The death of Stuart Hall has already provoked a wave of remembrance and retrospective reflection that will no doubt continue for years to come. Here I will consider Hall’s contribution to the field with which he and his work became at times synonymous: Cultural Studies. Exactly what type of entity Cultural Studies might be is itself a controversial topic. Hall was ambivalent about whether Cultural Studies was a ‘discipline’ or a ‘trans-disciplinary field of inquiry, not a discipline’: each of these characterizations appeared in the same 2007 essay.[1] This ambivalence is in part inherent to the concept of ‘discipline’ itself,[2] but is also a genuine index of a willingness to problematize the intellectual and institutional identity of cultural studies, which is one of the most distinctive hallmarks of that field itself; one that it shares with certain strands of art practice, but with few other disciplines or quasi-disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, wherein disciplinary policing is arguably become stricter and more anxious as the pressures of dwindling resources and bibliometric competition become more ever more intense.

This general resistance to formulation and institutionalization is one of the most striking effects of Hall’s long-range influence within Cultural Studies. Although both Richard Hoggart (who founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies [CCCS] at Birmingham University – inviting Hall to join the staff – in 1964 and appointed Hall as his successor in 1968) and Raymond Williams were committed to interdisciplinarity and methodological experimentation, their resistance to codification was not as rhetorically explicit as Hall’s. Hall was frank about his distaste for systematization, famously remarking upon his preference for The Eighteenth Brumaire over Capital,although it was always unclear how far this was a matter of literary taste and how far a deconstructive ethic, resistant to system as such, informed Hall’s approach. The obvious retort was that Marx could only write The Eighteenth Brumaire because, and to the extent that, he was on the way to writing Capital;that the possibility (and, at times, the necessity) of abstract schematization is a necessary element of any analytical practice that can get beyond the limits of positivism. I don’t think Hall would have disagreed with this, however, and his own forays into schematic theoretical exposition were notorious for their economy, utility and widespread influence.[3]

Although Hall authorized and encouraged the idea of Cultural Studies as a field within which a very diverse ecology of practices could flourish – from ethnography to media content-analysis to ‘pure’ theory – he was consistent in his understandings of what the overall aim and shared objective of such work should be. On the one hand, Cultural Studies was to be always about power, about the shifting nature and multiple operations of power relationships at every conceivable social scale, a formulation that Hall offered most memorably and succinctly in his 1997 interview with Radical Philosophy.[4] On the other hand, the orientation of Cultural Studies was always to be towards the general analysis of ‘the conjuncture’, this Gramscian term designating the specific ensemble of social, cultural and economic forces shaping possible political outcomes at a given moment.[5] This by no means implied that all work in Cultural Studies had to concern itself with some ambitious attempt to survey the whole field of contemporary power relationships, merely that the question ‘what does this have to do with everything else?’ should, at some point, always be asked of whatever phenomenon was under discussion.

This raises the intriguing question of why exactly a transdisciplinary field with its roots in Leavisite English Literature should have become the place where two (perhaps more – we shall see) generations of anglophone scholars would go if these were the questions they wanted to address. Michael Rustin has remarked that Cultural Studies as we know it could just as well have emerged from social anthropology. Paul Bowman once quipped to me that if today we were thinking of a name for the transdisciplinary field concerned with the conjunctural, multiscalar analysis of power relationships, then ‘Cultural Studies’ probably wouldn’t be the obvious choice. We could add to these observations by remarking upon a situation with which readers of Radical Philosophy will probably be familiar: that in many institutional contexts ‘Cultural Studies’ has come, bizarrely, to name a space in which speculative philosophy in the ‘continental’ tradition is discussed, banished as it has largely been from academic ‘Philosophy’ by the dominance of the analytic tradition. At the same time we ought to ask why an intellectual practice whose primary object is the analysis of power relationships should, to this day, have had almost no productive relationships with the academic field of Political Science or even the supposedly more expansive ‘Political Studies’.

There are two related answers to this question. One is the influence of, and role played by, Hall himself, not only in Cultural Studies, but in the wider life of the British intellectual Left since the 1960s. Hall became the key figure in Cultural Studies, and drew many scholars into it, not only because of his own publications or the support and inspiration which he offered to successive cohorts of students who would go on from Birmingham (and later the Open University) to teach and practise Cultural Studies in their own careers, but also because of the role he played as a uniquely insightful political commentator in the wider public sphere. Hall’s commentary typically drew on conceptual resources that were being developed in Cultural Studies (semiotics, Gramscian and Althusserian ideology-critique; later on, postcolonial theory and some post-structuralism) in order to offer deft and penetrating pictures of the key emergent tendencies shaping British politics and culture. The most striking example of this continuity is his derivation of an analysis of emergent Thatcherism – which turned out to be unquestionably prescient and accurate, despite its dismissal at the time by most of the Left – from the analytical work done by Policing the Crisis, the multi-authored study of a press moral panic around ‘mugging’ and its broader political context conducted by Hall and colleagues in the mid-1970s and published in 1978.

The other answer is perhaps more contentious. I would suggest that it has to do with the profound hegemony of liberalism within the British academy, which takes multiple forms in different contexts, but which ensures that neither Philosophy nor Political Studies has been an institutional site at which any kind of serious critique of a culture and polity historically shaped by it has been possible, except under very exceptional circumstances. The narrowness of these disciplines’ self-conceptions is a symptom of the narrowness and complacency of the ideology that shapes their habitual norms and assumptions to this day, and it is in the vast space, the enormous territory of unanswered questions and unaddressed phenomena left vacant by this unconscious rigidity which something called ‘Cultural Studies’ has grown, spread out and multiplied, in a form which is often frustratingly diffuse, but which is so by virtue of the size and variety of the issues that have been left open to it by those disciplines that might otherwise have been expected to address them. Cultural Studies has been shaped, and indeed called into existence, in part by the need to find ways of talking about power, meaning, politics, popular culture, everyday life, global relations, and the nature of existence which were not permissible within domains hegemonized by liberalism and its individualistic, positivist assumptions about the world and humanity. Radical sociology had done some of this work already, and has continued to do more since, but in fields such as the study of the expressive arts and media culture, where sociology’s explanatory reach is limited, or at the level of abstract conceptions or of systematic historical analysis, Cultural Studies has filled various remaining gaps.

This draws our attention to the fact that Hall’s influence within Cultural Studies has in part taken the form of an almost unquestioned loyalty within the field to the political norms and assumptions which he brought with him as a central figure of the British New Left: socialist yet libertarian; anti-elitist; suspicious of Marxist dogma; committed to anti-colonialism, anti-racism and, eventually, feminism and queer politics. Clearly it would be inaccurate to claim that the overwhelming orientation of Cultural Studies to recognizably ‘New Left’ positions was simply a consequence of Hall’s personal political commitments. Raymond Williams was arguably at least as central a figure to the early British New Left, and Hoggart obviously knew Hall’s work as the founding editor of New Left Review when he recruited him to work at the CCCS. To some extent the very idea of ‘Cultural Studies’ is a New Left idea, more traditional forms of Leftism having tended to be satisfied with the intellectual tools made available by the more traditional social sciences or dialectical philosophy.

On the other hand, the propagation of Cultural Studies as an intellectual and (trans)disciplinary project informed by the politics of the New Left was a major political achievement for this trio and their followers, given that Leavisite liberal humanism could easily have become the organizing political paradigm for some new interdisciplinary project in the humanities, as Leavis’s own suggestions for an expanded liberal arts curriculum made clear. None of this is to deny that, as critics of the field tend to stress more than is perhaps reasonable, a certain banal liberalism has itself become the implicit political orientation of the worst kinds of Cultural Studies. Nor is it to deny that the precise political orientation of most Cultural Studies remains often frustratingly vague: this itself being, arguably, a symptom of Hall’s reluctance to address the issue schematically at any stage. But these facts do not detract from the general point that Hall succeeded in consolidating the work of his mentors in defining Cultural Studies not only as a productive and porous new field, but one wherein the politics of the New Left would remain implicitly hegemonic to this day.

This is not to say that Hall was entirely satisfied with what Cultural Studies had become. In later years he often expressed the view that cultural theory had emerged as too much of an autonomous domain, cut off from concrete political and analytical problems. He seemed to feel that it was Hall the theorist, the author of those classic schematic essays, rather than Hall the analyst, the key author of Policing the Crisis, whom younger scholars too often sought to emulate, whereas it was becoming the latter that he regarded as his greatest contribution to the intellectual and political causes that he espoused. At times, there was an inevitably conservative-sounding tone to some of these remarks, but his resistance to theoretical neophilia was clearly justified. How many of the conceptual fads that have excited aspiring young radical intellectuals in recent decades (from Agamben to Žižek) have ended up having any actual political purchase whatsoever? Isn’t the lack of historical consciousness and clear, patient analysis an endemic feature today of activist culture, just as a certain anti-intellectualism was the phenomenon against which Hall and his colleagues had to struggle on the left in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s? Under such circumstances, Cultural Studies as conceived by Hall – a sort of multifaceted political sociology, deploying a wide range of theoretical tools in order to analyse shifting dynamics of power and their historical specificities – is needed today more than ever.

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Notes

1. Stuart Hall ‘Epilogue: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life’, in Brian Meeks (ed.), Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 2007.
2. Cf. Jeremy Gilbert, Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics, Berg, Oxford, 2008, pp. 4–7.
3. See, for example, ‘Encoding/Decoding in Television Discourse’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Love, and Paul Willis, eds, Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, Hutchinson/CCCS, University of Birmingham, London, 1980, pp. 128–38; ‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms’, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 2, no. 1 (January 1980), pp. 57–72.
4. Stuart Hall, Lynne Segal and Peter Osborne, ‘Culture and Power: An Interview with Stuart Hall’, Radical Philosophy 86, November/December 1997, pp. 24–41.
5. Whether or not ‘conjuncture’ means the same thing as ‘totality’ is not a question that need detain us here. For thorough discussions of the status of concepts such as ‘conjuncture’ and ‘context’ in Cultural Studies, see Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2010.