Page 90 - Cultural Theory

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

Critical Evaluation

The work conducted in the Birmingham Centre between the mid-1960s and 1979
was extremely productive in raising the position of working class culture in academic
study. But there were important structural weaknesses with the enterprise. To begin
with, despite the emphasis on widening access and stimulating the widest possible
debate, the Centre typically functioned with an elusive and forbidding lexicon. Key
concepts like ‘hegemony’, ‘conjunction’ and ‘articulation’ are often used in contra-
dictory, not to say, incomprehensible ways. McGuigan (1992: 131) noted quite early
on that Hall’s analysis of the encoding and decoding process was ‘flexible almost to
the point of incoherence’. Wood (1998: 407) followed suit by arguing that slippage
in the meaning of concepts dogs Hall’s work. By way of support he lists five different
meanings of the concept of articulation in Hall’s writings:

The ‘ensemble of relations’ which constitute ‘society’. The ‘discursive proce-
dures’ that transform ideology into culture or combine determinate ideologies
together. The ‘social force’ that ‘makes’ subjective conceptions of the world.
The ‘many autonomous’ parts of civil society that elicit hegemony. The ‘differ-
ent social practices’ and ‘range’ of political discourses transformed into the
operation of ‘rule and domination’.

Anti-essentialism is perhaps the principal motif in Hall’s work (Rojek 2003). He refuses
to be contained by any intellectual tradition at either the levels of methodology or the-
ory. The result is a strong tendency towards eclecticism and arguably an over-readiness
to absorb new ideas. Terry Eagleton’s (1996) comment that Hall frequently confuses
being ‘au fait’ with being ‘a la mode’ is a valid critical insight, not only into Hall’s work,
but the entire Birmingham project.
Feminists were also highly critical of the Birmingham ‘golden age’. The Women’s
Studies Group (1978: 11) in the Centre denounced the atmosphere of ‘masculine domi-
nation of both intellectual work and the environment in which it was being carried out’.
Admittedly, it is difficult to know what a known supporter of women’s liberation like Hall,
could have done to respond to this criticism. If he took remedial action it would tacitly
admit that an atmosphere of male domination prevailed in the Centre. If he did nothing,
it would confirm the feminist case. Damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, Hall felt
extremely discomfited. His early work is always implicitly pro-feminist and the value of
feminism is explicitly acknowledged in his writings after 1979. However, the attribution
of masculine domination was damaging for an anti-essentialist like Hall, whose socialism
was moreover, predicated n the premise of increasing access and social inclusion.
Hall’s approach came under fire from another flank within the Centre. The ethno-
graphic work conducted by Paul Willis (1977; 1978) on ‘the lads’ in a West Midlands
school and ‘biker’ and ‘hippie’ cultures in the same region, used notions of embodiment
and emplacement which tacitly challenged Hall’s stress on ideology and interpellation.
Willis argued that working class actors are above all embodied and emplaced in concrete
social settings which they negotiate with what he (2001: 35) later called ‘sensuous

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