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, Bound aries,” or ga- nized by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Both the teaching insti- tute, 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 teach- ing—in the U.S. today can be credited in part to the events of that sum- mer 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 cul- tural 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 writ- ing 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 Con temporary Cultural Studies, but very quickly, as news of the exceptional nature of t hese 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 lectures were 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 impor tant 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 cul- ture, media, news and popu lar 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 proj ect of Cultural Studies, few people outside the U.K. knew of either Hall or the proj ect. 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 a fter 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 vari ous research groups that formed the heart of the Centre in the 1970s. They largely bypass the Centre as a space of administrative and orga nizational experi- mentation that provided the condition of possibility of its intellectual experimentation. They put aside the crucial and often heated lipo ti cal debates and diversity that constituted a vital part of the everyday life of the Centre and often connected it with po liti cal 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 of women’s voices in this story, when by 1983 there had been significant theoretical challenges to the influence of patriarchy on subcultural theory and sig- nificant contributions by feminists to theorizing articulation. The reali ty 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 teach- ing institute and conference: Marxism’s contribution to the interpreta- tion 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 be- ginning 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 liti cally (in the New Left)—w ere explic itly 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 were 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 narra- tive 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 t hese 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— and in the pro cess 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 in ter est ing 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 fi nally agreed only if they could be presented as a historical document, the product of a par tic u lar moment, as a story constructed at a par tic u lar moment and from a par tic u lar perspective about develop- ments 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 in- tellectual debates, and into specific historical and po liti cal 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 re sis tance, containment, x | editors’ introduction and strug gle) face new challenges.