There are people whose reach and generosity is only fully
understood when they go. Stuart Hall was such a man. He was the reason I did
cultural studies and went to work at Marxism Today in the 80s. I hardly knew
him, but I knew his work well and it was never just "writing" to me.
Hall's words were political interventions that changed the terms of the debate
– about what Thatcherism meant and how it could be opposed; about race; about
class; about culture. This sounds complicated, but to see him speak was to be
overwhelmed by his charisma, his eloquence, his desire to include everybody in
the room, his sheer moral force.
"My God!" I remember saying. "This man should
be in charge of the universe." But then he would sit next to you in some
godforsaken canteen at some conference and ask you about your kids.
The tributes made it clear that he provided a home for those
of us who could not fit in elsewhere. As a black intellectual, he inspired so
many black writers and artists, and it is fitting that he became surrounded by
younger black visual artists but would always describe these relationships as
reciprocal.
Connecting race and power, the need to uncover hidden –
often unconscious and shifting – relationships was essential to his work. But
that work was always nuanced: identity itself is always in transformation. And
there is the optimism: the incremental changes he saw over his lifetime around
multiculturalism and sexual identity. But his pessimism about class led him to
analyse neo-liberalism brilliantly. He was not a communist nor an economic
determinist but he used Marxist theory as a tool. Capital and its workings, he
insisted, needed to be understood specifically, historically, as it changed
from post-Fordism to full globalisation. What underpinned it ideologically?
In order to understand Thatcher and then New Labour, he
first took apart the neo-liberal consensus. His argument with New Labour was
that it continued what Thatcherism has begun: an accommodation with
globalisation that leaves so much of the world desperately poor.
But he was not one for revolutionary politics. Instead he
was always trying to discuss the circumstances or events that would precipitate
change. For that he used the word conjuncture. What joins together to make the
big shifts in consciousness?
The interdisciplinary approach of cultural studies, so often
dismissed as merely the study of pop culture, was part of that. It was the
study of how power operates in the everyday. But by the mid 80s we had drifted
off into the apolitical world of post-modernism. By then, I was editing the
culture section of Marxism Today and procured an interview with that grump Jean
Baudrillard. Martin Jacques, the magazine's editor, understandably, did not
trust me to do it and said I must run it by Stuart. So I did. "Do you know
what you want to ask him?" Stuart said.
"Yes."
"Then you'll be fine."
And this vote of confidence meant the world. He gave me
permission. He gave so many people who felt "other" to the
establishment permission to speak, by his very being. John Akomfrah's beautiful
film The Stuart Hall Project shows something of that. If there is melancholy in
the tributes it is because the lodestar of that diaspora has gone missing.
Where do these ideas now belong?
Well, maybe he is the godfather of multiculturalism, but as
he increasingly understood race through the modality of class and vice versa,
as he understood gender politics as an unsettling challenge, we can see that
intersectionality is not new; that Hall's work embodies it, that he is more
pioneer than prophet. His insistence that identities shift and drift, that new
forms of power and opposition are always emerging, is still vital.
The thinkers currently advising Ed Miliband are borrowing
from Hall's work, though to seek a populist consensus around nation and family
is anathema to it. Edging towards addressing inequality rather than thinking
the market will adjust, as Miliband did in last month's Hugo Young lecture, is
more like it.
Hall's life reminds us too of the conservatism of academia,
with its fetishising of autonomous scholarship. Hall was that rare thing: a
fully engaged public intellectual who thrived on collaboration, who did not
separate the personal from the political. Identifying himself as a black
intellectual, he said, gave him "no alternative".
To see him debate with a conservative was a joy. Just a
flicker of pity – or was it contempt? "In the back of my head are things
that can't be in the back of your head. That part of me comes from a
plantation, when you owned me." God, that hit home.
No wonder he was preoccupied by the downside of
globalisation, the great mass of humanity in transit, in refugee camps,
dispossessed.
He used theory to prise open the chaos and to start all
these conversations. Listen to his cadence: he would make sense of something
complicated and say it simply and profoundly, often with an upward inflection
at the end. "Yes? Yeah? OK?" he would say. Thinking, for him, was
always democratic, a dialogue with the past, the present, the people in the room
and those outside it.
We owe it to him to keep thinking, listening, to fully grasp
the circumstances in which we live in order that we might change them. Yes?
