Stuart McPhail Hall (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) died today aged 82 of complications following kidney failure. He has been an important theorist of cultural studies and a significant influence during both my undergraduate and post graduate studies. Our paths ran particularly close in the 1980s but as early as 1968 Stuart Hall became the director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) a research centre at the University of Birmingham. At that time I was a mere brat and a member of the Front Against Fascism an anarchist (dis)organisation that spent most of our time reading Kropotkin, spray painting graffiti, marching with the anti-Vietnam war campaign and also with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarment. At that time I knew nothing of professor Hall or his work a couple of miles down the road in Edgbaston, where the campus of Birmingham university was then a place to which I had no right of admittance. As it happens in 1996 I was a postgraduate student at the university for a while but when Stuart Hall started his long and eminent academic career I had no prospect of going to university.
When I did finally gain admittance to higher education in 1980 at Wolverhampton Polytechnic (now the University of Wolverhampton) Stuart Hall was already a luminary and well known (amongst the academic community at least) for his theories on encoding and decoding in cultural communication. He was the director of the CCCS until 1979 when my own academic career was just about to blossom, if that can be said of someone with a second class honours degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in Welfare. Although I've chalked up a few more letters since then at rather more luminescent institutions, this was the best educational experience of my life bar none, although it was also suffused with what seems now to have been s bouts of debauchery... of one sort or another.
When I did finally gain admittance to higher education in 1980 at Wolverhampton Polytechnic (now the University of Wolverhampton) Stuart Hall was already a luminary and well known (amongst the academic community at least) for his theories on encoding and decoding in cultural communication. He was the director of the CCCS until 1979 when my own academic career was just about to blossom, if that can be said of someone with a second class honours degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in Welfare. Although I've chalked up a few more letters since then at rather more luminescent institutions, this was the best educational experience of my life bar none, although it was also suffused with what seems now to have been s bouts of debauchery... of one sort or another.
Stuart Hall was initially interesting to me because he was the director of The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies concerned particularly with such topics as subcultures, popular culture and critical theory which I as a native of Birmingham remained nearby, in the heart of the Black Country studying much the same things.
I have never actually met Stuart Hall, although I have seen him on a platform at a Marxism Today event.
He was nevertheless an important person to me at the time and I have always counted him as ultimately an ally, so that is why I'm typing this now in his memory.
There is considerably less than six degrees of separation between Stuart Hall and me. For starters during the early 1980s we were both members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, we both knew journalists on Marxist Today magazine and had chewed the fat with its editor Martin Jacques and many other neo-Gramcians.... with whom I eventually parted ideological company to endorse municipalism without the need of a vanguard party. I think toward the end of his life Stuart Hall came to a similar opinion, but it is often said that Blairite New Labour were created by the editorial line of Marxism Today and by Stuart Hall in particular, but that's a not fair assessment in my view.
Hall’s sneers at Cool Britannia Tony Blair’s “corporatist and managerialist style”, his debts to Thatcher ended for Stuart Hall in disillusionment with the remnants of the left in Britain which sets him apart from the odious New Labour project (or capitulaltion).
He was nevertheless an important person to me at the time and I have always counted him as ultimately an ally, so that is why I'm typing this now in his memory.
There is considerably less than six degrees of separation between Stuart Hall and me. For starters during the early 1980s we were both members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, we both knew journalists on Marxist Today magazine and had chewed the fat with its editor Martin Jacques and many other neo-Gramcians.... with whom I eventually parted ideological company to endorse municipalism without the need of a vanguard party. I think toward the end of his life Stuart Hall came to a similar opinion, but it is often said that Blairite New Labour were created by the editorial line of Marxism Today and by Stuart Hall in particular, but that's a not fair assessment in my view.
Hall’s sneers at Cool Britannia Tony Blair’s “corporatist and managerialist style”, his debts to Thatcher ended for Stuart Hall in disillusionment with the remnants of the left in Britain which sets him apart from the odious New Labour project (or capitulaltion).
The discourses and conversations that Stuart Hall sparked off were for me, if nothing else, worth marking the passing of this innovative and important 20th century thinker. One other link I like to imagine I have with Stuart Hall is that he was an essayist and unlike just about every other New Left author he never actually wrote a book.
Stuart Hall was a big part of a synthesis in British sociology incorporating the politics of race, feminism and popular culture and this trend led me to the New Criminology and deviance studies, where all of these themes collided.
During the Thatcher years I was a local unemployed activist who stood on picket lines and squatted derelict schools, burning logs we sat in our squat with academics from Birmingham university, members of the Communist Party and for a while fellow travellers in our resistance to Thatcherism and the corporations that created her.
During the Thatcher years I was a local unemployed activist who stood on picket lines and squatted derelict schools, burning logs we sat in our squat with academics from Birmingham university, members of the Communist Party and for a while fellow travellers in our resistance to Thatcherism and the corporations that created her.
Eventually we all went our own way, but before that parting took place we had fought Thatcherism on the streets and in the lecture hall, we had done our praxis and we were ready to take on whatever they had got to throw at us and did so at Orgreave, Trafalgar Square, Greenham Common and many other battlefields up and down the land.
Stuart Hall was a big part of that story of resistance, he made what I think are some mistakes in his analysis of hegemony but we were on the same side even though he never actually knew that, I am left here today to say it.
He was a special person was Stuart Hall and today we lost someone all thinking people can identify with, acknowledge and take our collective hats off to. But as he says in the clip I don't think any one thing will tell us who he was... or who we are anymore.
He was a special person was Stuart Hall and today we lost someone all thinking people can identify with, acknowledge and take our collective hats off to. But as he says in the clip I don't think any one thing will tell us who he was... or who we are anymore.
To me, AA, any public intellectual who pushed back against racism, endless war and the long slide of society into Thatcher and Reagan's draconian public policies in 1980's deserves a tribute, and you certainly have provided that for Stuart Hall.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you really put in your time on the academic rungs as well as the pickets lines, over-policed streets and squatters' houses where the changes in your Black Country where the laboratory of a changing metropolis provided the basis for the New Left to challenge old ideas, some of them from their own leaders, I suspect, since the urban USA faced and faces new challenges every few years. We could certainly use the wisdom of people like Stuart Hall in the new debates about bringing more immigrants out of the shadows of the American economy and to eventual citizenship and voting rights, to take one tough issue.
It's interesting how to me how often it is the thinkers in a community or a region we don't formally meet often have more impact on us as those who instructed us as graduates and undergrads. We cannot choose those who the Academy puts on staff, but we can choose who we read and inspire us.
It's probably less important that we agree in lockstep with those we admire, I think AA, as much as we have men and women who set forth a public platform for us to measure our own individual or group progress. It sounds as if Stuart Hall that way for you and others the same way as leftists like Noam Chomsky or the late Michael Harrington, or even a traditional liberal like Robert Reich does in the USA for many on the Left. And hopefully Mr. Hall got more media attention in the UK than the former two I mentioned.
Thank you, AA, for this introduction to a provocative thinker and activist.
Thanks Doug for your response to this post on Stuart Hall. I entirely agree with the points you make about agreement and disagreement amongst 'fellow travellers' or people of goodwill, its about the overall direction of travel and not the minutiae of political dogmatisms. This is precisely what has been wrong with the left in the Anglosphere (and elswhere) for decades, namely idiotic sectarianism and a startling inability to see the wood for the trees a lot of the time.
DeletePersonally I hope I have risen above all such pettifogging doctrinal disputes, indeed I hardly think that the left/right axis in politics is anymore meaningful in postmodern society... where the authoritarian/libertarian axis is equally important.
This means that political orientations are I think spherical in shape and that left authoritarianism is no less possible than right libertarianism and each occupy a position in direct relation to each pole of the ideological globe.
Thankfully the wave theory of revolution is able to take on these changes in the flow of currents and can surf them to its own satisfaction and toward an outcome irrespective of where it finds the support to carry the project forward.
Sometimes I read on here that Barrack Obama is a "socialist" or even a "communist" and whilst it is intended as an insult to me such a designation confirms the redundancy of the modernist debate between the left and right.
Now its basically a debate between the rational and raving mad I think, all other divisions take a backseat here (and hopefully forever) its what we do and the way we live that matters... not what colour rosette we think suits us best every four or five years. Not in my view anyway.
I thought you might find Stuart Hall's last observations on the US political scene interesting Doug, thanks for your comments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKm8MW-FdX0
"If Barack Obama is a socialist, he has a funny way of showing it", is all I can say on those remarks you've received, AA. The outstanding religious, political and spiritual leaders that I know of always come back to human action over any party or sectarian affiliation, as you have also pointed out.
ReplyDeleteI find your blogs on matters refreshingly free of kant and "brand" mania you see in the affairs of the past and today.
I've have to get to the video later, and add my comments below. Thanks for your follow-up remarks.
I'll have to
Thanks for that Doug, sectarianism is indeed a curse. I suppose the best way to deal with it is to reverse it....that is to begin every political relationship as if we were a 'sect' unto ourselves and work toward becoming more integrated witth all the others.
DeleteAs parties collapse under the internal divisions that leaves only dishonesty as the glue, the communicipalist makes political relationships on the basis of a sort of mutuality test, where no labels or affiliations past or present are any longer important ...and where alliances can form around single issues when they are ideologically and morally acceptable to us.
That is in my view precisely what makes c'ism the ideology of the furture - where governance is a collective responsibility and indeed a civic duty in any viable locality, rather than all too often a free ticket to the corporate gravy train of professional (i.e.corporate) politics here, there and almost everywhere else as well I think Doug.