In the early years of our century I ran across the name of Stuart Hall, though I don’t remember where. I came to him by a circuitous path involving politics and theory but which, as I would eventually learn from him, was also a project of self-examination. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, a thinker beloved to Hall, outlined this path in his Prison Notebooks with the maxim inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, taken up by Socrates as the foundation of philosophy: “Know thyself.”
Gramsci rejected, however, “the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists.” In fact, Gramsci asserted, “everyone is a philosopher,” by which he meant that everyone forms a conception of the world, contained in the language and “common sense” that are furnished to us by history. But to attain the critical awareness that allows you to actively transform your conception of the world, you have to go beyond the common sense imposed by your environment, and that means “‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”
I first came across these words in Orientalism, the landmark study by Edward Said that inaugurated the academic field of “postcolonialism.” Orientalism showed how Western representations of “the East” constructed an object of knowledge called “the Orient,” which didn’t exist prior to its representation. This study, Said wrote, was motivated not only by academic interest but also by his experience growing up in two British colonies: Said was born in Palestine and spent his adolescence in Egypt before settling in the United States and becoming a literary scholar and public intellectual. After citing Gramsci’s passage on “knowing thyself,” Said noted that the standard English translation left out the last line: “Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.” Thus his study of the history of knowledge was also “an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.”
I too was aware of such traces left in me by a childhood constituted by migration, my parents having moved from Pakistan to the U.S. before my birth. My inventory now seems somewhat banal, a consciousness split between Islam and MTV. (I imagine MTV has a show about such things by now.) But just a few decades ago the world was far less hybrid and cosmopolitan than Said’s postcolonial successors suggested, and compiling its traces didn’t come so easily. In fact, it’s never easy. In contrast to the idea of knowing ourselves that proceeds from privileged access to our “true” or inner selves, compiling your inventory means displacing the unity of your self onto the traces of historical processes that march on with or without you—whether you like it or not, and whether you know it or not.
On September 11, 2001, as a fifteen-year-old living in central Pennsylvania, I was forced to think about the relationship between politics and the ground I stood on. My belonging was divided between the country I inhabited and a country frequently inhabited by Osama bin Laden. It hardly seemed possible to decide that the Americans who wanted to bomb the entire region “back into the Stone Age” were my friends, while those who had the misfortune to be stuck there were my enemies. What was called American patriotism seemed to consist of callous ignorance and bellicosity buried deep in some kind of national psyche, and those of us who belonged elsewhere understood this. But a month after 9/11 I came across a speech by Noam Chomsky, who was quite far from sharing my background, yet made even more radical criticisms of American imperialism. In fact, Chomsky focused mainly on the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, to establish with merciless and unsentimental rationalism that his and my country of residence was the deadliest and most powerful terrorist agent in the world. But this wasn’t because of some American pathology, as though a predilection for violence was part of the national DNA. There’s nothing natural or inevitable about Americans supporting their government’s wars, a position that’s just as often a symptom of petty bourgeois snobbery as it is of Muslim grievances. In fact, Chomsky explained, it takes a massive propaganda machine to manufacture consent for policies that put profits over people.
Toward the end of that year, I found a transcript of a pre-9/11 lecture by the Pakistani political scientist Eqbal Ahmad called “Terrorism: Theirs and Ours.” I learned that Ahmad had migrated to Pakistan as a child during the bloody Partition in 1947, but later came to reject “Muslim Zionism,” and that his anti-imperialist principles had led him to join Frantz Fanon in the Algerian national liberation struggle in the early 1960s. He mentioned Latin America, but also addressed histories closer to “home”—how American imperialism had cultivated the very forces of Islamic fundamentalism that it now presented as an enemy to hate and fear, and which I also grew up hating. Ahmad also emphasized another reason these reactionary movements now dominated: the absence of revolutionary ideologies once presented as alternatives.
Seeking out these alternatives led me to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and an education in Marxist anti-imperialism. For this reason I’ve always found the premise that Marxism is Eurocentric to be utterly absurd. But even though I came to Marxism from outside “the West,” I found myself tracing it back, because it seemed to me that the propaganda model wasn’t enough to explain why people would support policies that not only led to atrocities abroad but also furthered their own exploitation at home. Pursuing this line of inquiry led me to the Frankfurt School, the group of German Jewish intellectuals who were condemned to conduct their research in American exile after fleeing Nazism. Transplanted from the land of Goethe and Hegel to that of Donald Duck and Betty Boop, these thinkers did not shy away from asking whether the mass culture they found here was really so much better than the fascism they had fled in Europe.
I started with Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which had the aura of the revolutionary Sixties. With enormous effort, I read his account of a world in which individuals, far from enjoying freedom and autonomy, had been “indoctrinated and manipulated (down to their very instincts).” Before they even turned on their TVs, Marcuse argued, consumers were “preconditioned receptacles,” and the working class had become integrated into the system. “The people recognize themselves in their commodities,” Marcuse wrote. “They find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”
But I was drawn to the Frankfurt School not only because I wanted to understand the operations of advanced capitalist society; I also felt an affinity with their resistance to identity, their refusal to melt their various forms of estrangement into any kind of false belonging. I felt this affinity all the more because it came to me through Said’s essay “Reflections on Exile,” where I first read Theodor Adorno’s maxim: “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” For Adorno, this injunction was imposed by a world in which “dwelling” had been annihilated by the hotel room and the concentration camp. For Said it was the Palestinian experience of dispossession, the fate of being “turned into exiles by the proverbial people of exile.”
There was also, in Said’s essay, a Pakistani experience of exile, namely that of the communist poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Said described an evening with Faiz during the latter’s exile in Beirut, where they were joined by Eqbal Ahmad: “The three of us sat in a dingy Beirut restaurant late one night, while Faiz recited poems. After a time, he and Eqbal stopped translating his verses for my benefit, but as the night wore on it did not matter. What I watched required no translation: it was an enactment of a homecoming expressed through defiance and loss.”
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I’ve taken you a little far from Stuart Hall, but this was the route that led me to him. By the time I found him, I knew Hall was a theorist of popular culture—though one with an entirely different orientation from the Frankfurt School—who had intervened in the discussions that went from Fanon to Said on nation, race and empire. But despite what was clearly his enormous influence, it was difficult to find Hall’s writings. While it may now seem like a banality to say this, it was not always easy to find books then; you were at the mercy of local bookstores and libraries, and the longevity of those enterprising collectors whose descendants would ultimately donate their libraries to used-book sales. Hall, however, presented special challenges. As I looked around, it seemed like he had never actually written a book, and I had no idea which articles I was supposed to read.
Eventually I found Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, whose original cover had a striking picture of Hall standing in front of a blackboard. But this wasn’t a book in the sense I expected (the majority of the chapters weren’t even written by Hall), and my greatest initial exposure came, instead, through two lecture films at the local university library, produced by the Media Education Foundation: Representation and the Media and Race, the Floating Signifier. As I watched Hall’s extraordinarily accessible and engaging lecture on media, I saw immediately that his approach was more open-ended than Chomsky’s or Marcuse’s, but no less political. Rather than a kind of absolute expression of domination, popular culture was, according to Hall, a process of generating meaning, which was implicated in power but could never be fully fixed by it. Announcing his provocative intentions at the outset, Hall singled out the “very common idea” that “representation represents a meaning which is already there”—this was one of the ideas that he would “try to subvert.”
A certain kind of media analysis would proceed by measuring the gap between the meaning presented in the media and the “true” meaning of the object it was supposed to represent. But Hall started from a different premise: that representation doesn’t simply present something to us that already exists, “out there in the world.” Certainly, things exist out there in the world, but they have no “essential, fixed or true meaning” in themselves, which would allow us to measure “the level of distortion in the way in which they’re represented.” Because the meaning of things is always contested, the work of cultural interpretation is to trace the “maps of meaning” and the “frameworks of intelligibility” that make up culture in the first place.
If culture is actually a system of making meaning, then it’s nonsensical to condemn systems of communication as mass deception. The audience must necessarily participate in the process of making meaning—otherwise no communication would take place. At the same time, systems of communication aren’t simply neutral. The fact that communication takes place within institutions and through technologies that are owned and controlled means that “the question of the circulation of meaning almost immediately involves the question of power. Who has the power, in what channels, to circulate which meanings to whom?” This means that “the issue of power can never be bracketed out from the question of representation.” Yet it’s precisely because meaning can never be entirely fixed that it is possible to contest and change the meanings that power attempts to fix in place.
This approach to representation and meaning also framed Hall’s lecture on race, in which he demolished, with seemingly effortless lucidity, the “common sense” that groups of people already exist as “races.” Hall opened by declaring that race was both “a discursive construct” and “a sliding signifier.” By calling it a signifier, Hall meant that rather than representing a genetic, biological and physiological reality, race belonged to a system of making meaning, like a language. Signifiers are meaningful not because of some essence they contain, but because of their differences with other signifiers, and these relations of difference are constantly shifting; they can “never be finally fixed.”
Hall anticipated the criticisms that would come from skeptical listeners: Could he really be claiming that race is “simply a signifier” that “floats in a sea of relational differences”? How could he respond to “the brute facts of human history,” the realities of race that have “disfigured the lives, and crippled and constrained the potentialities of literally millions of the world’s dispossessed?” He did not give an inch: “A signifier, a discourse, yes, that is my argument.”
In fact, it was only through this “discursive” conception of race that we could understand how history constituted divisions of people into “us” and “them”—a division which put “them in the boats and us on top of the civilization that we had conquered.” Without this conception, Hall pointed out, we would end up mirroring racism by accepting this division as an “obvious and banal fact,” even if we rejected the hierarchy—which was why even those who condemned racism frequently reproduced the essentialist conception of race. “The biological, physiological, or genetic definition,” Hall declared, “having been shown out the front door, tends to sidle around the veranda and climb back in through the window.”
Hall ended both lectures by calling for a politics “without guarantees,” a phrase which has now become indissociable from his thought. In the talk on race, the term referred to the notion that any fixed quality or category—biology, genetics, physiology—could “guarantee the truth and authenticity of the things we believe and want to do.” The search for a guarantee was the search for a fixed and stable foundation, which could then serve as a standpoint of moral purity. But just as it’s impossible for power to fix bad images, like racial stereotypes, Hall argued that it’s impossible for us to fix good ones. This is why a politics of representation can’t simply operate through denunciation and condemnation, but has to produce “new dimensions of meaning which have not been foreclosed by the systems of power which are in operation.”
Hall’s approach to culture made Marcuse’s seem, well, one-dimensional. People are never just “preconditioned receptacles,” malleable and manipulable, totally alienated and controlled down to their language and gestures. Such a framework, however passionately it may condemn existing forms of domination, represents its own kind of ideological closure: it can’t conceive of ordinary people contesting the images and representations that are presented to them, much less engaging in political action. Hall’s approach, by contrast, affirmed that people are never simply passive. Even as they exist within existing relations of power, people have the capacity to make sense of their world.
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Autobiographical reflection is not only a fundamental component of Hall’s style, but also an index of his most fundamental theoretical questions. I have written in an autobiographical register to try to follow his thought. But I have also narrated the effort it took for me to access his work to illustrate the importance of the Selected Writings now being released by Duke University Press. It is an event of profound historical significance that a new generation will be able to begin its political and theoretical education with systematic access to Hall’s writing. Cultural Studies 1983 lays out his approach in accessible lecture form, and the two-volume Essential Essays shows the broad scope of his work. Selected Political Writings presents his now canonical analysis of the rise of the right and the strategic impasses of the left beginning in the late 1970s. Familiar Stranger, memoirs he worked on with Bill Schwarz up to the end of his life, gives us a sustained picture of his practice of autobiography. Appearing now are the collections Selected Writings on Race and Difference—edited by two of the most important scholars on these questions today, Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which includes a transcript of the lecture that I watched years ago, “Race, the Floating Signifier”—and Selected Writings on Marxism, edited by Gregor McLennan, which should make apparent Hall’s importance as a major figure in the history of Marxist theory.
Selected Writings on Race and Difference is certain to provoke and perhaps even scandalize those who have equated any discourse on race with contemporary moral pieties, whether they are for or against them. As Gilroy observes in his introduction, “there is real danger that Hall’s apparently old-fashioned view of race politics will be harshly judged because it fails to coincide with the contemporary taste for essentialist self–scrutiny and the accompanying retreat of antiracism into the private interpersonal world beloved of Instagram warriors.” As an example, Gilroy quotes Hall’s comments in a 1980 talk to the London Branch of the Association of Teachers of Social Science called “Teaching Race,” in which, as Gilroy puts it, Hall presents the “surprising proposition” that “the struggle against racism demands a high degree of discipline from its political advocates who must not only reject the disabling simplifications of Manichaeanism and moralism but also learn to create and manage unsafe spaces.”
Hall’s talk, which displays his commitment to engage practically and theoretically with the public beyond one’s university department, is so extraordinary and counterintuitive for today’s doxa that it bears quoting once again here: “You have to create an atmosphere which allows people to say unpopular things. I don’t think it is at all valuable to have an atmosphere in the classroom which is so clearly, unmistakably antiracist that the natural and ‘commonsense’ racism which is part of the ideological air that we all breathe is not allowed to come out and express itself.” The point isn’t only that sunlight is the best disinfectant, but also that there’s no fixed or pure moral standpoint from which racial ideology can be criticized. We’re all caught up in it, we all live and breathe in it, and the task before us isn’t to condemn the sins of others but to criticize our own conceptions of the world, to inventory our traces.
In this sense, Hall’s practical proposal is fundamentally tied to his critique of identity. “There is something guaranteed about that logic or discourse of identity,” said Hall in a 1991 talk collected in Essential Essays. “And it helps us, I would say, to sleep well at night. … Around us history is constantly breaking in unpredictable ways but we, somehow, go on being the same.” But the role of theory, for Hall, was not to give us a good night’s rest, and Hall’s writings on Marxism will, accordingly, not help Marxists get to sleep. For Hall, Marxism wasn’t pre-given as a complete and self-sufficient doctrine; it was in itself an unfinished research program that had to be carried forward through original and undogmatic study of both its classical texts and the new historical contexts within which they were being read.
What might seem to simply be a sensible and straightforward approach to reading actually aligned Hall with a tendency in Marxism so controversial that some contemporary partisans of the Frankfurt School insist that it shouldn’t be considered Marxist at all: the heretical reading initiated in France by Louis Althusser. In my early Marxist readings I had already encountered Althusser’s lesson in heresy. I can still remember being on the road to Washington, D.C., where I was attending an IMF- World Bank protest, and coming across his 1962 essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination” in an old collection called The New Left Reader. At first, I found it almost completely incomprehensible. But eventually my sight was restored, and Marxism started to look rather different. The essay, which seems to have been Hall’s favorite work by Althusser—it’s still mine too—is known for the critique of the classical Marxist model of “base and superstructure,” and the argument that historical events are irreducible to a single cause (to give a brutally simplified description of “overdetermination”). For cultural studies, this approach helped theorists understand popular culture in social and historical terms without reducing it to a pure function of the economic base. But as Hall showed in his writings on political strategy, there was much more at stake.
We can go straight to the heart of “Contradiction and Overdetermination” by posing the following question: Why do events happen that theory says weren’t supposed to happen? More specifically, why did a socialist revolution happen in underdeveloped Russia rather than in Germany, which had already passed through the stage of capitalist development and was supposedly ripe for revolution? What this seemingly exceptional situation shows us, Althusser argued, is that there’s no linear process of historical necessity that marches on despite the contingency of circumstances. We’re always in exceptional situations. History is the complex and uneven way these circumstances come together in a given “conjuncture.”
The concept of the conjuncture, elaborated with the help of Gramsci’s strategic writings, would become central to Hall’s method. In his famous analysis of Thatcherism, “The Great Moving Right Show,” Hall showed how a new ruling-class strategy, which he called “authoritarian populism,” emerged in a situation which was not simply determined by historical laws or reducible to the single cause of the economic base. Indeed, such rigid frameworks kept us from recognizing the “related but distinct contradictions” whose combination in a particular time and place “is what defines a conjuncture.”
But this isn’t only a question of method, of understanding what happens in history—it raises a question about the basis for political action. A basic assumption of our contemporary common sense is the primacy of “lived experience.” There is a kind of moral imperative to recognize and respect everyone’s experience as the foundation of politics: to accept that those who define themselves according to a given identity category have not only a privileged and indisputable knowledge of the social relations underlying that identity, but also an exclusive political legitimacy to speak on any issue related to it. The contemporary discourse of identity is founded on the myth of an essential subject that, by virtue of its experience, already knows itself.
This myth is precisely what Hall aimed to interrogate. “There is no way in which the category of ‘experience’ can be an unproblematic one for Marxism,” he observed in a debate with the socialist historian E. P. Thompson. There is no such thing as pure experience, prior to culture and representation; experience can’t simply be “read for its meaning,” but has to be “interrogated for its complex interweaving of real and ideological elements.” To take the most obvious example in the annals of Marxism, there is no necessary correspondence between the economic existence of the working class and “class consciousness.” Uniting the two with the category of “experience” implies that the working class “is always really in its place, at the ready, and can be summoned up ‘for socialism.’” But this is refuted by the entire history of socialism, even if Marxists generally don’t care to admit it in polite company. For Hall the only way to persist in Marxism was to face up to this indeterminacy, to recognize that “socialism has to be constructed by a real political practice” rather than merely being “rediscovered” in experience.
After all, experience is contradictory; another political practice could use it as the raw material to construct something different entirely. The debate with Thompson took place the very year Hall published “The Great Moving Right Show,” in which he pointed out that Thatcherism’s success did “not lie in its capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk but in the way it addresses real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions—and yet is able to represent them within a logic of discourse which pulls them systematically into line with policies and class strategies of the right.” In other words, there are no guarantees. Whether experience is defined in terms of class relations or racial and sexual identity, it has no necessary political expression, and does not spontaneously yield any special knowledge.
For Hall, the yearning to recover unity and authenticity—to be the center of all phenomena, the origin and the end—was always an attempt to fix and stabilize what can never be fixed and stable. To follow through on Hall’s thought today therefore means to conceive of a political action which doesn’t rest on an already existing foundation, whether it is defined in terms of experience or identity. There’s nothing to guarantee that the historical process will proceed toward a predetermined goal. Political action is collective, organized and specific to its historical situation—made possible by the contingency of the conjuncture.
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The Essential Essays concludes with a 2004 talk called “Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life,” a response to a conference dedicated to Hall’s work in Jamaica. I’ve often considered it Hall’s most beautiful text; it manages to be humble and gracious while also being as ambitious and inventive as one would expect. At the very beginning, Hall notes the strangeness of “knowing thyself” through others:
I keep looking around trying to discover this person “Stuart Hall” that everybody is talking about. Occasionally I recognize him. … But this experience of, as it were, experiencing oneself as both subject and object, of encountering oneself from the outside, as another—an other—sort of person next door, is uncanny. It is like being exposed to a serialized set of embarrassments. And I want just to draw from that experience a first thought about thought. I think theory—thinking, theorizing—is rather like that, in the sense that one confronts the absolute unknowingness, the opacity, the density, of reality, of the subject one is trying to understand.
The autobiographical reflection that is a trademark of Hall’s writing does not provide a fixed authorial foundation but indicates the unstable yet situated position from which he spoke—as if to show by example that we too can put our identities into question: “I cannot become identical with myself.” Identity is an effect of difference, and its fixity is constantly deferred. Identifications shift: they’re transformed by impersonal political and economic forces, articulated into different and irreconcilable political positions. The lonely hour—and truly it would be a lonely one—when we finally become ourselves never arrives.
Thinking without guarantees, though, does not mean dispensing with theory; rather, it shows us its necessity. It’s precisely because knowledge is not guaranteed by either perception or experience that we need to take a “detour” through concepts. Hall precedes a summary of his earlier reflections on Marx’s method with a confession:
I would do without theory if I could! The problem is, I cannot. You cannot. Because the world presents itself in the chaos of appearances, and the only way in which one can understand, break down, analyze, grasp, in order to do something about the present conjuncture that confronts one, is to break into that series of congealed and opaque appearances with the only tools you have: concepts, ideas, and thoughts.
Theory remains relevant, its development remains valid; no anti-intellectual populism is licensed by the study of popular culture. Even though ordinary people are capable of “bringing into being new modes of thought,” as Gramsci had shown, not everyone in the division of labor that characterizes our societies has the function of an intellectual. This function matters because the domination of the ruling class is not automatic: it is maintained through active processes of education and persuasion, and aided by intellectuals who serve ruling-class interests. A politics of opposition has to educate and persuade people in an emancipatory rather than a reactionary direction. But pursuing this project does not mean that intellectuals should claim privileged insight into the direction of history. The “detour through theory” leads toward addressing people in their complexity and multiplicity, as people who are not identical with themselves and are on this basis capable of thinking and acting together.
What is to be done, Hall constantly followed Gramsci in asking, by those who are assigned the function of intellectuals in the division of labor that they are politically committed, somehow and in some way, to overcoming?
I do think it is a requirement of intellectuals to speak a kind of truth. Maybe not truth with a capital T but, anyway, some kind of truth, the best truth they know or can discover—to speak that truth to power. To take responsibility, which can be unpleasant and is no recipe for success, for having spoken it. To take responsibility for speaking it to wider groups of people than are simply involved in the professional life of ideas. To speak it beyond the confines of the academy. To speak it, however, in its full complexity. Never to speak it in too simple a way, because “the folks won’t understand.” Because then they will understand, but they will get it wrong, which is much worse! So, to speak it in its full complexity, but to try to speak it in terms in which other people who, after all, can think and do have ideas in their heads, though they are not paid or paid-up intellectuals, need it. They need it like you and I need food. They need it in order to survive. I commend the vocation of the intellectual life in this sense to you.
There is both a dignity and a modesty in Hall’s conception of the intellectual life. This modesty is how I read the narrowing of his political outlook in 2004, the part of “Prism” I find most difficult to accept. After a clear-sighted analysis of the havoc that global capitalism continues to wreak, he tells us to leave behind the “revolutionary dream” and instead to look toward “just a little opening here and there toward the horizon of freedom, justice, and equality.”
I’m not convinced that such minor adjustments are actually realistic in a world of burning forests and mutating viruses. But the rational kernel of Hall’s ambivalence is that those of us who still believe in the revolutionary dream haven’t come to terms with its failures. As the political theorist Wendy Brown put it in a classic reflection on Hall, we have to ask how to construct a politics that “does not falsely ground itself in the notion that ‘history is on our side.’” Thinking without guarantees, as Hall said, doesn’t help you get to sleep at night, and it means confronting the fact that socialism may not happen.
But politics without guarantees also has to mean taking a risk, a hazardous leap. And if Hall had come to envision a future that looked mostly like the present, he knew that the consequences of his thought were that this vision was just as much suspended in the realm of historical contingency as any other. “I do not believe,” he had already reminded us, “in ‘the laws of history.’ There is no closure yet written into it. And to be absolutely honest, if you do not agree that there is a degree of openness or contingency to every historical conjuncture, you do not believe in politics.”
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There’s no guarantee that we end up who we are. And as Hall pointed out in “Prism,” this contingency is where the work of theory begins:
There is a sense in which one has to stand back, outside of oneself, in order to make the detour through thought, to approach what it is one is trying to think about indirectly, obliquely, in another way, another mode. I think the world is fundamentally resistant to thought, I think it is resistant to “theory.” I do not think it likes to be thought. I do not think it wants to be understood. So, inevitably, thinking is hard work, a kind of labor. It is not something that simply flows naturally from inside oneself. Thus, one of the perplexities about doing intellectual work is that, of course, to be any sort of intellectual is to attempt to raise one’s self-reflexiveness to the highest maximum point of intensity.
All our biographies are unfinished, and will remain so long after we are gone. In all our “detours” we learn to think, and to act, and the intensity of thought resists the fixity of selfhood we impose on it. And as we think we still hear Stuart Hall, in all his multiplicity, inviting us—why not?—to live without guarantees.
Photo credit: Stuart Hall, courtesy of the Stuart Hall family archive.
In the early years of our century I ran across the name of Stuart Hall, though I don’t remember where. I came to him by a circuitous path involving politics and theory but which, as I would eventually learn from him, was also a project of self-examination. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, a thinker beloved to Hall, outlined this path in his Prison Notebooks with the maxim inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, taken up by Socrates as the foundation of philosophy: “Know thyself.”
Gramsci rejected, however, “the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists.” In fact, Gramsci asserted, “everyone is a philosopher,” by which he meant that everyone forms a conception of the world, contained in the language and “common sense” that are furnished to us by history. But to attain the critical awareness that allows you to actively transform your conception of the world, you have to go beyond the common sense imposed by your environment, and that means “‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”
I first came across these words in Orientalism, the landmark study by Edward Said that inaugurated the academic field of “postcolonialism.” Orientalism showed how Western representations of “the East” constructed an object of knowledge called “the Orient,” which didn’t exist prior to its representation. This study, Said wrote, was motivated not only by academic interest but also by his experience growing up in two British colonies: Said was born in Palestine and spent his adolescence in Egypt before settling in the United States and becoming a literary scholar and public intellectual. After citing Gramsci’s passage on “knowing thyself,” Said noted that the standard English translation left out the last line: “Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.” Thus his study of the history of knowledge was also “an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.”
I too was aware of such traces left in me by a childhood constituted by migration, my parents having moved from Pakistan to the U.S. before my birth. My inventory now seems somewhat banal, a consciousness split between Islam and MTV. (I imagine MTV has a show about such things by now.) But just a few decades ago the world was far less hybrid and cosmopolitan than Said’s postcolonial successors suggested, and compiling its traces didn’t come so easily. In fact, it’s never easy. In contrast to the idea of knowing ourselves that proceeds from privileged access to our “true” or inner selves, compiling your inventory means displacing the unity of your self onto the traces of historical processes that march on with or without you—whether you like it or not, and whether you know it or not.
On September 11, 2001, as a fifteen-year-old living in central Pennsylvania, I was forced to think about the relationship between politics and the ground I stood on. My belonging was divided between the country I inhabited and a country frequently inhabited by Osama bin Laden. It hardly seemed possible to decide that the Americans who wanted to bomb the entire region “back into the Stone Age” were my friends, while those who had the misfortune to be stuck there were my enemies. What was called American patriotism seemed to consist of callous ignorance and bellicosity buried deep in some kind of national psyche, and those of us who belonged elsewhere understood this. But a month after 9/11 I came across a speech by Noam Chomsky, who was quite far from sharing my background, yet made even more radical criticisms of American imperialism. In fact, Chomsky focused mainly on the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, to establish with merciless and unsentimental rationalism that his and my country of residence was the deadliest and most powerful terrorist agent in the world. But this wasn’t because of some American pathology, as though a predilection for violence was part of the national DNA. There’s nothing natural or inevitable about Americans supporting their government’s wars, a position that’s just as often a symptom of petty bourgeois snobbery as it is of Muslim grievances. In fact, Chomsky explained, it takes a massive propaganda machine to manufacture consent for policies that put profits over people.
Toward the end of that year, I found a transcript of a pre-9/11 lecture by the Pakistani political scientist Eqbal Ahmad called “Terrorism: Theirs and Ours.” I learned that Ahmad had migrated to Pakistan as a child during the bloody Partition in 1947, but later came to reject “Muslim Zionism,” and that his anti-imperialist principles had led him to join Frantz Fanon in the Algerian national liberation struggle in the early 1960s. He mentioned Latin America, but also addressed histories closer to “home”—how American imperialism had cultivated the very forces of Islamic fundamentalism that it now presented as an enemy to hate and fear, and which I also grew up hating. Ahmad also emphasized another reason these reactionary movements now dominated: the absence of revolutionary ideologies once presented as alternatives.
Seeking out these alternatives led me to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and an education in Marxist anti-imperialism. For this reason I’ve always found the premise that Marxism is Eurocentric to be utterly absurd. But even though I came to Marxism from outside “the West,” I found myself tracing it back, because it seemed to me that the propaganda model wasn’t enough to explain why people would support policies that not only led to atrocities abroad but also furthered their own exploitation at home. Pursuing this line of inquiry led me to the Frankfurt School, the group of German Jewish intellectuals who were condemned to conduct their research in American exile after fleeing Nazism. Transplanted from the land of Goethe and Hegel to that of Donald Duck and Betty Boop, these thinkers did not shy away from asking whether the mass culture they found here was really so much better than the fascism they had fled in Europe.
I started with Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which had the aura of the revolutionary Sixties. With enormous effort, I read his account of a world in which individuals, far from enjoying freedom and autonomy, had been “indoctrinated and manipulated (down to their very instincts).” Before they even turned on their TVs, Marcuse argued, consumers were “preconditioned receptacles,” and the working class had become integrated into the system. “The people recognize themselves in their commodities,” Marcuse wrote. “They find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”
But I was drawn to the Frankfurt School not only because I wanted to understand the operations of advanced capitalist society; I also felt an affinity with their resistance to identity, their refusal to melt their various forms of estrangement into any kind of false belonging. I felt this affinity all the more because it came to me through Said’s essay “Reflections on Exile,” where I first read Theodor Adorno’s maxim: “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” For Adorno, this injunction was imposed by a world in which “dwelling” had been annihilated by the hotel room and the concentration camp. For Said it was the Palestinian experience of dispossession, the fate of being “turned into exiles by the proverbial people of exile.”
There was also, in Said’s essay, a Pakistani experience of exile, namely that of the communist poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Said described an evening with Faiz during the latter’s exile in Beirut, where they were joined by Eqbal Ahmad: “The three of us sat in a dingy Beirut restaurant late one night, while Faiz recited poems. After a time, he and Eqbal stopped translating his verses for my benefit, but as the night wore on it did not matter. What I watched required no translation: it was an enactment of a homecoming expressed through defiance and loss.”
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I’ve taken you a little far from Stuart Hall, but this was the route that led me to him. By the time I found him, I knew Hall was a theorist of popular culture—though one with an entirely different orientation from the Frankfurt School—who had intervened in the discussions that went from Fanon to Said on nation, race and empire. But despite what was clearly his enormous influence, it was difficult to find Hall’s writings. While it may now seem like a banality to say this, it was not always easy to find books then; you were at the mercy of local bookstores and libraries, and the longevity of those enterprising collectors whose descendants would ultimately donate their libraries to used-book sales. Hall, however, presented special challenges. As I looked around, it seemed like he had never actually written a book, and I had no idea which articles I was supposed to read.
Eventually I found Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, whose original cover had a striking picture of Hall standing in front of a blackboard. But this wasn’t a book in the sense I expected (the majority of the chapters weren’t even written by Hall), and my greatest initial exposure came, instead, through two lecture films at the local university library, produced by the Media Education Foundation: Representation and the Media and Race, the Floating Signifier. As I watched Hall’s extraordinarily accessible and engaging lecture on media, I saw immediately that his approach was more open-ended than Chomsky’s or Marcuse’s, but no less political. Rather than a kind of absolute expression of domination, popular culture was, according to Hall, a process of generating meaning, which was implicated in power but could never be fully fixed by it. Announcing his provocative intentions at the outset, Hall singled out the “very common idea” that “representation represents a meaning which is already there”—this was one of the ideas that he would “try to subvert.”
A certain kind of media analysis would proceed by measuring the gap between the meaning presented in the media and the “true” meaning of the object it was supposed to represent. But Hall started from a different premise: that representation doesn’t simply present something to us that already exists, “out there in the world.” Certainly, things exist out there in the world, but they have no “essential, fixed or true meaning” in themselves, which would allow us to measure “the level of distortion in the way in which they’re represented.” Because the meaning of things is always contested, the work of cultural interpretation is to trace the “maps of meaning” and the “frameworks of intelligibility” that make up culture in the first place.
If culture is actually a system of making meaning, then it’s nonsensical to condemn systems of communication as mass deception. The audience must necessarily participate in the process of making meaning—otherwise no communication would take place. At the same time, systems of communication aren’t simply neutral. The fact that communication takes place within institutions and through technologies that are owned and controlled means that “the question of the circulation of meaning almost immediately involves the question of power. Who has the power, in what channels, to circulate which meanings to whom?” This means that “the issue of power can never be bracketed out from the question of representation.” Yet it’s precisely because meaning can never be entirely fixed that it is possible to contest and change the meanings that power attempts to fix in place.
This approach to representation and meaning also framed Hall’s lecture on race, in which he demolished, with seemingly effortless lucidity, the “common sense” that groups of people already exist as “races.” Hall opened by declaring that race was both “a discursive construct” and “a sliding signifier.” By calling it a signifier, Hall meant that rather than representing a genetic, biological and physiological reality, race belonged to a system of making meaning, like a language. Signifiers are meaningful not because of some essence they contain, but because of their differences with other signifiers, and these relations of difference are constantly shifting; they can “never be finally fixed.”
Hall anticipated the criticisms that would come from skeptical listeners: Could he really be claiming that race is “simply a signifier” that “floats in a sea of relational differences”? How could he respond to “the brute facts of human history,” the realities of race that have “disfigured the lives, and crippled and constrained the potentialities of literally millions of the world’s dispossessed?” He did not give an inch: “A signifier, a discourse, yes, that is my argument.”
In fact, it was only through this “discursive” conception of race that we could understand how history constituted divisions of people into “us” and “them”—a division which put “them in the boats and us on top of the civilization that we had conquered.” Without this conception, Hall pointed out, we would end up mirroring racism by accepting this division as an “obvious and banal fact,” even if we rejected the hierarchy—which was why even those who condemned racism frequently reproduced the essentialist conception of race. “The biological, physiological, or genetic definition,” Hall declared, “having been shown out the front door, tends to sidle around the veranda and climb back in through the window.”
Hall ended both lectures by calling for a politics “without guarantees,” a phrase which has now become indissociable from his thought. In the talk on race, the term referred to the notion that any fixed quality or category—biology, genetics, physiology—could “guarantee the truth and authenticity of the things we believe and want to do.” The search for a guarantee was the search for a fixed and stable foundation, which could then serve as a standpoint of moral purity. But just as it’s impossible for power to fix bad images, like racial stereotypes, Hall argued that it’s impossible for us to fix good ones. This is why a politics of representation can’t simply operate through denunciation and condemnation, but has to produce “new dimensions of meaning which have not been foreclosed by the systems of power which are in operation.”
Hall’s approach to culture made Marcuse’s seem, well, one-dimensional. People are never just “preconditioned receptacles,” malleable and manipulable, totally alienated and controlled down to their language and gestures. Such a framework, however passionately it may condemn existing forms of domination, represents its own kind of ideological closure: it can’t conceive of ordinary people contesting the images and representations that are presented to them, much less engaging in political action. Hall’s approach, by contrast, affirmed that people are never simply passive. Even as they exist within existing relations of power, people have the capacity to make sense of their world.
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Autobiographical reflection is not only a fundamental component of Hall’s style, but also an index of his most fundamental theoretical questions. I have written in an autobiographical register to try to follow his thought. But I have also narrated the effort it took for me to access his work to illustrate the importance of the Selected Writings now being released by Duke University Press. It is an event of profound historical significance that a new generation will be able to begin its political and theoretical education with systematic access to Hall’s writing. Cultural Studies 1983 lays out his approach in accessible lecture form, and the two-volume Essential Essays shows the broad scope of his work. Selected Political Writings presents his now canonical analysis of the rise of the right and the strategic impasses of the left beginning in the late 1970s. Familiar Stranger, memoirs he worked on with Bill Schwarz up to the end of his life, gives us a sustained picture of his practice of autobiography. Appearing now are the collections Selected Writings on Race and Difference—edited by two of the most important scholars on these questions today, Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which includes a transcript of the lecture that I watched years ago, “Race, the Floating Signifier”—and Selected Writings on Marxism, edited by Gregor McLennan, which should make apparent Hall’s importance as a major figure in the history of Marxist theory.
Selected Writings on Race and Difference is certain to provoke and perhaps even scandalize those who have equated any discourse on race with contemporary moral pieties, whether they are for or against them. As Gilroy observes in his introduction, “there is real danger that Hall’s apparently old-fashioned view of race politics will be harshly judged because it fails to coincide with the contemporary taste for essentialist self–scrutiny and the accompanying retreat of antiracism into the private interpersonal world beloved of Instagram warriors.” As an example, Gilroy quotes Hall’s comments in a 1980 talk to the London Branch of the Association of Teachers of Social Science called “Teaching Race,” in which, as Gilroy puts it, Hall presents the “surprising proposition” that “the struggle against racism demands a high degree of discipline from its political advocates who must not only reject the disabling simplifications of Manichaeanism and moralism but also learn to create and manage unsafe spaces.”
Hall’s talk, which displays his commitment to engage practically and theoretically with the public beyond one’s university department, is so extraordinary and counterintuitive for today’s doxa that it bears quoting once again here: “You have to create an atmosphere which allows people to say unpopular things. I don’t think it is at all valuable to have an atmosphere in the classroom which is so clearly, unmistakably antiracist that the natural and ‘commonsense’ racism which is part of the ideological air that we all breathe is not allowed to come out and express itself.” The point isn’t only that sunlight is the best disinfectant, but also that there’s no fixed or pure moral standpoint from which racial ideology can be criticized. We’re all caught up in it, we all live and breathe in it, and the task before us isn’t to condemn the sins of others but to criticize our own conceptions of the world, to inventory our traces.
In this sense, Hall’s practical proposal is fundamentally tied to his critique of identity. “There is something guaranteed about that logic or discourse of identity,” said Hall in a 1991 talk collected in Essential Essays. “And it helps us, I would say, to sleep well at night. … Around us history is constantly breaking in unpredictable ways but we, somehow, go on being the same.” But the role of theory, for Hall, was not to give us a good night’s rest, and Hall’s writings on Marxism will, accordingly, not help Marxists get to sleep. For Hall, Marxism wasn’t pre-given as a complete and self-sufficient doctrine; it was in itself an unfinished research program that had to be carried forward through original and undogmatic study of both its classical texts and the new historical contexts within which they were being read.
What might seem to simply be a sensible and straightforward approach to reading actually aligned Hall with a tendency in Marxism so controversial that some contemporary partisans of the Frankfurt School insist that it shouldn’t be considered Marxist at all: the heretical reading initiated in France by Louis Althusser. In my early Marxist readings I had already encountered Althusser’s lesson in heresy. I can still remember being on the road to Washington, D.C., where I was attending an IMF- World Bank protest, and coming across his 1962 essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination” in an old collection called The New Left Reader. At first, I found it almost completely incomprehensible. But eventually my sight was restored, and Marxism started to look rather different. The essay, which seems to have been Hall’s favorite work by Althusser—it’s still mine too—is known for the critique of the classical Marxist model of “base and superstructure,” and the argument that historical events are irreducible to a single cause (to give a brutally simplified description of “overdetermination”). For cultural studies, this approach helped theorists understand popular culture in social and historical terms without reducing it to a pure function of the economic base. But as Hall showed in his writings on political strategy, there was much more at stake.
We can go straight to the heart of “Contradiction and Overdetermination” by posing the following question: Why do events happen that theory says weren’t supposed to happen? More specifically, why did a socialist revolution happen in underdeveloped Russia rather than in Germany, which had already passed through the stage of capitalist development and was supposedly ripe for revolution? What this seemingly exceptional situation shows us, Althusser argued, is that there’s no linear process of historical necessity that marches on despite the contingency of circumstances. We’re always in exceptional situations. History is the complex and uneven way these circumstances come together in a given “conjuncture.”
The concept of the conjuncture, elaborated with the help of Gramsci’s strategic writings, would become central to Hall’s method. In his famous analysis of Thatcherism, “The Great Moving Right Show,” Hall showed how a new ruling-class strategy, which he called “authoritarian populism,” emerged in a situation which was not simply determined by historical laws or reducible to the single cause of the economic base. Indeed, such rigid frameworks kept us from recognizing the “related but distinct contradictions” whose combination in a particular time and place “is what defines a conjuncture.”
But this isn’t only a question of method, of understanding what happens in history—it raises a question about the basis for political action. A basic assumption of our contemporary common sense is the primacy of “lived experience.” There is a kind of moral imperative to recognize and respect everyone’s experience as the foundation of politics: to accept that those who define themselves according to a given identity category have not only a privileged and indisputable knowledge of the social relations underlying that identity, but also an exclusive political legitimacy to speak on any issue related to it. The contemporary discourse of identity is founded on the myth of an essential subject that, by virtue of its experience, already knows itself.
This myth is precisely what Hall aimed to interrogate. “There is no way in which the category of ‘experience’ can be an unproblematic one for Marxism,” he observed in a debate with the socialist historian E. P. Thompson. There is no such thing as pure experience, prior to culture and representation; experience can’t simply be “read for its meaning,” but has to be “interrogated for its complex interweaving of real and ideological elements.” To take the most obvious example in the annals of Marxism, there is no necessary correspondence between the economic existence of the working class and “class consciousness.” Uniting the two with the category of “experience” implies that the working class “is always really in its place, at the ready, and can be summoned up ‘for socialism.’” But this is refuted by the entire history of socialism, even if Marxists generally don’t care to admit it in polite company. For Hall the only way to persist in Marxism was to face up to this indeterminacy, to recognize that “socialism has to be constructed by a real political practice” rather than merely being “rediscovered” in experience.
After all, experience is contradictory; another political practice could use it as the raw material to construct something different entirely. The debate with Thompson took place the very year Hall published “The Great Moving Right Show,” in which he pointed out that Thatcherism’s success did “not lie in its capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk but in the way it addresses real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions—and yet is able to represent them within a logic of discourse which pulls them systematically into line with policies and class strategies of the right.” In other words, there are no guarantees. Whether experience is defined in terms of class relations or racial and sexual identity, it has no necessary political expression, and does not spontaneously yield any special knowledge.
For Hall, the yearning to recover unity and authenticity—to be the center of all phenomena, the origin and the end—was always an attempt to fix and stabilize what can never be fixed and stable. To follow through on Hall’s thought today therefore means to conceive of a political action which doesn’t rest on an already existing foundation, whether it is defined in terms of experience or identity. There’s nothing to guarantee that the historical process will proceed toward a predetermined goal. Political action is collective, organized and specific to its historical situation—made possible by the contingency of the conjuncture.
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The Essential Essays concludes with a 2004 talk called “Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life,” a response to a conference dedicated to Hall’s work in Jamaica. I’ve often considered it Hall’s most beautiful text; it manages to be humble and gracious while also being as ambitious and inventive as one would expect. At the very beginning, Hall notes the strangeness of “knowing thyself” through others:
The autobiographical reflection that is a trademark of Hall’s writing does not provide a fixed authorial foundation but indicates the unstable yet situated position from which he spoke—as if to show by example that we too can put our identities into question: “I cannot become identical with myself.” Identity is an effect of difference, and its fixity is constantly deferred. Identifications shift: they’re transformed by impersonal political and economic forces, articulated into different and irreconcilable political positions. The lonely hour—and truly it would be a lonely one—when we finally become ourselves never arrives.
Thinking without guarantees, though, does not mean dispensing with theory; rather, it shows us its necessity. It’s precisely because knowledge is not guaranteed by either perception or experience that we need to take a “detour” through concepts. Hall precedes a summary of his earlier reflections on Marx’s method with a confession:
Theory remains relevant, its development remains valid; no anti-intellectual populism is licensed by the study of popular culture. Even though ordinary people are capable of “bringing into being new modes of thought,” as Gramsci had shown, not everyone in the division of labor that characterizes our societies has the function of an intellectual. This function matters because the domination of the ruling class is not automatic: it is maintained through active processes of education and persuasion, and aided by intellectuals who serve ruling-class interests. A politics of opposition has to educate and persuade people in an emancipatory rather than a reactionary direction. But pursuing this project does not mean that intellectuals should claim privileged insight into the direction of history. The “detour through theory” leads toward addressing people in their complexity and multiplicity, as people who are not identical with themselves and are on this basis capable of thinking and acting together.
What is to be done, Hall constantly followed Gramsci in asking, by those who are assigned the function of intellectuals in the division of labor that they are politically committed, somehow and in some way, to overcoming?
There is both a dignity and a modesty in Hall’s conception of the intellectual life. This modesty is how I read the narrowing of his political outlook in 2004, the part of “Prism” I find most difficult to accept. After a clear-sighted analysis of the havoc that global capitalism continues to wreak, he tells us to leave behind the “revolutionary dream” and instead to look toward “just a little opening here and there toward the horizon of freedom, justice, and equality.”
I’m not convinced that such minor adjustments are actually realistic in a world of burning forests and mutating viruses. But the rational kernel of Hall’s ambivalence is that those of us who still believe in the revolutionary dream haven’t come to terms with its failures. As the political theorist Wendy Brown put it in a classic reflection on Hall, we have to ask how to construct a politics that “does not falsely ground itself in the notion that ‘history is on our side.’” Thinking without guarantees, as Hall said, doesn’t help you get to sleep at night, and it means confronting the fact that socialism may not happen.
But politics without guarantees also has to mean taking a risk, a hazardous leap. And if Hall had come to envision a future that looked mostly like the present, he knew that the consequences of his thought were that this vision was just as much suspended in the realm of historical contingency as any other. “I do not believe,” he had already reminded us, “in ‘the laws of history.’ There is no closure yet written into it. And to be absolutely honest, if you do not agree that there is a degree of openness or contingency to every historical conjuncture, you do not believe in politics.”
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There’s no guarantee that we end up who we are. And as Hall pointed out in “Prism,” this contingency is where the work of theory begins:
All our biographies are unfinished, and will remain so long after we are gone. In all our “detours” we learn to think, and to act, and the intensity of thought resists the fixity of selfhood we impose on it. And as we think we still hear Stuart Hall, in all his multiplicity, inviting us—why not?—to live without guarantees.
Photo credit: Stuart Hall, courtesy of the Stuart Hall family archive.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.