Stuart Hall – an appreciation by Bob Williams-Findlay

The Guardian carried an obituary to Stuart Hall on its website within hours of his death. I was alerted to it by a round-robin email from a network. In many ways there is a kind of irony here; the social media has such a pivotal role these days in popular culture, which was of course, the terrain upon which Hall built a lasting legacy.

My personal relationship with Stuart was a result of me having a ‘political refugee’ status following being banned for two years by the University of Essex due to student protests. The University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was the only place willing to accept me. This was a couple of years before Stuart moved on to the Open University towards the end of the 1970s. Those two years however were to have a lasting impact upon my life and helped shape me into the kind of person I am today. I’ve made this observation because I believe it is a common experience among hundreds of people who had the good fortune to come into contact with the man and his work; the truth is, Stuart Hall was an incredible individual.

So who was Stuart Hall?

Stuart was born on February 3 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica, into a middle class family. His father, Herman, was the first non-white person to hold a senior position – chief accountant – with United Fruit in Jamaica. Both his parents had non-African components in their ancestry, though as he recalled: “I was always the blackest member of my family and I knew it from the moment I was born.”

Watching John Akomfrah’s film narrative on Stuart Hall’s life, work and legacy (‘The Stuart Hall Project’, 2013), I was struck by how Stuart spoke of his estranged relationship with his family and was left wondering what impact this had on his life once he had won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University. He arrived in Britain in 1951 as part of the large-scale Caribbean migration that had begun symbolically with the arrival of the Empire Windrush three years earlier.

Tariq Ali explains: ‘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.’

Out of the political upheavals of 1956 – marked by the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt and by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution – Stuart became an influential figure within the emerging new left. In 1957 the politics landscape paved the way for the launching of the Universities and Left Review. The subsequent merger with the New Reasoner led to the birth of the New Left Review, of which Stuart was the founding editor. On the 1964 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march from Aldermaston to London, Stuart 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.

Making sense of the Stuart Hall project

My biggest criticism of ‘The Stuart Hall Project’ was the underplaying of his work in Birmingham – I described the film as being ‘decentred’. I would argue that it was at CCCS where Stuart was able to develop his praxis which led to a rich tapestry of enquiry and research using an array of theoretical thought. Stuart, as a cultural theorist, viewed culture as not something to simply appreciate or study, but a “critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled”.

During his time as Director of the Centre he wrote a number of influential articles, including Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures (1972) and Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973). He also contributed to the book, Policing the Crisis (1978) and co-edited the influential, Resistance Through Rituals (1975).

No doubt many will describe Stuart as being inspirational however this in my opinion doesn’t adequately explain his unique qualities. While Stuart was an educator, he also understood the importance of creating space for others to grow, enquire and challenge themselves and their peers. There was a desire that those at CCCS recognised their responsibility to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in. A fellow CCCS student wrote in an email to me: We are, so many of us, conjoined in the Stuart Hall project. To fully appreciate these words it is necessary to consider how Stuart saw life at CCCS.

Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist from the turn of the 20^th century, ‘… distinguished between a “traditional” intelligentsia which sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks “organically”. Such “organic” intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but instead articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves.’ It was within this tradition Stuart wanted CCCS to develop its work. Someone else who went to CCCS said that Stuart was, ‘Interestingly, in a speech for EHRC back in 2008, Jane Campbell argued that the Disabled People’s Movement had been campaigning for ‘personalization’ within social care for the last 30 years – I totally, utterly, disagree with this view. Jane is presenting ‘personalization’ as being the same notion as self-determination and I believe this is a common error among many ‘reformist’, rights based, disabled campaigners. To be fair, Jane questions the ‘individualized’ over ‘collective’ focus, but this wasn’t taken far enough. Since then the Coalition has taken ‘personalization’ to a whole new level. I keep talking about the hijacking of progressive ideas and giving them alternative status quo meanings – this whole terrain is covered by this activity. The link below illustrates why disabled people need to be more critical of how ‘disability rights’ have been accommodated into neoliberal policies which promote ‘self-reliance’ rather than self-determination.Interestingly, in a speech for EHRC back in 2008, Jane Campbell argued that the Disabled People’s Movement had been campaigning for ‘personalization’ within social care for the last 30 years – I totally, utterly, disagree with this view. Jane is presenting ‘personalization’ as being the same notion as self-determination and I believe this is a common error among many ‘reformist’, rights based, disabled campaigners. To be fair, Jane questions the ‘individualized’ over ‘collective’ focus, but this wasn’t taken far enough. Since then the Coalition has taken ‘personalization’ to a whole new level. I keep talking about the hijacking of progressive ideas and giving them alternative status quo meanings – this whole terrain is covered by this activity. The link below illustrates why disabled people need to be more critical of how ‘disability rights’ have been accommodated into neoliberal policies which promote ‘self-reliance’ rather than self-determination…. a towering presence, yet never overbearing, showing by example his commitment to democracy, egalitarianism and tolerance of divergent views.’

The man and his ideas

Stuart was often called a post-Gramscian or a structuralist, however, my appreciation of Stuart’s way of working stems from the fact he was able to ‘borrow’ from traditional Marxist texts, French philosophers, such as Foucault, other post-modernists, to construct a new set of arguments and positions. His work wasn’t therefore tied to a particular discipline or aligned to a specific ‘political direction’. He wrote for the CPGB’s theoretical journal Marxism Today where he challenged the left’s views of markets and general organisational and political conservatism, but this was to enable him to engage with the centre-left and the labour movement. Stuart is also spoken of as the ‘godfather of multiculturalism’, however, I would caution against such a characterisation. Paul Gilroy, I believe, offers a better insight when he writes: ‘I say multiculture rather than multiculturalism, for there is in fact, in the UK, no such active ideology.’ A mainstay of Stuart’s work was concerned with the twists and turns within multiculture, and in no way should he be linked to the absurd misrepresentations of people such Trevor Philips and the Daily Mail.

Using a quotation from Paul Gilroy is fitting. Paul and I were instrumental in establishing the ‘Race and Politics Groups’ which, not only brought together both black and white post-graduates, but also others from Birmingham’s diverse communities. The outcome was the publishing of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s Britain. Key contributions came from Gilroy, but also other black students such as Hazel Carby and Errol Lawrence; however, Stuart only ‘popped in’ from time to time to “see how we were doing”. Paul and I view this as a conscious political decision by Stuart, an acknowledgement that the second generation needed its own ‘voice’.

Stuart Hall and politics

Stuart Hall also made a huge contribution in mainstream politics through his analysis of Thatcherism (a term coined by Hall) and post-Thatcher Thatcherism of Tony Blair. As David Morley and Bill Schwarz write:

‘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.’

In an interview with Zoe Williams (February, 2012) Stuart said:

‘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.’

Williams goes on to explain that Hall saw ‘….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.” Despite the pessimistic view taken in the interview, Williams was able to conclude: ‘… 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.’

There are so many other sides to Stuart I’ve not touched upon, but my aim here was to capture my perspective on a human being I came to both love and admire. His passing has caused me sadness, but even now his legacy gives me fresh hope. In the Guardian 12 September 2011, Stuart stated: “Excluded social forces…form the basis of counter-movements…and the struggle over a hegemonic system starts anew… History is never closed but maintains an open horizon towards the future.” I believe in that future, as he did.