Page 84 - Cultural Theory

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

in Birmingham during the golden years of the Centre was to use knowledge as one
instrument in liberating the working class from the shackles of domination.
While the central dynamic in this process is the accumulation of historical and cul-
tural knowledge designed to reveal how ideology and hegemony order subjects, it would
be wrong to minimize the romantic commitment to achieving a fundamental qualita-
tive change in the character of human relations. Hall (1989b) himself emphasized the
importance of the ‘social imaginary’ in the labour of the organic intellectual. By this
he meant a space between socialism and social democracy in which issues relating to the
quality and purpose of life would be examined and re-defined. However, as befits the
commitment of organic intellectuals, Hall always insisted that the purpose of intellec-
tual labour is political. The aim is to challenge the central institutions of capitalist nor-
mative coercion and elicit socialist transformation. In the 1990s Hall (1991a; 1991b)
praised decentralized politics as practised, for example, by Ken Livingstone during the
hay-day of the Greater London Council and acknowledged the role of social movements
in challenging normative coercion. A distinctive feature of Hall’s approach is the cen-
trality it assigns to the state as the decisive institution in normative coercion. This leads
to a characteristic weakness in Hall’s analysis of culture, which is to read history and cul-
ture through the lens of transformations in the state and concomitant class struggles of
resistance. On the whole the corporation is an underdeveloped and arguably, absent
agent in Birmingham analysis. Moreover, despite the interest shown in globalization in
his later writings, for most of the Birmingham years Hall’s empirical interest are res-
olutely focused on Britain and black colonial diaspora. I shall return to take up these
points in more detail later.

Encoding/Decoding

Hall resisted the tendency to revive what he regarded to be the naïve humanism of the
native culturalist tradition by championing the more ‘scientific’ approach of Althusser
and Gramsci. One early expression of this is the encoding–decoding model of media rela-
tions (Hall 1973; 1993c). Hall’s application of Althusser led him to postulate ideology as
permanently striving to colonize language. As he (1993c: 263–4) put it:
I use ideology as that which cuts into the infinite semisosis of Language. Language
is pure textuality, but ideology wants to make a particular meaning … it’s the
point where power cuts into discourse, where power overcuts knowledge and
discourse; at that point you get a cut, a stoppage, you get a suture, you get an
over-determination. The meaning constructed by that cut into language is
never permanent, because the next sentence will take it back, will open the
semiosis again. And it can’t fix it, but ideology is an attempt to fix it.
This recognition of the ‘suture’ or the ‘cut’ in ideology is a product of Hall’s engage-
ment with the linguistic philosophy of Volosinov (1973) and the Marxist revisionism
of Laclau and Mouffe (1985). His later work returns regularly to the argument that in
‘New Times’ identity is permanently ‘under erasure’. This new emphasis on the
contingency of identity suggests a more conditional reading of the influence of
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