Page 90 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

78 COLIN SPARKS

much more as a consumer than as a producer’ (Hall, 1958:28). One
consequence of this was that the old world depicted by Williams was
passing:

The break up of a ‘whole way of life’ into a series of lifestyles…
means that life is now a series of fragmented patterns for living for
many working class people.
(Hall, 1958:27)

The most remarkable thing about this article is that it was written in the
late 1950s. The conception of the nature of the changes which were seen as
taking place in working-class experience in the 1950s is strikingly similar to
the analysis of ‘New Times’ with which Hall was to be closely identified in
the late 1980s.
This theme was one which he continued to develop into the early phase
of New Left Review:

The rising, skilled working class, before whom Mr Gaitskell makes
his obeisances, are simply new groups of people with new aspirations
and new visions, living through the end of an old society. They are
the people whose inarticulate needs are untouched by socialism, as
we speak of it today.
(Hall, 1960a:4)

It was necessary for socialists to think again about the people to whom
their message was addressed, and about the nature of that message. Any
insistence upon an established analysis, like that offered by marxism,
would be an obstacle to this new thinking. There is little in his other
writings of the period to suggest anything other than that, at this early
stage in his career, Hall identified marxism as an obsolete and reductivist
system of thought. It was necessary to go beyond its limitations in order to
understand contemporary culture.
The new world of the affluent worker, of the mass media and of upward
mobility, which were seen by the other three writers as a threat to the
integrity and independence of the working class and its culture, were taken
by Hall as the starting-point for his analysis. In this distinctive difference,
personal factors of generation and ethnicity may well have played an
important role. Unlike Hoggart and Williams, for example, Hall could not
look back, with a measure of sentimentality, on a provincial British
childhood within which the positive values of working-class culture were
embodied in concrete human behaviour. Hall’s distinctive contribution to
the formation of cultural studies was to insist on an urgent sense of
engagement with the contemporary.