Since the late 2010s, there has been a major revival of interest in the luminous work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall. This is manifest, for example, in the book series Stuart Hall: Selected Writings, published by Duke University Press, and in the work of units such as the Stuart Hall Foundation and the Stuart Hall Archive Project.
This revival is of course welcome, but it is also marked by distinct absences, as a result of how it has been anchored in the world-system. Simply put, the Northern academy and Northern scholars have emerged as the primary custodians of Hall’s work and legacy after his passing in 2014. Similarly, his distinctive approach to critical and engaged analysis has overwhelmingly been put to work in and on Northern social, cultural, and political formations. Conversely, Southern scholarship on Hall’s work, or Southern scholarship informed by Hall’s work, have been, at best, on the sidelines of, and frequently entirely absent from, the great Hall revival.
This is no small irony. As a person who came of age as his native Jamaica threw off the shackles of colonialism, and as a scholar, public intellectual, and activist who worked in active dialogue with Southern intellectual traditions and Southern movements for emancipation, Hall’s thinking spanned the North-South axis of the world-system.
This irony has irked me for some time. So much so, in fact, that the research unit I direct at the University of Pretoria – the Centre for Asian Studies in Africa – dedicated its annual symposium this year to a comprehensive engagement with Stuart Hall’s work from the position of the global South. Across four days, scholars from Asia, Latin America, and Africa congregated to discuss how Hall has been read and applied across Southern contexts, and how his methods and approaches can be put to work in an early-twenty-first-century global South that is a furnace of social, political, and cultural change. The following are some of the thoughts that I am left with, about Hall’s work in general and about its relationship to us here in the global South, in the wake of our efforts to address the Southern absences in the great Hall revival.
For me, reading and rereading Stuart Hall’s work have brought out the stunning intellectual agility that underpinned his thinking, and the many ways that this agility is fused with a fierce commitment to “this-worldliness” in his intellectual praxis.
When I say intellectual agility, I mean a number of things. First of all, I think of how, throughout his intellectual life, he continually and successfully navigated between multiple devils and many deep, blue seas. For example, as much as he took structures very seriously, he never lapsed into a view of human beings as passive bearers of structures, while at the same time, as much as he acknowledged agency, he understood that agency was always – and here I’m using Raymond Williams’ phrasing very deliberately – subject to the exertion of structural pressures and the setting of structural limits. This might be a very obvious and simple example, but it testifies to something very profound, which is the fact that Stuart Hall was, through and through, a master dialectician.
His intellectual agility and skills as a dialectician also manifest in other important ways in his work. To my mind, a key example of this is to be found in his work on ideology, popular culture, and what we might call subaltern consciousness. In an essay that should be cited much more than it has been, Hall speaks of the double movement of containment and resistance in popular culture. Popular culture, he argued, was always subject to attempts at containment from above, but never completely contained, and always a wellspring of resistance from below, but never completely autonomous and oppositional.
It was this kind of dialectical agility that enabled him to pinpoint how Thatcher’s authoritarian populism had gained traction among working class communities, and also to highlight the very simple fact that social groups which different bodies of theory have portrayed as bringers of justice and emancipation can equally well join the ranks of profoundly reactionary political projects. Hall threw down an intellectual and political gauntlet when he did this, and I have yet to see anyone pick it up in a persuasive manner, least of all those “scholar-activists” who love nothing more than making the claim that, cometh the revolution, they will be first over the barricades. This is a pity, because his refusal of political guarantees and assertion of political indeterminacy are insights that we ignore at our future’s peril.
A final example of Hall’s intellectual agility that I want to flag here is his ability to avoid tying himself to the mast of one particular theoretical ship. This comes up most clearly in those very tedious and very futile debates about Hall’s relationship to Marxism, which tend to be animated by a contest between the Scylla of “Hall wasn’t a proper Marxist!” and the Charybdis of “Hall wasn’t a postmodernist, he was a Marxist!” As a matter of fact, these two positions have one thing in common, namely that they are both a criminal waste of intellectual space.
When I read Hall, I encounter an intellectual who engages seriously and profoundly with Marxism and, significantly, puts its sharpest insights to use in his own analytical work. Indeed, I welcome anyone who doubts this to read his essay on Marx’s notes on method, and I guarantee that you will change your mind. But I also encounter an intellectual that engages in similar ways with, for example, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and the black radical tradition. And importantly, in these engagements, Hall was unafraid to call bullshit – whether it was Marxist bullshit, postmodern bullshit, postcolonial bullshit, or bullshit in the black radical tradition.
Perhaps this resonates with me because I’m so very tired of the intellectual wars that have unfolded and are unfolding still between the self-appointed wardens of bodies of theory that emanate not from the academy but from social movements that have attempted to bring about emancipatory transformations – that is, the kind of thought I call insurgent social theory. What I would like to see instead is a concerted collective effort to construct passages between different bodies of insurgent social theory in order to achieve insurgent epistemic gain, or, put slightly differently, better and clearer ideas of how we can collectively make the world more equal and more emancipated. For me, Hall’s very capacious relationship to theory embodies an ethic that might take us some way toward achieving this.
Here I also arrive at the quality of this-worldliness in Hall’s intellectual praxis. I take the term “this-worldliness” from Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach – that series of crisp propositions from 1845 which ends with the famous dictum that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. Hall said something similar when he commented, in one of his essays, that “theory is always a detour on the way to something more important”, with the “something more important” being critical interventions in concrete, actually-existing social and political struggles. Now, this did not amount to a disavowal of theory on Hall’s part. He always insisted that the sometimes long and winding detours through theory in his own writings were necessary. He did, however, also insist that theory should not just enable us to understand why the world is the way it is, but to think productively about how we can change the world in emancipatory ways.
The this-worldliness of Hall’s intellectual praxis was, I believe, borne out most fully in his methodology of conjunctural analysis. This methodology is perhaps best defined as the art of grasping how a specific set of contradictions come to be articulated together in a particular moment of time to produce a crisis and locating possible points of progressive intervention into this conjuncture. To me, the most delightful expression of its power can be found in one of Hall’s polemics from the hallowed pages of New Left Review.
In the mid-1980s, Bob Jessop, the sheriff of Marxist High Theory, rounded up a posse of his deputies to hunt down Hall and his writings on authoritarian populism. These musings, they alleged, had committed the capital offence of not being adequately Marxist. Hall responded with an outlaw swagger the likes of which can only be found in Robert Redford’s portrayal of the Sundance Kid, essentially saying, “Fellas, why are your historical materialist knickers in such a godawful twist? You’re accusing me of a crime I never even aspired to commit!” That is to say, Hall pointed out that he wasn’t trying to arrive at a general theory of Thatcherism as a global phenomenon, but rather to comprehend “the shift towards Thatcherism as it was taking place” in Britain at the time – specifically in terms of the shifting political and ideological relationships between the ruling bloc, the state, and the dominated classes. The high-level abstractions of pure Marxist theory, Hall argued, were not particularly well-suited for this kind of intervention into concrete historical conjunctures.
In saying this, Hall not only shot both the sheriff and his deputies; he also, I think, argued that being useful is as much of a virtue as being theoretically clever and correct. As someone who has wasted an awful lot of time labouring in Marxist salt mines where this basic point is often very poorly understood, I find the this-worldliness of Hall’s intellectual praxis both liberating and sobering. This is especially so given the exceptionally high stakes of our current conjuncture, in which it is very possible that we might all end up going to straight to hell in a handbasket. To put it bluntly, the theory-bros and their endless, mind-numbing intellectual postures are likely to be of little help to us in our search for counterhegemonic points of intervention into our present crisis.
I have argued before on this platform that the global South is the locus of the worldwide turn to the far right and that this turn has to be understood on its own terms and in its own right, rather than as an echo or mimicry of something that has already come to pass in the global North. Hall’s mode of thought in his work on authoritarian populism has enabled me to work toward this end, especially due to the way that it effortlessly operates with an articulated focus on political economy, structures of feeling, and ideology. With such an optic, it has been possible for me to think simultaneously about (i) how trajectories of uneven development across the global South since the 1980s have thrown up middle-income economies shot through with inequality and precarity, (ii) how these trajectories have thrown up emotional cultures of anxiety and aspiration, and (iii) how far-right movements, parties, and regimes have harnessed these structures of feeling to ideologies that pit an authentic and deserving people against their enemies within – from Turkey and India, via Brazil and the Philippines, to South Africa, where I live and work.
Doing so has also left me with questions which I would have loved to put to Stuart Hall. First of all, Hall had a lot to say about how and why the left got things wrong in Britain back from the 1970s onwards to the present. “Our illusions remain intact,” he wrote in one of his most well-known essays on Thatcherism, “even when they no longer provide an adequate analytic framework.”
The left is arguably also getting things wrong across the global South in the early twenty-first century, and one of my questions for Hall would be this: what are the primary illusions of the left across social and political formations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa today, and how can we move beyond them?
Secondly, Hall was ahead of the curve in terms of taking political emotions seriously – his writings on moral panics as a form of anxiety that is harnessed by right-wing hegemonic projects testify to this. Another question, then, for Stuart Hall, extending from my previous one, is this: how can and should left projects take political emotions seriously? More specifically, is it possible to forge emotional attachments to futures that are more equal and more democratic, as opposed to futures that are more exploitative and authoritarian, which is what the far-right in the global South is currently doing, with terrifying success and horrendous consequences?
Hall is not here to answer these questions, of course; they are questions we must engage on our own, as I’m sure he would also have insisted that we do, if he were still among the living. No doubt, Hall’s intellectual agility, dialectical skills, and capacious ethic of engagement will stand us in good stead as we do so.
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