Page 82 - Cultural Theory

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••• Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School •••

the methodology of historical materialism, an interest in the Left wing transformation
of society but a retreat from the premise that class struggle is the engine of history.
Hall always emphasized the necessity of regarding intellectual labour as a political
activity. He adopted Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual as a role model. The
organic intellectual is pointedly contrasted with ‘traditional intellectuals’ who align
themselves with values of ‘objectivity’, ‘detachment’ and ‘value freedom’. Instead the
organic intellectual operates with the latest cutting edge ideas in society and engages
with the oppressed. The Birmingham School approach constantly returns to the
theme of demystifying ideology. The end of intellectual labour is to advance the
power of the down-trodden. The organic intellectual is presented as one of the main
switchboards between knowledge, power and socialist transformation.
In the high moment of the Birmingham Centre, the oppressed were theorized in
terms of the working class. Working class resistance is a prominent theme in
Birmingham work on schooling, youth culture and policing. However, in the final years
of Hall’s period in Birmingham questions of women’s oppression and racism become
more prominent. The concern with oppression is gradually expressed as a critique of
identity in Western epistemology. The notion of centred, bounded, pure identity grad-
ually gives way to new concepts of hybridity and hyphenated-identity (Hall 1999).
These concepts became most fully elaborated in Hall’s later writings on the politics of
identity, ‘new’ ethnicity and multi-culturalism (Hall 1991a; 1991b; 1995; 1997).
With the benefit of hindsight it is evident that intellectual labour in the Centre was
finally about challenging the central ideologically impregnated epistemological cat-
egories through which identity, association and practice are comprehended and prac-
tised under capitalism. This becomes appreciably more emphatic after Hall’s departure
to become Professor of Sociology at the Open University in 1979. His (1989a; 1993a;
1996) work on identity and post-colonialism draws on Birmingham critiques of
policing, the authoritarian state and the law and order society. However, it also incor-
porated new themes from Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and particularly, Laclau and
Mouffe (1985) to mount a comprehensive challenge to Western epistemology, espe-
cially the notion of pure, stable, integrated identity. The new emphasis on the propo-
sition that culture is structured like a language in Hall’s later writings suggests that
‘the cultural turn’ accomplished in the Birmingham years was succeeded, after the
mid 80s, by ‘the linguistic turn’, in which post-structuralism rather awkwardly sits
side by side with Marxism in Hall’s thought.

The Birmingham Golden Age

Hall was employed in the Centre between 1964 and 1979. Arguably, this was the Golden
Age of the Centre. The vitality and significance of the institution can be gauged by con-
sidering some of the students who were enrolled there and who have since gone on to
achieve distinguished academic careers: Charlotte Brundson, Iain Chambers, Phil
Cohen, Hazel Corby Chas Critcher, Paul Gilroy, Larry Grossberg, Dick Hebdidge, Angela
MacRobbie, David Morley, Frank Mort, Paul Willis and Janice Winship. Hall favoured a

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