility that the movement prefigured the shift to a more diverse and counterpolitical politics akin to the radical currents which emerged in British political life, such as feminism, environmentalism and anti-racism, in the 1970s and 1980s. (Kenny, 1995: 14)

Given the diversity of views and allegiances within the movement, it comes as no surprise that the early articles and papers were the setting for many hotly contested debates. The New Left was concerned to challenge Labour Party and Communist Party orthodoxies in its search for a practical and meaningful socialism. This necessarily caused some disquiet and argument between members of the movement. Hall’s piece, ‘A sense of classlessness’, published in 1958 is just such an attack. It demonstrates Hall’s keen engagement with what he identifies as the post-war shifts and accommodations in spending and consumerism in relation to high levels of unemployment. He takes as his main thesis the uneven patterns of progress, change and stability within the physical environment of working-class Londoners. Work, leisure and consumption cannot be easily separated. He yokes together Marx’s theory of alienation and the cons...