MARXISM WITHOUT GUARANTEES WHAT I LEARN (1)
“MARXISM, WITHOUT GUARANTEES”
WHAT I LEARNED FROM STUART HALL
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 certainly not sunny on the surface, but there is still before us the formidable, albeit posthumous, instance of Stuart Hall—an always-bracing
presence, at all times combining a gravity in his analyses with an unstoppable 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 kidney transplant, in the two decades before his death).
I was at Birmingham from 1972 to 1977 doing my PhD in philosophy and theology. On most days it was possible to see this stylish
black man (the only one on the faculty as I recall)—usually wearing
Cultural Critique 89—Winter 2015—Copyright 2015 Regents of the University of Minnesota
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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.1 Hall was director of the Centre of
Contemporary Cultural Studies, whose remit was a source of puzzlement 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.
Hall had a reputation, which transcended departmental boundaries, as a rivetingly charismatic lecturer, and he did give the occasional open lecture, a couple of which I attended. But at that point
in my intellectual formation, with a first degree in analytical philosophy, plodding now with a zig-zagging passion through a narrowly
focused dissertation on the ontological argument for the existence
of God using the semantics of modal logic, I had no real reference
points for engaging with the intellectual agendas associated with Hall,
even though I was in complete agreement with the essence of his politics. Toward the end of my time at Birmingham, as a respite from
reading (ah, that endless bibliography!) Quine, Saul Kripke, David
Lewis, Richard Montague, Alvin Plantinga, Richmond Thomason,
Nino B. Cocchiarella, Richard Routley (who changed his name to
Richard Sylvan when he abandoned quantified modal logic for environmental philosophy), Jaakko Hintikka, Stig Kanger (a pioneering modal logician in his 50s from Helsinki who gave a talk to our
philosophy department; he was a very dignified grandfatherly figure
with shoulder-length gray hair, dressed in what looked like a pale blue
spacesuit with boots of the same color, a veritable prefiguration of Gary
Numen and Devo in the post-punk movement of a decade later—did
they know that a great Finnish logician was their precursor in fashion?), and others, I read with absolute fascination Adorno’s Minima
Moralia and Martin Jay’s intellectual history of the early Frankfurt
School at the instigation of Rex Ambler, the much-loved but at times
bewilderingly eclectic Quaker theologian in Birmingham’s theology
department.
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KENNETH SURIN
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 surviving the caprices of the British external examiner system—that not a
single aspect of my PhD work addressed the social and political questions 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 compromise between labor and capital. Hall never made an explicit repudiation of Benn’s militantly socialist platform, though it was clear from
Hall’s close affiliation with the journal Marxism Today that he believed
that this Bennite socialist platform, with its statist underpinnings, was
already being superseded by the existing political conjuncture.2
The soon-to-be terminal crisis of this postwar concordat between
labor and capital, and the seemingly rapid emergence of its Thatcherite
successor, signaled the necessity for new modes of description and
analysis, as well as alerting those of us on the Left to the need for an
invention of forms of opposition perhaps not seen since the General
Strike of 1926 and the Great Depression (these were to occur in the
year-long miners’ strike in 1984, in which Thatcher prevailed largely
by turning the police into a paramilitary army; and the 1990 riots over
the so-called poll tax, which prompted Thatcher’s party to dismiss her
as its leader).3 With the exception of the 1984 miners’ strike and the
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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 generation of Britons, many of whom would probably now say that the
Falklands are somewhere off the coast of Scotland next to the Shetlands) 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 neutralize 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 philosophical aspects of theology, and having abandoned analytical philosophy, 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 anything 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
gleichschaltung. Hall had, since his arrival in the UK in the early 1950s,
always been interested in issues of public import (the CND campaigns
and marches of the early 1950s in which he took part; the Vietnam
War; racism in Birmingham, especially in the borough of Handsworth, where the neofascist National Front used to hold rallies as a
provocation to its overwhelmingly Afro-Caribbean residents). This
prior activity on Hall’s part notwithstanding, Thatcher’s emergence
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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 sensing, 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 political 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
“Thatcherism” even before Thatcher was elected. He was soon recognized as the foremost analyst of the intellectual-cultural formation 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 installed in a position of official primacy where the economy was concerned, in the UK and United States, and not just in the Pinochet-ruled
Chile admired by Friedman), along with an atavistic social authoritarianism, as evidenced by Thatcher’s braying refrain “We need a return
to Victorian values,” and so on.4
Before anything is said about Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism, it
has to be noted that in addition to dealing with Thatcherism and its
legacies, Hall’s richly varied purview included the key topics of our
time: cultural coding, policing, implicit racism, immigration and diaspora, the role of television, neoliberalism—and this is only skimming
the surface. The reader who followed his treatment of these topics
soon realized that while Hall eschewed an explicit systematicity in
his presentation of this material, there was nonetheless a powerfully
implicit coherence in his work: the treatment of Thatcherism was therefore inextricably bound up with the analyses he provided of cultural
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coding, policing, implicit racism, “moral panics,” immigration, neoliberalism, 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”);5 there 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 instruments of the state to defend or advance interests based on class and
class positions. Instead, he suggested, the Left had to promote a populism 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 argument being that any expanded politics of the kind proposed by Hall
would require bringing together heterogeneous groups and movements that were unlikely to cohere into any kind of effective longerterm bloc), and on the other hand, by stalwarts of the old Left who
were dismayed by what they perceived as Hall’s demotion or abandonment of “class” as an analytical category in what was ostensibly a
Marxist assessment of Thatcher’s UK.6
But today five virtually uninterrupted decades of the Thatcherite
hegemony—the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
having merely embedded her neoliberal policies while giving them a
less bellicose visage, as Blair’s rictus smile replaced Thatcher’s hectoring snarl on television screens—have in the main proved Hall right.
The mobilization undertaken by Thatcher exploited, shrewdly, the
complex fractures and dissents emerging in the British body politic
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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 opposition 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.
Many of the key ruptures and transformations associated with the
collapse of the Keynesian compromise were only tenuously connected
with class and explicit class positions. Thatcher and her backers realized, for instance, as Reagan and his promoters did in the United
States, that repeated invocations of “patriotism” and “striving to earn
your way,” when delivered with the appropriate rhetorical pitch and
the requisite symbolism (the fictional Reaganite “welfare queen”
demonized for picking up her checks in a Cadillac; the Thatcherite
equivalent being the equally mythical “chappie on the dole” with
a Jaguar and small yacht on a trailer parked in front of his rentsubsidized council house), served to dragoon significant fractions of
the working class into voting against their own economic interests.
The essence of this class-dividing strategy is reflected in the words
one of Reagan’s slogans, used by supporters of Mitt Romney in the
2012 presidential election: “I believe the best social program is a job.”
This catchphrase—indicating that taking a job with miserable pay that
made one a veritable serf could somehow obviate the need for a welfare state—also represented the quintessence of Thatcherism, even as
she espoused policies that destroyed the industrial base that was the
massive core of working-class employment in the UK. Overcoming
this Thatcherite hegemony was clearly going to require a countermobilization on a comparable scale. So far, alas, no such countermobilization on the part of the Left has been forthcoming, as, at the time of
writing, the Labour Party, led by Ed Miliband, trails behind the ruling Conservatives in some opinion polls with the next general election due to take place in May 2015.
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Hall always worked with an extensive and varied theoretical
palette, as evinced by his analysis of Thatcherism. His range of interests 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 “multiculturalism,” 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, handbags, 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 collective 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 (anthropologists from Lévi-Strauss to Jack Goody have alerted us to the
centrality of food as a decisive marker of cultural and social demarcations and identifications) 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 anachronistic sentimentalism, which naturalized and concealed the very mechanisms of interpellation served by such rose-hued invocations of a
“merrie olde England.”8 In acknowledging, correctly of course, that
the UK has always taken many more multifarious, less overt, and often
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troubled paths when dealing with questions of national and ethnic
identity, Hall quickly decided that there is more than one species of
multiculturalism.9 The one that grabs the headlines—with its sometimes 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, without resorting to the self-defeating means espoused by single-issue constituencies 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 all identities
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 supplemented by the insertion of a smiling turbaned Sikh or beaming dreadlocked Rastafarian.10
The above sketch is unavoidably incomplete, and vastly so. Nothing 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.11 Nothing has been said about the unflagging energy and verve with which he inaugurated and sustained collaborative projects, from giving the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies its distinctive approach both methodologically and pedagogically, to the founding editorship of the New Left Review, to his participation 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 groundbreaking 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
I met Hall once, in the early 1990s, and we had a conversation
about C. L. R. James (we had contributed to the same volume on James
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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.13 Hall also wrote essays on James.14 It 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 Marxist 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 socialism, 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 Surin teaches in the literature program at Duke University.
His most recent book is Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World
Order.
Notes
1. The main quad at Birmingham was, in those days (and probably still is),
a favorite spot for many who escaped, or pretended to escape, the library fronting
it when there was a vestige of pale sunshine. The reading of books, often in circles
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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 lectures at the Centre, who loped across the quad wrapped in a heavy scarf seemingly 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 remembered that well-known analytical philosophers were also at the forefront of opposition to Thatcher—most notably Antony Kenny, Michael Dummett, and Simon
Blackburn.
4. Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e., finance minister) 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 connections 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,” “PopularDemocratic versus Authoritarian Populism,” and “Gramsci and Us.” Also important is Hall and Scraton.
5. The following segment from one of Thatcher’s speeches (delivered on
November 25, 1984) conveys the tone she used on such occasions where undertaking an Althusserian “interpellation” was clearly her task at hand, this time
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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 acknowledged 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 economic determination—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 Theater on 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’ multiculturalism. 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 addition to the article mentioned 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.
12. All of these, and more, are documented in the many obituaries of Hall.
See, for instance, Blackburn; Morley and Schwarz; Williamson; Jeffries 2014; Gilbert
2014; and Wark 2014.
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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 Review 86:75–93.
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-tostuart-hall.
Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media, Culture & Society
2:57–72.
———. 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 Inquiry 10:5–27.
———. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: 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.” In Rethinking C .L. R. James: A
Critical Reader. Ed. Grant Farred, 14–44. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 1996a. “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” In Questions of Cultural Identity. 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 Morley, 262–75.
———. 1998. “Breaking Bread with History: C. L. R. James and The Black Jacobins,
Stuart Hall Interviewed by Bill Schwarz.” History Workshop Journal 46:17–31.
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———. 2000. “Conclusion: The Multicultural Question.” In Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: 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.”
Guardian, February 10. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/feb/
10/stuart-hall-cultural-legacy-britain-godfather-multiculturalism.
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.”
Guardian, February 10. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/10
/stuart-hall.
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://
www.publicseminar.org/2014/02/rip-stuart-hall/#.U3p7Q_ldW7.
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.”
Independent, February 11. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/
professor-stuart-hall-sociologist-and-pioneer-in-the-field-of-cultural
-studies-whose-work-explored-the-concept-of-britishness-9120126.html.
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WHAT I LEARNED FROM STUART HALL
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 certainly not sunny on the surface, but there is still before us the formidable, albeit posthumous, instance of Stuart Hall—an always-bracing
presence, at all times combining a gravity in his analyses with an unstoppable 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 kidney transplant, in the two decades before his death).
I was at Birmingham from 1972 to 1977 doing my PhD in philosophy and theology. On most days it was possible to see this stylish
black man (the only one on the faculty as I recall)—usually wearing
Cultural Critique 89—Winter 2015—Copyright 2015 Regents of the University of Minnesota
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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.1 Hall was director of the Centre of
Contemporary Cultural Studies, whose remit was a source of puzzlement 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.
Hall had a reputation, which transcended departmental boundaries, as a rivetingly charismatic lecturer, and he did give the occasional open lecture, a couple of which I attended. But at that point
in my intellectual formation, with a first degree in analytical philosophy, plodding now with a zig-zagging passion through a narrowly
focused dissertation on the ontological argument for the existence
of God using the semantics of modal logic, I had no real reference
points for engaging with the intellectual agendas associated with Hall,
even though I was in complete agreement with the essence of his politics. Toward the end of my time at Birmingham, as a respite from
reading (ah, that endless bibliography!) Quine, Saul Kripke, David
Lewis, Richard Montague, Alvin Plantinga, Richmond Thomason,
Nino B. Cocchiarella, Richard Routley (who changed his name to
Richard Sylvan when he abandoned quantified modal logic for environmental philosophy), Jaakko Hintikka, Stig Kanger (a pioneering modal logician in his 50s from Helsinki who gave a talk to our
philosophy department; he was a very dignified grandfatherly figure
with shoulder-length gray hair, dressed in what looked like a pale blue
spacesuit with boots of the same color, a veritable prefiguration of Gary
Numen and Devo in the post-punk movement of a decade later—did
they know that a great Finnish logician was their precursor in fashion?), and others, I read with absolute fascination Adorno’s Minima
Moralia and Martin Jay’s intellectual history of the early Frankfurt
School at the instigation of Rex Ambler, the much-loved but at times
bewilderingly eclectic Quaker theologian in Birmingham’s theology
department.
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KENNETH SURIN
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 surviving the caprices of the British external examiner system—that not a
single aspect of my PhD work addressed the social and political questions 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 compromise between labor and capital. Hall never made an explicit repudiation of Benn’s militantly socialist platform, though it was clear from
Hall’s close affiliation with the journal Marxism Today that he believed
that this Bennite socialist platform, with its statist underpinnings, was
already being superseded by the existing political conjuncture.2
The soon-to-be terminal crisis of this postwar concordat between
labor and capital, and the seemingly rapid emergence of its Thatcherite
successor, signaled the necessity for new modes of description and
analysis, as well as alerting those of us on the Left to the need for an
invention of forms of opposition perhaps not seen since the General
Strike of 1926 and the Great Depression (these were to occur in the
year-long miners’ strike in 1984, in which Thatcher prevailed largely
by turning the police into a paramilitary army; and the 1990 riots over
the so-called poll tax, which prompted Thatcher’s party to dismiss her
as its leader).3 With the exception of the 1984 miners’ strike and the
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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 generation of Britons, many of whom would probably now say that the
Falklands are somewhere off the coast of Scotland next to the Shetlands) 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 neutralize 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 philosophical aspects of theology, and having abandoned analytical philosophy, 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 anything 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
gleichschaltung. Hall had, since his arrival in the UK in the early 1950s,
always been interested in issues of public import (the CND campaigns
and marches of the early 1950s in which he took part; the Vietnam
War; racism in Birmingham, especially in the borough of Handsworth, where the neofascist National Front used to hold rallies as a
provocation to its overwhelmingly Afro-Caribbean residents). This
prior activity on Hall’s part notwithstanding, Thatcher’s emergence
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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 sensing, 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 political 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
“Thatcherism” even before Thatcher was elected. He was soon recognized as the foremost analyst of the intellectual-cultural formation 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 installed in a position of official primacy where the economy was concerned, in the UK and United States, and not just in the Pinochet-ruled
Chile admired by Friedman), along with an atavistic social authoritarianism, as evidenced by Thatcher’s braying refrain “We need a return
to Victorian values,” and so on.4
Before anything is said about Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism, it
has to be noted that in addition to dealing with Thatcherism and its
legacies, Hall’s richly varied purview included the key topics of our
time: cultural coding, policing, implicit racism, immigration and diaspora, the role of television, neoliberalism—and this is only skimming
the surface. The reader who followed his treatment of these topics
soon realized that while Hall eschewed an explicit systematicity in
his presentation of this material, there was nonetheless a powerfully
implicit coherence in his work: the treatment of Thatcherism was therefore inextricably bound up with the analyses he provided of cultural
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coding, policing, implicit racism, “moral panics,” immigration, neoliberalism, 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”);5 there 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 instruments of the state to defend or advance interests based on class and
class positions. Instead, he suggested, the Left had to promote a populism 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 argument being that any expanded politics of the kind proposed by Hall
would require bringing together heterogeneous groups and movements that were unlikely to cohere into any kind of effective longerterm bloc), and on the other hand, by stalwarts of the old Left who
were dismayed by what they perceived as Hall’s demotion or abandonment of “class” as an analytical category in what was ostensibly a
Marxist assessment of Thatcher’s UK.6
But today five virtually uninterrupted decades of the Thatcherite
hegemony—the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
having merely embedded her neoliberal policies while giving them a
less bellicose visage, as Blair’s rictus smile replaced Thatcher’s hectoring snarl on television screens—have in the main proved Hall right.
The mobilization undertaken by Thatcher exploited, shrewdly, the
complex fractures and dissents emerging in the British body politic
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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 opposition 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.
Many of the key ruptures and transformations associated with the
collapse of the Keynesian compromise were only tenuously connected
with class and explicit class positions. Thatcher and her backers realized, for instance, as Reagan and his promoters did in the United
States, that repeated invocations of “patriotism” and “striving to earn
your way,” when delivered with the appropriate rhetorical pitch and
the requisite symbolism (the fictional Reaganite “welfare queen”
demonized for picking up her checks in a Cadillac; the Thatcherite
equivalent being the equally mythical “chappie on the dole” with
a Jaguar and small yacht on a trailer parked in front of his rentsubsidized council house), served to dragoon significant fractions of
the working class into voting against their own economic interests.
The essence of this class-dividing strategy is reflected in the words
one of Reagan’s slogans, used by supporters of Mitt Romney in the
2012 presidential election: “I believe the best social program is a job.”
This catchphrase—indicating that taking a job with miserable pay that
made one a veritable serf could somehow obviate the need for a welfare state—also represented the quintessence of Thatcherism, even as
she espoused policies that destroyed the industrial base that was the
massive core of working-class employment in the UK. Overcoming
this Thatcherite hegemony was clearly going to require a countermobilization on a comparable scale. So far, alas, no such countermobilization on the part of the Left has been forthcoming, as, at the time of
writing, the Labour Party, led by Ed Miliband, trails behind the ruling Conservatives in some opinion polls with the next general election due to take place in May 2015.
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Hall always worked with an extensive and varied theoretical
palette, as evinced by his analysis of Thatcherism. His range of interests 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 “multiculturalism,” 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, handbags, 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 collective 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 (anthropologists from Lévi-Strauss to Jack Goody have alerted us to the
centrality of food as a decisive marker of cultural and social demarcations and identifications) 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 anachronistic sentimentalism, which naturalized and concealed the very mechanisms of interpellation served by such rose-hued invocations of a
“merrie olde England.”8 In acknowledging, correctly of course, that
the UK has always taken many more multifarious, less overt, and often
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troubled paths when dealing with questions of national and ethnic
identity, Hall quickly decided that there is more than one species of
multiculturalism.9 The one that grabs the headlines—with its sometimes 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, without resorting to the self-defeating means espoused by single-issue constituencies 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 all identities
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 supplemented by the insertion of a smiling turbaned Sikh or beaming dreadlocked Rastafarian.10
The above sketch is unavoidably incomplete, and vastly so. Nothing 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.11 Nothing has been said about the unflagging energy and verve with which he inaugurated and sustained collaborative projects, from giving the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies its distinctive approach both methodologically and pedagogically, to the founding editorship of the New Left Review, to his participation 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 groundbreaking 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
I met Hall once, in the early 1990s, and we had a conversation
about C. L. R. James (we had contributed to the same volume on James
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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.13 Hall also wrote essays on James.14 It 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 Marxist 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 socialism, 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 Surin teaches in the literature program at Duke University.
His most recent book is Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World
Order.
Notes
1. The main quad at Birmingham was, in those days (and probably still is),
a favorite spot for many who escaped, or pretended to escape, the library fronting
it when there was a vestige of pale sunshine. The reading of books, often in circles
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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 lectures at the Centre, who loped across the quad wrapped in a heavy scarf seemingly 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 remembered that well-known analytical philosophers were also at the forefront of opposition to Thatcher—most notably Antony Kenny, Michael Dummett, and Simon
Blackburn.
4. Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e., finance minister) 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 connections 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,” “PopularDemocratic versus Authoritarian Populism,” and “Gramsci and Us.” Also important is Hall and Scraton.
5. The following segment from one of Thatcher’s speeches (delivered on
November 25, 1984) conveys the tone she used on such occasions where undertaking an Althusserian “interpellation” was clearly her task at hand, this time
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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 acknowledged 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 economic determination—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 Theater on 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’ multiculturalism. 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 addition to the article mentioned 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.
12. All of these, and more, are documented in the many obituaries of Hall.
See, for instance, Blackburn; Morley and Schwarz; Williamson; Jeffries 2014; Gilbert
2014; and Wark 2014.
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148
KENNETH SURIN
13. For this interview, see Hall 1985.
14. For these essays (and one interview on James), see Hall 1992b; 1995;
1998.
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Chen, Kuan-Hsing, and David Morley, eds. 1996. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
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