Remembering Stuart Hall: Learning to think differently

There is something of a conundrum when considering the work and legacy of Stuart Hall. He appears at once as a thinker who is both too big (almost a metonym for Cultural Studies) and too small (dismissed by some as a faddish follower of popular trends), somehow everywhere and yet, at times, nowhere. Hall is the starting point, even the terrain itself, for so many of our intellectual enquiries but a figure who is not always acknowledged and recognised, as such. An intellectual palimpsest that others write from and over, even if they are not aware that they are making their own arguments from positions that Hall himself first formulated and refined.

If we take the period from the end of the Second World War through to the first decade of the twenty-first century, a convincing argument could be made that during this time, Hall’s impact was more significant and influential than any other thinker on the Left. And yet, despite that, Hall is too often ignored in otherwise authoritative accounts of the (European) Left. Hall still gets overlooked as a key Marxist thinker in his own right (as opposed to being a ‘translator’ of Gramsci, say). At best, in such intellectual histories, Hall is given a passing, walk-on, role as a notable but ultimately peripheral player. For a figure who was not only centrally involved in attempting to theorise the limits and possibilities of Marxist thought but who was also an active participant in democratic socialist politics for most of the second half of the twentieth century, this state of affairs is striking and requires explanation.

For example, in Göran Therborn’s overview of leftist thinking, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, the arguments and ideas of Hall are entirely absent from a work that claims to provide a ‘systematic panorama of left-wing thought in the North’.¹ Similarly, in Razmig Keucheyan’s more expansive and interesting The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today, whilst Hall is at least noted in a few passing passages, there is still no systematic engagement with Hall’s oeuvre.² Hall’s relevance is largely located and reduced to being ‘one of ’ the founders of British Cultural Studies, alongside scholars such as Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, but Hall is not deemed worthy of serious engagement, separate from those other figures of the British New Left, in his own right. Or take the respected British journalist and writer Paul Mason, who in an otherwise insightful essay on the contemporary rise of ‘authoritarian populism’, notes that the term was first used and developed in the 1980s, in order to make sense of the project of Thatcherism, by what he vaguely calls ‘academics’. Mason, then, having failed to specifically credit Stuart Hall as the originator of that important and still relevant concept, provides a link not to Hall’s actual writings on the topic but, instead, to Bob Jessop’s critique of Hall’s idea.³

These are, I believe, symptomatic and not merely selective examples of a problem many on the European Left have in even seeing, let alone appreciating, Hall’s work as significant in and of itself and as part of the Marxist Left. Why might this be? In some ways this may be linked to the fact that during his life time, Hall’s intellectual projects were multiple and diverse, and not easily categorised. As a black diasporic public intellectual, immersed in Marxist thought, but critical of socialist orthodoxies, who increasingly works to think through the ways in which social formations are racialised and not merely products of autonomous class antagonisms, and who was centrally interested in thinking ‘culturally about politics and politically about culture’,^4...