| Subject: | Three degrees darker: Stuart Hall obiit |
|---|---|
| Date: | Tue, 11 Feb 2014 02:47:25 +0000 |
| From: | Retort <retort@sonic.net> |
| To: | Retort <retort@sonic.net> |
To: Retort
When the writer and academic Richard Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964, he invited Stuart Hall, who has died aged 82, to join him as its first research fellow. Four years later Hall became acting director and, in 1972, director. Cultural studies was then a minority pursuit: half a century on it is everywhere, generating a wealth of significant work even if, in its institutionalised form, it can include intellectual positions that Hall could never endorse.
The foundations of cultural studies lay in an insistence on taking popular, low-status cultural forms seriously and tracing the interweaving threads of culture, power and politics. Its interdisciplinary perspectives drew on literary theory, linguistics and cultural anthropology in order to analyse subjects as diverse as youth sub-cultures, popular media and gendered and ethnic identities – thus creating something of a model, for example, for the Guardian's own G2 section.
Hall was always among the first to identify key questions of the age, and routinely sceptical about easy answers. A spellbinding orator and a teacher of enormous influence, he never indulged in academic point-scoring. Hall's political imagination combined vitality and subtlety; in the field of ideas he was tough, ready to combat positions he believed to be politically dangerous. Yet he was unfailingly courteous, generous towards students, activists, artists and visitors from across the globe, many of whom came to love him. Hall won accolades from universities worldwide, despite never thinking of himself as a scholar. Universities offered him a base from which he could teach – a source of great pleasure for him – and collaborate with others in public debate.
He was born in Kingston, into an aspiring Jamaican family. His father, Herman, was the first non-white person to hold a senior position – chief accountant – with United Fruit in Jamaica. Jessie, his formidable mother, had white forebears and identified with the ethos of an imaginary, distant Britain. Hall received a classical English education at Jamaica College in Kingston – while allying himself with the struggle for independence from colonial rule.
But he found the country's racial and colonial restrictions intolerable and an escape presented itself when he won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University. He arrived in Britain in 1951, part of the large-scale Caribbean migration that had begun symbolically with the arrival of the Empire Windrush three years earlier. Hall recalled that when he took the train from Bristol to Paddington station in London, he saw a landscape familiar to him from the novels of Thomas Hardy.
However, if Britain was a culture he knew from the inside, it was also one he never entirely felt part of, always imagining himself a "familiar stranger". At Merton College, studying English, he experienced this sense of displacement, his enthusiasms – for a new politics, for bebop, for a world alive to the values of human difference – incomprehensible to the cavalry-twilled former public schoolboys who surrounded him.
As his time in Britain lengthened, so his identifications with blackness deepened. Ambivalent about his relation both to his place of departure and to his place of arrival, he sought to survive the medieval gloom of Oxford by making common cause with the city's displaced migrant minority. Out of these new attachments, and out of the political cataclysm of 1956 – marked by the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt and by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution – emerged the new left, in which Hall was an influential figure: it provided him with a political home. At this point he found himself "dragged backwards into Marxism, against the tanks in Budapest" – and, if his Marxism came "without guarantees", it was nonetheless a vital part of him to the end.
In 1957 these issues became the catalyst for the launching of the Universities and Left Review, in which Hall was an active presence, and which subsequently merged with the New Reasoner to form the New Left Review, of which Hall was the founding editor. Abandoning his thesis on Henry James, he moved to London. By day he worked as a supply teacher in Brixton and, late into the night, on the Soho-based NLR. In 1961, he became a lecturer in film and media at Chelsea College, London University. Brixton and Soho had proved congenial to him where Oxford had not, and he began his work on popular culture. The Popular Arts (1964), co-authored with Paddy Whannel, opened a field of inquiry he was to develop at Birmingham.
On the 1964 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march from Aldermaston to London, Hall met Catherine Barrett, and they married later that year. With his appointment to the CCCS they moved to Birmingham where their two children, Becky and Jess, were born, and where they lived until 1979. During these years Catherine became an acclaimed historian, and the marriage proved to be a source of great mutual love and support. Their homes, in Birmingham and then in London, were welcoming places, drawing in their many friends.
In Birmingham, under Hall's charismatic leadership – and on a shoestring budget – cultural studies took off. But as Hoggart remarked, Hall rarely used the first person singular, preferring to speak of the collaborative aspects of the work. His energy was prodigious and he shifted the terms of debate on the media, deviancy, race, politics, Marxism and critical theory.
While there are no single-authored, scholarly monographs to his name, Hall produced an astonishing array of collectively written and edited volumes, essays and journalism – translated into many languages – as well as countless political speeches, and radio and television talks.
In 1979 he became professor of sociology at the Open University, attracted by the possibility of reaching out to those who had fallen through the conventional educational system. He remained there until 1998 – later becoming emeritus professor – launching a series of courses in communications and sociology. Increasingly, he focused on questions of race and postcolonialism, and on theorising the migrant view of Britain that he had always cherished.
The move to the OU coincided with the election victory of Margaret Thatcher. Before the election, Hall, convinced that the emergence of this new Conservatism marked a profound cleavage in British political history, coined the term Thatcherism, in a visionary article in Marxism Today. Drawing both on his long involvement with Antonio Gramsci's theorisation of the forms of political hegemony and on the collaborative CCCS volume Policing the Crisis (1978), he emphasised the role of race in Thatcherite politics, particularly in relation to the creed of law and order which he characterised as "authoritarian populism".
In The Politics of Thatcherism (1983), he insisted that the left's traditional statism was in part responsible for creating the conditions that had allowed the Thatcherites to win ascendancy, pointing to the degree to which Thatcherism had rooted itself in authentically popular sentiment – something he believed the left had failed to do. This generated fierce controversy among those who might otherwise have been among his political allies. His conviction that Thatcherism would define the politically possible, long after Thatcher herself had departed, proved enormously prescient, providing a key to understanding the politics not only of New Labour, but also of the subsequent coalition.
Hall, a campaigner for racial justice, was invited to join many official, and unofficial, public bodies. From 1997 to 2000 he served on the Runnymede Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, and was shocked by the media reaction to the commission's observation that the idea of Britain itself was racially far from innocent. He knew that the persistence of race thinking ran deep among the British.
He enjoyed university life but was relieved to relinquish his full-time academic role. This presented him with another opportunity to reinvent himself, by then in alliance with young artists and film-makers, exploring the politics of black subjectivity. A new Hall emerged, evident in catalogue introductions and workshop discussions in galleries in Britain and across Europe.
Once again he collaborated with – and learned from – people considerably younger than himself, chairing Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers) and the International Institute of Visual Arts. He was proud that he helped secure funding for Rivington Place, in Hoxton, east London, a location dedicated to public education in multicultural issues, drawing from contemporary art and photography. His involvement in the movement for black arts gave him a new lease of intellectual life. This Stuart Hall was reflected in the history of his life and work produced by the film-maker John Akomfrah, in the form of a much lauded gallery installation, The Unfinished Conversation (2012), and in a widely distributed film, The Stuart Hall Project (2013), which brought Hall to the attention of a new generation.
Latterly Hall's health, always more precarious than he let on, declined; he had to face intensive dialysis and later, at an advanced age, a kidney transplant. This ate up his time and energy, gradually constraining his mobility and his ability to take part in public life. But to the end, he held court at home to an endless stream of visitors keen to discuss the politics of contemporary times.
Under New Labour he became increasingly furious that managerialism was hollowing out public life, and increasingly pessimistic about the global situation. Yet he was cheered that "someone with Hussein for a middle name" was sitting in the White House and, after the credit crunch, was mesmerised by the sight of capitalism falling apart of its own accord. Throughout, he maintained an optimism of the will, and as late as last year he and his colleagues on Soundings magazine were producing manifestos for a post-neoliberal politics.
In 2005 he was made a fellow of the British Academy. His published work includes the collaborative volumes Resistance Through Rituals (1975); Culture, Media, Language (1980); Politics and Ideology (1986); The Hard Road to Renewal (1988); New Times (1989); Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (1996); and Different: A Historical Context: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity (2001). All these works testify to the breadth of Hall's intellectual engagements, and to the ways he moved through the various new times of his own life.
When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, Hall talked about his lifelong passion for Miles Davis. He said that the music represented for him "the sound of what cannot be". What was his own intellectual life but the striving, against all odds, to make "what cannot be" alive in the imagination?
He is survived by Catherine, Becky and Jess, by his grandchildren, Noah and Ishaan, and by his sister Patricia.
• Stuart McPhail Hall, teacher, cultural theorist and campaigner, born 3 February 1932; died 10 February 2014
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It would be perverse to suggest that Professor Stuart Hall, 81, has been a neglected figure in British cultural life over the last six decades. He was a founding editor of the hugely influential New Left Review in 1958 and the co-creator of the first cultural studies programme (at Birmingham University in 1964). He has been the most prominent of black British intellectuals since the 1960s, a prominent figure of the Open University and among the most trenchant critics of Thatcherism.
Even so, watching Akomfrah's film, which traces Hall's journey from childhood in Jamaica, through his arrival in Britain and Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in 1950, to now, you come to see how pivotal his voice has been in shaping the progressive debates of our times – around race, gender and sexuality – and how an increasingly conservative culture has worked lately to marginalise his nuanced understanding of this country.
As an alternative history of Britain in the last half century, The Stuart Hall Project, which has its British premiere on 6 September after a warm critical reception at the Sundance film festival in Utah, could hardly be bettered.
The chilly class-based world into which Hall arrived, strictly black and white in every sense, has been transformed by any measure into a far more inclusive and tolerant place.
It has always been Hall's contention that there is no such thing as a simple shift in history; that even the most comprehensive revolution in ideas carried the baggage of what came before, and this two steps forward one step back progress is the theme of his own life.
As Akomfrah explains, in talking about making the documentary: "I always wanted to try to do a film about the new left in Britain, that postwar period that is so often ignored. And the more we looked at it the more we realised that we could tell this whole story through Stuart's amazing life."
Akomfrah first met Hall after inviting him to be involved in his first documentary, Handsworth Songs, about the riots of 1981. "We called him because we knew he had been there and lived there," Akomfrah says. "And he came down and watched a rough cut of the film and responded to it. And after that the group of young film-makers, of which I was a part, gravitated towards him."
For such a rigorous thinker, Hall displayed unusual kindness; tolerance and generosity of spirit were not only articles of faith for him, Akomfrah suggests, but also central to his character: "If you go to any of his birthday parties, which I have been doing for a while now, they always seem a very good indication of his influence and his warmth.
"There will be people there from literally every decade of his working life, people from the New Left era, from the Open University, from Iniva [a contemporary collective of young minority artists, of which Hall remains mentor-in-chief]. The age range is astonishing, and Stuart is there in the centre of it all …"
I interviewed Hall six years ago at the time of the opening of Rivington Place, an arts centre in east London, which he fought to establish and which has a library that bears his name.
At the time, he was contemplating a retirement circumscribed by kidney failure and the need for dialysis. He subsequently had a successful transplant, but his health has deteriorated further and lately enforced something of a retreat from public life. Akomfrah has been working on his film for three years, and much of it arose from conversations with Hall. In digging into the archive, even he has been surprised both by how far back Hall's influence goes, and the consistency of his analysis and argument.
For those, like me, who remember Hall chiefly from the 1980s as the most articulate voice of multiculturalism, it is fascinating to see him in the mid-50s, a hipster with a Che Guevara beard, in the company of such august figures as EP Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class (published 50 years ago this year), or Raymond Williams, the seminal cultural critic, or Ralph Miliband. He looks singularly cool among tweedy pipe-smoking academics. Akomfrah emphasises this theme by giving a Miles Davis soundtrack to the scenes of postwar Britain; smoggy London is cast in a kind of blue light. As Hall recalls: "Miles Davis put his finger on my soul and it never went away."
Akomfrah adds: "I always knew Stuart had an interest in jazz, but I had no idea really of the depth of that; again in conversations it became clear this was really a shaping force for him.
"And the more we got into it, the more I realised that there was an affinity in the way the two of them went about things: very alive to the moment, to what was going on at any given time, and responding."
It was also a shock to the director's sense of history. "I was into jazz in the 80s," says Akomfrah, "and there was a sense in my mind that the artists and film-makers I was working with kind of discovered that tradition, and here was Stuart, you know 20 or 30 years earlier, already making those connections."
Hall was also ahead of his time in other ways, not least in his understanding of assimilation and its discontents as the great political theme of our times. He was fated to this knowledge in a way.
Born to an aspirational family in Jamaica, he emerged into the world a few shades darker than his siblings or parents. His mother, craving whiteness and respectability, appears to have been disturbed by his arrival. She would not let him bring black boys home from school.
"We were part Scottish, part African, part Portuguese-Jew," Hall recalls. The highly caste-based Caribbean was a failed test case for the world in which we now inhabit, "the home of hybridity" Hall was, as he came to understand, the shape of things to come. As he comments in the film, when he asks anyone in London now where they are from, "I expect an extremely long story".
His journey toward finding a home in Britain has not always been an easy one. Having married the (white) academic Catherine Bennett, with whom he has two children, the couple experienced a great deal of racism on the streets of Birmingham. Hall resisted bitterness and, mostly, anger, and stuck to his exemplary arguments.
In doing so, Akomfrah suggests he helped to open up a space for those who followed. The director himself came to Britain from Ghana, where his parents had been prominent in anti-colonial politics, in the 1960s. As he has said elsewhere: "For my generation in the 70s, [Hall] was one of the few people of colour we saw on television who wasn't crooning, dancing or running. His very iconic presence on this most public of platforms suggested all manner of 'impossible possibilities'. With him and through him we began to ask the indispensable questions: who are we, what are we and what could we become."
It seems, I suggest to Akomfrah, that with the Ukip-inflected political debate around immigration ever more charged, a good moment to be revisiting such recent history. What kind of audience is he hoping for his film? "It's funny," he says. "First and foremost, we wanted Stuart to see it.
"It was only really afterwards when we thought what kind of public it might reach. I mean it was made with cinema in mind and there will be a release there. But then we are talking to various television companies including the BBC."
What did Hall make of it? "It was a nerve-racking moment for me and it was very odd watching him watching it. I think there were things he had forgotten, things he hadn't thought about for a long time. He said he felt it was all him, but also someone else, if you know what I mean. I think he is glad we did it."
The title, the "project", suggests unfinished business; does Akomfrah see the postwar new left as relevant today? "I do. It has been fractured in many ways, but among the young generation you see more and more collectives emerging, for example, and no end of small journals and so on, people re-engaging with that tradition."
More than that, though, the legacy of that politics of inclusion, the values that Hall fought and argued for, lives on. "Every time I look at my own life here," Akomfrah says, "and the lives of my children, I see something that the work of Stuart and others allowed.
"They helped to create a way for us to really live here. It didn't happen by accident but through example and struggle; looking back it might be easy for some to be dismissive of that, but I think my daily life is a validation of that work."
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Hall arrived in Britain in 1951 and went to Merton College, Oxford, on a Rhodes scholarship. "Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home. I'm not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure." He says all this with an amused look, as if to say that his displacement hasn't dented his happiness, and his failure seems, if anything, to have tickled him.
He has lived here for 60 years, and is married to Catherine Hall, a professor at UCL. To sit in his Hampstead kitchen, with the sun streaming in, the day before his 80th birthday, I have this surreal sense that I'm looking at an ur-academic, totally uncompromised, fulfilled, successful, the kind of academic John Updike might have written, when he was young. Hall says, again amused: "I was going to be – dirty word – an intellectual. Academia was just how I made my money."
[...]
He mildly rejects the idea that academia was the engine of the new world order. "We drew the line in the 60s. We were here. They were there. It wasn't going to look like Dunkirk. It was never going to look like that again. I think some advances were made academically, but it was more what I think of as a multicultural drift, just having them [people from other cultures] around, they weren't going to eat you, they didn't have tails. The smartest guy in the store is probably black. You turn on the television and the guy singing is probably black. That mattered a lot in accustoming people to think about it."
And he still maintains that this country, which has adored Bob Marley for three decades, is a very different place to the one he arrived in. And yet, he says, "I'm more politically pessimistic than I've been in 30 years."
This pessimism is not down to the failure of multiculturalism, or rather, that speech last year in which David Cameron claimed it had failed – Hall takes a benign, if dismissive, attitude to Conservative posturing here, commenting mildly that Cameron is talking about equal-opportunities legislation, as he perceives it, rather than multiculturalism as part of the culture. No, it's the state of the left that strikes him as the most problematic. "The left is in trouble. It's not got any ideas, it's not got any independent analysis of its own, and therefore it's got no vision. It just takes the temperature: 'Whoa, that's no good, let's move to the right.' It has no sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things."
The examples of this are everywhere, but take as the most pressing the case of the NHS. "How can millions of people have benefited from the NHS and not be on the streets to defend it? Come on. The NHS is one of the most humanitarian acts that has ever been undertaken in peace time. The principle that someone shouldn't profit from someone else's ill health has been lost. If someone says an American health company will run the NHS efficiently, nobody can think of the principle to refute that. The guiding principles have been lost." There was a study recently investigating why America, which spends more per capita on health, has worse outcomes, and the answer was quite clear: when there is a profit motive, the rich are overinvestigated, and the poor are undertreated. People die needlessly.
So there's quite a sound pragmatic argument against private involvement in health, but Hall's is a blistering moral statement – who would profit from someone's ill health? What sort of person would that be? Would you trust them with your budget, let alone your health, or the health of a loved one? The moral case is not being forcefully enough put; indeed, it is not being put at all.
Being human and all that, and 80, Hall has observed the NHS at close range recently; following a diagnosis of renal failure, he spent seven years on dialysis, but by that time, "it's killing you and keeping you alive at the same time". This was a very profound experience. "It gives you a different conception of yourself, a different conception of yourself in relation to others. Your wife becomes your carer. For God's sake!"
But, of course, it has deepened his political identity as well. "I've always known in my head I'm not an island, but it really came across. It's not just the kidneys – I could give you a litany of things that are wrong with me. I couldn't go two days without someone coming in to help me. [Richard] Titmuss called it the gift relationship – you throw your bread on to the water, you don't know who will pick it up, you don't know if you're going to need it later, you just give it because you have it. That's the opposite of exchange value. It has no value.
"You recoup nothing. I've always thought the ego, Adam Smith's selfish individual, was wrong. The outside world gets into our heads, there is a constant dialectic, it is ineradicable. So we have to forge consanguinity. I've always known that, but of course if you're ill, it comes through much more. Have you any idea how much dialysis costs per session? Do I believe in a public health system? I sure do. With bells on."
It is this failure of the Labour party to make a strong moral case, to dare to inspire people, that Hall takes as the main threat to the political landscape. He was impressed by the part of Ed Miliband's conference speech about business "predators", but he doesn't have this modish interest in the evils of business, big or small. He reserves his analysis for the weaknesses of mainstream politicians, though not vindictively; rather out of an apparent belief that they could be much better.
We talk briefly about David Lammy's comments about hitting children, this new articulation of multiculturalism where diversity is ranged against liberalism, so that the very liberal voice which should be celebrating difference is actually thwarting it with namby-pamby legislation. "I think he's playing to the gallery. He's not talking about multiculturalism. He's saying, 'Get back to the good old verities, you can't go out because you can't go out because you can't go out.' It's old-school authoritarianism. He's the person who knows how Tottenham feels. Politicians always think they know what people feel. It's a fallacy, because there is no such thing as 'the people'. It is a discursive device for summoning the people that you want. You're constructing the people, you're not reflecting the people."
While we are on the racial flashpoints of recent weeks, what does he think of Diane Abbott, and the "tactics as old as colonialism" furore? Laughingly, he doesn't want to go anywhere near this subject, but throws in: "It was just incredibly bad timing, and a lack of care in formulating the argument." I suggest, here, that the mainstream has got into the habit of appropriating the sensitivities of the minority, as a way of making them seem ridiculous. So you'll get home-counties Tory MPs claiming to be offended by Abbott's "racism", when of course they aren't offended, they're just trying to discredit the whole idea of racism causing offence. "And you say you're the optimist!" he says. "Look, Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, believed in pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the spirit. You must look at what's happening now. If it's unpropitious, say it's unpropitious. Don't fool yourself. Analyse the conjuncture that you're in. Then you can be an optimist of the will, and say I believe that things can be different. But don't go to optimism of the will first. Because that's just utopianism."
Naturally, we arrive at the riots of the summer, the place where the austerity, these so-called "failures" of multiculturalism, the absence of politics, all meet, in Foot Locker, of all places. "The riots bothered me a great deal, on two counts. First, nothing really has changed. Some kids at the bottom of the ladder are deeply alienated, they've taken the message of Thatcherism and Blairism and the coalition: what you have to do is hustle. Because nobody's going to help you. And they've got no organised political voice, no organised black voice and no sympathetic voice on the left. That kind of anger, coupled with no political expression, leads to riots. It always has. The second point is: where does this find expression in going into a store and stealing trainers? This is the point at which consumerism, which is the cutting edge of neoliberalism, has got to them too. Consumerism puts everyone into a single channel. You're not doing well, but you're still free to consume. We're all equal in the eyes of the market."
And this is the most pessimistic of all his ideas: that three decades of neoliberalism have got into people's consciousness and infected the way young people respond to poverty just as they have neutered the way politicians express themselves. "I got involved in cultural studies because I didn't think life was purely economically determined. I took all this up as an argument with economic determinism. I lived my life as an argument with Marxism, and with neoliberalism. Their point is that, in the last instance, economy will determine it. But when is the last instance? If you're analysing the present conjuncture, you can't start and end at the economy. It is necessary, but insufficient."
In this present conjuncture, though, he sees everywhere the hangover – indeed, the ongoing orgy of an essentially economic agenda. The left is faltering because it can't realistically say it didn't continue what Thatcher started. The institutions of the old welfare state have already been "hollowed out. This is what Blair discovered – you don't need to have a fight about privatisation, you just have to erode the distinction between public and private."
But it is that lifelong argument against economic determinism that makes me doubt Hall's commitment to a pessimistic view. That's probably unjust, I'm sure he is a pessimist of the intellect; but his life's work has been to give intellectual expression to the possibility of something better. It would take more than a financial crash, more than three decades of neoliberalism, and so much more than a Cameron-led coalition government to eradicate that.
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