Editors' Introduction Lawrence Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack

editors’ introduction

Lawrence Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack

The lectures in this volume were delivered by Stuart Hall in the summer of 1983 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as part of the teaching institute (which was followed by a conference) called “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: Limits, Frontiers, Boundaries,” orga nized by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Both the teaching institute, June 8–July 8, and the conference, July 8–12, have been extremely influential in shaping the development of cultural theory in and across a variety of disciplines, including Cultural Studies, Communication, Lit- erary Theory, Film Studies, Anthropology, and Education. The teaching institute consisted of seminars taught by Perry Anderson, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, Julia Lesage, Gajo Petrovi, Gayatri Spivak, and Uni- versity of Illinois faculty A. Belden Fields, Lawrence Grossberg, and Richard Schacht. Participants w ere students and faculty from across the U.S. as well as from several other countries. The conference, with an audience of over five hundred students and faculty, resulted in a book of essays and exchanges (Nelson and Grossberg 1988) that reflects the event’s many interdisciplinary exchanges and includes Hall’s “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists” (35–73). The shape of cultural theory—its interpretation, directions, scholarship, and teaching—in the U.S. today can be credited in part to the events of that summer and the book, the extensive interaction of established and young scholars in the seminars and conference, and the cultivation of a col- lective sense of the vitality and diversity of Marxist contributions to cultural theory at the time. These events have been hailed as a particularly significant moment in the history of Cultural Studies, for although a few people were writing about and practicing Cultural Studies in the U.S. (and other places outside of Britain) at the time, and although Hall had given occasional lectures in the U.S., the teaching institute provided the first sustained exposure for many intellectuals to both Hall and British Cultural Stud- ies. At the seminar’s beginning, only a few p eople knew of Hall’s work and the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, but very quickly, as news of the exceptional nature of these lectures spread, Hall attracted hundreds of students and faculty, many driving for hours to attend. The lectures were riveting, and the mood during the lectures was electric. We had the sense of being part of theory being developed, of Cultural Studies being made. The lecturesw ere contributing to invigo- rating Cultural Studies in the U.S. in both subtle and dramatic ways. Hall had been the first person Richard Hoggart hired at the Centre for Con temporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. When Hog- gart left to take up a high-le vel position at unesco in 1969, Hall became the new director, where he remained un til 1980, when he was appointed Professor of Sociology at the Open University. By the summer of 1983, the work of the Centre and Hall’s important contributions were gaining vis- ibility in what were largely minor disciplines (e.g., Communication Stud- ies and Education) at a number of respected public universities rather than elite private schools. The Centre’s early work on working-class culture, media, news and popular culture, subcultures, ideology, and semiot- ics, as well as the now classic study of racism and the new conservatism (notably a book that predicted the rise of Thatcherism, Policing the Crisis [Hall et al. 1978]), was neither well known nor widely available outside the U.K. But while Hall had already become the leading figure and the most articulate spokesperson for the project of Cultural Studies, few people outside the U.K. knew of either Hall or the project. What Hall presented in this series of eight lectures was a personally guided tour of the emergence and development of British Cultural Stud- ies as seen from his own perspective. Th ese lectures are, in fact, the first serious attempt to tell a story about the emergence and development viii | editors’ introduction of Cultural Studies at the Centre. Yet they are both less and more than this, as the 1988 preface he wrote some years after the lectures makes clear. They are not in any sense a history of the Centre. They underplay the crucial empirical studies and contributions of the various research groups that formed the heart of the Centre in the 1970s. They largely bypass the Centre as a space of administrative and organizational experimentation that provided the condition of possibility of its intellectual experimentation. They put aside the crucial and often heated lipo tical debates and diversity that constituted a vital part of the everyday life of the Centre and often connected it with political and artistic activities in Birmingham (and to a lesser extent, in London and elsewhere). The lectures offer instead a history of theory. Even then, however, they could not possibly be a comprehensive account of the rich theoretical sources, confrontations, negotiations, and paths taken up and rejected, as well as advances that constituted the formation and history of British Cultural Studies. For example, it is difficult to miss the lacunae ofw omen’s voices in this story, when by 1983 there had been significant theoretical challenges to the influence of patriarchy on subcultural theory and significant contributions by feminists to theorizing articulation. The reality of even Cultural Studies’ theoretical history was already then too messy, uneven, and contested at any and every moment—p aths were taken up and rejected, some coexisted, and o thers confronted each other with open hostility— for one person to tell the story adequately, even when that one person was Stuart Hall. In addition, these lectures were further inflected no doubt by the challenge to contribute to the overall theme of the teaching institute and conference: Marxism’s contribution to the interpretation of culture. This collection is also a history of what John Clarke once called “the diversity that won” and in that sense, it is a history of what had already become the dominant trajectory of British Cultural Studies. It is the beginning of a story that has Hall’s own development at its center, and, at least up to the point at which this version of the story ends, it is a story not so much about Marxism as about the Centre’s history, to use Hall’s description of theoretical work, of “wrestling with the angels” of Marxist theory. But it is an encounter with Marxism avant la lettre in a double sense. On the one hand, Cultural Studies’ roots—both intellectually and po litically (in the New Left)—w ere explicitly defined by a rejection of the

L awrence Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack | ix politics of the dominant forms of Marxist theory and politics, and both the New Left and Cultural Studiesw ere seeking another sort of critical materialist practice and socialist politics. On the other hand, insofar as the first significant theoretical engagement was with the work of Ray- mond Williams, it was Williams before he came out of the Marxist closet as it were, before he knew that there w ere other ways to do Marxism. Hall obviously knew all this; he knew that he was constructing a story, making it up as it w ere, paralleling the efforts oft hose at the Centre to make up Cultural Studies as they were claiming to do it. It is in this sense as well that he describes it as a “theoretical history,” a history that self- consciously understands that it is “fictioning the real.” It is also a narrative that ends before its time, for it ends not at the time of the lectures but at the slightly earlier moment when Hall left the Centre. Thus, when we started to talk with Hall about publishing these lectures, he suggested that he would want to update and extend the story, suggested that he had come to some sort of terms with developments in Cultural Studies that postdated where the lectures left off—p articularly chapters on post- structuralism, subjectivity, and the engagement with feminism. It should be noted that later he did extend the narrative—a nd in the process changed it significantly—in the lecture he gave at the conference “Cultural Studies Now and in the Future” in 1988, subsequently published as “Cultural Stud- ies and Its Theoretical Legacies” (Hall 1992). All of this raises the interesting question of why it has taken over thirty years for these lectures to see the light of day or, to be more morose, why they are appearing only after Hall’s death. When we approached Hall about the possibility of publishing the lectures, he was, to say the least, uncertain and finally agreed only if they could be presented as a historical document, the product of a particular moment, as a story constructed at a particular moment and from a particular perspective about developments that by the very act of being narrated w ere being artificially closed, as if they w ere finished, or their trajectory already guaranteed. It is no secret that Hall was an essayist. Essays are interventions into specific intellectual debates, and into specific historical and political contexts. They do not create fixed and universal positions; they are not finished state- ments, for they are always provisional, always open to revision as new intellectual resources become available, as historical contexts change, and as the relations of power (domination and resistance, containment, x | editors’ introduction and struggle) face new challenges. This was Hall’s mode of thinking. The temporality of books is different: It suggests closure and a certainty that Hall eschewed. The only books that bear his name are either col- laborative or edited, with one exception: Hall was persuaded (largely by his friend, Martin Jacques, the editor of Marxism Today) to publish The Hard Road to Renewal (1988), a collection of his essays on Thatcherism as an intervention at a precise moment with the precise intent to open up debates about future directions of the Left and of theL abour Party more generally. This is a crucial point, for while many intellectuals are comfortable with the necessary contextuality of empirical accounts, it is more difficult to accept that theories (and concepts) have to be approached simi- larly, as contextually specific tools or interventions. Hall was particularly wary of this in the light of what he sometimes described as the tendency to fetishize theory in the U.S. academy, to believe that one’s critical intellectual work could be understood as the search for the right theory, which, once found, would unlock the secrets of any social reality. This contextuality of theory is what he so elegantly tried to emphasize in (and why we believe he insisted on writing) the preface to these lectures. He did not want readers to think that he was suggesting that he was propos- ing the right theory, even for Cultural Studies, even for Cultural Studies in Britain. He did not want readers to think that he was telling them what Cultural Studies r eally was, what it should look like, the theoretical resources it should utilize, or the theoretical paths it should follow. Rather, he was describing a project that he could not specify apart from the way it was actualized and developed in the British context. Let us be clear. He was not saying that Cultural Studies was and could only be a uniquely Brit- ish field; only that he could only describe the way it came to be articulated in the British context. He was not saying that these are the necessary theoretical components of Cultural Studies; only that these were what was taken up from the field of theoretical resources that were available. He was not saying that these particular debates are necessarily constitutive of Cultural Studies; only that Cultural Studies constitutes itself in a process of continuous theorizing, always responding to the political challenges of what he called a “conjuncture.” He was not saying that this is the final shape of Cultural Studies, even British Cultural Studies; only that this was as far as the story went, or at least, as far as he was able to narrate a story

L awrence Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack | xi at the time of the lectures. And he was not saying that the story (and its ending) could be picked up and “transferred wholesale” into another geo graphi cal/intellectual/organizational/political context. One has to treat his ideas of Cultural Studies—a nd the theoretical moves on which it has been constructed—w ith the same care he would later describe in his own relation to Gramsci’s concepts: “they have to be delicately dis-in terred from their concrete and specific historical embeddedness and trans- planted to new soil with considerable care and patience” (Hall 1986, 6–7). Given the unique status of this book as a historical document, as a rec ord of Hall’s lectures delivered over thirty years ago, we have been faced with some rather unusual choices as editors. We have left the structures of the lectures relatively intact, for they embody Hall’s own logic and structure, although his later writings might suggest other possible organ izations. We considered adding chapters, based either on published works or other lectures, recognizing Hall’s own desire, expressed years a fter these lectures were given, to update the story as well as to offer a more elaborate description of his own engagement with both Marx’s theory and with other Marxist theorists—g iven in a series of brilliant but largely unknown essays including “Rethinking the ‘Base-and-Superstructure’ Meta phor” (1977b), “The ‘Politic al’ and the ‘Economic’ in Marx’s Theory of Classes” (1977a), and “Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘Reading’ of the ‘1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse’ ” (2003). But we decided that these lectures, which had such a profound influence ont hose who heard them and who often carried their lessons to their own work and institutions, that this version of the story was worth having in itself, and in its own right. Because we view it as much as a historical document as a valuable con temporary contribution to Cultural Studies, we have chosen to use the time and tense of the lectures in order to stay within the moment, although this may read somewhat strangely (especially now that some of the authors discussed in the present tense are deceased). We have also tried to retain some of the personality of the lectures by leaving in some of the stylistic quirks that marked Hall’s speaking style, un less they made the text significantly more awkward. We have also added references when they seemed called for, and we have tried as much as possible to use the references that Hall would have used at the time. The most difficult deci- sions resulted from the ordinary practices of the academ y. A number of these lectures became templates for later publications, some of which we xii | editors’ introduction assisted with. Material in lectures 5 and 6, in which Hall addressed the Althusserian break, ideology, and articulation, was reorganized into the now widely cited article, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Al- thusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates” (Hall 1985). It is in the original lecture where, for example, Hall first elaborated the multiple ways of being hailed as “black” to powerfully illustrate the work of ideology and articulation. The publication of this article was specifically meant to in- troduce Hall and the generative possibilities offered by Cultural Studies to a broader North American audience. Material on Gramsci, ideological strug gle, and cultural resistance from lecture 7 was later integrated into “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity” (Hall 1986), another central essay in Hall’s oeuvre. In fact, there are echoes and reso- nances of the lectures presented here in many other essays Hall authored in the mid- to late 1980s. We did not reconcile these lectures with later published versions, except in cases where brief corrections or elabora- tions were necessary for either accuracy or clarity. We decide d to remain true to the original lectures as much as possible, to honor both the theoretical moment and the characteristic rhythms of Hall’s oral delivery. That t hese lectures w ere recorded and saved is remarkable. Jennifer Slack, enthralled to meet at last the teacher of her teacher (Lawrence Grossberg), decide d and received permission to reco rd the lectures. She sat in the front row of the lecture hall with a small portable cassette re- corder, flipping over cassettes as necessary. Once Hall realized that words were lost when cassettes w ere turned over, he would generously pause his lecture un til recording resumed. A fter several weeks, when it became clear to all those in attendance that these lectures w ere a monu- mental contribution to Cultural Studies, and we began to contemplate the importance of concepts such as articulation unfolding before us, we began discussing the possibility of publishing the lectures. Were it not for the reasons discussed above, this would have happened in the 1980s. After the teaching institute and conference, we transcribed and typed the lectures (there was no help from computers back then), at both Purdue University and the University of Illinois, with assistance from an un- dergraduate student at Purdue and a couple of graduate students. The technology was clunky and the process labor intensive. Hall read all the transcripts and was engaged in editing them when the project was halted in the late 1980s as a consequence of Hall’s reluctance to publish. The

L awrence Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack | xiii partially edited, typed, and yellowing manuscript has been stored in a box until recently. And the original cassettes still sit on Jennifer’s desk, except for the first one, which has been lost to time. Hall, as anyone who met him can attest, was a profoundly generous scholar. His reluctance to police the boundaries of Cultural Studies by telling his story of Cultural Studies as though it were the story of Cultural Studies kept this story from being widely shared until now. It is a good story, a helpful story, and a story that will still contribute significantly to— p erhaps reenergize—ongoing conversations about what Cultural Studies has been, is, and can be. Th ese lectures still have much to contribute to understanding and engaging relations of power, to understanding and engaging relations of cultural domination, struggle, and resi stance. We are deeply grateful to Catherine Hall, who has granted us permission to share these lectures now.

References

Hall, Stuart. 1977a. “The ‘Political’ and the ‘Economic’ in Marx’s Theory of Classes.” In Class and Class Structure, edited by Alan Hunt, 15–60. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, Stuart. 1977b. “Rethinking the ‘Base-a nd-Superstructure’ Metaphor.” In Class and Party, edited by John Bloomfield et al., 43–72. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, Stuart. 1985. “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post- Structuralist Debates.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (2): 91–114. Hall, Stuart. 1986. “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (2): 5–27. Hall, Stuart. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal. London: Verso. Hall, Stuart. 1992. “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies.” In Cultural Stud ies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, 277–294. New York: Routledge. Hall, Stuart. 2003. “Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘Reading’ of the ‘1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse.’ ” Cultural Studies 17 (2): 113–149. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan. Nelson, Cary, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. 1988. Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

xiv | editors’ introduction