Reaction 4

Thirty years ago, many academics considered the study of popular culture beneath them. Stuart Hall helped change that. Photograph by Eamonn McCabe / Camera Press / Redux

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Page-Turner

Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies

By Hua Hsu

July 17, 2017

n the summer of 1983, the Jamaican

scholar Stuart Hall, who lived and taught in England, travelled to the

University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, to deliver a series of lectures

on something called “Cultural Studies.” At the time, many academics still considered

the serious study of popular culture beneath them; a much starker division

existed, then, between what Hall termed the “authenticated, validated” tastes of the

upper classes and the unre�ned culture of the masses. But Hall did not regard this hierarchy as useful. Culture, he argued,

does not consist of what the educated élites happen to fancy, such as classical music or the �ne arts. It is, simply, “experience lived, experience interpreted,

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experience de�ned.” And it can tell us things about the world, he believed, that

more traditional studies of politics or economics alone could not.

A masterful orator, Hall energized the audience in Illinois, a group of thinkers

and writers from around the world who had gathered for a summer institute devoted to parsing Marxist approaches to cultural analysis. A young scholar

named Jennifer Daryl Slack believed she was witnessing something special and decided to tape and transcribe the lectures. After more than a decade of coaxing,

Hall �nally agreed to edit these transcripts for publication, a process that took years. The result is “Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History,” which was

published, last fall, as part of an ongoing Duke University Press series called “Stuart Hall: Selected Writings,” chronicling the career and in�uence of Hall,

who died in 2014.

Broadly speaking, cultural studies is not one arm of the humanities so much as

an attempt to use all of those arms at once. It emerged in England, in the nineteen-�fties and sixties, when scholars from working-class backgrounds, such

as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, began thinking about the distance between canonical cultural touchstones—the music or books that were supposed

to teach you how to be civil and well-mannered—and their own upbringings. These scholars believed that the rise of mass communications and popular forms

were permanently changing our relationship to power and authority, and to one another. There was no longer consensus. Hall was interested in the experience of

being alive during such disruptive times. What is culture, he proposed, but an attempt to grasp at these changes, to wrap one’s head around what is newly

possible?

Hall retained faith that culture was a site of “negotiation,” as he put it, a space of

give and take where intended meanings could be short-circuited. “Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the

powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle,” he

argues. “It is the arena of consent and resistance.” In a free society, culture does

not answer to central, governmental dictates, but it nonetheless embodies an unconscious sense of the values we share, of what it means to be right or wrong.

Over his career, Hall became fascinated with theories of “reception”—how we decode the different messages that culture is telling us, how culture helps us

choose our own identities. He wasn’t merely interested in interpreting new forms, such as �lm or television, using the tools that scholars had previously

brought to bear on literature. He was interested in understanding the various political, economic, or social forces that converged in these media. It wasn’t

merely the content or the language of the nightly news, or middlebrow magazines, that told us what to think; it was also how they were structured,

packaged, and distributed.

According to Slack and Lawrence Grossberg, the editors of “Cultural Studies

1983,” Hall was reluctant to publish these lectures because he feared they would be read as an all-purpose critical toolkit rather than a series of carefully situated

historical conversations. Hall himself was ambivalent about what he perceived to be the American fetish for theory, a belief that intellectual work was merely, in

Slack and Grossberg’s words, a “search for the right theory which, once found, would unlock the secrets of any social reality.” It wasn’t this simple. (I have found

myself wondering what Hall would make of how cultural criticism of a sort that can read like ideological pattern-recognition has proliferated in the age of social

media.)

Over the course of his lectures, Hall carefully wrestles with forebears, including

the British scholar F. R. Leavis and also Williams and Hoggart (the latter founded Birmingham University’s in�uential Center for Contemporary Cultural

Studies, which Hall directed in the seventies). Gradually, the lectures cluster around questions of how we give our lives meaning, how we recognize and

understand “the culture we never see, the culture we don’t think of as cultivated.” These lectures aren’t instructions for “doing” cultural studies—until the very end,

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they barely touch on emerging cultural forms that intrigued Hall, such as reggae

and punk rock. Instead, they try to show how far back these questions reach.

or Hall, these questions emerged from his own life—a fact that his memoir,

“Familiar Stranger,” published by Duke, in April, brings into sharp focus. Hall was born in 1932, in Kingston. His father, Herman, was the �rst nonwhite

person to hold a senior position with the Jamaican office of United Fruit, an American farming and agricultural corporation; his mother, Jessie, was mixed-

race. They considered themselves a class apart, Hall explains, indulging a “gross colonial simulacrum of upper-middle-class England.” From a young age, he felt

alienated by their cozy embrace of the island’s racial hierarchy. As a child, his skin was darker than the rest of his family’s, prompting his sister to tease,

“Where did you get this coolie baby from?” It became a family joke—one he would revisit often. And yet he felt no authentic connection to working-class

Jamaica, either, “conscious of the chasm that separated me from the multitude.” The mild sense of guilt that he describes feels strikingly contemporary. And he

had trouble articulating the terms of this discomfort: “I could not �nd a language in which to unravel the contradictions or to confront my family with

what I really thought of their values, behaviors, and aspirations.” The desire to �nd that language would become the animating spark of his professional life.

In 1951, Hall won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. He was part of the “Windrush” generation—a term used to describe the waves of West Indian

migration to England in the postwar years. Although Hall came from a different class than most of these migrants, he felt a connection to his countrymen.

“Suddenly everything looked different,” he would later remember of his arrival in England. He clipped a newspaper photo of three Jamaicans who arrived

around the time he did. Two of them are carpenters and one is an aspiring boxer; they are all dressed to the nines. “This was style. They were on a mission,

determined to be recognized as participants in the modern world and to make it

theirs. I look at this photograph every morning as I myself head out for that

world,” he writes.

Hall found ready disciples in American universities, though it might be argued

that the spirit which animated cultural studies in England had existed in the U.S. since the �fties and sixties, in underground magazines and the alternative

press. The American fantasy of its supposedly “classless” society has always given “culture” a slightly different meaning than it has in England, where social

trajectories were more rigidly de�ned. What scholars like Hall were actually reckoning with was the “American phase” of British life. After the Second

World War, England was no longer the “paradigm case” of Western industrial society. America, that grand experiment, where mass media and consumer

culture proliferated freely, became the harbinger for what was to come. In a land where rags-to-riches mobility is—or so we tend to imagine—just one hit away,

culture is about what you want to project into the world, whether you are fronting as a member of the élite or as an everyman, offering your interpretation

of Shakespeare or of “The Matrix.” When culture is about self-fashioning, there’s even space to be a down-to-earth billionaire.

How did we get here, to this present, with our imaginations limited by a common sense of possibility that we did not choose? “Selected Political

Writings,” the other book of Hall’s work that Duke has published as part of its series, focusses largely on the lengthy British phase of Hall’s life. The centerpiece

essay is “The Great Moving Right Show,” his 1979 analysis of Margaret Thatcher’s “authoritarian populism.” Her rise was as much a cultural turning

point as a political one, in Hall’s view—an enmity toward the struggling masses, obscured by her platform’s projected attitude of tough, Victorian moderation.

Many of the pieces in this collection orbit the topic of “common sense,” how culture and politics together reinforce an idea of what is acceptable at any given

time.