by
Stuart Hall
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
[...] the practice of impartiality has several inescapable consequences.
(1) It leads broadcasting into the impasse of a false symmetry of issues. All controversial questions must have two sides, and the two sides are usually given a rough equality in weight. Responsibility is shared out between the parties: each side receives a measure of praise or censure. This symmetry of oppositions is a formal balance: it has little or no relevance to the quite unequal relative weights of the case for each side in the real world. If the workman asserts that he is being poisoned by the effluence from a noxious plant, the chairman must be wheeled in to say that all possible precautions are now being taken.… This symmetrical alignment of arguments may ensure the broadcaster’s impartiality, but it hardly advances the truth. Opposition has been neutralized in this maneuver: the political level and the class content of the conflict have been suppressed.
(4) Via impartiality, broadcasting is thus raised above the conflicts which it treats. It seems to stand outside the real play of interests on which it reports and comments. The men and women who produce programs are real social individuals in the midst of the conflicts which they report. But this “subjective” dimension is repressed in the “objectivity” of the program. The programs they produce are outside those conflicts—they reflect on and judge them, but they do not participate in them. As a recent pamphlet on Television and the State observes, “the identifications contained in programmes gain a mysterious validity as they are put forward as being the product of an analytical rationality from outside the society and separate from society and class conflict rather than as the product of a dialectic rationality which includes an understanding and knowledge of the involvements from where the ‘truth’ of the programme is created.” 1
What we have to be concerned with, in this definition, is not the question of the “authenticity” or organic wholeness of popular culture. Actually, it recognizes that almost all cultural forms will be contradictory in this sense, composed of antagonistic and unstable elements. The meaning of a cultural form and its place or position in the cultural field is not inscribed inside its form. Nor is its position fixed once and forever. This year’s radical symbol or slogan will be neutralized into next year’s fashion; the year after, it will be the object of a profound cultural nostalgia. Today’s rebel folksinger ends up, tomorrow, on the cover of the Observer color magazine. The meaning of a cultural symbol is given in part by the social field into which it is incorporated, the practices with which it articulates and is made to resonate. What matters is not the intrinsic or historically fixed objects of culture, but the state of play in cultural relations: to put it bluntly and in an oversimplified form—what counts is the class struggle in and over culture.
Almost every fixed inventory will betray us. Is the novel a “bourgeois” form? The answer can only be historically provisional: when? which novels? for whom? under what conditions?
We can be certain that other forces also have a stake in defining “the people” as something else: “the people” who need to be disciplined more, ruled better, more effectively policed, whose way of life needs to be protected from “alien cultures,” and so on. There is some part of both those alternatives inside each of us. Sometimes we can be constituted as a force against the power bloc: that is the historical opening in which it is possible to construct a culture which is genuinely popular. But, in our society, if we are not constituted like that, we will be constituted into its opposite: an effective populist force, saying “Yes” to power. Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture—already fully formed—might be simply “expressed.” But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why “popular culture” matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.
The welfare state was always a compromised social formation—corporate profits and the public good, privatized “affluence” and collective social provision pulling in opposite directions. It depended on the continuing growth of private capital to create the wealth that the state then redistributed. However, the redistributive impact of the welfare state cannot be underestimated: it proved one of the most successful peaceful social transformations of modern times. For this reason, it was seen by its conservative opponents as an unwarranted intrusion by the state into the prerogatives of capital, private property, and the “free” individual and as an attempt fundamentally to shift the balance of social forces toward the working classes and the poor. They determined to reverse this damaging initiative and to destroy the consensus that developed around it. Some would argue that this long vendetta is still working its way through the political system today.
Contrary to common-sense understanding, the transformations of self-identity are not just a personal matter. Historical shifts out there provide the social conditions of existence of personal and psychic change in here. What mattered was how I positioned myself on the other side – or positioned myself to catch the other side: how I was, involuntarily, hailed by and interpellated into a broader social discourse. Only by discovering this did I begin to understand that what black identity involved was a social, political, historical and symbolic event, not just a personal, and certainly not simply a genetic, one.
[...] the gay, Yoruba-born, artist-photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Rotimi lived and practised most of his adult life outside Africa. He became one of the most significant figures in the explosion of black artistic creativity in the UK in the 1980s, and one of the first to break the silence by bringing male sexuality into the discourses of black representation. He always acknowledged his profound sense of sexual, geographical and familial displacement. His work is a way of both remembering and mourning the losses this represented: mourning his ancestors and their traditions, not by omitting them but by ‘masking’ them, thus giving them a new sensuous but perverse erotic charge. This was his way of honouring their symbolic power in his life and, at the same time, recognizing his own distance from them. In one of his constructed, masked works, as in Yoruba ritual, he sought to exorcize his ancestors by summoning them up but in another register. He always insisted that he was what he was because of, not in spite of, his lost selves. ‘My identity’, he said, ‘has been constructed from my own sense of otherness.’ Identity is never singular but is multiply constructed across intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions.
The unrest of the late 1930s was the outcome of profound crises which had accumulated over many decades. Economic dependency and the exploitation of labour had done their inexorable work. In the eighteenth century the Jamaican plantocracy reaped the economic rewards. ‘King Sugar’ reigned supreme. But after Abolition in the 1830s West Indian sugar was increasingly replaced by reliance on the cheaper sugar beet. The British government paid the planters compensation for the loss of ‘their’ property – that is, the enslaved: a bounty for their acceptance of the end of slavery. The planters looked elsewhere for more profitable investment. Jamaica became an economic backwater. The development of the US-owned banana industry did something to revive its fortunes, but left the majority of the working population untouched. By the Depression of the 1930s, the living standards of the masses had collapsed and unemployment was rife. These devastating consequences erupted politically, driven by intensified trade-union activity and by general, deep-seated social discontent – conditions which formed the historical background to the labour rebellions of 1938.
The emergence of this system of universal, mass politics coincided with my own growing up. I had inside me the sensibilities of the colonial order of things. But for my generation, following 1938, in no way could the colonial system represent our future. We could only perceive it as an unwanted impediment. Thus the events of 1938 were formative for my future intellectual and personal life. Much of the rest of my life in Jamaica was about struggling to erase and overcome the gap between my early childhood within the enclave of my family and the tumultuous world of Jamaican society and politics outside, from which the former was designed to insulate me. If 1938 symbolized the creation of modern Jamaican politics, I was of the generation which was born to inherit the new world the rebellions had inaugurated. This new political world marshalled the historical conditions in which the very idea of politics could enter my life, and enabled me and my generation to imagine a sovereign future.
Although I was much too young at the time to understand what was happening, I can see that I was formed by 1938: I came to be of that political generation. Generation is more than chronology. It’s symbolic rather than literal, relating as much to a shared experience, a common vision, or thinking within the same ‘problem space’ as it does to a mere date of birth.
To evoke my mental world in this way is to follow history from its ‘bad’ side, as Brecht has it, focusing on the afflictions which were lodged in our inner lives. This is the story of colonial oppression. But while true, it misses an important dimension. Intellectually there were also virtues in our capacity to see the world askew, from below or backwards, or from below and backwards, free from the desire for domination which characterized the imperatives of the colonial order. This was to live W. E. B. DuBois’ ‘double consciousness’. We never could subscribe to ‘the rational madness’ (in Derek Walcott’s words) which conceived of progress as a programmed sequence leading us to ‘a dominated future’. Walcott believed such an idea to be ‘the bitter secret of the apple’. We grew up knowing the contingencies, the out-of-placeness, of history. For us history was the carrier of no absolutes and conformed to no overarching scriptural commandments. Nothing was ever codified as having its correct place and time. In a suitably paradoxical formulation, displacement moved to the centre of things. To think in this manner enabled us to catch the world in all its unpredictabilities. Out of our subaltern position there emerged the possibility of engaging with history anew. That colonialism, despite itself, bequeathed to us this way of seeing indicates that within what I’ve identified as the ‘bad’ dynamic of history, contrary and liberating forces were also generated. As the Lévi-Straussian in me later came to realize, the Caribbean has been – for me, personally speaking – good to think with. My understanding of the world was creolized from the start.
goddamn i just love the way he writes