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Stuart Hall
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It is pertinent to ask, then, not only how much it owed to and derived from the discourse of “Kulturkritik” but how far and in what significant ways did it break with that discourse? What were the methodological and conceptual innovations implicit in its practice of writing and thinking on which new directions could be built? One can list them without elaboration. A very different conception of “culture” is at work here from that which animates the tradition of Kulturkritik. By “culture,” Hoggart meant how working-class people spoke and thought, what language and common assumptions about life they shared, in speech and action, what social attitudes informed their daily practice, what moral categories they deployed, even if only aphoristically, to make judgments about their own behavior and that of others—including, of course, how they brought all this to bear on what they read, saw, and sang. This view of culture as the practices of “making sense” was very far removed indeed from “culture” as the ideal court of judgment, whose touchstone was “the best that has been thought and said,” which animated the tradition from Arnold to Eliot and Leavis. The aim to make culture in the former sense a central and necessary part of the object of study, however fitfully achieved, was as defining a break as Williams’s third definition in The Long Revolution— culture as “ways of life”—and, moreover, despite significant differences, a break moving in a parallel direction . This was a formative moment for Cultural Studies.
We cannot discuss this in detail here but we can see the broad contours of this shift much more clearly in retrospect. There was a postwar boom, with rising living standards. The long-term redistributive shift was much more limited than the prophets estimated (though Immanuel Wallerstein is right to argue that it was quite enough to scare capital out of its wits and provoked the great counter-surge of globalization, market forces, the neoliberal revolution, and the “new world order”). In fact, affluence did not represent “classlessness” as such: rather, it marked the early stages of that long transition (not yet completed) from the older, tiered, socially embedded class structures and Protestant ethic typical of Western European bourgeois societies to the more truncated, “post-industrial” class structures, based on corporate capital, money, celebrity lifestyle, hedonism, and consumption. Underlying this was the prolonged shift from nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism, via the apotheosis of the “high noon” of imperialism, the First World War, the failure of the proletarian “moment,” and the interwar Depression, to the great surge of power represented by the concentrations of corporate capitalism, the managerial revolution, and Fordist economies of scale of the late twentieth century. Mass society, mass culture, mass consumerism, and mass markets were integral aspects of this historic shift: precisely how to understand their real interdependencies remains one of Cultural Studies’ unfulfilled tasks—probably lost forever in the hyper-theoretical and post-political climate that came to prevail. Of course, in the immediate decades after The Uses of Literacy , the shape of things was to be dominated by the historic compromise of the welfare state and the social-democratic consensus. But by the end of the 1970s—and massively reorganized on a global scale—the forces we were trying to understand began to return to the stage with unstoppable force and did, indeed, change the world.
[...] the whole of Thompson’s historical work, from The Making to Whigs and Hunters , The Poverty of Theory and beyond 18 —“capitalist society was founded upon forms of exploitation which are simultaneously economic, moral and cultural. Take up the essential defining productive relationship … and turn it round, and it reveals itself now in one aspect (wage-labour), now in another (an acquisitive ethos), and now in another (the alienation of such intellectual faculties as are not required by the worker in his productive role).”
Here, then, despite the many significant differences, is the outline of one significant line of thinking in Cultural Studies—some would say, the dominant paradigm. It stands opposed to the residual and merely reflective role assigned to “the cultural.” In its different ways, it conceptualizes culture as interwoven with all social practices; and those practices, in turn, as a common form of human activity: sensuous human praxis, the activity through which men and women make history. It is opposed to the base-superstructure way of formulating the relationship between ideal and material forces, especially where the “base” is defined as the determination by “the economic” in any simple sense. It prefers the wider formulation—the dialectic between social being and social consciousness: neither separable into its distinct poles (in some alternative formulations, the dialectic between “culture” and “non-culture”). It defines “culture” as both the meanings and values which arise among distinctive social groups and classes, on the basis of their given historical conditions and relationships, through which they “handle” and respond to the conditions of existence; and as the lived traditions and practices through which those “understandings” are expressed and in which they are embodied. Williams brings together these two aspects—definitions and ways of life—around the concept of “culture” itself. Thompson brings the two elements—consciousness and conditions—around the concept of “experience.” Both positions entail certain difficult fluctuations around these key terms, Williams so totally absorbs “definitions of experience” into our “ways of living,” and both into an indissoluble real material practice-in-general, as to obviate any distinction between “culture” and “not-culture.” Thompson sometimes uses “experience” in the more usual sense of consciousness, as the collective ways in which men “handle, transmit or distort” their given conditions, the raw materials of life; sometimes as the domain of the “lived,” the midterm between “conditions” and “culture”; and sometimes as the objective conditions themselves—against which particular modes of consciousness are counterposed. But, whatever the terms, both positions tend to read structures of relations in terms of how they are “lived” and “experienced.” Williams’s “structure of feeling”—with its deliberate condensation of apparently incompatible elements—is characteristic. But the same is true of Thompson, despite his far fuller historical grasp of the “given-ness” or structuredness of the relations and conditions into which men and women necessarily and involuntarily enter, and his clearer attention to the determinacy of productive and exploitative relations under capitalism. This is a consequence of giving culture-consciousness and experience so pivotal a place in the analysis. The experiential pull in this paradigm, and the emphasis on the creative and on historical agency, constitutes the two key elements in the humanism of the position outlined. Each consequently accords “experience” an authenticating position in any cultural analysis. It is, ultimately, where and how people experience their conditions of life, define them, and respond to them, which for Thompson defines why every mode of production is also a culture, and every struggle between classes is always also a struggle between cultural modalities; and which, for Williams, is what a “cultural analysis,” in the final instance, should deliver. In “experience,” all the different practices intersect; within “culture” the different practices interact—even if on an uneven and mutually determining basis. This sense of cultural totality—of the whole historical process—overrides any effort to keep the instances and elements distinct. Their real interconnection, under given historical conditions, must be matched by a totalizing movement “in thought,” in the analysis. It establishes for both the strongest protocols against any form of analytic abstraction which distinguishes practices, or which sets out to test the “actual historical movement” in all its intertwined complexity and particularity by any more sustained logical or analytical operation. These positions, especially in their more concrete historical rendering, are the very opposite of a Hegelian search for underlying Essences. 20 Yet, in their tendency to reduce practices to praxis and to find common and homologous “forms” underlying the most apparently differentiated areas, their movement is “essentializing.” They have a particular way of understanding the totality—though it is with a small “t,” concrete and historically determinate, uneven in its correspondences. They understand it “expressively.” And since they constantly inflect the more traditional analysis toward the experiential level, or read the other structures and relations downward from the vantage point of how they are “lived,” they are properly (even if not adequately or fully) characterized as “culturalist” in their emphasis: even when all the caveats and qualifications against a too rapid “dichotomous theorizing” have been entered.
The great strength of the structuralisms is their stress on “determinate conditions.” They remind us that, unless the dialectic really can be held, in any particular analysis, between both halves of the proposition—that “men make history … on the basis of conditions which are not of their making”—the result will inevitably be a naive humanism, with its necessary consequence: a voluntarist and populist political practice. The fact that “men” can become conscious of their conditions, organize to struggle against them, and in fact transform them—without which no active politics can even be conceived, let alone practiced—must not be allowed to override the awareness of the fact that, in capitalist relations, men and women are placed and positioned in relations which constitute them as agents. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” is a better starting point than a simple heroic affirmation. Structuralism does enable us to begin to think—as Marx insisted—of the relations of a structure on the basis of something other than their reduction to relationships between “people.” This was Marx’s privileged level of abstraction: that which enabled him to break with the obvious but incorrect starting point of “political economy”—that of bare individuals.
There never was a prior moment when Cultural Studies and Marxism represented a perfect theoretical fit. From the beginning (to use this way of speaking for a moment) there was always already the question of the great inadequacies, theoretically and politically, the resounding silences, the great evasions of Marxism—the things that Marx did not talk about or seem to understand which were our privileged object of study: culture, ideology, language, the symbolic. These were always already, instead, the things which had imprisoned Marxism as a mode of thought, as an activity of critical practice—its orthodoxy, its doctrinal character, its determinism, its reductionism, its immutable law of history, its status as a metanarrative. That is to say, the encounter between British Cultural Studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement with a problem—not a theory, not even a problematic. It begins and develops through the critique of a certain reductionism and economism, which I think is not extrinsic but intrinsic to Marxism; a contestation with the model of base and superstructure, through which sophisticated and vulgar Marxism alike had tried to think the relationships between society, economy, and culture. It was located and sited in a necessary and prolonged and as yet unending contestation with the question of false consciousness. In my own case, it required a not-yet-completed contestation with the profound Eurocentrism of Marxist theory. I want to make this very precise. It is not just a matter of where Marx happened to be born, and of what he talked about, but of the model at the center of the most developed parts of Marxist theory, which suggested that capitalism evolved organically torn within its own transformations. Whereas I came from a society where the profound integument of capitalist society, economy, and culture had been imposed by conquest and colonization. This is a theoretical, not a vulgar critique. I don’t blame Marx because of where he was born; I’m questioning the theory for the model around which it is articulated: its Eurocentrism.
I tried on many occasions, and other people in British Cultural Studies and at the Centre especially have tried, to describe what it is we thought we were doing with the kind of intellectual work we set in place in the Centre. I have to confess that, though I’ve read many, more elaborated and sophisticated, accounts, Gramsci’s account still seems to me to come closest to expressing what it is I think we were trying to do. Admittedly, there’s a problem about his phrase “the production of organic intellectuals.” But there is no doubt in my mind that we were trying to find an institutional practice in Cultural Studies that might produce an organic intellectual. We didn’t know previously what that would mean, in the context of Britain in the 1970s, and we weren’t sure we would recognize him or her if we managed to produce it. The problem about the concept of an organic intellectual is that it appears to align intellectuals with an emerging historic movement and we couldn’t tell then, and can hardly tell now, where that emerging historical movement was to be found. We were organic intellectuals without any organic point of reference; organic intellectuals with a nostalgia or will or hope (to use Gramsci’s phrase from another context) that at some point we would be prepared in intellectual work for that kind of relationship, if such a conjuncture ever appeared. More truthfully, we were prepared to imagine or model or simulate such a relationship in its absence: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
[...] That is to say, unless and until one respects the necessary displacement of culture, and yet is always irritated by its failure to reconcile itself with other questions that matter, with other questions that cannot and can never be fully covered by critical textuality in its elaborations, Cultural Studies as a project, an intervention, remains incomplete. If you lose hold of the tension, you can do extremely fine intellectual work, but you will have lost intellectual practice as a politics. I offer this to you, not because that’s what Cultural Studies ought to be, or because that’s what the Centre managed to do well, but simply because I think that, overall, is what defines Cultural Studies as a project. Both in the British and the American context, Cultural Studies has drawn the attention itself, not just because of its sometimes dazzling internal theoretical development, but because it holds theoretical and political questions in an ever irresolvable but permanent tension. It constantly allows the one to irritate, bother, and disturb the other, without insisting on some final theoretical closure.
I’ve been talking very much in terms of a previous history. But I have been reminded of this tension very forcefully in the discussions on AIDS . AIDS is one of the questions which urgently brings before us our marginality as critical intellectuals in making real effects in the world. And yet it has often been represented for us in contradictory ways. Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point of Cultural Studies? What is the point of the study of representations, if there is no response to the question of what you say to someone who wants to know if they should take a drug and if that means they’ll die two days later or a few months earlier? At that point, I think anybody who is into Cultural Studies seriously as an intellectual practice must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we’ve been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don’t feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook. On the other hand, in the end, I don’t agree with the way in which this dilemma is often posed for us, for it is indeed a more complex and displaced question than just people dying out there. The question of AIDS is an extremely important terrain of struggle and contestation. In addition to the people we know who are dying, or have died, or will, there are the many people dying who are never spoken of. How could we say that the question of AIDS is not also a question of who gets represented and who does not? AIDS is the site at which the advance of sexual politics is being rolled back. It’s a site at which not only will people die, but desire and pleasure will also die if certain metaphors do not survive, or survive in the wrong way. Unless we operate in this tension, we don’t know what Cultural Studies can do, can’t, can never do; but also, what it has to do, what it alone has a privileged capacity to do. It has to analyze certain things about the constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death. Those are the things Cultural Studies can address.
HALL: When I said that part of what the Centre was about was trying to produce organic intellectual work, I of course had the question of pedagogy essentially in mind. I don’t think we can divorce theoretical work and pedagogy. At the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies there were only three academics, so the organic intellectuals we were trying to produce were not only ourselves but our students. So the question of pedagogy as a form of intellectual production is crucial. I agree with what I take to be an underlying criticism in your comment, namely that when we talk about the institutional position of Cultural Studies, we often fail to talk about questions of teaching and pedagogy. We talk about intellectual practice as if it is the practice of intellectuals in the library reading the right canonical texts or consulting other intellectuals at conferences or something like that. But the ongoing work of an intellectual practice for most of us, insofar as we get our material sustenance, our modes of reproduction, from doing our academic work, is indeed to teach. And I suppose my real silence was in not responding to Ros Brunt by saying that the first people we might make some connection with are our students. Before we invoke the great mass ranks out there, it might be quite important that our students are with us in the project and that we are helping them to conduct a little intellectual work. I’m sorry if I appeared to take that for granted.