Page 89 - Cultural Theory

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••• Chris Rojek •••

by holding that decentralization and the extension of civil rights produced new
opportunities for co-opting ‘free’ citizens in the service of capitalism as well as decen-
tralizing power ‘below’. The representative-interventionist state was never interested
in achieving anything greater than tokenistic integration of the working class and
ethnic minorities in civil society. The analysis of this process is most elaborately pre-
sented in Policing The Crisis (Hall et al 1978b). In this book, arguably the most fully
accomplished in the Birmingham oeuvre, the interplay between the history of British
capitalism and the ordering of subjectivity is elucidated with great cogency. The book,
which was published before the collapse of the Callaghan Labour government, accu-
rately predicted a drastic swing to the authoritarian, centrist state, which used the
police and the law to roll back permissive society, the welfare state and accomplish
the ‘modernization’ of industrial relations through the massive deregulation of the
market.
Hall’s (1988) attacks on what he called, ‘authoritarian populism’ in the 80s and 90s
reached a wide audience and it was at this time that he established himself unequiv-
ocally as the leading black public intellectual in Britain. His articles in Marxism Today,
his numerous media broadcasts and his public lectures were extremely forceful,
courageous and offered a massive resource of hope for the Left as they witnessed
Thatcher triumph over three successive elections.
However, they were written after Hall left Birmingham to become Professor of
Sociology at the Open University. Here he launched a series of course books and
handbooks that disseminated the Birmingham approach to a much wider audience.
This was also the period in which the internationalization of the Centre’s theory
and practice occurred, through the migration of a Birmingham intelligentsia out-
side the UK. For example, Larry Grossberg returned to American academic life
where he became an influential advocate of the Birmingham project. Dick Hebdige,
one of the most imaginative researchers in the Birmingham circle, followed him
to California. Tony Bennett migrated to Australia where he set about conjoining
3
the Birmingham project with certain aspects of Foucault’s work. Gradually, the
Birmingham Centre became recognized as an important catalyst in what came to
be known as ‘the cultural turn’ in social science, in which discursive, textual and
post-identity thinking become more pronounced and economic reductionism
eschewed.
By the same token, Hall achieved international recognition as a significant cultural
theorist. At the same time, Birmingham influences were permeating British sociology
and media and communications studies through the appointment of a number of
Birmingham post-graduates to University lectureships. It would be rash to submit
that the result was a new hegemony in these fields integrated around the ‘complex
unity’ of Birmingham theory and practice. Even so, the period since the early 80s has
been marked by the incorporation of Birmingham methodology and theory into the
core curriculum of sociology, media and communications study and, of course,
Cultural Studies. As a result Hall and his associates experienced the relatively unusual
but, one imagines, deeply satisfying experience of finding their own ideas and prac-
tices moving from the margins of academic life to the core curriculum.
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