Hall - Cultural Studies 1983

Stuart Hall: Selected Writings

A series edited by Catherine Hall and Bill Schwarz

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS | DURHAM AND LONDON | 2016

2016 Stuart Hall Estate

Introduction 2016, Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

Typeset in Minion Pro and Meta by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hall, Stuart, [date], author. | Slack, Jennifer Daryl, editor. | Grossberg, Lawrence, editor. | Hall, Stuart, [date]. Works. Selections. 2016.

Title: Cultural studies 1983 : a theoretical history / Stuart Hall ; edited and with an introduction by Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg.

Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Series: Stuart Hall, selected writings | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:LCCN2016020794 (print)LCCN2016022037 (ebook)

ISBN9780822362487 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN9780822362630 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN9780822373650 (e-book)

Subjects:LCSH: CultureStudy and teaching. | Critical theory. | Social sciencesPhilosophy.

Classification:LCC HM623.365 2016 (print) |LCC HM623 (ebook) |306dc23

record available athttps://lccn.loc.gov/2016020794

Cover art: Photo of Stuart Hall by Dharmachari Mahasiddhi.

CONTENTS

The lectures in this volume were delivered by Stuart Hall in the summer of 1983 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as part of the teaching institute (which was followed by a conference) called Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: Limits, Frontiers, Boundaries, organized by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Both the teaching institute, June 8July 8, and the conference, July 812, have been extremely influential in shaping the development of cultural theory in and across a variety of disciplines, including Cultural Studies, Communication, Literary Theory, Film Studies, Anthropology, and Education. The teaching institute consisted of seminars taught by Perry Anderson, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, Julia Lesage, Gajo Petrovi, Gayatri Spivak, and University of Illinois faculty A. Belden Fields, Lawrence Grossberg, and Richard Schacht. Participants were students and faculty from across the U.S. as well as from several other countries. The conference, with an audience of over five hundred students and faculty, resulted in a book of essays and exchanges (Nelson and Grossberg 1988) that reflects the events many interdisciplinary exchanges and includes Halls The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists (3573). The shape of cultural theoryits interpretation, directions, scholarship, and teachingin the U.S. today can be credited in part to the events of that summer and the book, the extensive interaction of established and young scholars in the seminars and conference, and the cultivation of a collective sense of the vitality and diversity of Marxist contributions to cultural theory at the time.

These events have been hailed as a particularly significant moment in the history of Cultural Studies, for although a few people were writing about and practicing Cultural Studies in the U.S. (and other places outside of Britain) at the time, and although Hall had given occasional lectures in the U.S., the teaching institute provided the first sustained exposure for many intellectuals to both Hall and British Cultural Studies. At the seminars beginning, only a few people knew of Halls work and the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, but very quickly, as news of the exceptional nature of these lectures spread, Hall attracted hundreds of students and faculty, many driving for hours to attend. The lectures were riveting, and the mood during the lectures was electric. We had the sense of being part of theory being developed, of Cultural Studies being made. The lectures were contributing to invigorating Cultural Studies in the U.S. in both subtle and dramatic ways.

Hall had been the first person Richard Hoggart hired at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. When Hoggart left to take up a high-level position at UNESCO in 1969, Hall became the new director, where he remained until 1980, when he was appointed Professor of Sociology at the Open University. By the summer of 1983, the work of the Centre and Halls important contributions were gaining visibility in what were largely minor disciplines (e.g., Communication Studies and Education) at a number of respected public universities rather than elite private schools. The Centres early work on working-class culture, media, news and popular culture, subcultures, ideology, and semiotics, as well as the now classic study of racism and the new conservatism (notably a book that predicted the rise of Thatcherism, Policing the Crisis [Hall et al. 1978]), was neither well known nor widely available outside the U.K. But while Hall had already become the leading figure and the most articulate spokesperson for the project of Cultural Studies, few people outside the U.K. knew of either Hall or the project.

What Hall presented in this series of eight lectures was a personally guided tour of the emergence and development of British Cultural Studies as seen from his own perspective. These lectures are, in fact, the first serious attempt to tell a story about the emergence and development of Cultural Studies at the Centre. Yet they are both less and more than this, as the 1988 preface he wrote some years after the lectures makes clear. They are not in any sense a history of the Centre. They underplay the crucial empirical studies and contributions of the various research groups that formed the heart of the Centre in the 1970s. They largely bypass the Centre as a space of administrative and organizational experimentation that provided the condition of possibility of its intellectual experimentation. They put aside the crucial and often heated political debates and diversity that constituted a vital part of the everyday life of the Centre and often connected it with political and artistic activities in Birmingham (and to a lesser extent, in London and elsewhere).

The lectures offer instead a history of theory. Even then, however, they could not possibly be a comprehensive account of the rich theoretical sources, confrontations, negotiations, and paths taken up and rejected, as well as advances that constituted the formation and history of British Cultural Studies. For example, it is difficult to miss the lacunae of womens voices in this story, when by 1983 there had been significant theoretical challenges to the influence of patriarchy on subcultural theory and significant contributions by feminists to theorizing articulation. The reality of even Cultural Studies theoretical history was already then too messy, uneven, and contested at any and every momentpaths were taken up and rejected, some coexisted, and others confronted each other with open hostilityfor one person to tell the story adequately, even when that one person was Stuart Hall. In addition, these lectures were further inflected no doubt by the challenge to contribute to the overall theme of the teaching institute and conference: Marxisms contribution to the interpretation of culture.