Grant Farred, The Con
“Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my
home,” he told the Guardian in 2012. “I’m not English and I never will be. The
life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means
of escape, and it was a failure.”
There are few events that demand our thinking as much as
death. It is difficult enough to find the right words with which to remember
the one who has passed; to remember exactly what it is that mattered in the
moment of that passing, a moment unavoidably fraught and overwrought with loss,
recollection, pain and immense gratitude for the life that was. Producing a
language that befits the dead, who are still so alive to us, is a task made
inordinately more difficult when the one who is being honoured is an
intellectual who made the political use of language his life’s work. When the
intellectual in question, as is the case here, gave theoretical gravity to
“articulation”, renovated Marxism for our time, made us think about how
“encoding” and “decoding” constituted a critical part of our everyday
existence, and, perhaps his greatest accomplishment, made us attend to
“culture” as though it were an entirely new concept.
Culture, as the fundament of cultural studies, the field
with which the late Stuart Hall (1932-2014) is most intimately connected, the
field, many are apt to say, that he brought to life and, with incisive
regularity, rethought. Hall who, with figures such as Richard Hoggart and Paddy
Whannel, first imagined cultural studies, critiqued the field so that it might
do the political work that the new conjuncture (another key Hall term) needed.
In the past 60 years, there are few thinkers on the left the world over who can
claim to have remained immune to the charge of political engagement issued by
cultural studies or whose work was not, in one way or another, influenced by
Hall.
In light of such a towering intellectual legacy, it is not
so much ironic as provocative that it is the notion of “failure to escape
home”, as the Guardian reported, that resonates most because it addresses
directly the question of work, of the conditions (“partial displacement”) under
which the intellectual thinks. Hall, who came to England in 1951 from colonial
Jamaica on a Rhodes scholarship to study at Merton College, Oxford, declares
himself not to be “English”. Hall’s disavowal, considering that he lived in
England from 1951 until his death on February 10 2014, does nothing so much as
make us think not only what it might mean to be English (itself a matter of
theoretical and political import for him), but also what it means for him to
have worked, for more than six decades, in Britain.
In some ways, of course, Hall’s is an old story of exile or
the diaspora, which are not the same things but are, from time to time, so
proximate as to be indistinguishable. This narrative begins with alienation
from the place of origin and ends, often tragically, with death and alienation
from the place to which the intellectual has been deracinated. But that is
precisely not what Hall offers. For Hall, working from England, this place
which he pronounces “not my home”, is about responding to the demands of his
“partial integration”, which is itself a response to his failed integration
into Jamaican middle class life. Hall fled the racism of his own family (or, to
phrase it crudely, the “colour consciousness” – that is, lighter is better).
This “colour consciousness” manifested itself most traumatically when his
parents would not permit his sister to have a relationship with a dark-skinned
medical student from Barbados. Hall was, he recalled to me in a conversation
over mid-morning coffee in the summer of 1993, pejoratively referred to in his
family because of his own dark skin. And not just personally, psychically, but
intellectually, Jamaica was hardly home. It took until 1996, in a conference
organised at the University of the West Indies’ MONA campus, for Hall to be
honoured in the Caribbean.
Hall’s intellectual trajectory, then, from scholarship boy
to doyen of cultural studies and the British New Left, including his commitment
to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and his role as founding editor of the
journal New Left Review, is a testament to the difficulty and possibility of
thinking from a “partial” but not marginal place. To be only, ever, “partially”
at home means that the self must always know itself, in moments critical and
mundane, as (raced, colonised, diasporic) other and, because of Hall’s
centrality to the defining cultural and political debates in Britain since at
least 1956, “partial (raced, diasporised, postcolonial, metropolitan) other”.
Most importantly, this meant that Hall’s political work was never restricted to
a single constituency, even if it was ideologically “delimited” – Stuart was,
from start to finish, a thinker of and for the Left.
Hall took up the role of intellectual who championed so much
more, while never losing sight of it as a lodestar for his thinking, than the
cause of the Empire Windrush generation (the name of the first post-World War
II ship to bring immigrants from the Caribbean) and subsequent generations of
their descendants. This work included in its ambit everything from critiquing
late-imperial racism (a condition that remains, to this day, slow to die) to
discrimination in education, labour (a critique located at the intersection of
class, race and capital) and culture. The Popular Arts, co-written with Paddy
Whannel, makes a wonderful case for American jazz as a potential subject for
study. Fitting, then, that one of Hall’s last public moments – The Stuart Hall
Project, directed by John Akomfrah, screened at this year’s Sundance Film
Festival – is a poetic recalling of his love for that most iconic of jazz
figures, Miles Davis.
Beginning with his work for the New Left in 1956, itself a
global anti-colonial movement that stretched from the Suez Canal (that Suez
crisis that pitted France, Britain and Israel against Gamal Abdel Nasser’s
newly independent Egypt) to Budapest (the Soviet invasion of Hungary) and
Moscow (Nikita Kruschev’s denunciation of Joseph Stalin), Hall spent the rest
of his life in Britain trying to realise, as he might have put it, an “already
existing socialism” that was unwavering in its commitment to on-the-ground
cultural struggles. The Hard Road to Renewal, arguably his best known book (a
collection of essays written over a decade or so), brings a Gramscian paradigm
to bear on the rise of Margaret Thatcher’s “authoritarian populism”. (It is
possible to claim that he not only coined the term “Thatcherism” but made it
the left pejorative it deservedly became.) “Thatcherism” was a mode of coming
to and organising power that extended to and coincided with Ronald Reagan’s
presidency in the United States.
“Authoritarian populism” stands as one of Hall’s signal
accomplishments: he modelled for us not only how to take conservatism seriously
but, critical in a moment when class lines were presumed to be absolutely
rooted in the economy, never to fall prey to the Narodnikist line – that the
working class is not, simply by virtue of being working class, always already
radical. The working class, as Thatcherism demonstrated time and again, must
never be thought outside of its capacity for nationalism – Thatcher’s ability
to mobilise Britain in the Falklands (Malvinas) War made that point amply. He
modelled for us how to think, via Gramsci, Marx and several other thinkers he
dubbed, ironically, “old testament prophets” of the Left, of the terrain of
authoritarian populism and how to counter it. So much so that much of The Hard
Road to Renewal reads like an open letter to Neil Kinnock. Hall is explaining
to the British Labour Party leader (Hall described his relationship to Labour
as ambivalent, “one foot in, one foot out”) how to overcome Thatcher’s “Little
England” mode of governing and how to construct a bloc that could undo the
Tories’ populism.
When Labour, under the leadership of Tony Blair, finally
unseated the Tories, there were those on the left who blamed Hall, some more
loudly than others, for the triumph of the neo-liberalist Third Way. But they
were wrong. Even if Blair’s Labour learned from Hall’s critiques of the party’s
outmoded loyalty to the unions, even if they recognised the value of the
cultural popular and its ability to mobilise and cohere, however precariously
and impermanently, different constituencies (youth, gays, environmentalists,
ethnicised communities and so on), Stuart never flinched in his socialist
commitment. Neo-liberalism, no matter who occupied Downing Street, was for Hall
the enemy of a radical politics.
Until his health began to deteriorate in his last decade or
so, Hall stood at the centre of the political debate in Britain. In truth, his
argument had an impact on politics far beyond his London home. Hall’s formative
role in post-War British politics and culture, then, introduces a productive
contradiction at the core of “partial displacement”. On the one hand, it
signifies, as Hall intends, as an incomplete, jagged and truncated relationship
to the metropolis. On the other, “partial displacement” gives voice to the
power of the part, enabling a series of affiliations that extend well beyond
the self without ever subsuming or invalidating that self. In his not belonging
fully to the erstwhile imperial centre, Hall is able to give himself entirely –
as the political landscape shifts, as new political possibilities emerge – to
the struggles of the part (say, Marxism, cultural struggle) that identifies
itself with, however problematically or tendentiously, the ideological whole
(left politics).
The partial, in this logic, marks not the withdrawal of the
displaced subject to the margins, but the immersion – the act of political
commitment – of the self in the struggle at hand. Ironically, then, when he
says that his “escape to England” was a “failure”, he is inadvertently,
circuitously, entirely by accident, acknowledging the political and
intellectual success of said “failure”. Hall, to phrase the matter jocularly,
failed to escape England. As a result, he gave himself fully, not partially
(that is, the kind of remove that is acquired only in retrospect), to Britain.
Furthermore, it is England – in its imperial and post-imperial formations –
that made of him the intellectual he became. Much like, we might say, it made
his wife, the Northamptonshire native Catherine Hall (nee Barrett), the critic
of imperial Britain and a feminist scholar of the colonial Caribbean.
The logic of the partial brings things, paradoxically, full
circle. It is not only England that shaped Hall, but late- and post-imperial
England has been shaped by a thinker who made of his partial displacement a
full-time commitment to a radical politics that he, in his turn, both practised
in England and also “displaced” far beyond this place that was “not home”, this
place that was, as irony would have it, also perhaps the most fertile site for
Hall’s thinking. Displacement, or, more properly phrased, the violence of
deracination that compelled Hall to England, made of England a “home” for
thinking. In this way, at least, England did not fail him at all.
What an intellectual benefit it is, then, to have lived, to
be able to live (now, as the numbers of “displaced” intellectuals grows apace),
a life of partial displacement, a life that resonates with Marx of the 18th
Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” We can say
this of very few thinkers: what an intellectual history Stuart Hall made under
conditions that he, only in part, chose. How Hall put those conditions to work,
how he struggled to make a different history. How he used his “partial
displacement” to “present” to, as Marx puts it, a “new scene” to world history.
In confronting Hall’s death, he has made us, once again,
turn to, return to, the very thinking, the very life-sustaining difficulties,
which were so crucial in forming him as an intellectual. In our turning to face
the accomplishments of his life, Hall has presented us with his greatest gift:
he alloyed his displacement into an intellectual culture of discomfiture. He
discomfited us into thought so that we grappled with notions of home, radical
homeless, the diaspora and the intellectual so that we contemplated the place
of the exile and the displaced in intellectual history. Stuart Hall continues
to make us think in death as he did so magnificently in his life.
