Zohran Mamdani Says He's Ready for Donald Trump | The New Yorker Interview

Zohran Mamdani Says He's Ready for Donald Trump | The New Yorker Interview

The New Yorker

October 10, 2025

The New Yorker Interview

VIDEO: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbq7DFB8jWE 

 

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: Writer, Teacher, Scholar, Public Intellectual, Political And Social Theorist, Cultural Critic, Historian, and Activist Henry A. Giroux On 'Resisting the Deadly Language Of American Fascism' and 'Gangster capitalism and nostalgic authoritarianism in Trump’s America'

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/11/resisting-the-deadly-language-of-american-fascism/ 

 
Resisting the Deadly Language of American Fascism
by Henry Giroux
July 11, 2025
Counterpunch

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Introduction: Language in the Age of Fascist Politics

In the age of expanding fascism, the power of language is not only fragile but increasingly threatened. As Toni Morrison has noted, “language is not only an instrument through which power is exercised,” it also shapes agency and functions as an act with consequences. These consequences ripple through the very fabric of our existence. For in the words we speak, meaning, truth, and our collective future are at risk. Each syllable, phrase, and sentence becomes a battleground where truth and power collide, where silence breeds complicity, and where justice hangs in the balance.

In response, we find ourselves in desperate need of a new vocabulary, one capable of naming the fascist tide and militarized language now engulfing the United States. This is not a matter of style or rhetorical flourish; it is a matter of survival. The language required to confront and resist this unfolding catastrophe will not come from the legacy press, which remains tethered to the very institutions it ought to expose. Nor can we turn to the right-wing media machines, led by Fox News, where fascist ideals are not just defended but paraded as patriotism. In the face of this crisis, Toni Morrison’s insight drawn from her Nobel Lecture becomes all the more urgent and makes clear that the language of tyrants, embodied in the rhetoric, images, and modes of communication characteristic of the Trump regime, is a dead language.

For her “a dead language is not simply one that is no longer spoken or written,” it is unyielding language “content to admire its own paralysis.” It is repressive language infused with power, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties and dehumanizing language, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. “Though moribund, it is not without effect” for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, and “suppresses human potential.” Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, or fill baffling silences. This is the language of official power whose purpose is to sanction ignorance and preserve it. Beneath its glittering spectacle and vulgar performance, lies a language that is “dumb, predatory, sentimental.” It offers mass spectacles, a moral sleepwalking state of mind, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment. It is a language unadorned in its cruelty and addiction to creating an architecture of violence. It is evident in Trump’s discourse of occupation, his militarizing of American politics, and in his use of an army of trolls to turn hatred into a social media spectacle of swagger and cruelty.

Despite differing tones and political effects, the discourses of the far right and the liberal mainstream converge in their complicity: both traffic in mindless spectacle, absorb lies as currency, and elevate illusion over insight. The liberal mainstream drapes the machinery of cruelty in the language of civility, masking the brutality of the Trump regime and the predatory logic of gangster capitalism, while the far right revels in it, parading its violence as virtue and its hatred as patriotism. Language, once a powerful instrument against enforced silence and institutional cruelty, now too often serves power, undermining reason, normalizing violence, and replacing justice with vengeance. In Trump’s oligarchic culture of authoritarianism, language becomes a spectacle of power, a theater of fear crafted, televised, and performed as a civic lesson in mass indoctrination. If language is the vessel of consciousness, then we must forge a new one– fierce, unflinching, and unafraid to rupture the fabric of falsehood that sustains domination, disposability, and terror. The late famed novelist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, was right in stating that “language was a site of colonial control,” inducting people into what he called “colonies of the mind.”

The utopian visions that support the promise of a radical democracy and prevent the dystopian nightmare of a fascist politics are under siege in the United States. Increasingly produced, amplified and legitimated in a toxic language of hate, exclusion, and punishment, all aspects of the social and the democratic values central to a politics of solidarity are being targeted by right-wing extremists. In addition, the institutions that produce the formative cultures that nourishes the social imagination and democracy itself are now under attack. The signposts are on full display in a politics of racial and social cleansing that is being fed by a white nationalist and white supremacist ideology that is at the centre of power in the US, marked by fantasies of exclusion and accompanied by a full-scale attack on morality, reason, and collective resistance rooted in democratic struggle. As more people revolt against this dystopian project, neoliberal ideology and elements of a fascist politics merge to contain, distract and misdirect the anger that has materialised out of legitimate grievances against the government, controlling privileged elites and the hardships caused by neoliberal capitalism. The current crisis of agency, representation, values and language demands a discursive shift that can call into question and defeat the formative culture and ideological scaffolding through which a savage neoliberal capitalism reproduces itself. This warped use of language directly feeds into the policies of disposability that define Trump’s regime.

State Terror and Trump’s Politics of Disposability

As Trump’s regime concentrates power, he invokes a chilling convergence of law, order, and violence, a cornerstone of his politics of disposability. His acts of cruelty and lawlessness, abducting and deporting innocent people, branding immigrants as “vermin,” claiming they are “poisoning the blood” of Americans, and even proposing the legalization of murder for twelve hours, make clear that his violent metaphors are not just rhetorical flourishes. They are policy blueprints. In Trump’s hands, rhetoric becomes a weaponized prelude to atrocity, a tool of statecraft. Threats, hatred, and cruelty are transformed into instruments of governance.

This is not careless talk, it is a brutal and calculated expression of power. Trump’s threats to arrest and deport critics such as Zohran Mamdani reveal his willingness to use the machinery of the state for political extermination. His targets are predictable: immigrants, Black people, educators, journalists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and anyone who dares to challenge his white Christian nationalist, neoliberal, and white supremacist vision. His language does not merely offend, it incites harm, enacts repression, and opens the gates to state-sanctioned violence. It extends the reign of terror across the United States by labeling protesters as terrorists and deploying the military to American cities, treating them as if they were “occupied territories.”

We now live in a country where class and racial warfare both at home and abroad is on steroids, exposing the killing machine of gangster capitalism in its rawest, most punitive form. Trump supports the genocidal war waged by a state led by a war criminal. Children are being slaughtered in Gaza. Millions of Americans, including poor children, teeter on the edge of losing their healthcare. Funds for feeding hungry children are being slashed, sacrificed to feed the pockets of the ultra-rich. Thousands will die, not by accident, but by design. Terror, fear, and punishment have replaced the ideals of equality, freedom, and justice. Childcide is now normalized as the law of the land. The lights are dimming in America, and all that remains are the smug, ignorant smirks of fascist incompetence and bodies drained of empathy and solidarity.

Gangster Capitalism and the Death of Empathy

Gangster capitalism lays the foundation for Trump’s racist and fascist politics. As I have noted elsewhere, the United States has descended into a state of political, economic, cultural, and social psychosis, where cruel, neoliberal, democracy-hating policies have prevailed since the 1970s. At the core of this authoritarian shift lies a systemic war on workers, youth, Blacks, and immigrants, increasingly marked by mass violence and a punishing state both domestically and internationally. The U.S. has transformed into an empire dominated by a callous, greedy billionaire class that has dismantled any remnants of democracy, while embracing the fascistic ideology of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Fascism now parades not only beneath the flag but also under the Christian cross. America has shifted from celebrating unchecked individualism, as depicted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, to the glorification of greed championed by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and the psychotic avarice of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. This descent into barbarity and psychotic infatuation with violence is further demonstrated by Justin Zhong, a right-wing preacher at Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Indianapolis, who called for the deaths of LGBTQ+ individuals during a sermon. Zhong defended his comments by citing biblical justifications and labeling LGBTQ+ people as “domestic terrorists.” It gets worse. During a Men’s Preaching Night at Sure Foundation Baptist Church, Zhong’s associate, Stephen Falco, suggested that LGBTQ+ people should “blow yourself in the back of the head,” and that Christians should “pray for their deaths.” Another member, Wade Rawley, advocated for violence, stating LGBTQ+ individuals should be “beaten and stomped in the mud” before being shot in the head. Fascism in America, nourished by the toxic roots of homophobia, now cloaks itself not just in the poisonous banner of the Confederate flag, but also in the sacred guise of the Christian cross.

Welcome to Trump’s America, where empathy is now viewed as a weakness and the cold rule of the market is the template for judging all social relations. One noted example can be found in the words of Trump’s on-and-off billionaire ally, Elon Musk, who dismisses empathy as a naive and detrimental force that undermines the competitive, individualistic ethos he champions. Speaking to Joe Rogan on his podcast, Musk specifically stated that “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.” As Julia Carrie Wong observes in The Guardian, the stakes extend far beyond casting empathy as a “parasitic plague.” Empathy’s true power lies in its ability to disrupt the conditions that make dehumanization possible. Rather than enabling violence, it challenges the narrowing of moral boundaries and insists on expanding the definition of who belongs within a democratic society.”This is a recipe for barbarism, one that allows both states and individuals to turn a blind eye to the genocidal violence unfolding in Gaza and beyond.

Naming the Deep Roots of the Police State

Ruth Ben-Ghiat has warned that “America has been set on a trajectory to become a police state,” pointing to the passage of the Brutal and Bellicose Bill (BBB), which handed ICE a budget larger than the militaries of Brazil, Israel, and Italy combined. But the roots of this state violence go deeper. The foundation was laid under Bush and Cheney, whose war on terror birthed Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, mass surveillance, and extraordinary rendition. What Trump has done is strip these earlier authoritarian practices of all pretenses, elevating them to the status of governing principles.

The police state did not begin with Trump; it evolved through him. Now, we see its terrifying maturity: racial cleansing disguised as immigration policy, hatred normalized as political speech, dissent criminalized, birthright citizenship threatened, and everyday life militarized. This is not politics as usual, it is fascism in real time.

Trump’s fascist politics grows even more dangerous when we recognize that his language of colonization and domination has helped transform American society into what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o chillingly describes as a “war zone.” This war zone now spans the digital terrain—through the internet, podcasts, social media, and educational platforms—becoming a fertile breeding ground for fascist symbols, reactionary values, manufactured identities, and the toxic resurrection of colonial logics. In this battleground of meaning, the language of colonization does more than obscure the truth—it erodes critical thinking, silences historical memory, and disarms the very possibility of empowered agency. What remains in its wake is a nation scarred by suffering, haunted by loneliness, bound by shared fears, and anesthetized by the numbing rituals of a punishing state.

The transformation of America into a war zone finds its most visible expression in the rise of Trump’s omnipresent police state. This authoritarian machinery reveals itself through the mechanisms of state-sponsored terror, a heavily militarized ICE force operating like masked enforcers, and the rapid expansion of detention centers that will increasingly resemble a network of potential forced labor camps. As Fintan O’Toole warns, Trump’s deployment of troops onto the streets of Los Angeles is not merely symbolic—it is “a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation.” In this reorientation, soldiers are no longer defenders of the Constitution but are being retrained as instruments of authoritarian power, bound not by democratic ideals but by obedience to a singular will.

Nevertheless, we resist or refuse to name the fascist threat and the ideological and economic architecture of its politics. Still, we recoil from calling the Trump regime what it is: a fascist state engaged in domestic terrorism. Still, we remain blind to the fact that economic inequality, global militarism, and the genocidal logics of empire are not peripheral issues, they are the center. Why is it so difficult to admit that we are living in an age of American fascism? Why do the crimes of the powerful, at home and abroad, so often pass without scrutiny, while the victims are blamed or erased?

The Collapse of Moral Imagination

What we face is not only a political crisis, partly in the collapse of conscience and civic courage– a profound moral collapse. The war being waged at home by the Trump regime is not just against immigrants or the poor, it is a war on critical thought, on historical memory, on the courage to dissent. It is a war on every institution that upholds critical thinking, informed knowledge, and civic literacy. This is a genocidal war against the very possibility of a just future—a war not merely against, but for stupidity, for the death of morality, and for the annihilation of any robust notion of democracy. Viktor Klemperer, in his seminal work The Language of the Third Reich, offers a crucial lesson from history: “With great insistence and a high degree of precision right down to the last detail, Hitler’s Mein Kampf teaches not only that the masses are stupid, but that they need to be kept that way, intimidated into not thinking.” Klemperer’s analysis reveals that Nazi politics did not arise in a vacuum; it was cultivated in a culture where language itself was the breeding ground of cruelty and control.

Trump’s rhetoric of fear, racial hatred does not emerge in a vacuum. It resonates because it taps into a long and violent history, a history soaked in blood, built on genocide, slavery, colonialism, and exclusion. His language recalls the genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Jews, and others deemed disposable by authoritarian regimes. It is a necrotic lexicon, resurrected in service of tyranny. It gives birth to politicians with blood in their mouths, who weaponize nostalgia and bigotry, cloaking brutality in the false promises of patriotism and “law and order.”

Language as War and the Return of Americanized Fascism

This is not merely a rhetoric of cruelty, it is a call to arms. Trump’s words do not simply shelter fascists; they summon them. They silence dissent, normalize torture, and echo the logic of death camps, internment camps, and mass incarceration. His discourse, laden with hatred and lies, is designed to turn neighbors into enemies, civic life into war, and politics into a death cult and zone of terminal exclusion. Undocumented immigrants, or those seeking to register for green cards or citizenship, are torn from their families and children, cast into prisons such as Alligator Alcatraz, a grotesque manifestation of the punishing state. As Melissa Gira Grant writes in The New Republic, it is “an American concentration camp…built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE,” constructed in a chilling display of colonial disregard, and erected on traditional Miccosukee land without so much as consulting the Tribe.

This is the face of modern cruelty: language wielded as a tool to orchestrate a spectacle of violence, designed to degrade, divide, and erase. Culture is no longer a peripheral force in politics; it has become the central weapon in the rise of state terrorism. The language of war and complicity normalizes America’s transformation into a monstrous carceral state, a symbol of state-sponsored terror where due process is suspended, and suffering is not just an outcome but the point itself. A culture of cruelty now merges with state sponsored racial terror, functioning as a badge of honor. One example is noted in Trump advisor Laura Loomer, who ominously remarked that “the wild animals surrounding President Donald Trump’s new immigration detention center… will have ‘at least 65 million meals.” Change.org, along with others such as Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor, noted that her comment “is not only racist, it is a direct emotional attack and veiled threat against Hispanic communities. This kind of speech dehumanizes people of color and normalizes genocidal language.” Her racist remark not only reveals the profound contempt for human life within Trump’s inner circle but also highlights how cruelty and violence are strategically used as both a policy tool and a public spectacle. Loomer’s remark is not an aberration, it is a symptom of the fascist logic animating this administration, where death itself becomes a political message. Her blood-soaked discourse if symptomatic of the criminogenic politics fundamental to the working of the Trump regime.

The parallels to history are unmistakable. Loomer’s invocation of death as the outcome of detention recalls the Nazi designation of certain camps as Vernichtungslager, extermination camps, where as Holocaust survivor Primo Levi noted, imprisonment and execution were inseparable. Likewise, the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, though often sanitized in public memory, operated under a similar logic of racial suspicion and collective punishment. The message in each case is clear, as Judith Butler has noted in her writing: some lives are rendered invisible, deemed unworthy of legal protection, of family, of dignity, of life itself. In fascist regimes, such spaces function not only as instruments of punishment but as symbolic theaters of power, meant to instill terror, enforce obedience, and declare which bodies the state has marked for erasure.

For Trump, J.D. Vance, and their ilk, fascism is not a specter to be feared but a banner to be waved. The spirit of the Confederacy and the corpse-like doctrines of white supremacy, militarism, and neoliberal authoritarianism have returned, this time supercharged by surveillance technologies, financial capital, and social media echo chambers. In the spirit of the Trump regime, the symbols of the Confederacy are normalized. Confederate flags are now waved by neo-Nazis in public squares and parades, while Trump renames US warships and 7 military bases after Confederate officers, reinforcing a dangerous nostalgia for a past rooted in racism and rebellion against the very ideals of unity and equality that this nation claims to uphold.

It should not surprise us that the American public has grown numb with the constant echo chamber of state terrorism playing out in multiple sites of attack. Powerful disimagination machines, mainstream media, right-wing propaganda platforms, tech billionaires, have flooded public consciousness with conspiracy theories, historical amnesia, and spectacularized images of immigrants and others being deported to prisons, foreign Gulags, and moder day black holes. These are not simply entertainment outlets; they are pedagogical weapons of mass distraction, breeding civic illiteracy and moral paralysis. Under their influence, the American people have been placed in a moral and political coma.

White Nationalism and Reproductive Control

Nowhere is this more evident than in the mainstream media’s failure to address the racial and ideological foundations of Trump’s agenda. His attacks on Haitian immigrants, the travel ban on seven African countries, the shutting down of refugee programs, and his open-door policy for white Afrikaners from South Africa are not merely racist; they are explicitly white nationalist. The same ideology drives attacks on women’s reproductive rights, revealing the deep racial and gender anxieties of a movement obsessed with white demographic decline. These are not isolated skirmishes, they are interconnected strategies of domination.

These converging assaults, white nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchal control, and militarized life, manifest most vividly in the war on reproductive freedom. White nationalists encourage white women to reproduce, to hold back demographic change, while punishing women of color, LGBTQ+ people, and the poor. It is a violent calculus, animated by fantasies of purity and control.

The Systemic Assault on Democracy

This is a full-spectrum assault on democracy. Every act of cruelty, every racist law, every violent metaphor chips away at the social contract. A culture of authoritarianism is now used to demean those considered other, both citizens and non-citizens, critics and immigrants, naturalized citizens and those seeking such status. They are labeled as unworthy of citizenship now defined by the Trump regime as a privilege rather than a right. Meanwhile, a media ecosystem built on clickbait and erasure renders both such fascists as legitimate while making invisible the roots of suffering mass suffering and fear, all the while, turning oppression into spectacle and silence into complicity.

In this fog, language itself is emptied of meaning. Truth and falsehood blur. As Paulo Freire warned, the tools of the oppressor are often adopted by the oppressed. We now see that the logic of fascism has seeped into the culture, eroding civic sensibility, destroying moral imagination, and rendering resistance almost unspeakable.

The Normalization of Tyranny

Trump’s authoritarian fantasies do not alienate his base, they galvanize it. What was once unthinkable is now policy. What was once fringe has become mainstream. Cruelty is not something to be deplored and avoided at all costs, it is a central feature of power, wielded with theatrical and spectacularized brutality. Under the current acting ICE Director, Todd Lyons, this punitive logic has intensified: Lyons oversees a $4.4 billion Enforcement and Removal Operations apparatus staffed by over 8,600 agents across 200 domestic locations, using militarized tactics, surprise raids, and aggressive targeting of immigrant communities to sustain a regime of fear. ICE’s presence is at the heart of Trump’s hyper-police state, and its funding has been greatly expanded to $170 billion under Trump’s new budget bill, creating what journalist Will Bunch calls Trump’s “own gulag archipelago of detention camps across a United States that’s becoming increasingly hard to recognize.”

Meanwhile, figures like Tom Homan, who led ICE under Trump’s first term, laid the groundwork with Gestapo-style operations, midnight raids, family separations, and public declarations that undocumented immigrants “should be afraid”. As the “border tzar” under Trump, Homan has initiated deportation policies that are even more aggressively violent and cruel that those that took place in Trump’s first term as president. As Bunch notes, take the case of “the 64-year-old New Orleans woman, Donna Kashanian, who fled a tumultuous Iran 47 years ago, volunteered to rebuild her battered Louisiana community after Hurricane Katrina, never missed a check-in with U.S. immigration officials , and was snatched by ICE agents in unmarked vehicles while she was out working in her garden and sent to a notorious detention center.” These horror stories now take place daily in cities extending from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island.

A central player in this current regime of state terrorism, systemic racism, mass abductions, deportations, and the criminalization of dissent is Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff. During Trump’s first term, Miller was the driving force behind the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, and assaults on birthright citizenship, all rooted in an unapologetic white supremacist and eugenicist worldview. In Trump’s second term, he has emerged as the architect of even more draconian measures, pushing for mass deportations, the abolition of birthright citizenship, and the revocation of naturalized citizenship for those who fall outside his white Christian vision of who deserves to be called American.

Far-right white nationalist such as Miller, Tom Homan and Todd Lyons, do not treat cruelty as a regrettable side effect. For them, cruelty is the currency of power. Suffering becomes a spectacle, and violence a ritual of statecraft. Tyranny is not inching forward in silence; it is advancing at full speed, cheered on by those who treat fear as a governing principle and pain as public policy.

This is not a passing storm. It is the death throes of a system that has long glorified violence, commodified everything, and fed on division. Trump’s language is not a performance, it is preparation. His words are laying the foundation for a society without empathy, without justice, without democracy.

Reclaiming the Language of Resistance, Reclaiming Democracy

In a decent society, language is the lifeblood of democracy, a vessel of solidarity, truth, and hope. But in Trump’s America, language has become a weapon, dehumanizing, excluding, and dominating. His vision is not a warning; it is a blueprint. We must resist, or we risk losing everything. The stakes are nothing less than the survival of democracy, the retrieval of truth and the refusal to live in a world where cruelty is policy and silence is complicity. What is needed now is not only a rupture in language but a rupture in consciousness, one that brings together the critical illumination of the present with a premonitory vision of what lies ahead if fascist dynamics remain unchecked. As Walter Benjamin insisted, we must cultivate a form of profane illumination, a language that disrupts the spectacle of lies and names the crisis in all its violent clarity. At the same time, as A.K. Thompson argues, we must grasp the future implicit in the present. His notion of premonitions urges us to read the events unfolding around us as urgent warnings, as signs of the catastrophe that awaits if we do not confront and reverse the political and cultural paths we are on. It demands that we see the connections that bind our suffering, rejecting the fragmented reality that neoliberalism forces upon us. The time for complacency is past. The time for a new and more vibrant language, one of critique, resistance, and militant hope, is now. A language capable not only of indicting the present but of envisioning a future rooted in justice, memory, and collective struggle.

As Antonio Gramsci remarked in his Prison Notebooks, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” What is clear is that these morbid symptoms have arrived. Yet, alongside the despair they breed, they also present new challenges and opportunities for revitalized struggles. This is where the power of language comes into play—this is the challenge and opportunity for those who believe in the transformative power of culture, language, and education to address not just the nature of the crisis but its deeper roots in politics, memory, agency, values, power, and democracy itself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors. 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/26/the-road-to-the-camps-echoes-of-a-fascist-past/

“What’s Past is Prologue…”
 

Gangster capitalism and nostalgic authoritarianism in Trump’s America

 
In one year, the Trump regime has wrought immense damage to democracy, culture and thought. But there's new hope

 
by Henry A. Giroux
Contributing Writer
December 3, 2017 

 

(Getty/Paramount Pictures/20th Century Fox/Salon)

 

Just one year into the Donald Trump presidency, not only have the failures of American democracy become clear, but many of the darkest elements of its history have been catapulted to the center of power. A dystopian ideology, a kind of nostalgic yearning for older authoritarian relations of power, now shapes and legitimates a mode of governance that generates obscene levels of inequality, expands the ranks of corrupt legislators, places white supremacists and zealous ideologues in positions of power, threatens to jail its opponents, and sanctions an expanding network of state violence both at home and abroad.

Trump has accelerated a culture of cruelty, a machinery of terminal exclusion and social abandonment that wages a war on undocumented immigrants, poor minorities of color and young people. He uses the power of the presidency to peddle misinformation, erode any sense of shared citizenship, ridicule critical media and celebrate right-wing “disimagination machines” such as Fox News and Breitbart News. Under his “brand of reality TV politics,” lying has become normalized, truthfulness is viewed as a liability, ignorance is propagated at the highest levels of government and the corporate controlled media, and fear-soaked cyclones of distraction and destruction immunize the American public to the cost of human suffering and misery.

Under the Trump administration, culture has been weaponized and is used as a powerful tool of power, misinformation and indoctrination. James Baldwin, in a 1979 New York Times essay titled “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” wrote, “People evolve a language … in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.”

This is certainly true for Trump, who recognizes that the normalization of state-sanctioned lying kills democracy, and destroys the capacity to produce informed judgments. Trump’s serial lying is daunting in that it normalizes discourses, “actions, and policies exempt from moral evaluation [and] treated as beyond good and evil.” As Hannah Arendt argues in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the erasure of truth, facts and standards of reference furthers the collapse of democratic institutions because it is “easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which have become pious banalities. Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it the worst … and [is] easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life.”

As language is emptied of any meaning, an authoritarian populism is emboldened and fills the airways and the streets with sonic blasts of racism, anti-Semitism and violence. New York Times columnist (and former Salon reporter) Michelle Goldberg rightly observes that Trump makes it difficult to hold onto any sense of what is normal given his relentless attempts to upend the rule of law, justice, ethics and democracy itself. She writes:

The country has changed in the past year, and many of us have grown numb after unrelenting shocks. What now passes for ordinary would have once been inconceivable. The government is under the control of an erratic racist who engages in nuclear brinkmanship on Twitter. … He publicly pressures the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents. He’s called for reporters to be jailed, and his administration demanded that a sportscaster who criticized him be fired. Official government statements promote his hotels. You can’t protest it all; you’d never do anything else. After the election, many liberals pledged not to “normalize” Trump. But one lesson of this year is that we don’t get to decide what normal looks like. 

There is more at work here than the kind of crass entertainment that mimics celebratory culture. As Byung-Chul Han argues, “every age has its signature afflictions.” Ours is an unprecedented corporate takeover of the U.S. government and the reemergence of elements of totalitarianism in new forms. At stake here is the power of an authoritarian ideology that fuels a hyperactive exploitative economic order, apocalyptic nationalism and feral appeals to racial cleansing that produce what Paul Street has called the nightmare of capitalism.

Trump engages in a culture war that militarizes the social media and in doing so creates a politics of diversion while erasing memories of a fascist past that bears an uncanny and terrifying resemblance to his own worldview. As Zygmunt Bauman observes in “Strangers at Our Door,” Trump’s endless racist discourses, taunts and policies cast blacks, immigrants and Muslims as “humans unworthy of regard and respect” and in engaging in the dehumanization of the Other shifts major social problems away from the “sphere of ethics to that of threats to security, crime prevention, and punishment, criminality, defense of order, and, all in all, the state of emergency usually associated with the threat of military aggression and hostilities.”

Trump makes no apologies for ramping up the police state, imposing racist-inspired travel injunctions, banning transgender people from serving in the military, and initiating tax reforms that further balloon the obscene wealth gap in the United States. All the while using his Twitter feed to entertain his right-wing, white supremacist and religious fundamentalist base at home with a steady stream of authoritarian comments, while showering affection and legitimation on a range of despots abroad, the most recent being the self-confessed killer, Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines.

According to Felipe Villamor of the New York Times, “Mr. Duterte has led a campaign against drug abuse in which he has encouraged the police and others to kill people they suspect of using or selling drugs.” Powerful authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping appear to pose an especially strong attraction to Trump, who exhibits little interests in their massive human rights violations. Trump’s high regard for white supremacy and petty authoritarianism became clear on the domestic front when he pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, a vicious racist who waged a war against undocumented immigrants, Latino residents and individuals who did not speak English. Arpaio also housed detainees in an outdoor prison that he called his personal “concentration camp.”

As Marjorie Cohn observes, Arpaio engaged in a series of sadistic practices in his outdoor jail in Phoenix that included forcing them “to wear striped uniforms and pink underwear,” “work on chain gangs,” and be subjected to blistering Arizona heat so severe that their “shoes would melt.” There is more at work here than Trump legitimating the practices of a monstrous racist; there is also expressed support for both a culture of violence and state-sanctioned oppression. 

Trump’s authoritarianism cuts deeply into the fabric of both government and everyday politics in the United States. For example, despicable and morally reprehensible acts of collaboration with an emergent authoritarianism have created a Republican Party that echoes an eerie resemblance to similar flights of moral and political corruption that characterized the cowardly politicians in power in Vichy France during World War II.

Former conservative talk-show host Charles Sykes is right to argue that members of the current Republican Party are “collaborators and enablers” and as such are Vichy Republicans who are willingly engaged in a Faustian bargain with an incipient authoritarianism. Corrupted by power and willing to turn a blind eye to corruption, stupidity, barbarism and the growing savagery of the Trump administration, Republicans have surrendered to Trump’s authoritarian ideology, economic fundamentalism, support for religious orthodoxy and increasingly cruel and mean-spirited policies, which “meant accepting the unacceptable [all the while reasoning] it would be worth it if they got conservative judges, tax cuts, and the repeal of Obamacare.”

Alarmingly, they have ignored the criticisms of Trump by high-profile members of their own party. For instance, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, accused Trump of “debasing the nation” and “treating his office like a reality show.” Corker warned that Trump may be setting the U.S. “on the path to World War III.”

Egregious examples of political barbarism, state violence, the morally reprehensible and the utter corruption of politics and democracy have become all too familiar in the first year of Trump’s presidency, and the list just keeps growing. Trump’s hatred of Muslims and undocumented immigrants is visible in his call to build walls rather than bridges, to invoke shared fears rather than shared responsibilities, to destroy all the public institutions that make democracy possible, and to expand a culture in which self-interest, greed, militarism and repression expand the ideology, social relations and practices that breathe life into what might be called gangster capitalism, rather than the less odious notion of a Second Gilded Age.
Trump has no shame and seems to delight in a pornographic display of moral indiscretion that produce waves of not only moral outrage but a constant theater of distraction. Against growing concern over his connection with the Russians, he fires James Comey as head of the FBI. In the face of his failure to pass any of his regressive legislative policies, particularly around healthcare reform, he insults fellow Republicans in Congress. As Robert Mueller’s investigation heats up, he publicly humiliates Jeff Sessions, his own attorney general.

In the interest of political expediency, both Trump and presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway have called for the election of Roy Moore, Republican nominee for the Alabama Senate seat abandoned by Sessions. Moore is a theocratic extremist, religious fundamentalist, homophobe and accused sexual predator. More than a half dozen women have now accused him of various forms of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. Trump and Conway’s defense rested on the morally vacuous claim and obscene rationale that it was necessary to elect Moore to the Senate so Trump would have another Republican Senate vote to pass a tax bill that functions as a wet kiss and wedding gift for the rich. It gets worse. This is not simply politics without a moral referent. It is a politics that embraces civic regression, and represents a form of evil one associates with the forms of domestic terrorism that characterizes totalitarianism.

Trump is the apostle of moral blindness and unchecked corruption. He revels in a mode of governance that merges the idiocy of a never-ending theatrics of self-promotion with a deeply authoritarian politics of contempt, punishment and humiliation free from any kind of self-reflection or moral evaluation. One under-analyzed example can be seen in his contempt for young people, whether expressed through his attempt to expel more than 700,000 Dreamers from the United States, sanction a budget that eliminates or cuts major social provisions for poor and vulnerable youth, or advocate a tax reform bill that will impose massive suffering and hardships on minorities of class and color.

Trump has given new force to the rise of the punishing state with its obsession with security, incarceration, public shaming and the resuscitation of debtor prisons and the school-to-prison pipeline. Trump’s contempt for the lives of young people, his support for a culture of cruelty and his appetite for destruction and civic catastrophe is more than a symptom of a society ruled almost exclusively by the logic of the market and a “survival of the fittest” ethos, with its willingness if not glee in calling for the separation of economic, political and social actions from any social costs or consequences. It is about the systemic derangement of democracy and the emergence of a politics that celebrates the toxic pleasures of the authoritarian state.

While there is much talk about the influence of Trumpism, there are few analyses that examine its culture of cruelty and politics of disposability, or the role that culture plays in legitimating intolerance and suffering. The culture of cruelty and mechanisms of disposability reach back to the founding of the United States as a settler-colonial society. How else does one explain a long line of state-sanctioned atrocities: the genocide waged against Native Americans in order to take their land, enslavement and breeding of black people for profit and labor, and the passage of the Second Amendment to arm and enforce white supremacy over those populations? The legacies of those horrific roots of U.S. history are coded into Trumpist slogans about “making America great again,” and egregiously defended through appeals to American exceptionalism.

More recent instances indicative of the rising culture of bigoted cruelty and mechanisms of erasure in U.S. politics include the racially motivated drug wars, policies that shifted people from welfare to workfare without offering training programs or child care, and morally indefensible tax reforms that will “require huge budget cuts in safety net programs for vulnerable children and adults.” As Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when millions of American children “are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness. Nearly 13.2 million children are poor – almost one in five. About 70 percent of them are children of color who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”

Trump is both a symptom and enabler of this culture, one that enables him to delight in taunting black athletes, defending neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and mocking anyone who disagrees with him. This is the face of a kind of Reichian psycho-politics, with its mix of violence, repression, theatrics, incoherency and spectacularized ignorance. Trump makes clear that the dream of the Confederacy is still with us, that moral panics thrive against a culture of rancid racism, “a background of obscene inequalities, progressive deregulation of labor markets and a massive expansion in the ranks of the precariat.” 

In an age of almost unparalleled extremism, violence and cruelty, authoritarianism is gaining ground, rapidly creating a society in which shared fears and unchecked hatred have become the organizing forces for community. Under the Trump regime, dissent is disparaged as a pathology or dismissed as fake news, while even the slightest compassion for others becomes an object of disdain and subject to policies that increase the immiseration, suffering and misery of the most vulnerable.
Under the shadow of 9/11, fear has gained a new momentum as more and more individuals and groups are denigrated, labeled as disposable, subject to forms of social and racial cleansing that are in accord with the force of a resurgent white supremacy emboldened by the fact that one of its sympathizers is now president of the United States. Rejecting the most basic elements of a sustainable democracy, Trumpism has unleashed a rancid populism and racially inspired ultra-nationalism that sustains itself by looking everywhere for enemies while occupying the high ground of political purity and an empty moralism.

 
In the past, racist Democrats and Republicans did everything they could to cover over any naked expressions of their racism. This is no longer the case. Under Trump, both racist discourse and the underlying principles of white supremacy are both encouraged and emboldened. In the midst of the collapse of civil society and the public spheres that make a democracy possible, every line of decency is crossed, every principle of civility is violated, and more and more elements of justice are transformed into an injustice. Trump has become the blunt instrument and Twitter preacher for displaying a contempt for the truth, a critical citizenry, and democracy itself. He has anointed himself as the apostle of unchecked greed, unbridled narcissism and limitless militarism.

 
Wedded to both creating a culture of civic illiteracy and the plundering of the planet for both his own personal gain and that of his corporate cronies, Trump has done more than assault standards of truth, verification and evidence. He has opened the door to the dark cave of moral depravity, political corruption and a dangerous right-wing nationalist populism that, as Frank Rich observes, threatens to have “remarkable staying power” long after Trump is gone.

 
Gangster capitalism under Trump has reached a new stage, in that it is unabashedly aggressive in mounting a war against every institution capable of providing a vision, a semblance of critical agency or a formative culture capable of creating agents who might be willing to hold power accountable. The American public is witnessing a crisis not merely of politics but of history, vision and agency, or what Andrew O’Hehir more pointedly called the acts of a domestic terrorist. This is a politics of domesticated fear, manufactured illusions and atomizing effects. Trump is the product of a culture long in the making, one fueled by the triumph of finance capital, the legitimation of a rancid individualism and a crippling notion of freedom. In this age of precarity, infantilizing publicity machines and uncertainty, a sense of collective impotency and fear provides the breeding ground for isolation, the corporate state and the discourses of inscription, demonization and false communities.

A culture of immediacy, an economy of profound boredom, instant gratification and spectacularized violence, has created a society of deliberate forgetting and a sadomasochistic culture that thrives on humiliation, revenge, a culture of punitiveness and an aesthetics of depravity. Trump signifies the death of the radical imagination and the apotheosis of its opposite: a lackluster hatred of thoughtfulness, creativity and inventiveness. Trump makes clear that capitalism and democracy are not synonymous, and that everyone has to be either consumer or taxpayer.

 
I think the artist Sable Elyse Smith is right in arguing that ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge or the refusal to know. It is also a form of violence that is woven into the fabric of everyday life by the power of massive “disimagination machines.” Its ultimate goal is to enable us to not only consume pain and to propagate it, but to relish in it as a form of entertainment and emotional uplift. Ignorance is also the enemy of memory and a weapon in the politics of disappearance and the violence of organized forgetting. It is also about the erasure of what Brad Evans calls “the raw realities of suffering” and the undermining of a politics that is in part about the battle for memory.

Trump within a very short time has legitimated and reinforced a culture of social abandonment, erasure and terminal exclusion. Justice in this discourse is disposable along with the institutions that make it possible. What is distinctive about Trump is that he defines himself through the tenets of a predatory and cruel form of gangster capitalism, while using its power to fill government positions with what appear to be the walking dead and at the same time produce death-dealing policies. Of course he is just the overt and unapologetic symbol of a wild capitalism and dark pessimism that have been decades in the making. He is the theatrical, self-absorbed monster that embodies and emboldens a history of savagery, greed and extreme inequality that has reached its endpoint — a poisonous form of American authoritarianism that must be stopped before it is too late. Trump makes clear that democracy is tenuous and has to be viewed as a site of ongoing contestation, one that demands a new understanding of politics, language and collective struggle.

Trump’s reign of terror will come to an end. But the forces that made Trump possible will not end with his political demise. This means that in the ongoing struggle against authoritarianism, progressives need a language of critique and possibility. This suggests the need for a new vocabulary that refuses to look away, refuses to surrender to either the dictates of consumerism, fear or bigotry. It also suggest a left/progressive movement that does more than say what it is against. It also needs a vision and an ongoing project that enables it to say what it is for. This could take the form of creating a political, economic and social platform rooted in the principles of democratic socialism.

Ariel Dorfman, drawing upon his own memories and experience of authoritarianism under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, speaks to the need for such a language. He writes: “It brings back to me the imaginative enormity that every true demand for radical change insists upon. It catches a missing feeling of our age: the belief that alternative worlds are possible, that they are within reach if we’re courageous enough, and smart enough, and daring enough to take control of our own lives.” 

We get a hint of such a language in the words of the writer Maaza Mengiste, who calls for a discourse of passion, power, responsibility and justice, one that “will take us from shock and stunned silence toward a coherent, visceral speech, one as strong as the force that is charging at us.” In the age of Trump, we need to take seriously the notion that education is at the center of politics — that, as Stuart Hall has consistently stressed, “politics follows culture.” For Hall, this meant that addressing oppression cannot rest with an emphasis on economic structures, however important. What was also needed was recognizing how domination worked at the level of belief and persuasion, which suggested that education and consciousness-raising was at the center of politics. 

 
As Hall puts it, “You can’t just rest with the underlying structural logic. And so you think about what is likely to awaken identification. There’s no politics without identification. People have to invest something of themselves, something that they recognize is of them or speaks to their condition, and … you won’t have a political movement without that moment of identification.”

 
This suggests a politics that begins both with a vision of what a democratic socialist society might look like and a narrative that makes power visible. This implies a language that is both rigorous theoretically and accessible. Moreover, it means developing a vocabulary that moves people, speaks directly to their problems, allows them to feel compassion for the other and gives them the courage to talk back. This suggests forging the appropriate pedagogical and symbolic weapons that make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. Rethinking politics means creating a vocabulary that enables us to confront a sense of responsibility in the face of the unspeakable, and to do so with a sense of dignity, self-reflection and the courage to act in the service of a radical democracy. It also means providing the theoretical tools that enable people to connect private problems with wider social issues.

 
In the face of Trump’s brand of authoritarianism, progressives need a vocabulary that allows us to recognize ourselves as agents, not victims, in the discourse of a radical democratic politics. We need a politics that addresses systemic problems and refuses gangster capitalism’s insistence that all problems are personal, an exclusive matter of individual responsibility and privatized solutions. This is not to underplay how difficult it is to acknowledge any viable sense of the outrage and struggle in an age when the power of culture, new digital technologies, social media and mainstream cultural apparatuses seem almost overwhelming in their deleterious effects on shaping agency, desires, values and modes of identification. But rather than surrender to such forces, they need to be reworked in the interest of a set of collective and emancipatory modes of communication, social relations and forms of resistance. 

At the same time it is crucial to remember that there is more at stake here than a struggle over meaning. There is also the struggle over power, over the need to create a formative culture that will produce new modes of critical agency and contribute to a broad social movement that can translate meaning into a fierce struggle for economic, political and social justice. Power is never entirely on the side of domination, and there are numerous examples of resistance cropping up all over the United States. Not only it is evident in youth movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Dreamers, but also middle-aged women in the red states fighting over what Judith Shulevitz calls “the big issues for the resistance [such as] health care and gerrymandering, followed by dark money in politics, education and the environment.”

Activists are also mobilizing over immigrant rights, mass incarceration, police violence, abolishing nuclear weapons and environmental justice, among other issues. Facing the challenge of fascism will not be easy, but Americans are marching, protesting and organizing in record-breaking numbers. Hopefully, mass indignation will evolve into a worldwide movement whose power will be on the side of justice rather than impunity, bridges rather than walls, dignity rather than disrespect, and kindness rather than cruelty. What is crucial is that these discrete movements come together under a larger political and social formation in order to develop alliances capable of developing into a democratic socialist party, one willing to make resistance a necessity rather than not an option.

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

 

Henry A. Giroux
 

Henry A. Giroux holds the Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (Canada) and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy there.  He is the author of over 25 critically acclaimed books about politics, history, philosophy, culture, ideology, critical theory, and the state 

 
MORE FROM Henry A. Giroux

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FASCIST AMERICA 2025: Legendary and Iconic Writer, Editor, Teacher, Social And Cultural Theorist, Public Intellectual, Philosopher, Cultural Critic, Sociologist, Historian, Media Producer, and Activist Stuart Hall (1932-2014) On Fascism, Walter Rodney, Antonio Gramsci, Socialism, Cultural History and Criticism, and the Importance and Necessity of Mass Movements For Freedom, Justice, and Self-Determination

Image of Walter Rodney and Stuart Hall (L-R) by Jim Alexander, the Stuart Hall Estate

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/when-we-are-all-enemies-of-the-state/

Politics
Race

 
When We Are All Enemies of the State

A recently discovered 1974 speech by Stuart Hall on Walter Rodney—and why fascists fear ideas.

Stuart Hall
Jordan T. Camp
Caribbean History Protest

June 12, 2025
Boston Review

In September 1974, at a protest in London, Stuart Hall delivered a speech in support of fellow Caribbean-born radical intellectual Walter Rodney. After being offered a professorship at the University of Guyana, Rodney had resigned from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to accept the job. As he returned home to join his wife Patricia and their children in Guyana, Rodney was informed that the offer had been rescinded under pressure from the government of Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. A revised version of Hall’s remarks was recently discovered in the Stuart Hall Archive at the University of Birmingham; they are published here for the first time.

The “Reinstate Walter Rodney Now!” protest in London was just one episode in a global solidarity movement that erupted in support of Rodney, who by that point had established an international reputation following the publication of The Groundings with My Brothers (1969) and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). His scholarship focused on exploitation by the “colonial capitalist system.” Yet Rodney also argued that formal independence, including Guyana’s, was not the fulfillment of anticolonial struggle: on the contrary, it had resulted in the ascension of a governing class—exemplified by Burnham’s rule—that spoke the language of national liberation and socialist movements while advancing interests contrary to those of workers and peasants. Independence, Rodney warned, had not fundamentally altered the “map of the world” or shifted the material conditions of the masses.

The year 1974 was a pivotal historical moment—or as Hall and Rodney might say, a conjuncture. That year, Rodney became a member of the newly formed Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, a multiracial class alliance formed to resist the U.S.-backed Burnham dictatorship. The organization challenged the Burnham regime’s nationalist narratives, which portrayed racial conflicts between African and Indian working people as inexorable features of Guyanese society. For this work, Rodney and his comrades were subject to multiple arrests and harassment.

By 1974, Hall had been a leading figure of the British New Left for almost two decades, immersed in the political culture of “Caribbean Marxism” in dialogue with other radical intellectuals like C. L. R. James. In these remarks, Hall writes that Rodney had been criminalized by the “caretakers of neo-imperialism” and targeted by the Burnham regime for his ideas, which made their way “outside the strictly academic context, because he insisted on talking to and with ordinary people.” Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s recently translated prison writings, Hall argues that Rodney was a “shining and striking example” of a revolutionary, organic intellectual.

Hall also understood the profound threat that Rodney’s work posed to the legitimacy of the Burnham regime, and he correctly anticipated the force of the state’s reaction. On June 13, 1980, Rodney was assassinated by a car bomb in Georgetown, Guyana. He was just thirty-eight years old. It would take over four decades to officially corroborate what Rodney’s family, colleagues, and comrades knew at the time: that the assassination was carried out by an agent of the Burnham dictatorship.

Today the legacies of both Hall and Rodney demonstrate the imperative of organic intellectuals to confront authoritarian nationalism and forge global solidarity. Over a half century after Hall’s speech, and forty-five years after Rodney’s assassination, their work speaks to our own moment of resurgent fascism with remarkable clarity.

The following text is published with the permission of the estate of Stuart Hall and with the generous support of Professor Nick Beech of the Stuart Hall Archive Project.
—Jordan T. Camp

I am sorry that circumstances prevent me being with you today, to join again in the voices of protest raised against the actions of the Burnham Government with respect to Walter Rodney. But I am pleased to have the opportunity to say again, in summary form, the remarks I was privileged to address to the excellent London protest meeting organized a fortnight ago. 

I was asked then to say something about Rodney’s work and position as a radical and committed black intellectual. Now it may seem odd to speak of Rodney’s intellectual work at a moment like this: for it is clear that the embargo which the Burnham government have laid against him is not intellectual in origin but political. However, it is not easy, or indeed, correct, to make this false distinction between intellectual work and politics. The Burnham government has itself given us an important political lesson in this respect. It is, first of all, because of his ideas that the Government fear[s] Rodney’s return to the Caribbean: because they know the power of critical ideas, powerfully and cogently expressed, to take root among people and to move them into action and organization. It is also because he has a special view of the role and responsibility of the intellectual that they fear him: because he has always taken responsibility for the propagation of his ideas outside the strictly academic context, because he has insisted on talking to and with ordinary people.

The government fears Rodney because it knows the power of critical ideas to move people into action.

It may be worth saying a word about this question of the relation between the intellectual and politics: it is a relation which is frequently misunderstood, not only abroad but amongst our own people, and perhaps especially by intellectuals themselves. Intellectuals are formed by their education, their training, the situations in which they work, the dominant definitions of intellectual work which they pick up like bad habits. Black intellectuals from the West Indies, in my experience, are especially prone to believe that intellectual work is, by definition, an elite activity—for other intellectuals only: and that it is only worth doing if it is done—as they say, “objectively,” in a framework of “value neutrality,” without the intrusion of commitments, biases, personal feelings or opinions: neutral men, standing outside history, judging and commenting on it in a way which leaves him free of the judgements he makes and of the things he finds out. This is a disastrous and crippling view. It utterly mistakes the role of the intellectual and the nature of intellectual work in its relation to politics.

Value neutrality, false objectivity of this sort may be possible in the natural sciences (though of course what one doeswith the things one finds out about nature cannot be “neutral”). But this sort of neutrality, I am convinced, does not belong within the human and historical sciences—whether your particular branch is history, economic, political science, literature or sociology. I say this particularly because so many of our gifted young men and women go into economics and the law, especially, and inhabit those professions as if they guaranteed them protection against the winds of politics and political controversy. 

Of course, given the way educational chances are distributed in our society, only a very few men and women—and more men than women—ever get the chance to become full-time intellectuals. Often, these men and women work in schools, colleges, universities—in the academic world—and they tend to confuse the jobs they hold, the careers they are carving out for themselves, the whole restricted universe of Academia—for serious, critical intellectual work. They equate the restricted route they have been privileged to take to knowledge, with the functions of knowledge itself, with its production. Let me insist that “the academic” and “the intellectual” are not interchangeable terms: they are not the same thing: they may even be at the opposite ends of the scale. The academic life can actually prevent intellectuals [from] doing serious intellectual work. The academic world certainly encourages us to cut ourselves off from the transmission of ideas into action, the propagation of knowledge among the people. The fact is that, as Gramsci, the great Italian revolutionary and theorist once said, “all men are intellectuals,” though only a few are paid to do such work. All men, in so far as they think about what they do, apply thought to action, becomes self-conscious of their actions and their consequences, are intellectuals. If, then, we “full-time” intellectuals restrict our knowledge to those who have been fortunate enough to get full-time education and to work in universities, we are simply reproducing, by our own efforts, the unequal distribution of knowledge and education in our societies. We are simply contributing to the perpetuation of the “knowledge” of the few, and the ignorance of the many. Academics may be satisfied with that role: revolutionary intellectuals cannot be. 

It is not possible, in my view, to study human societies, to study historical movements and developments, in a “value-neutral” framework. Knowledge is always from a certain point of view. It is always for this group or that. It always, either tells the story from the top downwards—making firmer the orthodox and prevailing interpretations of history—or it tells history from the bottom up, and thereby disrupts, displaces, challenges and subverts the dominant definition of things. There are lots of things we don’t know about slavery and the plantation: but there is no invisible point of “true objectivity” between a history of slavery told from the perspective of the slave-owner and the history of slavery told from the perspective of the slave. Of course, this does not mean that the intellectual is free to say whatever he likes, according to his personal beliefs. He has a commitment to the truth. He has a commitment to the complexity of events. He has a commitment to discover things we did not know, to expand the range and reach of our common knowledge. His commitment to the truth, to the complexity of historical reality, however, is not due to the fact that he must obey certain canons of academic scholarship. He has a commitment to the truth because we need to know, because we need to be right about the past and the present, so that we can actively take hold of history and shape the future for ourselves. Sometimes, then, the intellectual must tell us unpalatable truths—things we would much sooner not have heard. He must not bow before these difficulties. On the other hand, he must never confuse commitment to the truth with value-neutrality, with standing outside of history. 

In this respect, Walter Rodney has set us a shining and striking example—his whole life, so far, has been a living testimony to the points I have been trying to make. Long ago, he set out to find out and to tell as fully and truthfully as he knew, the facts about the relationship between Caribbean society and its African heritage. I need hardly tell you how deeply this whole story has been buried, how falsely the history about it has been reconstructed for us over 400 years by our intellectual masters and mentors—what a labour of discovery, a labour in the “archeology of hidden knowledge” this story of Africa and the Caribbean has been. I need hardly tell you the courage it requires, even now, to assent and assert “the African connection.” Walter Rodney’s works in this field of Caribbean and African history have been models of historical scholarship: but that is not the point. That is only to say that, as an intellectual, he did his work well. What is more important, Rodney recognized from the very outset the political and cultural consequences of telling the African story anew to Caribbean audiences. He knew how deeply we had all, collectively, repressed that “African connection.” He knew the depths of collective forgetfulness which have marked our culture, which have led us black men and women to scorn and repress and look away from the truth about our past which history, properly told, has to tell us. He knew the depths of collective self-disgust and self-mistrust over which we had constructed a heavy historical veil. To open up the dark corners of history, not only to rewrite “white” history in “black terms” but to enable black men to see for themselves who they were and where they came from, is, in our present circumstances, to trigger the deepest emotions, to touch off a historical time-bomb with [a] short fuse. The connection, then, between Rodney’s intellectual work and politics in the Caribbean were not externally imposed—imposed from the outside. The connections were internal to the story itself—the intellectual and the political work were one and the same. To do one, given our past, was inevitably to do the other. To assert that our societies in the Caribbean are connected to world history through the history of black civilizations, as well as of Asians, is to pose the question, at the same time, of how this connection ever got lost: who told the story the wrong way round? and why? and what consequences follow when we destroy the old historical myths and falsifications and begin to reconstruct history along different lines? That is a critical and subversive intellectual task—political because it is intellectual. It constitutes his first “crime” in the eyes of the governments which protect and defend the status quo in our home societies. The fact that some of those governments are themselves composed of black men is only one of the many paradoxes which his unfolding story discovers—and explains. 

To do revolutionary intellectual work, then, on the black, African past of present Caribbean societies was itself, in the eyes of the powers that be, a “crime”: a political crime. We should not at all underestimate the pressure and the constraints, the harassments and surveillance which go on and have gone on over the last two decades, pressuring black intellectuals at work in the Caribbean to conform: Walter Rodney, after all, has himself already been a victim of precisely such pressures, exerted—to my shame—by the then Government of my own country, Jamaica.

The “black revolution” was never about those men who happened to have black skin but about changing the terms of power itself.

To this first “crime,” however, Walter Rodney added a second. He refused the invitation, so to speak, to limit his work to academic circles and audiences only. He was determined to go out beyond the walls of the universities, to speak to ordinary people, to organize classes and meetings and discussions with them, to make his ideas and his knowledge live among them. If it is a “political” act to do certain kinds of intellectual work, to take one’s commitments seriously, and to follow the path of critical knowledge, it is considered even more so to break the boundaries of Academia and to try to reach and work alongside the masses in their struggle. This is the point where the intellectual takes upon himself the full political responsibility of his work, his role—and thus the point at which he most directly encounters the repressive mechanisms of the State. Rodney’s career is also a clear testimony to this harsh fact not once, but now thanks to the Burnham Government—twice. 

It has never been easy in the Caribbean setting to follow the intellectual vocation—as I’ve tried to outline it—right through to its logical conclusion. But in earlier days, when the lines of power and influence were simpler, more starkly drawn, it was easier to know one’s enemies, and to foresee where the crunch would come. It is not so easy today. Almost everywhere in the Caribbean [where] political independence has been “won,” “black people” have won a measure of political, economic and educational influence and power in these societies. Not only this: often, in the name of the nationalist revolution, in the name of “independence,” even in the name, God help us, of “black power,” Governments have appropriated and incorporated the national figures of the past, the history of the past, and erected them into symbols and totems which feed and support their own power. The statues to slave leaders, to black nationalists, to Maroons and leaders of rebellions go up everywhere; the names are woven into the nationalist rhetoric; the stamps and coins are printed; the power of their names and actions are b[r]ought over. How comes it, then, that black men, in power, ruling in the name of a nationalist revolution, and with the symbolic power of a Garvey or a Gordon behind them, fear to hear the truth about black men and Africa from a black intellectual who is also their own countryman? If “black power” is in command, how can “black history” subvert?

This is a paradox: and the Walter Rodney case demands that we confront it honestly and openly, and discover its truth. The truth is that the “black revolution” was never about those men who happened to have black skins: it was never about black men slipping into white men’s shoes; it was never about black men inheriting the mantle of power which white men had laid aside. It was always about the dispossessed of the earth, about changing the terms of power itself, about creating new societies—not about inheriting the old. The truth is that, though the trappings and emblems and sometimes the “colour” of power in the Caribbean has changed, the structures have not. Those things which kept some men and women in chains while others were free, and then kept some men in power while others were powerless, are still at work keeping some men rich and powerful while others—the great masses of the people, wait at the gate, “the wretched of the earth.” Structures are more powerful than men. Men with good or bad intentions enter into structures they have not revolutionized—and are tamed by them. They take over the structures of exploitation and power: they internalize the beliefs, the justifications, the rationalizations, the motivations of power and privilege: they begin to think of “the dispossessed” as them; and of those who take up the struggle alongside the dispossessed as—the enemy. For some of these men—the caretakers of neo-imperialism, those who manage the “over-development of under-development” in the Caribbean—Walter Rodney has become the enemy. We must not, for a moment, misunderstand what this means, or what its consequences are. 

I salute Walter Rodney. If what he has tried to do is the act of “an enemy,” then we are all enemies. When the lines of struggle are drawn in this way, men cannot stand aside, hesitating between one value-neutral hypothesis and another—especially not intellectuals. It is his duty to the truth which drives him to commit himself. He is an intellectual, not in spite of the fact that he is committed, but because he is committed, because he has chosen to stand on the line. I protest that the Burnham Government finds itself in this historical moment, drawing the line. It is a matter of deep dismay to find the whole repressive apparatus of power inherited by black men from white, and applied in exactly the same way. But it is a matter which has to be faced and dealt with. The struggle to defend Walter Rodney against this willful and arbitrary exercise of coercive power is one episode in that longer struggle. It is to that longer struggle—the struggle [to] “make the revolution in the Caribbean”—to which his life and work witnesses, and to which Rodney continues to summon us.
Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was a Jamaica-born sociologist and cultural theorist. He served as inaugural editor of New Left Review and Director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Jordan T. Camp is Associate Professor of American Studies and Founding Co-Director of the Trinity Social Justice Institute at Trinity College and author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State.

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2448-stuart-hall-gramsci-and-us

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.” 

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

Stuart Hall: Gramsci and Us
by Stuart Hall
10 February 2017
VERSO

 
On this day in 1891 one of the most influential Marxists of the 21st Century, Antonio Gramsci, was born in the small town of Ales in Sardinia. Gramsci's work transformed how we think about a Marxist politics. Whereas the Russian Revolution occured in the "backward" Russia, and as such was as much a revolution against the "old regime" as against capital, Gramsci attempted to wrestle with the question of how we build a revolutionary movement in the developed areas of Western Europe. In particular it was his development of the concept of "hegemony" which was to prove the most influential. In this piece, from the great Stuart Hall and published in The Hard Road to Renewal, Hall attempts to expand these insights of Gramsci's to analyse the "regressive modernisation" of Thatcher. In an age where many are tackling the question of how to build a new left modernity, Gramsci and Hall are as relevant as ever.

This is not a comprehensive exposition of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, nor a systematic account of the political situation in Britain today. It is an attempt to 'think aloud' about some of the perplexing dilemmas facing the Left, in the light of - from the perspective of - Gramsci's work. I do not claim that, in any simple way, Gramsci 'has the answers' or 'holds the key' to our present troubles. I do believe that we must 'think' our problems in a Gramscian way - which is different. We mustn't use Gramsci (as we have for so long abused Marx) like an Old Testament prophet who, at the correct moment, will offer us the consoling and appropriate quotation. We can't pluck up this 'Sardinian' from his specific and unique political formation, beam him down at the end of the 20th century, and ask him to solve our problems for us: especially since the whole thrust of his thinking was to refuse this easy transfer of generalisations from one conjuncture, nation or epoch to another.

The thing about Gramsci that really transformed my own way of thinking about politics is the question which arises from his Prison Notebooks. If you look at the classic texts of Marx and Lenin, you are led to expect a revolutionary epochal historical development emerging from the end of the First World War onwards. And indeed events did give considerable evidence that such a development was occurring. Gramsci belongs to this 'proletarian moment'. It occurred in Turin in the 1920s, and other places where people like Gramsci, in touch with the advance guard of the industrial working class — then at the very forefront of modern production — thought that, if only the managers and politicians would get out of the way, this class of proletarians could run the world, take over the factories, seize the whole machinery of society, materially transform it and manage it, economically, socially, culturally, technically. The truth about the 1920s is that the 'proletarian moment' very nearly came off. Just before and after the First World War, it really was touch and go as to whether, under the leadership of such a class, the world might not have been transformed - as Russia was in 1917 by the Soviet revolution. This was the moment of the proletarian perspective on history. What I have called Gramsci's question' in the Notebooks emerges in the aftermath of that moment, with the recognition that history was not going to go that way, especially in the advanced industrial capitalist societies of Western Europe. Gramsci had to confront the turning back, the failure, of that moment: the fact that such a moment, having passed, would never return in its old form. Gramsci, here, came face to face with the revolutionary character of history itself. When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no 'going back'. History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment. You have to attend, 'violently', with all the 'pessimism of the intellect' at your command, to the 'discipline of the conjuncture'. 

In addition (and this is one of the main reasons why his thought is so pertinent to us today) he had to face the capacity of the Right - specifically, of European fascism - to hegemonise that defeat. 

So here was a historic reversal of the revolutionary project, a new historical conjuncture, and a moment which the Right, rather than the Left, was able to dominate. This looks like a moment of total crisis for the Left, when all the reference points, the predictions, have been shot to bits. The political universe, as you have come to inhabit it, collapses.

I don't want to say that the Left in Britain is in exactly the same moment; but I do hope you recognise certain strikingly similar features, because it is the similarity between those two situations, that makes the question of the Prison Notebooks so seminal in helping us to understand what our condition is today. Gramsci gives us, not the tools with which to solve the puzzle, but the means with which to ask the right kinds of questions about the politics of the 1980s and 1990s. He does so by directing our attention unswervingly to what is specific and different about this moment. He always insists on this attention to difference. It's a lesson which the Left in Britain has yet to learn. We do tend to think that the Right is not only always with us, but is always exactly the same: the same people, with the same interests, thinking the same thoughts. We are living through the transformation of British Conservatism — its partial adaptation to the modern world, via the neo-liberal and monetarist 'revolutions'. Thatcherism has reconstructed Conservatism and the Conservative Party. The hard-faced, utilitarian, petty-bourgeois businessmen are now in charge, not the grouse-shooting, hunting and fishing classes. And yet, though those transformations are changing the political terrain of struggle before our very eyes, we think the differences don't have any real effect on anything. It still feels more 'left-wing' to say the old ruling-class politics goes on in the same old way. 

Gramsci, on the other hand, knew that difference and specificity mattered. So, instead of asking 'what would Gramsci say about Thatcherism?' we should simply attend to this riveting of Gramsci to the notion of difference, to the specificity of a historical conjuncture: how different forces come together, conjuncturally, to create the new terrain, on which a different politics must form up. That is the intuition that Gramsci offers us about the nature of political life, from which we can take a lead.

I want to say what I think 'the lessons of Gramsci' are, in relation, first of all, to Thatcherism and the project of the New Right; and, second, in terms of the crisis of the Left. Here, I'm foregrounding only the sharp edge of what I understand by Thatcherism. I'm trying to address the opening, from the mid-1970s onwards, of a new political project on the Right. By a project, I don't mean (as Gramsci warned) a conspiracy. I mean the construction of a new agenda in British politics. Mrs Thatcher always aimed, not for a short electoral reversal, but for a long historical occupancy of power. That occupancy of power was not simply about commanding the apparatuses of the state. Indeed, the project was organised, in the early stages, in opposition to the state, which in the Thatcherite view had been deeply corrupted by the welfare state and by Keynesianism and had thus helped to 'corrupt' the British people. Thatcherism came into existence in contestation with the old Keynesian welfare state, with social democratic 'statism', which, in its view, had dominated the 1960s. Thatcherism's project was to transform the state in order to restructure society: to decentre, to displace, the whole post-war formation; to reverse the political culture which had formed the basis of the political settlement — the historic compromise between labour and capital — which had been in place from 1945 onwards. 

The depth of the reversal aimed for was profound: a reversal of the ground-rules of that settlement, of the social alliances which underpinned it and the values which made it popular. I don't mean the attitudes and values of the people who write books. I mean the ideas of the people who simply, in ordinary everyday life, have to calculate how to survive, how to look after those who are closest to them.

That is what is meant by saying that Thatcherism aimed for a reversal in ordinary common sense. The 'common sense' of the English people had been constructed around the notion that the last war had erected a barrier between the bad old days of the 1930s and now: the welfare state had come to stay; we'd never go back to using the criterion of the market as a measure of people's needs, the needs of society. There would always have to be some additional, incremental, institutional force — the state, representing the general interest of society — to bring to bear against, to modify, the market. I'm perfectly well aware that socialism was not inaugurated in 1945. I'm talking about the taken-for-granted, popular base of welfare social democracy, which formed the real, concrete ground on which any socialism worth the name has to be built. Thatcherism was a project to engage, to contest, that project, and, wherever possible, to dismantle it, and to put something new in place. It entered the political field in an historic contest, not just for power, but for popular authority, for hegemony.

It is a project — this confuses the Left no end — which is, simultaneously, regressive and progressive. Regressive because, in certain crucial respects, it takes us backwards. You couldn't be going anywhere else but backwards to hold up before the British people, at the end of the 20th century, the idea that the best the future holds is for them to become, for a second time, 'Eminent Victorians'. It's deeply regressive, ancient and archaic.

But don't misunderstand it. It's also a project of 'modernisation'. It is a form of regressive modernisation. Because, at the same time, Thatcherism had its beady eye fixed on one of the most profound historical facts about the British social formation: that it never ever properly entered the era of modern bourgeois civilisation. It never made that transfer to modernity. It never institutionalised, in a proper sense, the civilisation and structures of advanced capitalism — what Gramsci called 'Fordism'. It never transformed its old industrial and political structures. It never became a second capitalist-industrial-revolution power, in the way that the US did, and, by another route, (the 'Prussian route), Germany and Japan did. Britain never undertook that deep transformation which, at the end of the 19th century, remade both capitalism and the working classes. Consequently, Mrs Thatcher knows that there is no serious political project in Britain today which is not also about constructing a politics and an image of what modernity would be like for our people. And Thatcherism, in its regressive way, drawing on the past, looking backwards to former glories rather than forwards to a new epoch, has inaugurated the project of reactionary modernisation.

There is nothing more crucial, in this respect, than Gramsci's recognition that every crisis is also a moment of reconstruction; that there is no destruction which is not, also, reconstruction; that, historically nothing is dismantled without also attempting to put something new in its place; that every form of power not only excludes but produces something. That is an entirely new conception of crisis and of power. When the Left talks about crisis, all we see is capitalism disintegrating, and us marching in and taking over. We don't understand that the disruption of the normal functioning of the old economic, social, cultural order, provides the opportunity to reorganise it in new ways, to restructure and refashion, to modernise and move ahead. If necessary, of course, at the cost of allowing vast numbers of people — in the North East, the North West, in Wales and Scotland, in the mining communities and the devastated industrial heartlands, in the inner cities and elsewhere - — to be consigned to the historical dustbin. That is the 'law' of capitalist modernisation: uneven development, organised disorganisation.

Face to face with this dangerous new political formation, the temptation is always, ideologically, to dismantle it, to force it to stand still, by asking the classic Marxist question: who does it really represent? Now, usually when the Left asks that old classic Marxist question in the old way, we are not really asking a question, we are making a statement. We already know the answer. Of course, the Right represents the occupancy, by capital, of the state, which is nothing but its instrument. Bourgeois writers produce bourgeois novels. The Conservative Party is the ruling class at prayer. Etc, etc ... This is Marxism as a theory of the obvious. The question delivers no new knowledge, only the answer we already knew. It's a kind of game, political theory as a Trivial Pursuit. In fact, the reason we need to ask the question is because we really don't know.

It really is puzzling to say, in any simple way, whom Thatcherism represents. Here is the perplexing phenomenon of a petty-bourgeois ideology which 'represents', and is helping to reconstruct, both national and international capital. In the course of 'representing' corporate capital, however, it wins the consent of very substantial sections of the subordinate and dominated classes. What is the nature of this ideology which can inscribe such a vast range of different positions and interests in it, and which seems to represent a little bit of everybody — including most of the readers of this essay! For, make no mistake, a tiny bit of all of us is also somewhere inside the Thatcherite project. Of course, we're all one hundred per cent committed. But every now and then — Saturday mornings, perhaps, just before the demonstration — we go to Sainsbury's and we're just a tiny bit of a Thatcherite subject. How do we make sense of an ideology which is not coherent, which speaks now, in one ear, with the voice of free-wheeling, utilitarian, market-man, and in the other ear, with the voice of respectable, bourgeois, patriarchal man? How do these two repertoires operate together? We are all perplexed by the contradictory nature of Thatcherism. In our intellectual way, we think that the world will collapse as the result of a logical contradiction: this is the illusion of the intellectual - that ideology must be coherent, every bit of it fitting together, like a philosophical investigation. When, in fact, the whole purpose of what Gramsci called an organic (i.e. historically effective) ideology is that it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a 'unity' out of difference. 

We've been in the grasp of the Thatcherite project, not since 1983 or 1979, as official doctrine has it, but since 1975. 1975 is the climacteric in British politics. First of all, the oil hike. Secondly, the onset of the capitalist crisis. Thirdly, the transformation of modern Conservatism by the accession of the Thatcherite leadership. That is the moment of reversal when, as Gramsci argued, national and international factors came together. It doesn't begin with Mrs Thatcher's electoral victory, as politics is not a matter of elections alone. It lands in 1975, right in the middle of Mr Callaghan's political solar plexus. It breaks Mr Callaghan — already a broken reed — in two. One half remains avuncular, paternalist, socially-conservative. The other half dances to a new tune. One of the siren voices, singing the new song in his ear, is his son-in-law, Peter Jay, one of the architects of monetarism, in his missionary role as economic editor at The Times. He first saw the new market forces, the new sovereign consumer, coming over the hill like the marines. And, hearkening to these intimations of the future, the old man opens his mouth; and what does he say? The kissing has to stop. The game is over. Social democracy is finished. The welfare state is gone forever. We can't afford it. We've been paying ourselves too much, giving ourselves a lot of phoney jobs, having too much of a swinging time.

You can just see the English psyche collapsing under the weight of the illicit pleasures it has been enjoying — the permissiveness, the consumption, the goodies. It's all false; tinsel and froth. The Arabs have blown it all away. And now we have got to advance in a different way. Mrs Thatcher speaks to this 'new course'. She speaks to something else, deep in the English psyche: its masochism. The need which the English seem to have to be ticked off by Nanny and sent to bed without a pudding. The calculus by which every good summer has to be paid for by twenty bad winters. The Dunkirk Spirit — the worse off we are, the better we behave. She didn't promise us the give-away society. She said, iron times; back to the wall; stiff upper lip; get moving; get to work; dig in. Stick by the old, tried verities, the wisdom of 'Old England'. The family has kept society together; live by it. Send the women back to the hearth. Get the men out on to the Northwest Frontier. Hard times — followed, much later, by a return to the Good Old Days. She asked you for a long leash — not one, but two and three terms. By the end, she said, I will be able to redefine the nation in such a way that you will all, once again, for the first time, since the Empire started to go down the tube, feel what it is like to be part of Great Britain Unlimited. You will be able, once again, to send our boys 'over there', to fly the flag, to welcome back the fleet. Britain will be Great again. People don't vote for Thatcherism, in my view, because they believe the small print. People in their right minds do not think that Britain is now a wonderfully booming, successful economy. But Thatcherism, as an ideology, addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary. Mrs Thatcher has totally dominated that idiom, while the Left forlornly tries to drag the conversation round to 'our policies'.

This is a momentous historical project, the regressive modernisation of Britain. To win over ordinary people to that, not because they're dupes, or stupid, or because they are blinded by false consciousness. Since, in fact, the political character of our ideas cannot be guaranteed by our class position or by the 'mode of production', it is possible for the Right to construct a politics which does speak to people's experience, which does insert itself into what Gramsci called the necessarily fragmentary contradictory nature of common sense, which does resonate with some of their ordinary aspirations, and which, in certain circumstances, can recoup them as subordinate subjects, into a historical project which hegemonises what we used — erroneously — to think of as their necessary class interests. Gramsci is one of the first modern Marxists to recognise that interests are not given but have to be politically and ideologically constructed.

Gramsci warns us in the Notebooks that a crisis is not an immediate event but a process: it can last for a long time, and can be very differently resolved: by restoration, by reconstruction or by passive transformism. Sometimes more stable, sometimes more unstable; but in a profound sense, British institutions, the British economy, British society and culture have been in a deep social crisis for most of the 20th century.

Gramsci warns us that organic crises of this order erupt, not only in the political domain and the traditional areas of industrial and economic life, not simply in the class struggle, in the old sense; but in a wide series of polemics, debates about fundamental sexual, moral and intellectual questions, in a crisis in the relations of political representation and the parties — on a whole range of issues which do not necessarily, in the first instance, appear to be articulated with politics, in the narrow sense, at all. That is what Gramsci calls the crisis of authority, which is nothing but the crisis of hegemony or general crisis of the state. We are exactly in that moment. We have been shaping up to such a 'crisis of authority' in English social life and culture since the mid 1960s. In the 1960s, the crisis of English society was signalled in a number of debates and struggles around new points of antagonism, which appeared at first to be far removed from the traditional heartland of British politics. The Left often waited patiently for the old rhythms of the class struggle to be resumed, when in fact it was the forms of 'the class struggle' itself which were being transformed. We can only understand this diversification of social struggles in the light of Gramsci's insistence that, in modern societies, hegemony must be constructed, contested and won on many different sites, as the structures of the modern state and society complexify and the points of social antagonism proliferate.
 

So one of the most important things that Gramsci has done for us is to give us a profoundly expanded conception of what politics itself is like, and thus also of power and authority. We cannot, after Gramsci, go back to the notion of mistaking electoral politics, or party politics in a narrow sense, or even the occupancy of state power, as constituting the ground of modern politics itself. Gramsci understands that politics is a much expanded field; that, especially in societies of our kind, the sites on which power is constituted will be enormously varied. We are living through the proliferation of the sites of power and antagonism in modern society. The transition to this new phase is decisive for Gramsci. It puts directly on the political agenda the questions of moral and intellectual leadership, the educative and formative role of the state, the 'trenches and fortifications' of civil society, the crucial issue of the consent of the masses and the creation of a new type or level of civilisation, a new culture. It draws the decisive line between the formula of 'Permanent Revolution' and the formula of 'civil hegemony'. It is the cutting-edge between the war of movement and the war of position": the point where Gramsci's world meets ours.

 
That does not mean, as some people read Gramsci, that therefore the state doesn't matter any more. The state is clearly absolutely central in articulating the different areas of contestation, the different points of antagonism, into a regime of rule. The moment when you can get sufficient power in the state to organise a central political project is decisive, for then you can use the state to plan, urge, incite, solicit and punish, to conform the different sites of power and consent into a single regime. That is the moment of 'authoritarian populism' - Thatcherism simultaneously 'above' (in the state) and 'below' (out there with the people).
 

Even then, Mrs Thatcher does not make the mistake of thinking that the capitalist state has a single and unified political character. She is perfectly well aware that, though the capitalist state is articulated to securing the long-term, historical conditions for capital accumulation and profitability, though it is the guardian of a certain kind of bourgeois, patriarchal civilisation and culture, it is, and continues to be, an arena of contestation. Does this mean that Thatcherism is, after all, simply the 'expression' of the ruling class? Of course Gramsci always gives a central place to the questions of class, class alliances, class struggle. Where Gramsci departs from classical versions of Marxism is that he does not think that politics is an arena which simply reflects already unified collective political identities, already constituted forms of struggle. Politics for him is not a dependent sphere. It is where forces and relations, in the economy, in society, in culture, have to be actively worked on to produce particular forms of power, forms of domination. This is the production of politics - politics as a production. This conception of politics is fundamentally contingent, fundamentally open-ended. There is no law of history which can predict what must inevitably be the outcome of a political struggle. Politics depends on the relations of forces at any particular moment. History is not waiting in the wings to catch up your mistakes into another inevitable success. You lose because you lose because you lose.
 

The 'good sense' of the people exists, but it is just the beginning, not the end, of politics. It doesn't guarantee anything. Actually, he said, 'new conceptions have an extremely unstable position among the popular masses'. There is no unitary subject of history. The subject is necessarily divided, an ensemble: one half Stone Age, the other containing 'principles of advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history, intuitions of a future philosophy. Both of those things struggle inside the heads and hearts of the people to find a way of articulating themselves politically. Of course, it is possible to recruit them to very different political projects.
 

Especially today, we live in an era when the old political identities are collapsing. We cannot imagine socialism coming about any longer through the image of that single, singular subject we used to call Socialist Man. Socialist Man, with one mind, one set of interests, one project, is dead. And good riddance. Who needs 'him' now, with his investment in a particular historical period, with 'his' particular sense of masculinity, shoring 'his' identity up in a particular set of familial relations, a particular kind of sexual identity? Who needs 'him' as the singular identity through which the great diversity of human beings and ethnic cultures in our world must enter the 21st century? This 'he' is dead: finished. Gramsci looked at a world which was complexifying in front of his eyes. He saw the pluralisation of modern cultural identities, emerging between the lines of uneven historical development, and asked the question: what are the political forms through which a new cultural order could be constructed, out of this 'multiplicity of dispersed wills, these heterogeneous aims'. Given that that is what people are really like, given that there is no law that will make socialism come true, can we find forms of organisation, forms of identity, forms of allegiance, social conceptions, which can both connect with popular life and, in the same moment, transform and renovate it? Socialism will not be delivered to us through the trapdoor of history by some deux ex machina.

Gramsci always insisted that hegemony is not exclusively an ideological phenomenon. There can be no hegemony without the decisive nucleus of the economic. On the other hand, do not fall into the trap of the old mechanical economism and believe that, if you can only get hold of the economy, you can move the rest of life. The nature of power in the modern world is that it is also constructed in relation to political, moral, intellectual, cultural, ideological, sexual questions. The question of hegemony is always the question of a new cultural order. The question which faced Gramsci in relation to Italy faces us now in relation to Britain: what is the nature of this new civilisation? Hegemony is not a state of grace which is installed forever. It's not a formation which incorporates everybody. The notion of a 'historical bloc' is precisely different from that of a pacified, homogeneous, ruling class.
 

It entails a quite different conception of how social forces and movements, in their diversity, can be articulated into a set of strategic alliances. To construct a new cultural order, you need not to reflect an already-formed collective will, but to fashion a new one, to inaugurate a new historic project.
 

I've been talking about Gramsci in the light of, in the aftermath of, Thatcherism: using Gramsci to comprehend the nature and depth of the challenge to the Left which Thatcherism and the new Right represent in English life and politics. But I have, at the same moment, inevitably also been talking about the Left. Or rather, I've not been talking about the Left, because the Left, in its organised, labourist form, does not seem to have the slightest conception of what putting together a new historical project entails. It does not understand the necessarily contradictory nature of human subjects, of social identities. It does not understand politics as a production. It does not see that it is possible to connect with the ordinary feelings and experience which people have in their everyday lives, and yet to articulate them progressively to a more advanced, modern form of social consciousness. It is not actively looking for and working upon the enormous diversity of social forces in our society. It doesn't see that it is in the very nature of modern capitalist civilisation to proliferate the centres of power, and thus to draw more and more areas of life into social antagonism. It does not recognise that the identities which people carry in their heads - their subjectivities, their cultural life, their sexual life, their family life, their ethnic identities, their health - have become massively politicised.
 

I simply don't think, for example, that the current Labour leadership understands that its political fate depends on whether or not it can construct a politics, in the next 20 years, which is able to address itself, not to one, but to a diversity of different points of antagonism in society; unifying them, in their differences, within a common project. I don't think they have grasped that Labour's capacity to grow as a political force depends absolutely on its capacity to draw from the popular energies of very different movements; movements outside the party which it did not — could not — set in play, and which it cannot therefore administer. It retains an entirely bureaucratic conception of politics. If the word doesn't proceed out of the mouths of the Labour leadership, there must be something subversive about it. If politics energises people to develop new demands, that is a sure sign that the natives are getting restless. You must expel or depose a few. You must get back to that fiction, the 'traditional Labour voter: to that pacified, Fabian notion of politics, where the masses hijack the experts into power, and then the experts do something for the masses: later ... much later. The hydraulic conception of politics.

That bureaucratic conception of politics has nothing to do with the mobilisation of a variety of popular forces. It doesn't have any conception of how people become empowered by doing something: first of all about their immediate troubles; then, the power expands their political capacities and ambitions, so that they begin to think again about what it might be like to rule the world ... Their politics has ceased to have a connection with this most modern of all resolutions — the deepening of democratic life. 

Without the deepening of popular participation in national-cultural life, ordinary people don't have any experience of actually running anything. We need to re-acquire the notion that politics is about expanding popular capacities, the capacities of ordinary people. And in order to do so, socialism itself has to speak to the people whom it wants to empower, in words that belong to them as late 20th century ordinary folks. 

You'll have noticed that I'm not talking about whether the Labour Party has got its policy on this or that issue right. I'm talking about a whole conception of politics: the capacity to grasp in our political imagination the huge historical choices in front of the British people, today. I'm talking about new conceptions of the nation itself: whether you believe Britain can advance into the next century with a conception of what it is like to be 'English' which has been entirely constituted out of Britain's long, disastrous imperialist march across the earth. If you really think that, you haven't grasped the profound cultural transformation required to remake the English. That kind of cultural transformation is precisely what socialism is about today.
Now a political party of the Left, however much it is centred on government, on winning elections, has, in my view, exactly this kind of decision before it. The reason why I'm not optimistic about the 'mass party of the working class' ever understanding the nature of the historical choice confronting it is precisely because I suspect Labour does secretly still believe that there's a little bit of lee-way left in the old, economic-corporate, incremental, Keynesian game. It does think it could go back to a little smidgeon of Keynesianism here, a little bit more of the welfare state there, a little bit of the old Fabian thing ... Actually, though I don't have a cataclysmic vision of the future, I honestly believe that that option is now closed. It's exhausted. Nobody-believes in it any more. Its material conditions have disappeared. The ordinary British people won't vote for it because they know in their bones life is not like that any more. What Thatcherism, in its radical way, poses is not what we can get back to but along which route are we to go forward? In front of us is the historic choice: capitulate to the Thatcherite future, or find another way of imagining. 

Don't worry about Mrs Thatcher herself; she will retire to Dulwich. But there are lots more third, fourth and fifth generation Thatcherites, dry as dust, sound to a man, waiting to take her place. They are convinced that socialism is about to be obliterated forever. They think we are dinosaurs. They think we belong to another era. As socialism slowly declines, a new era will dawn and these new kinds of possessive men will be in charge of it. They dream about real cultural power. And Labour, in its softly-softly, don't-rock-the-boat, hoping-the-election-polls-will-go-up way, actually has in front of it only the choice between becoming historically irrelevant or beginning to sketch out an entirely new form of civilisation.

I don't say socialism, lest the word is so familiar to you that you think I mean just putting the same old programme we all know about back on the rails. I am talking about a renewal of the whole socialist project in the context of modern social and cultural life. I mean shifting the relations of forces — not so that Utopia comes the day after the next general election, but so that the tendencies begin to run another way. Who needs a socialist Heaven where everybody agrees with everybody else, where everybody's exactly the same? God forbid. I mean a place where we can begin the historic quarrel about what a new kind of civilisation must be. Is it possible that the immense new material, cultural and technological capacities, which far outstrip Marx's wildest dreams, which are now actually in our hands, are going to be politically hegemonised for the reactionary modernisation of Thatcherism? Or can we seize on those means of history-making, of making new human subjects, and shove it in the direction of a new culture? That's the choice before the Left.

'One should stress', Gramsci wrote, 'the significance which, in the modern world, political parties have in the elaboration and diffusion of conceptions of the world, because essentially what they do is to work out the ethics and the politics corresponding to these conceptions and act as it were as their historical "laboratory".'

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/02/stuart-hall-1932-2014-pioneering.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on February 26, 2014):

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Stuart Hall, 1932-2014: Pioneering Cultural Theorist, Social Critic, Public Intellectual, Teacher, and Political Activist

  
STUART HALL 1932-2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/world/europe/stuart-hall-trailblazing-british-scholar-of-multicultural-influences-is-dead-at-82.html

All,

I'm always extremely wary of any and all so-called "official obituaries" about important people of color especially in such national mainstream rags as the NY Times etc. The inevitable distortions, blatant inaccuracies, and intellectual condescension masked as "objective analysis" really Irks me so please take all that in consideration as I post these particular obits in this space. This one about Stuart Hall is not as thoroughly egregious as most of these obits are but it is still suspect because it fails to do justice to Mr. Hall in any real substantive way given that he was easily one of the most important, profound, and widely influential public intellectuals of the past century. But what can one say given the alarming fact that most black public intellectuals today have almost universally failed to create or establish important national newspapers, magazines, journals and other truly competitive media outlets of our own--the way that everybody from Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B Dubois, William Monroe Trotter, Eslanda and Paul Robeson to Langston Hughes, CLR James, the Black Panther Party, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Amiri Baraka, and so many others did in the past. Unless and until we collectively address and answer that paramount question these brazen misappropriations of the work of our most significant thinkers, artists, and activists will not only continue but these major figures will remain inexplicably neglected and marginalized by us despite the central even crucial role that they continue play in this rich global history and discourse...

Kofi

Stuart Hall, Trailblazing British Scholar of Multicultural Influences, Is Dead at 82

by WILLIAM YARDLEY
February 17, 2014
New York Times

Stuart Hall helped create the academic field of cultural studies.

Stuart Hall, a pioneering Jamaican-born British academic who argued that culture is in fact multicultural — not high or low, good or bad, or black or white, but a constantly shifting convergence reflecting the range of people who create and consume it — died on Feb. 10 in London. He was 82.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Catherine, a professor of modern British history at University College London, who said he had had kidney disease for many years.

Division and blending were lifelong themes for Mr. Hall. Born in colonial Jamaica to mixed-race parents who worried that his dark complexion would be an impediment to ascending the island pigmentocracy, he went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship to study literature when he was 19. His politics at the time, he later wrote, were “principally anti-imperialist.”

He quickly concluded that he was seeking something there that he could not attain.

“What I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it,” he recalled in a 2000 interview. “I mean, I could make a success there, I could even be perhaps accepted into it, but I would never feel it was my place. It’s the summit of something else. It’s distilled Englishness.”

That experience, along with the societal transformations he was witnessing in postwar Britain, prompted him to help create a new academic field: cultural studies, which would explore, as he put it, “the changing ways of life of societies and groups and the networks of meanings which individuals and groups use to make sense of and communicate with one another.”

Setting aside his dissertation on Henry James, he was drawn to an eclectic variety of subjects and the relationships among them: the rising leftist movement in postwar Britain and the softening of the country’s rigid class structure, but also the weakening of the working class, television, youth, civil rights, nuclear disarmament, immigration, feminism and racial diversity. All of it, he concluded, was changing the Englishness he had found alien.

Traditional measures of identity in Britain and elsewhere — “our class position or our national position or our geographical origins or where our grandparents came from,” he said in one of many televised interviews he gave — were losing their relevance, he said, and “I don’t think any one thing any longer will tell us who we are.”

In 1960, he helped found the journal New Left Review. In 1964, he joined Richard Hoggart at the newly founded Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, considered by many to be the birthplace of the field. By the early 1970s, Mr. Hall was its director.

He became known for developing a theory he called encoding/decoding, which analyzed how those in power spread messages through popular culture and how those who receive the messages interpret them. He later moved to the Open University, and remained there until he retired in the late 1990s.

Mr. Hall was a very public intellectual: He wrote numerous books, gave frequent speeches and appeared often on television. He advocated disarmament and objected to British involvement in various military conflicts. He was particularly critical of the conservative social and economic policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and he is often given credit for coining a succinct and, when he used it, derogatory term: Thatcherism.

Stuart McPhail Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on Feb. 3, 1932. His parents’ ancestors were English, African and Indian. Fearing appearances, they prevented him from playing with dark-skinned children.

“I’m the blackest member of my family,” Mr. Hall once recalled. “You know, these mixed families produce children of all colors, and in Jamaica, the question of exactly what shade you were, in colonial Jamaica, that was the most important question. Because you could read off class and education and status from that. I was aware and conscious of that from the very beginning.”

He studied English at Jamaica College before moving to England at a time of rising Caribbean immigration.

In addition to his wife, the former Catherine Barrett, whom he married in 1964, his survivors include a daughter, Rebecca; a son, Jess; two grandchildren; and a sister, Patricia.

Cultural studies long ago expanded beyond Britain as a common academic discipline, one with plenty of critics. Some view it as a politically correct assault on Western culture. Others say that, taken to extremes, it regards every element of popular culture as worthy of a doctoral dissertation.

“If I have to read another cultural studies analysis of ‘The Sopranos,’ I give up,” Mr. Hall said. “There’s an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as cultural studies.”

For him, the discipline was about power and politics and understanding the forces that shape them. Race was one of those forces.

“Race is more like a language than it is like the way in which we are biologically constituted,” he said in a 1996 speech.

He was often sought out by black artists and intellectuals. “The Stuart Hall Project,” a documentary by John Akomfrah, was shown at the Sundance Film Festival last year. The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently called Mr. Hall “the Du Bois of Britain.”

In 2009, asked what he thought of the election of Barack Obama, Mr. Hall emphasized the president’s grasp of the fluidity of identity. Noting Mr. Obama’s racially mixed heritage and his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia, he said the president was “not in a classic sense a black African-American.”

“He’s a black politician because of what he symbolizes, not because of the color of his skin or the history,” Mr. Hall said. “It’s because he’s learned to speak on behalf of a tradition to the rest of America.”

Stuart Hall's writing on race, gender, sexuality and identity was considered groundbreaking. Photograph: David Levene

Academics, writers and and politicians have paid tribute to one of Britain's leading intellectuals, the sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who has died age 82.

Known as the "godfather of multiculturalism", Hall had a huge influence on academic, political and cultural debates for over six decades.

Jamaican-born Hall was professor of sociology at the Open University from 1979 to 1997, topping off an academic career that began as a research fellow in Britain's first centre for cultural studies, set up by Richard Hoggart at the University of Birmingham in 1964. Hall would later lead the centre and was seen as a key figure in the development of cultural studies as an academic discipline.

Martin Bean, vice-chancellor of The Open University said: "He was a committed and influential public intellectual of the new left, who embodied the spirit of what the OU has always stood for: openness, accessibility, a champion for social justice and of the power of education to bring positive change in peoples' lives."

His impact was felt far outside the realms of academia, however. His writing on race, gender, sexuality and identity, and the links between racial prejudice and the media in the 1970s, was considered groundbreaking.

Diane Abbott, the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington said: "For me he was a hero. A black man who soared above and beyond the limitations imposed by racism and one of the leading cultural theorists of his generation."

Later he wrote for and was associated closely with the journal Marxism Today in the 1980s. The journal's critique of Thatcherism - a term that Hall is said to have coined - challenged traditional leftwing thinking that held that culture was determined purely by economic forces, a view that would come to influence the Labour party leaders Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair.

David Lammy, MP for Tottenham paid tribute to his friend's intellectual range and prescience: "He was one of those 'cut-through' academics that could write in an incredibly erudite, Ivy-league way but who could also explain things in a way that could be understood by the ordinary man and woman. He was a thinker that you could not ignore."

Lammy said Hall would often come to visit him at the House of Commons, offering counsel and advice but was never afraid to berate him where he felt Lammy was wrong: "He was someone I had huge respect for, a real father figure. He was a kind, generous, wonderful man and a great, great role model".

In one of Hall's last interviews, with the Guardian two years ago, Hall expressed pessimism about politics generally and the Labour party specifically. "The left is in trouble. It has not got any ideas, it has not got any independent analysis of its own, and therefore it has got no vision. It just takes the temperature: 'Whoa, that's no good, let's move to the right.' It has no sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things."

Hall received a traditional "English" schooling in Jamaica before winning a scholarship to Oxford University in 1951. He took a degree in English but later abandoned a PhD on Henry James to concentrate on politics, setting up the influential New Left Review journal with the leftwing academics Raymond Williams and EP Thompson.

A documentary about his life by the film-maker John Akomfrah, called The Stuart Hall Project, was shown in cinemas in September. Writing in the Observer, the journalist Tim Adams wrote of the film: "You come to see how pivotal his [Hall's] voice has been in shaping the progressive debates of our times – around race, gender and sexuality – and how an increasingly conservative culture has worked lately to marginalise his nuanced understanding of this country."

Hall had been suffering ill health for some time, and had retreated from public life.

Documentary filmmaker John Akomfrah talks to Beyond Cinema Magazine about his 2013 Sundance documentary 'The Stuart Hall Project.' In the interview, Akomfrah explains how his early fascination with the British cultural historian led to a full-length documentary:


VIDEO: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59-Hrn6IrE4&list=PLSOHbjO_tfFvzZE2N7n408J8n82CvFD2C 

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21895-rage-against-the-dying-of-a-light-stuart-hall-1932-2014


Rage Against the Dying of a Light:
Stuart Hall (1932-2014)
Saturday, 15 February 2014 
by Lawrence Grossberg, Truthout | Op-Ed

 

Stuart Hall. (Photo: Lawrence Grossberg)

It is difficult for me to write a farewell to Stuart Hall, my teacher, mentor, interlocutor and friend. He has been the most significant intellectual and political figure in my life for 45 years, and yet, in celebrating and mourning him, I do not wish to sanctify him. My grief is both deeply personal and intensely political. I had not thought to make it public, but I have been moved to write because of the appalling absence of any notice of his death in the U.S. mainstream press as well as the alternative media. What this says about the left in the U.S., I will leave to another time.

The facts are known: his Jamaican background; his role in the founding of the New Left and New Left Review, as well as CND; his early work on media and popular culture; his crucial contributions to and leadership of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and his continuing iconic status and creative efforts to develop cultural studies while at the Open University; his brilliant analyses of and opposition to the rise of new conservative and neoliberal formations (he coined the term and wrote the book on Thatcherism); his public visibility as an intellectual in the media, and his bodily presence as a political leader whenever and wherever he saw an opening; his vital contributions to debates around race, ethnicity, multiculturalism and difference; his long-term involvement with and support of numerous Black and global artists and collectives, including the Black Audio Film Collective, Autograph, Iniva and eventually, the house that Stuart built—Rivington Place.

But that is not Stuart’s story; it is only the Wikipedia entry. I want to tell a better story about the man, the work, the ideas, the practices, and the commitments. My story begins by recognizing that every single moment of Stuart’s career was about a commitment to relations and the new forms of intellectual and political work that commitment entailed. Key words like collaboration and conversation, and key elements like generosity and humility, are a tangible part of his legacy. One loses something important if we fail to recognize that the story cannot be written without the people with whom he worked--during his years in the New Left, at the Centre and the OU, at Marxism Today and Soundings (the journal he created with Doreen Massey and Mike Rustin), and at Rivington Place. And these institutions— and Stuart did believe in the institutional moment—were profoundly important as well, because they always involved an effort to find new ways of working, to forge new kinds of organization, new practices of work and governance—open, humble, collaborative and interdisciplinary.

It’s hard to explain Stuart’s influence—the admiration, respect and affection—to those who have never encountered him, or seriously followed his work. Let me tell two stories. In the early 1980s, I co-organized an event called Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. It began with four-weeks of classes, offered by some of the leading lights in Marxist theory. We brought Stuart over for this; it was not the first time he had been to the States, but it was perhaps the first time he was given such a highly visible national platform (close to a thousand attended from all over). At the beginning, everyone flocked to the famous U.S. academic stars; most of the people had never heard of Stuart or cultural studies. But word spread quickly, and the audience for his lectures grew rapidly. People drove down to Champaign-Urbana (not a destination of choice you understand), often traveling for hours, just to listen to him. They saw and heard something—special. Yes, it was the ideas and the arguments, and the interweaving of theory, empirics and politics, but it was more. As so many people told me, they had never met an academic like this before—humble, generous, passionate, someone who treated everyone with equal respect and listened to what they had to say, someone who believed ideas mattered, because of our responsibility as intellectuals to people and the world. Someone who refused to play the role of star!

Some years later, Stuart gave a keynote address to the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, not a particularly hospitable environment. But by then, his reputation in the discipline (perhaps the first in the U.S. to grudgingly make a space for cultural studies) had spread and the hall was packed with people who wanted to see this increasingly influential British intellectual. Many were surprised to learn that he was Black. He brilliantly demolished the scientific and liberal underpinnings that dominated communication studies and then he invited—literally invited—people to join him in taking up the intellectual responsibility of addressing the injustices of the world and the role—complicated, contradictory and often nuanced—that communication (and the academy) continued to play in perpetuating such conditions. At the end, one of my friends—a quantoid and therefore not someone I had expected to like the talk—came up and said, “I would have followed Stuart if he had asked us to march on city hall or the local media.” Charisma? Yes, but not exactly. Is there such a thing as “earned” charisma?

Many of the obituaries have described Stuart as the leading British intellectual (academic and public) of culture, society and politics, of cultural theory, and of the politics of the everyday and of ordinary lives. He was that—but if one searches the web for responses to his death, two things stand out: first, they come from all corners of the globe; and second, they celebrate so much more than his ideas and publications. It is hard to place Stuart geographically. He was born in Jamaica but as he repeatedly said, he never went home—that is the life that he chose not to lead. He lived his life in Britain and devoted himself to its culture and politics, but as he repeatedly said, he never felt completely at home there. He wrote about Britain (almost entirely) but he offered something much more resonant. Yes, he was certainly one of the most important British intellectuals of the past sixty years, but he was also, I fervently believe, one of the most important and influential intellectuals in the world during those decades as well.

Stuart believed that everything is relational, that things are what they are only in relations. As a result, he was a contextualist—committed to studying contexts, to thinking contextually, and to refusing any universal claims. That is why he connected so strongly with Marx, with Gramsci, with my other beloved teacher James Carey—to whom Stuart sent me—and ultimately with Foucault. His brand of contextualism—conjuncturalism—sees contexts as complex relations of multiple forces, determinations and contradictions). For Stuart, this defined cultural studies. He knew the world was complicated, contingent and changing--too much for any one person, or any one theory, or any one political stake, or any one discipline. Everything followed from this. Intellectual and political work was an ongoing, endless conversation; one’s theoretical and political work had to keep moving as the contexts changed, if one wanted to understand and intervene into the processes of power that determined the future. They required constant vigilance, self-reflection and humility, for what worked (theoretically and politically) in one context might not work in another. One had to be wiling to question one’s theoretical (and I might add political) assumptions as one confronted the demands of concrete realities and people’s lives.

He believed that work always had to be particular, addressing the specific problems posed by the conjuncture. Despite all his important theoretical efforts, Stuart was not a philosopher, and certainly not the founder of a philosophical paradigm. He loved theory, but his work was never about theory; it was always about trying to understand and change the realities and possibilities of how people might live together in the world. He constantly distanced himself from the attempt to substitute theory for the more difficult work of cultural studies, and he was explicitly critical of the tendency (decidedly strong in the U.S. academy) to fetishize theory—theory gone mad in a world of capitalism gone mad. He did not offer abstract theories that could travel anywhere, for while he thought that theories were absolutely vital, they had to be held to what he once called “the discipline of the conjuncture.” He was too concerned with using theory strategically to understand and intervene into conjunctures that seemed to be pushing the possibility of a more humane world further and further away.

And he believed that work had to embrace the complexities rather than avoid or escape them. He fought against any reduction—anything that said it is all about just one thing in the end—capitalism, most commonly. Such simplifications simply deny the complexity of the world; they do not help us better understand what’s going on, or open up its possibilities. So he refused as well to understand history in simple binary terms: before and after, as if history we made through moments of rupture, absolute breaks with the past. For Stuart, the complexity of history was always a balance of the old and the new. History is always changing and while new elements may enter into the mix, much of what is too often assumed to be new is the reappearance (perhaps in a new rearticulated guise) of the old.

The contingency of the world, the fact that it is continuously being made, meant that there are, as he so often put it, no guarantees in history. The world is not destined to be what it is or to become what one fears (or hopes). Relations are never fixed once and for all, and their modifications are never given in advance. This grounded, at least until recently, his unstoppable optimism (“optimism of the spirit, pessimism of the intellect” as he repeatedly reminded us). And he knew, deep down in his soul, that culture—knowledge, ideas, art, everyday life, what he often called “the popular”—mattered. He had an extraordinary respect for the ordinary stuff of life, and for people (although he never hesitated to attack those who were making the world even worse or who were more committed to their own certainties than to contingent struggle). He refused to think of people as dupes, incapable of understanding the choices they faced and those they made. There is always the possibility of affecting the outcome, of struggle, if one starts where people are—where they may be simply struggling to live lives of minimal comfort and dignity—and move them even as one moves with them. He put his faith in people and ideas and culture—and he committed his life and work to making the world better.

Stuart did not teach us what the questions were and certainly not provide the answers. He taught us how to think relationally and contexually, and therefore how to ask questions. He taught us how to think and even live with complexity and difference. He refused the all too easy binaries that theory and politics throw in our way—he described himself as a theoretical anti-humanist and a political humanist. He sought neither a compromise nor a dialectic synthesis, but ways of navigating the contradictions and complexities rather than redistributing them into competing camps, because that was what a commitment to change the world required. Relations! Context! Complexity! Contingency! He inspired many of us with another vision of the intellectual life.

When I think of Stuart, I think of an expanding rich tapestry of relations, not of followers and acolytes, but of friends, students, colleagues, interlocutors, participants in various conversations, and anyone willing to listen, talk and engage. Stuart Hall was more than an intellectual, a public advocate for ideas, a champion of equality and justice, and an activist. He was also a teacher and a mentor to many people, in many different ways, at many different distances from his immediate presence. He talked with anyone and everyone, and treated them as if they had as much to teach him as he had to teach them.

I imagine Stuart as a worldly Doctor Who, a charismatic figure with a seriousness of purpose and a wonderful sense of style and humor, who changes not only the way people think but often, their lives as well. (I think Stuart would appreciate the popular culture metaphor, because its ordinariness prevents it from sounding too grandiose.) Stuart could not regenerate (what I would give if he could) but he did appear differently to different people. I was always surprised by what people could see in Stuart, and how generous he could be with people whom he thought had clearly missed something essential in his argument. At the same time, to be honest, I occasionally suffered his anger when he thought I had missed the point. I am sure others did as well. And like Doctor Who, the geography of his relations was heterogeneous, with many different intensities and timbres, a multiplicity of conversations, each person taking up, changing and extending the conversation in so many different places and directions.

I met Stuart when I came to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to escape the nightmares of Vietnam and the boring banalities of academic habits. Secretly, I was hoping to find a way to connect my three passions: a love of ideas; a commitment to political change; and a devotion to popular culture. Stuart helped me see how to weave them together into my own tapestry, called cultural studies. He was the first to admit that this was more a project than a finished product, as it had to be; it was the effort to forge a new way of being political and intellectual that set me on my own path. I think of my whole life as a political intellectual as a continuous effort to pursue that project, and to live up to his efforts. I have tried to champion that project, to make it visible and to fight for its specificity and value. Neither of us believed it to be the only way to be a political intellectual, but we were both sure that it offered something worth pursuing.

Now, it is a time to grieve—I doubt that I will ever stop. I remember the times we spent together, the lectures and discussions at the Centre, the conversations we had in person and by phone (the latest concerned the specificity of conjunctural analysis, the nature of affect, and the return of postmodernist theories), his curiosity, warmth and gentleness, his rich voice and exuberant laugh, and the people he introduced me to as I was beginning—many of whom have become my intellectual life blood and my closest friends. And because it is all about relationality, I inevitably think about all that he and his family (Catherine, Becky and Jess) have given me. I will always remember the love they expressed when they came into church for my wedding and later, when Stuart came to my son’s christening as his godfather. And it is a time for contemplation, and for affirming the community of close friends and unknown colleagues who mourn his loss, and know that we are unlikely to ever be able to fill the space that his life created. It is a time to continue the work, and take up the ongoing and expansive conversations that Stuart enlivened. It is a time to remember that ideas matter as we try to change the world, and that bad stories make bad politics. That is my homage to Stuart.

Gratefully offered,
Larry Grossberg

This article is a Truthout original.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Lawrence Grossberg is the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One of the first students to work with Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and a founder of cultural studies in the U.S., he is recognized internationally as a leading figure in cultural studies and cultural theory. His latest book is Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. He is currently working on a book, Is This Any Way to Change the World?, which considers the crisis of knowledge, the nature of affective politics, the debates between critical theories of hegemony and ontological theories of horizontal politics, thinking towards the possibility of a different kind of counter cultural unity.

A very important video series on and about the crucial legacy of clarity, insight, analytical depth, courage, integrity, and profound knowledge of Major Black Public Intellectual, Scholar, and Activist Stuart Hall (1932-2014):

VIDEO: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59-Hrn6IrE4&list=PLSOHbjO_tfFvzZE2N7n408J8n82CvFD2C

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-Yp9oHV_oU

STUART HALL ON OBAMA
(Interview from August 2012):

Cultural and social theorist Stuart Hall comments on the Left's naive expectations of the Obama administration and their subsequent disappointments.

VIDEO:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKm8MW-FdX0

STUART HALL: POLITICS' PLACE IN CULTURAL STUDIES:

VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyuKRwd5Lqg

STUART HALL: CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM:

VIDEO: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95CBvCLGx94

http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Stuart_Hall_(cultural_theorist)

Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born
Stuart McPhail Hall
3 February 1932
Kingston, Colony of Jamaica

Died
10 February 2014 (aged 82)
London, England
Fields
Cultural Studies
Institutions
University of Birmingham and Open University
Alma mater
Merton College, Oxford
Known for
British Cultural Studies, Articulation, Encoding/decoding model of communication

Influences:
Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault

Stuart McPhail Hall (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was a Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.[1] He was President of the British Sociological Association 1995–97.

In the 1950s Hall was a founder of the influential New Left Review. At the invitation of Hoggart, Hall joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. Hall took over from Hoggart as director of the Centre in 1968, and remained there until 1979. While at the Centre, Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender, and with helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists.[2]

Hall left the centre in 1979 to become a professor of sociology at the Open University.[3] Hall retired from the Open University in 1997 and was a Professor Emeritus.[4] British newspaper The Observer called him "one of the country's leading cultural theorists".[5] He was married to Catherine Hall, a feminist professor of modern British history at University College London.

Contents:

1 Biography
2 Ideas
2.1 Encoding and decoding model
3 Publications (incomplete)
3.1 1960s
3.2 1970s
3.3 1980s
3.4 1990s
4 Legacy
4.1 Film
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links

Biography

Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica, into a middle-class Jamaican family of Indian, African and British descent.[5] In Jamaica he attended Jamaica College, receiving an education modelled after the British school system.[6] In an interview Hall describes himself as a "bright, promising scholar" in these years and his formal education as "a very 'classical' education; very good but in very formal academic terms." With the help of sympathetic teachers, he expanded his education to include "T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Freud, Marx, Lenin and some of the surrounding literature and modern poetry," as well as "Caribbean literature."[7] Hall's later works reveal that growing up in the pigmentocracy of the colonial West Indies, where he was of darker skin than much of his family, had a profound effect on his views of the world.[8][9]

In 1951 Hall won a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College at the University of Oxford, where he studied English and obtained an M.A.,[10] becoming part of the Windrush generation, the first large-scale immigration of West Indians, as that community was then known. He continued his studies at Oxford by beginning a Ph.D. on Henry James but, galvanised particularly by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary (which saw many thousands of members leave the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and look for alternatives to previous orthodoxies) and Suez Crisis, abandoned this in 1957[10] or 1958[6] to focus on his political work. In 1957, he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and it was on a CND march that he met his future wife.[11] From 1958 to 1960, Hall worked as a teacher in a London secondary modern school[12] and in adult education, and in 1964 married Catherine Hall, concluding around this time that he was unlikely to return permanently to the Caribbean.[10]

After working on the Universities and Left Review during his time at Oxford, Hall joined E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and others to merge it with The New Reasoner, launching the New Left Review in 1960 with Hall named as the founding editor.[6] In 1958, the same group, with Raphael Samuel, launched the Partisan Coffee House in Soho as a meeting-place for left-wingers.[13] Hall left the board of the New Left Review in 1961[14] or 1962.[9]

Hall's academic career took off after co-writing The Popular Arts with Paddy Whannel in 1964. As a direct result, Richard Hoggart invited Hall to join the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, initially as a research fellow and initially at Hoggart's own expense.[9] In 1968 Hall became director of the Centre. He wrote a number of influential articles in the years that followed, including Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures (1972) and Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973). He also contributed to the book Policing the Crisis (1978) and coedited the influential Resistance Through Rituals (1975).

After his appointment as a professor of sociology at the Open University in 1979, Hall published further influential books, including The Hard Road to Renewal (1988), Formations of Modernity (1992), Questions of Cultural Identity (1996) and Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997). Through the 1970s and 1980s, Hall was closely associated with the journal Marxism Today;[15] in 1995, he was a founding editor of Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture.[16]

Hall retired from the Open University in 1997. He was made a fellow of the Royal Academy in 2005 and received the European Cultural Foundation's Princess Margriet Award in 2008.[17] He died on 10 February 2014, from complications following kidney failure a week after his 82nd birthday. By the time of his death, he was widely known as the "godfather of multiculturalism".[18][19][20][21]

Ideas:

Hall's work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language-use as operating within a framework of power, institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. (Hegemony, in Gramscian theory, refers to the socio-cultural production of "consent" and "coercion".) For Hall, culture was not something to simply appreciate or study, but a "critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled".[22]

Hall became one of the main proponents of reception theory, and developed Hall's Theory of encoding and decoding. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience. This means that the audience does not simply passively accept a text—social control. Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes. Moral panics (e.g. over mugging) could thereby be ignited in order to create public support for the need to "police the crisis". The media play a central role in the "social production of news" in order to reap the rewards of lurid crime stories.[23]

Hall's works, such as studies showing the link between racial prejudice and media, have a reputation as influential, and serve as important foundational texts for contemporary cultural studies. He also widely discussed notions of cultural identity, race and ethnicity, particularly in the creation of the politics of Black diasporic identities. Hall believed identity to be an ongoing product of history and culture, rather than a finished product.

Hall's political influence extended to the Labour Party, perhaps related to the influential articles he wrote for the CPGB's theoretical journal Marxism Today (MT) that challenged the left's views of markets and general organisational and political conservatism. This discourse had a profound impact on the Labour Party under both Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, although Hall later decried New Labour as operating on "terrain defined by Thatcherism".[20]

Encoding and decoding model

Main article: Reception theory
Hall presented his encoding and decoding philosophy in various publications and at several oral events across his career. The first was in "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" (1973), a paper he wrote for the Council of Europe Colloquy on "Training in the Critical Readings of Television Language" organised by the Council & the Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester. It was produced for students at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which Paddy Scannell explains: "largely accounts for the provisional feel of the text and its ‘incompleteness’".[24] In 1974 the paper was presented at a symposium on Broadcasters and the Audience in Venice. Hall also presented his encoding and decoding model in "Encoding/Decoding" in Culture, Media, Language in 1980. The time difference between Hall’s first publication on encoding and decoding in 1973 and his 1980 publication is highlighted by several critics. Of particular note is Hall’s transition from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to the Open University.[24]



Hall had a major influence on cultural studies, and many of the terms his texts set forth continue to be used in the field today. His 1973 text is viewed as marking a turning point in Hall's research, towards structuralism and provides insight into some of the main theoretical developments Hall was exploring during his time at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Hall takes a semiotic approach and builds on the work of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco.[25] The essay takes up and challenges longheld assumptions on how media messages are produced, circulated and consumed, proposing a new theory of communication.[26] "The ‘object’ of production practices and structures in television is the production of a message: that is, a sign-vehicle or rather sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any other form of communication or language, through the operation of codes, within the syntagmatic chains of a discourse".[27]

According to Hall, "a message must be perceived as meaningful discourse and be meaningfully de-coded before it has an effect, a use, or satisfies a need". There are four codes of the Encoding/Decoding Model of Communication. The first way of encoding is the dominant (i.e. hegemonic) code. This is the code the encoder expects the decoder to recognize and decode. "When the viewer takes the connoted meaning full and straight and decodes the message in terms of the reference-code in which it has been coded, it operates inside the dominant code". The second way of encoding is the professional code. It operates in tandem with the dominant code. "It serves to reproduce the dominant definitions precisely by bracketing the hegemonic quality, and operating with professional codings which relate to such questions as visual quality, news and presentational values, televisual quality, ‘professionalism’ etc."[28] The third way of encoding is the negotiated code. "It acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations, while, at a more restricted, situational level, it makes its own ground-rules, it operates with ‘exceptions’ to the rule".[29] The fourth way of encoding is the oppositional code also known as the globally contrary code. "It is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and connotative inflection given to an event, but to determine to decode the message in a globally contrary way." "Before this message can have an ‘effect’ (however defined), or satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to a ‘use’, it must first be perceived as a meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded."[30]

Hall challenged all four components of the mass communications model. He argues that (i) meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; (ii) the message is never transparent; and (iii) the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning.[26] For example, a documentary film on asylum seekers that aims to provide a sympathetic account of their plight, does not guarantee that audiences will decode it to feel sympathetic towards the asylum seekers. Despite its being realistic and recounting facts, the documentary form itself must still communicate through a sign system (the aural-visual signs of TV) that simultaneously distorts the intentions of producers and evokes contradictory feelings in the audience.[26]

Distortion is built into the system, rather than being a "failure" of the producer or viewer. There is a "lack of fit", Hall argues, "between the two sides in the communicative exchange". That is, between the moment of the production of the message ("encoding") and the moment of its reception ("decoding").[26] In "Encoding/decoding", Hall suggests media messages accrue a common-sense status in part through their performative nature. Through the repeated performance, staging or telling of the narrative of "9/11" (as an example; but there are others like it within the media) a culturally specific interpretation becomes not only simply plausible and universal, but is elevated to "common-sense".[26]

Publications (incomplete)

1960s
(1960). "Crosland Territory", New Left Review, no. 2, pp. 2–4.
(1961), with P. Anderson. "Politics of the Common Market", New Left Review, no. 10, pp. 1–15.
(1961). "The New Frontier", New Left Review, no. 8, pp. 47–48.
(1961). "Student Journals", New Left Review, no. 7, pp. 50–51.
(1964), with Paddy Whannell. The Popular Arts. London: Hutchinson.
(1968). The Hippies: An American Moment. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
1970s[edit]
(1971). Deviancy, Politics and the Media. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
(1971). "Life and Death of Picture Post", Cambridge Review, vol. 92, no. 2201.
(1972), with P. Walton. Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures. London: Human Context Books.
(1972). "The Social Eye of Picture Post", Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 2, pp. 71–120.
(1973). Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
(1973). A ‘Reading’ of Marx's 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
(1974). "Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘Reading’ of the ‘1857 Introduction’", Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 6, pp. 132–171.
(1977), with T. Jefferson. Resistance Through Rituals, Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson.
(1977). "Journalism of the Air under Review", Journalism Studies Review, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 43–45.
(1978), with C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke, B. Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan. London: Macmillan Press. ISBN 0-333-22061-7 (paperback) ISBN 0-333-22060-9 (hardbound).
(1979). 'The Great Moving Right Show', Marxism Today. January.

1980s[edit]
(1980). "Encoding / Decoding." In: Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, and P. Willis (eds). Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–138.
(1980). "Cultural Studies: two paradigms". Media, Culture and Society. vol.2, pp. 57–72.
(1981). "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular". In People's History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge.
(1981), with P. Scraton. "Law, Class and Control". In: M. Fitzgerald, G. McLennan & J. Pawson (eds). Crime and Society, London: RKP.
(1988). The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.
(1986). "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity", Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 5–27.
(1986), with M. Jacques. "People Aid: A New Politics Sweeps the Land", Marxism Today, July, pp. 10–14.
1990s[edit]
(1992). "The Question of Cultural Identity". In: Hall, David Held, Anthony McGrew (eds), Modernity and Its Futures. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 274–316.
(1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Legacy[edit]

The Stuart Hall Library, InIVA's reference library at Rivington Place in Shoreditch, London, is named after Stuart Hall, who was the chair of the board of InIVA for many years.

Film
Hall was a presenter of a 7-part series titled "Redemption Song" where he examined the elements that make up the Caribbean, looking at the turbulent history of the islands and interviewing people who live there today. GB, Barraclough Carey for BBC tx BBC2 30/06/91-12/08/91 Series episodes were as follows
Shades of Freedom (11/08/1991)
Following Fidel (04/08/1991)
WORLD'S APART (28/07/1991)
La Grande Illusion (21/07/1991)
Paradise Lost (14/07/1991)
OUT OF AFRICA (07/07/1991)
IRON IN THE SOUL (30/06/1991)
Hall's lectures have been turned into several videos distributed by the Media Education Foundation:

Race, the Floating Signifier (1997).
Representation & the Media (1997).
The Origins of Cultural Studies (2006).
Mike Dibb produced a film based on a long interview between journalist Maya Jaggi and Stuart Hall called Personally Speaking (2009).

Hall is the subject of 2 films directed by John Akomfrah, entitled The Unfinished Conversation(2012) and The Stuart Hall Project (2013). The first film is currently (January 2014) showing at Tate Britain, Millbank, London while the second is now available on DVD.[31]

In August 2012, Professor Sut Jhally conducted an interview with Hall that touched on a number of themes and issues in cultural studies.[32]

References

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^ Procter, James (2004), Stuart Hall, Routledge Critical Thinkers.
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^ Schulman, Norman. "Conditions of their Own Making: An Intellectual History of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham." Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1993).
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^ Chen, Kuan-Hsing. "The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An interview with Stuart Hall," collected in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds: New York: Routledge, 1996.
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^ "Stuart Hall: Culture and Power," Interview, Radical Philosophy, November/December 1998.
^
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a b Tim Adams. "Tim Adams, "Cultural hallmark", The Observer. 22 September 2007". Guardian. Retrieved 2014-02-17.
^
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a b c Grant Farred, "You Can Go Home Again, You Just Can't Stay: Stuart Hall and the Caribbean Diaspora", Research in African Literatures, 27.4 (Winter 1996), 28–48 (p. 30).
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^ Kuan-Hsing, 1996, pp. 486–487.
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^ Farred 1996, pp. 33–34.
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a b c Tanya Lewis, "Stuart Hall and the Formation of British Cultural Studies: A Diasporic Perspective", Imperium, 4 (2004).
^
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a b c Caryl Phillips, "Stuart Hall", BOMB, 58 (Winter 1997).
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^ Marcus Williamson, "Professor Stuart Hall: Sociologist and pioneer in the field of cultural studies whose work explored the concept of Britishness" (obituary), The Independent, 11 February 2014.
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^ Farred 1996, p. 38.
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^ Bishopsgate Institute Podcast: The Partisan Coffee House: Cultural Politics and the New Left. Mike Berlin, 11 June 2009.
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^ Jonathan Derbyshire, "Stuart Hall: 'We need to talk about Englishness'", New Statesman, 23 August 2012.
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^ Alex Callinicos, 'The politics of Marxism Today ', International Socialism, 29 (1985).
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^ "Soundings". Lwbooks.co.uk. Retrieved 2014-02-17.
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^ "Stuart Hall obituary". The Guardian. 10 February 2014.
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^ Hudson, Rykesha (10 February 2014). "Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall dies, aged 82". The Voice. Retrieved 10 February 2014.
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^ David Morley and Bill Schwarz, "Stuart Hall obituary: Influential cultural theorist, campaigner and founding editor of the New Left Review", The Guardian, 10 February 2014.
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a b "Stuart Hall obituary". The Telegraph. 10 February 2014.
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^ Butler, Patrick (10 February 2014). "'Godfather of multiculturalism' Stuart Hall dies aged 82".
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^ Procter 2004, p. 2.
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^ Hall et al. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order.
^ Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, p. 1.
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^ Hall 1973, p. 16.
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^ Hall 1973, p. 17.
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^ Hall 1973, p. 18.
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^ Mark Hudson, "The Unfinished Conversation by John Akomfrah: a beautiful paean to identity", The Telegraph, 15 October 2012.
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^ from Sut Jhally Plus 1 year ago Not Yet Rated (2012-11-19). "Stuart Hall Interviewed By Sut Jhally on Vimeo". Vimeo.com. Retrieved 2014-02-17.
Further reading[edit]

Davis, Helen. Understanding Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 2004).
Rutherford, Johnathan, ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990, pp. 223–237, chapter entitled "Cultural Identity and Diaspora").
External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Stuart Hall (cultural theorist).

Obituary in The Independent by Marcus Williamson
John O'Hara interview with Stuart Hall for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Doubletake program, originally broadcast 5 May 1983: The Narrative Construction of Reality – Stuart Hall. Republished in centerforbookculture.org's "Context" online edition, No. 10. Retrieved on 2008-04-16.
Mitchell, Don. Chapter 24: Stuart Hall. In: Key Thinkers on Space and Place. Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, Gill Valentine (2004), pp. 160ff. ISBN 0-7619-4963-1.
Race, the Floating Signifier (1997).
Representation & the Media (1997).
The Origins of Cultural Studies (2006).
Personally Speaking (2009).
Marxist Media Theory
A brief biography
darkmatter Journal: Stuart Hall discussing globalization and power (2003, audio)
darkmatter Journal: Stuart Hall in conversation with Les Back (2010, audio)
Listing on the "people" section of Marxists.org
Stuart Hall in conversation with Pnina Werbner, March 2006 (film)
Professor Stuart Hall, Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4.
BFI Obituary

Posted by Kofi Natambu at 6:40 PMLabels: Britain, Critical theory, Cultural Studies, Ideology and Politics, Marxism, social activism, social criticism. Public intellectuals, Stuart Hall