ESSENTIALISMS, POLITICS AND IDENTITIES

At the Illinois conference, Hall also referred to the way in which his relation to marxism was necessarily inflected by his ‘not-yet completed contestation with the profound Eurocentrism of marxist theory’ (chapter 13, 265). The major problem he identifies there concerns traditional marxist theory’s basic stress on the internal dynamic of the development of capitalism and its relative neglect of the question of imperialism and colonialism. As he puts it in ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, the missing (‘third’) term is, in a sense, quite particularly his own—the Caribbean, as the ‘Third… New World…the “empty” land…where strangers from every other part of the globe collided’ (1990a: 234). In a striking use of a psychoanalytic figure, he proposes that ‘The New World is the third term—the primal scene—where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West’ (ibid.: 234; for the development of these arguments, see, in particular, ‘The West and the rest’, 1992).
 

As noted earlier, Hall’s (1985) essay on ‘Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity’ (chapter 20, here) can be seen as a turning-point in the substantive focus of his work, as it moved towards its present central concerns—with questions of ‘race’, ethnicity and cultural identity. Nonetheless, the essay also contains a set of important theoretical continuities, in its arguments concerning the need to develop modes of analysis—whether to be applied to questions of class, ‘race’, gender or ethnicity (or indeed, their intersections)—which are non-reductive and nonessentialist.

 

It is from Gramsci’s militantly conjunctural historical perspective on class formations that Hall derives, in part, the conceptual model for his later, non-essentialist analyses of race and ethnicity. It is, as it were, in substantial part on the basis of the theoretical gains made in the formative encounter with Gramsci that, in his influential essay on ‘New ethnicities’ (1988; reprinted here as chapter 21), Hall declares the ‘end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject’ (see the parallel debates between Hall et al. and Coward, concerning ‘Class, culture and the social formation’, 1977).

In the ‘New ethnicities’ essay, Hall insists that, rather than falling into essentialist perspectives on the issues at stake (which would replicate traditional marxism’s mistakes, concerning the nature of ‘pregiven’ class subjects—(see Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) we must recognize that ‘black’ is a‘politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed, trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories, and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature’ (1988:28)—just as, from a non-essentialist perspective, socialist politics can find no ‘guarantee’ in the economic sphere. It is for these very reasons, Hall argues in ‘Old and new identities’ (1991b), that what he calls ‘Identity Politics One’—the invocation of homogenized racial, ethnic or cultural categories as (idealized) ‘natural communities’—had to be abandoned as inadequate. And yet, even then, as indicated earlier, Hall is aware of the tensions (historical and intellectual) inevitably in play, in this context: as he notes in ‘What is this “black” in black popular culture?’ (chapter 23), ‘historically, nothing could have been done to intervene in the dominated field of mainstream popular culture, to try to win some space there, without the strategies through which those dimensions were condensed into the signifier “black”…’ (page 471). As he then asks, not entirely rhetorically:

 

‘where would we be, as bell hooks once remarked, without a touch of
essentialism…or what Gayatri Spivak calls “strategic essentialism”, a
necessary moment?’ (page 472)—even if the question is now, as Hall avers,
‘whether we are any longer in that moment, whether it is still a sufficient
basis for the strategies of new interventions’ (page 472).

 

In ‘Cultural studies and the politics of internationalization’ (chapter 19), Hall also returns to the question of class, and how that question appears now, after the impact of feminism, psychoanalysis, anti-racism and identity politics. Hall notes that, in relation to the previous, essentialist marxist tendency to treat class as the ‘master category’ of social analysis, in recent years the question of class has largely fallen off the agenda of cultural studies. As he points out, it is not only that some address to the question of class (even if in a more de-centred way) remains absolutely necessary, if we are to understand the development of the contemporary global economy and how that affects all our lives. Further, as he goes on to note, the politics of experience and of subjectivity and the focus on questions of personal identity (even if all of those developments have many positive aspects) can also have, unless one is extremely careful, what he describes as a regressive, socially ‘narrowing’ effect. As he puts it, In the early stages, perhaps we spoke too much about the working class, about subcultures. Now nobody talks about that at all. They talk about myself, my mother, my father, my friends, and that is, of course, a very selective experience, especially in relation to classes…. (402) To be sure, Hall’s invocation of a possible ‘return of the question of class’ is made with reference to a ‘return’ in which the question itself would bequite ‘decentred’ and transformed—but it is nonetheless characteristic of his mode of working that he should, at this point, wish to return to a question which, from another point of view, would now seem superseded or outmoded, in relation to current orthodoxies. Indeed, we would want to suggest that Hall’s intellectual practice is, in this respect, quite exemplary.

 

Hall has never been interested either in ‘orthodoxy’ or in ‘theory’, and ‘theoretical orthodoxies’ (especially ones which, in absolutist terms, present themselves as definitively superseding all that went before) have always been anathema to him. In his presentation to the Illinois conference, quoted
earlier, Hall also referred to what he called the ‘necessary modesty of theory’ in cultural studies. More polemically, in ‘Old and new identities’ (1991a) he remarks that ‘theory is always a detour [if a necessary detour—DM/KHC] on the way to something more interesting’ (op. cit.: 42). In ‘On postmodernism and articulation’ Hall says ‘I am not interested in Theory, I am interested in going on theorizing…in the postmodern context’ (chapter 6: 150). This interest in theorizing the concrete historical issues confronting us in any particular conjuncture would seem to us to be essential to the spirit of, as Hall himself puts it in that interview, how and why ‘cultural studies must remain open-ended.’
 

However, we want to suggest that what is particularly impressive and important in Hall’s own approach is not only an open-endedness about the future development of the discipline, but also a certain kind of openmindedness about its past—or rather about the process through which its past is to be constituted—and about how debates ‘progress’ within cultural studies, about how one set of ideas come to ‘disturb’ or displace another. The question is, what happens to what is displaced? (see the comments above, about the contemporary possibilities of a ‘return’ to the question of class in cultural studies): is it to be entirely discarded or rejected? If so, we are likely to enjoy a succession of exclusive orthodoxies, each enjoying a brief, if absolute, intellectual reign, prior to being dethroned by the next intellectually fashionable paradigm and itself removed to the dungeons reserved for the intellectually passé. Hall simply does not operate in this way: he has always refused the temptations of the easy point-scoring, negative critical perspective, which is concerned to enhance its own arguments by rubbishing those of others. His tendency has, rather, always been to the most productive sort of eclecticism, in which he will always look for the best, the most useful part—which can be taken from another (often opposed) intellectual position and worked with (and on) positively.

It is a tendency towards a selective, syncretic, mode of inclusiveness, dialogue and transformation—rather than to ‘critique’ and rejection of that which is opposed to his own point of view or position. The politics of discipleship or denunciation are equally anathema to him. As he puts it in ‘Cultural studies and the politics of internationalization’ (chapter 19), he has always been opposed to the view that a given theorist’s work (his example here is that of Raymond Williams) should be repudiated en bloc, just because it can be identified as having significant absences or deficiencies (for instance, in relation to questions of race and feminism, in Williams’ case). That kind of (all too common) combative polarization of intellectual ‘debate’, in which one either ‘advocates’ everything, as a disciple of a certain intellectual position, or automatically ‘refuses’ and denies it in its entirety, once it has been found wanting in some particular respect, offers little prospect of getting us anywhere, and it is greatly to Hall’s credit that he offers us such a good model of an alternative intellectual practice.
 

Speaking of continuities and their virtues (and positive usages), it is perhaps worth, in conclusion, noting a certain continuity, or parallel, between Hall’s career trajectory and that of the other two key figures in the history of cultural studies, Williams and Hoggart, with whom Hall’s name is customarily linked. Like Williams and Hoggart, Hall has always had a commitment to the politics of education itself, and especially to the education of the less privileged. As he explains in one of the interviews here, for him, a large part of the motivation for his move from teaching graduate students at CCCS (up until 1979) to teaching non-traditional undergraduates via the Open University (where he has worked since) was the attempt to take the most advanced ideas from the intellectual work of CCCS and to try to make them work as a form of ‘popular pedagogy’.

 

Quite apart from all his other achievements, Hall’s work at the Open University, in this respect alone, offers the finest testament to his ability to make the crossing of boundaries, in all their forms, a matter of intellectual adventure and innovation.

 

In ‘Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies’ Hall argues that cultural studies always needs to hold both theoretical and political questions ‘in an ever irresolvable, but permanent, tension’ (shades perhaps of Althusser’s conception of moments of what he called ‘teeth-gritting harmony’), constantly allowing ‘the one to irritate and bother and disturb the other’, because ‘if you lose that tension, you can do extremely fine intellectual work, but you will have lost intellectual practice, as a politics’. As so often with Hall, the key to this perspective is Gramsci, and, in particular, Gramsci’s conception of the role of the ‘organic intellectual’. In his own actions, Hall has demonstrated his commitment to living out the contradictions of the role of the ‘organic intellectual’ identified by Gramsci—the commitment to being at the very forefront of intellectual, theoretical work and, simultaneously, the commitment to the attempt to transmit the ideas thus generated, well beyond the confines of the ‘intellectual class’.

DAVID MORLEY AND KUAN-HSING CHEN