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STUART HALLBill SchwarzPublished online: 17 Aug 2006.

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STUART HALL

Stuart HallCHRIS ROJEK

Cambridge, Polity, 2003230 pp., ISBN 0 7456 2481 2 pbk, £14.99

In England, there is an ancient, venerable institution of some 60 years ormore, which goes by the name of Desert Island Discs . This is a radio programmetransmitted on Sunday mornings by the most traditional of the BBC radiochannels, broadcast alongside an act of Anglican worship and the equallyancient and venerable soap-opera devoted to the rituals of rural life, TheArchers . To tune in on a Sunday is to listen to the forms of the English past. Thecontent of Desert Island Discs is elegantly simple. Figures in the public eye areinvited to imagine themselves castaways on a desert island, and to choose totake with them eight pieces of music, a book and a single inanimate luxury. Itopens each week, after a few sonorous bars of ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’, with thefamiliar announcement: ‘Our castaway this week . . .’. Echoes of theshipwreck-stories of Renaissance colonialism are never far away, and castawaysare invariably relieved to discover that, by good fortune, already on their islandare the Bible �/ surely the King James Version �/ and the complete works ofShakespeare. There is something very genteel, indeed very English, about thisimagined island, for all its supposed tropical properties. Castaways lookforward to taking with them a case of good wine, or a pillow, or a hairbrush.There is no hint of dangers ahead, or of troublesome natives. These arenot the sort of castaways and seafarers brought to life by Herman Melville orC. L. R. James, or more recently by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker intheir recuperation of the ‘hydra-headed’ radical world of the eighteenth andnineteenth century Atlantic. In its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, with theinestimable Roy Plomley, the programme was so implacably, weirdly genteelthat it represented a moment of BBC high camp. Now it has been modernized,and it is less weird. Its current presenter, Sue Lawley, though not short whenit comes to gentility, at least distantly is of an R&B generation. It is, these days,every so often determinedly frank about the personal tribulations of its guests,needing a bit of past trauma (a habit, bankruptcy, a high-profile divorce) sothat current salvation can be admired and celebrity confirmed. Of course, it isnow overshadowed by any number of other chat-show competitors, whosecommitments to the confessional run deeper than Radio 4 could evercountenance. But Desert Island Discs can still be a topic for gossip: spectacularly

Bill Schwarz

Cultural Studies Vol. 19, No. 2 March 2005, pp. 176�/202

ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380500077730

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so on the occasion Mrs Thatcher chose as one of her discs ‘How Much is thatDoggie in the Window?’. And it can still create a modest frisson, as when oneguest (not Mrs Thatcher) asked to take with her a solar-powered vibrator. Itremains quietly compulsive.

Every so often the producers invite an academic. This is always tricky,because the habits of mind of academics do not naturally conform to chattingon air about life, music, one book and one luxury, in 20-something minutes.Sue Lawley, a skilled professional, is not most at ease in these situations. A fewyears back Stuart Hall was invited �/ an academic, a black Jamaican, a socialistin which, necessarily given the work he does, he was asked to discuss, amongstother things, what Britain means. Even though this inevitably pitched things alittle higher than the usual conversation, Lawley was fine with this. But onecannot help but feel she looked forward to the week which followed, when �/

as Stuart Hall (1970) himself put it many years ago �/ the BBC world wouldonce again be more comfortably ‘at one with itself’, and there would be noneed for unsettling issues to intrude.

This interview features in Chris Rojek’s recent critical study of Stuart Hall.It appears in his conclusion, in the context of a discussion about commodifiedcultures. ‘Hall’s standpoint on some aspects of popular culture is oftencensorious’, writes Rojek.

In common with the New Left he abhors the idea of high culture, but is rat-her priggish in his dislike of commercialism and commodification inpopular culture. This was nicely expressed in an embarrassing momentduring Hall’s appearance as a castaway on the BBC Radio 4 programmeDesert Island Discs . . . Despite Hall’s oft-repeated, querulous observationthat he feels an outsider in British culture, his appearance on Desert IslandDiscs perhaps proves that he has been more accepted and honoured by theestablishment than he would wish to recognize. Be that as it may, Hall seiz-ed the opportunity to discuss with great eloquence questions of his ownrelationship to ‘Britishness’, the meaning of Cultural Studies and his aspira-tions for multicultural/multi-ethnic society. But at one telling moment hiseloquence deserts him and he comes close to being tongue-tied on air.

Rojek transcribed this moment. It reads (with minor corrections):

SL: Do you watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire?SH: Well, um, I knew you would find the limit-point . . . the breaking-

point . . . I can’t watch that.SL: Why not? It’s great!SH: If you ask me, ‘Do I watch soap-operas?’, I do.SL: But, I mean again, it’s exactly what you are talking about . . . It’s

what . . . It’s what turns people on, it’s what shows all kinds ofthings about human nature.

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SH: Oh yes, I think that’s quite true.SL: It’s got it all!SH: You asked me whether I watch it and, you know, there are limits

to my taste. But if you ask me whether we should study it? Ithink we should study it. I mean it is . . . it comes right out of �/

well �/ everything that has happened in economic life in Britain andthe Western world in the last ten years. It’s kind of . . . It’s the Ur-story of the free market.

Rojek calls this last statement ‘portentous’. He explains: ‘It invests theprogramme with a cultural significance it does not possess, and it misses thereflexive character of both the agent and the audience. There is in Hallsomething of the Old Testament prophet who fumes at popular culture’stendency to worship at the feet of the golden calf’ (pp. 194�/5).

This is a characteristic passage from the book. It is misinformed. It assertswithout arguing. It accentuates the negative. It conflates distinct positions.

Rojek reveals that toward ‘some aspects’ of popular culture Hall is ‘oftencensorious’. Well . . . yes. One cannot help but wonder where the scandal is inthis. To talk seriously of the popular cannot mean that all popular forms(Fox News , Jeffrey Archer’s novels, pulp sadism on the Hollywood screen?)must be welcomed: to think otherwise would be to abolish both criticalthought and politics. ‘In common with the New Left he abhors the idea of highculture’: what New Left is this? Whom could Rojek have in mind? EdwardThompson, perhaps? Or Raymond Williams? What evidence can he possiblypresent for this view of Hall? On the very programme from which thisevidence is drawn, he spoke animatedly about Shakespeare, Tolstoy andGeorge Eliot, chose music from Bach and Puccini, and offered The Portrait of aLady as his favourite book. At the same time, Hall is depicted here as ‘ratherpriggish in his dislike’ of commodified popular cultures. Could this be the‘priggish’ Hall who spent his formative years wrestling with the influence ofLeavis in order to show that popular forms could often be serious and werealways important? Is it ‘priggish’ to emphasize the profoundly contradictory,double property of the commodity form? Yet if ‘he abhors the idea of highculture’ and ‘fumes’ against popular culture, it must leave us wondering whyHall bothers with culture at all. What has he been doing all these years?

What though of Hall’s ‘oft-repeated, querulous’ comments on his placewithin the culture of the British? This issue he discussed on the programme,explaining that although there was the possibility in the early 1950s thatOxford University might accept him, he had been unable to accept either theUniversity or what it represented: ‘it was just not me’. ‘Querulous’? There isno complaint here, no peevishness. It marks only a cool judgment about theworkings of a culture, and Hall’s own response to the larger social situation.‘Oft-repeated’? Could Rojek point to one, single instance in which could be

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found a discernible measure of personal complaint? (If you want querulous, trya chat with Hall’s Oxford contemporary, V. S. Naipaul.) Hall’s appearance onDesert Island Discs , Rojek tells us, ‘perhaps proves that he has been moreaccepted and honoured by the establishment than he would wish to recognize’.‘Perhaps’? Does this mean that it does? Or it does not? If it does, where onearth is the evidence? Rojek insists that his is a book which deals principallywith Hall’s ‘printed ideas and their influence’ (p. x). Where in his publishedworks or in his public lectures has this self-misrecognition been manifest?There is no answer. Excusing himself with an observation which still leaves thecharge hanging in the air �/ ‘Be that as it may’ �/ Rojek presses on. Hall, itappears, ‘seized the opportunity’ to discuss Britishness, and the other mattersnoted above. What can this mean? He was invited on to the programme, itsformat well-known. He was politely asked questions about his work, as thegenre demands, and he replied with courtesy and engagement. No-one seizedanything.

Rojek’s purpose, though, is to set the scene for the moment when (itseems) Stuart Hall is out-manoeuvred by Sue Lawley: the moment of‘embarrassment’, when his ‘eloquence deserts him’ and when he ‘comes closeto being tongue-tied on air’. To make these claims depends on a veryparticular reading, or over-reading, of a fragment of a text, which even on theevidence of the transcript is unpersuasive. Listening to the recording produces adifferent tone and register. One hears, in this moment, a genial laughter.There is a parrying between Lawley and Hall, which Hall himself brings outinto the open: ‘I knew you would find the limit-point’. For Rojek, though, it isnecessary to present this admission as a collapse on Hall’s part, so that it cantestify to a more general flaw in his theorization of popular culture. The factthat Rojek, as much as Sue Lawley, is happy to conflate personal taste withtheoretical interpretation appears to cause him no conceptual difficulty. Rojekpushes on. Hall’s identification of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? he finds‘portentous’. (Why ‘portentous’?) He believes this critique ‘misses thereflexive character of both the agent and the audience’, though there isnothing in Hall’s reading, fastening as it does on the mythic or formal status ofthe programme, which depends on an understanding of audience reflexivity �/

about which Hall himself has written important things, as Rojek concedes. Nomatter. We arrive at the terminal point, with Hall now cornered, presented inthe guise ‘of the Old Testament prophet’, ‘fuming’. Punto!

This is dispiriting, ignorant, mischievous prose. I see nothing innocenthere. It purports to engage with Hall’s ideas. In truth, it repeatedly falls into adhominen attack or innuendo. No great textual skills are required to grasp thatthis is writing which is systematically negative, and which concerns the personas much as his ideas. From Stuart Hall’s declared choice not to watch a singleTV programme, we arrive at the image of him as antediluvian patriarch,venting his rage at modern life. Why?

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There is much more in this vein. Rojek describes his book as ‘an attemptto critically interrogate his (Hall’s) ideas and evaluate his cultural and politicalinfluence’ (p. x). On these grounds it must be judged. He points out that his is‘the first full-length solo-authored book on Hall and his work’ (p. ix).1 Hebelieves such a study is necessary, in part, because earlier responses have(he says) largely come from what he identifies as ‘the Birmingham diaspora’,which he explains as those who worked with Hall in the Birmingham Centrefor Contemporary Cultural Studies (p. ix). Later in the book, this ‘diaspora’transmutes into a ‘mafia’ �/ a term, he indicates, which ‘is sometimesnegatively applied’, though where the term originates (if not with Rojek) andwho employs it is not disclosed (p. 79, p. 72). For Rojek, those onceassociated with Hall have not had it within them to be properly critical. Theyindulge in ‘an unhealthy degree of protectionism (sic) about (sic) Hall’ (p. ix).Colin Sparks, no political or intellectual ally of Hall, is found to be ‘cloying inthe respectful tenor of his remarks’ (p. 11). The tone of the papers contributedto a volume published to mark Stuart Hall’s intellectual life (less than a quarterof whose authors had any connection to Birmingham) is described as‘relentlessly anodyne’. ‘Arguably’, he suggests, the editors of the volume �/

Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg and Angela McRobbie (2000) �/ ‘were tooclose to Hall, personally, professionally, as well as in terms of intellectualgenealogy, to evaluate his work with sufficient critical distance’ (p. 11). Thisprovides Rojek his cue. Not for him the figure of ‘Saint Stuart’ (his construct);he has determined to produce ‘no hommage a Hall’ (p. 11, p. x). On thecontrary, he set out ‘to achieve and maintain the appropriate level of sang-froid’ (p. x). It has fallen to him ‘to enter the lion’s den’ (p. x).

Given these remarks, it is as well for readers to know that I studied at theBirmingham Cultural Studies Centre. Intermittently, I have worked withStuart Hall since, and I was an author of one of those essays that Rojek foundto be anodyne. Hall has been a profound intellectual influence on me. I cannotimagine doing the work I do now without his presence. This proximity mayindeed underwrite the sorrow I feel when I read Rojek. When ‘researching thebook with some Birmingham graduates’, Rojek writes, ‘I encountered adepressingly defensive reaction that boiled down to the presupposition that ifyou weren’t there . . . you can’t know what it was like’ (p. x). What it ‘waslike’, however, cannot be the issue. Nor does the fact of having been inBirmingham confer any conceptual privilege. How could it? The work is thereto be judged on its merits. Much of it is now dated. For Hall himself we needto remember that this temporal emphasis on the Birmingham years also servesto under-emphasize the subsequent quarter of a century of intellectual activity.Even so, what Rojek promises �/ a critical engagement with Stuart Hall’sideas and politics, from one who is outside his immediate intellectual influence�/ is not only proper but to be welcomed. It is, though, what he singularlyfails to do.

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What of the politics? Immediately following the image of Hall as Moses,descending the mountain to discover the masses in thrall to Who Wants to be aMillionaire? , Rojek observes that: ‘If Hall is uneasy about commodification andcommercialism, he has not supplied a convincing politics to transcend them’.How is this category of a ‘convincing politics’ to be determined?

The labour of the organic intellectual must be judged finally on its effectin socializing society and culture through critical pedagogy and engage-ment with the public sphere. Ioan Davies ventured the proposition thatone of the paradoxes of British Cultural Studies is that it has not changedthe logic of everyday life very much.

(p. 195)

This gives a maximal, or final, position. It also offers a particular interpretationof the place of British cultural studies. But what could the paradox be? Culturalstudies is an intellectual practice. It can inform a range of public or politicalinterventions, but on its own its reach is necessarily circumscribed. The ideathat cultural studies, or cultural studies in its British incarnation, couldtransform ‘the logic of everyday life’ may be rather pleasing to entertain, butno-one could suppose it to be remotely likely. Rojek imagines that ‘Hall andhis associates’ would ‘doubtless’ see Ioan Davies’s conclusion as ‘heretical’.Banal, yes; heretical, why? In fact, Rojek goes on to itemize a number of arenasof public life where what might broadly be conceived as cultural-studiesintellectuals, Stuart Hall foremost amongst them, have in fact intervened inpublic life and shifted debate. It is a remarkable political audit. If it does notamount to the transformation of ‘the logic’ of the everyday, many individualshave as a result been able to imagine their lives in new ways, and what is thisbut an engagement with the politics of the everyday?

But having conceded this much Rojek is having none of it. ‘Be that as itmay . . .’ �/ those ominous words again �/ ‘the fulcrum of Cultural Studies andHall’s own position in culture remains the Academy, and here Davies’sobservation bites hard’. (195) Well, it only ‘bites hard’ if one works with anotion of ‘the Academy’ (upper case) which is radically divorced from the restof social life; now, of all times, this is very far from the historical reality. Yet,Rojek makes it clear that he has a particular periodization in mind. ‘When Halljoined Hoggart in Birmingham it was realistic to conceive of the universitiesand the student movement as occupying the vanguard of opposition’ (p. 195).However, one may conceive of the ‘opposition’, in 1964 this was far fromrealistic. Nor was it greatly more so in 1968 or 19-whenever. For Rojek, thedecline in student militancy means the political end of cultural studies. Andwith it, more particularly, the political project of Stuart Hall. Rojek closes hisbook with this declaration:

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If Hall’s version of Cultural Studies is intrinsically and irredeemablypolitical, the balance facing it would appear to be stark. Either it will actas one active element in triumphantly reconciling the people into aneffective popular democratic cultural force from the midst of liquidhybridity �/ a prospect that other intellectual traditions hold to be remote�/ or it will be hoist by its own petard.

(pp. 197�/8)

The ‘starkness’ invoked here can mean one thing only. Either the politicsrepresented by Hall will be thoroughly triumphant (deemed by ‘otherintellectual traditions’ to be unlikely), or it will be thoroughly defeated (morelikely). This is no more than a common-or-garden ultra-leftism, based on theconviction that politics can only be composed by either the one or the other.Maybe Rojek believes this. If this is so, in a book of this nature it is incumbentupon him to make his case. Hall has spent much of his life advocating acontrary position. Simply to say at the end of the book that what Hall has beenarguing against happens to be right after all doesn’t get anyone anywhere. Itoffers no intellectual engagement.

Part of the problem is the strong identification of Hall’s politics with aparticular moment of Birmingham, and a particular moment of culturalstudies, as if his intellectual life and his public commitments have remainedunchanged for the past thirty or forty years. This is one of the difficulties ofcentring the preoccupation with Birmingham, or what Rojek calls the‘Birmingham Circle’ (p. ix). But the greater difficulty is his supposition thatsubordinate or marginal intellectual formations can only be judged in terms ofwildly inappropriate criteria.

One of the oddest things about Rojek’s interpretation of Hall, in thisregard, is his understanding of the New Left. The New Left emerged in Britainin the latter half of the 1950s, went through a series of deep divisions in theearly 1960s and, by the end of the decade, had ceased to be an identifiablepolitical current. When Rojek states that there existed ‘a curious atmosphereof didacticism and remoteness in much of the New Left work in the 1970s’, itis impossible to know about whom he is writing, because by then there was noNew Left (p. 28). When he complains that ‘the New Left’ produced nothing assophisticated as Castells’s analysis of ‘network society and the ‘weightlesseconomy’’ �/ work produced in the 1990s �/ we are in the realm of spirits andmediums (p. 29). About the earlier period, when there was a New Left, Rojekis ambivalent. Its activists, he notes, ‘were not people who hailed from a longline of peasants, mill-hands or factory workers’ (p. 28). It never became ‘avanguard of political and cultural transformation’ (p. 24). It suffered from thefact that England was never properly able to produce ‘a radical intelligentsia’�/ ‘if we mean by the term a disciplined movement, attached to a systematicprogramme of political, economic and cultural transformation, with strong

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roots in the organized labour movement’ (p. 26). The New Left, on thecontrary, suffered from the pitfalls of ‘modishness’. Yet, in a surprising move,Rojek supposes that this �/ ‘modishness’ �/ occurred precisely because theNew Left’s commitment to intellectual labour was ‘politically engaged’. TheNew Left

favoured a model of intellectual labour culturally and politically engagedwith concrete issues of the day, and as committed to elucidating them intheoretically informed ways . . . Perhaps this necessarily saddled themwith the appearance of ‘modishness’, since they were very deliberatelyopening doors in the Academy that had been bolted for a long time andwere using new theoretical influences from continental Europe andconcrete, changing economic, cultural and political circumstances as theirwarrant.

(p. 21)

I will come back to this, but it may seem, by this stage, as if we know whereRojek is going. The early New Left was not a vanguard, had no systematicprogramme and was distant from the labour movement. It was composed ofprofessionals, few of whom �/ here Rojek is spot on �/ ‘hailed from a long lineof peasants’, and carried with it, or was ‘saddled with’, a preoccupation with‘modishness’. Rojek himself believes that this political deficit derives from thelarger structural malformation of intellectual life in England: in othercountries, he supposes, the intelligentsia function properly. As EdwardThompson demonstrated many years ago, a priori reasoning of this sort invitesan unabashed, if inverted, Podsnappery. Thus in Rojek’s words:

In Communist Russia, Hungary, Poland and the Palestine LiberationOrganization, a radical intelligentsia engaged in direct political activitywith a coherent programme based in part on organized violence and adisciplined party organization. There is no real equivalent in Englishintellectual life.

(p. 27)

Indeed not, and thankfully so. But what are these comparisons meant to bedoing? What can they possibly mean? Is he seriously regretting the fact that theNew Left in Britain possessed no programme dedicated to ‘organizedviolence’? This is so much tomfoolery. It is at one with his final rebuke forthe New Left: it ‘never became a power bloc’ (p. 27).

The fate of the New Left, in this view, anticipated the fate of the CulturalStudies Centre: ‘the Centre was never firmly focused around a coherentpolitical strategy’; its ‘trajectories did not always converge’; its role ‘as aninstrument of political change was modest’ (p. 81). The researchers atBirmingham should have spent more time compiling political analysis of

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corporate business, of commercial branding, and of the aristocracy. ‘The levelsand components of cultural friction, fusion and fission, and their variousimplications for cultural intervention’ were ‘inadequately elucidated’ (p. 82).These are charges that are random, in the sense that �/ politically andintellectually �/ they have nowhere to go; they condemn a project that neitherexisted, nor was ever even imagined. Our ‘trajectories did not alwaysconverge’. Enough!

The provenance of these charges, though, may seem straightforward. Theymuster a certain left orthodoxy. That Hall himself has always inhabited a ratherdifferent conception of what politics is appears to be an issue with which Rojekchooses not to trouble himself. But at the same time Rojek criticizes Hall forbeing too conventional strategically. Hall is, apparently, ‘a left-wing loyalist’(p. 5). His sense of political strategy Rojek believes to be ‘traditional’, relyingtoo much on the state �/ ‘enjoining (sic) the pivotal significance of the state inthe transformation of society’ (p. 134). More particularly, ‘His socialism is of arather old-fashioned kind, based in (sic) the notion of the Keynesian state’(p. 45). This is strange, if one recalls that it was exactly the contradictionsinside the Keynesian state-system that Hall argued, created the conditions forthe popularity of the New Right in the 1970s. Rojek, though, suppliesevidence to the contrary: ‘witness the broadside he fired across the bows of‘‘new Labour’’ for being ‘‘seduced’’ by the ‘‘neo-liberal gospel of the globalmarket’’’ (p. 45). But is this to say that if one is critical of global neo-liberalism, one is necessarily forced back into the defence of the old Keynesianarrangement? Hasn’t Hall argued precisely against this? Hall’s traditionalism isfurther confirmed, it would seem, as a result of his belief in the necessity of‘regulating the market’. Does Rojek not think this necessary? Maybe not.Hall’s political strategy, he supposes, ‘amounts to the revival of the coreprogramme of traditional socialism, enhancing the role of the state andregulating the market’. Rojek continues: ‘The evidence of six successiveelections in Britain between 1979 and 2001 is that the public does not wantthese policies’. To think otherwise is to succumb to an ‘elitism’, ‘affecting toknow what is best for the people’ (p. 135).

There is an argument to be had here about the state. But it never happens.In its place there occur symptomatic, gestural asides. The vacuum that lies atthe centre of the book is what Rojek himself thinks about those matters forwhich he criticizes Hall. Throughout he issues an incessant litany ofcorrections. From the introduction alone:

It is unsatisfactory (p. 7); wants to have his cake and eat it (p. 7); aninconsistent thinker (p. 8); unquestionable imprecision (p. 11); vague,unsatisfying views (p. 11); pragmatic (p. 13); fails to satisfactorilyresolve . . . (p. 15); not . . . convincing (p. 17); not providing satisfactoryanswers (p. 18); the suspicion . . . of intellectual fashion (p. 19);

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overstates the case (p. 21); (failure) to go beyond the level of critique(p. 31); not a novel argument (p. 34); not candid (p. 40); the argument isnot novel (p. 42); undeniable flavour of insularity (p. 45); The point isoverstated (p. 45).

If these could be compared to alternative conceptualizations, so that readerscould judge concretely the scale and form of these failings, then there may bemerit to them. Without that �/ without critique �/ they can only be negative.Rojek’s supposition that Hall is a traditional political thinker, when the tenorof his own criticisms is so deeply orthodox, is a problem he gives no indicationof even noticing.

Rojek lays out his position early on. On the opening page of theintroduction he announces that Hall ‘can hardly be classed as an originaltheorist’ (p. 1). (This is where he informs the reader that ‘the job of theintellectual is to aggravate cliche’ (p. 1).) He lists the charges: ‘The criticismsof slippage, absence of methodology, modishness, radicalism, the limitations ofEnglishness, embodiment and emplacement will be substantiated in thefollowing chapters’ (p. 46). This substantiation doesn’t happen. What ‘thecriticism’ of ‘radicalism’ involves I don’t know: is it that Hall is too radical (inhis ‘elitist’ manner, prevailing upon Labour to abandon its neo-liberalcommitments), or that he is not radical enough (repudiating parties, vanguardsand violence)? The elaboration of embodiment and emplacement never occurs.I will say something about the connected issues of ‘slippage’, methodology and‘modishness’, and then close with some remarks on Englishness.

‘Slippage is arguably the most serious criticism made of Hall’s work’(p. 7). According to Rojek himself, this is a direct function of Hall’scommitments to anti-essentialism: ‘It (anti-essentialism) accounts for theunquestionable imprecision in his analysis of hegemony, articulation, race andidentity’ (p. 11). This sounds as if ‘unquestionable imprecision’ is thenecessary consequence of anti-essentialism. If this were so there could be nofurther argument to make, and there could no problem associated with Hall’s‘slippage’. It cannot both be ‘the most serious criticism’ of Hall, in particular,and an inevitable result of pursuing an anti-essentialism �/ for then half thecultural theorists on the planet would be open to exactly the same criticism. Itmay be wiser, however, to let this pass.

Discounting this, ‘slippage’ seems either to be a function of, or connectedto, ‘the absence of methodology’. Hall, Rojek claims, makes no contributionto ‘nuts and bolts methodology’ (p. 14). Nor, more generally, has culturalstudies ‘subjected epistemology’ to the same ‘critical interrogation’ thatsociology has done (p. 14). The fact that Hall himself never studied sociologyas an undergraduate has led to the situation �/ or, ‘arguably’ so �/ that he ‘hasbeen too cavalier about questions of methodology’ (p. 16). Rojek proclaimsthat ‘the subject of methodology is massively neglected in Hall’s writings’; a

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few pages on that his work is not necessarily ‘unsatisfactory’ methodologically,but that it is ‘undertheorized’ (p. 13, p. 16). ‘In as much as this is so, Hallalmost invites others to fill in the gap in methodology for him’ (p. 16).

As I understand it, for Rojek, it is this ‘slippage’, ‘gap’, ‘under-theorization’, ‘cavalier’ attitude, ‘absence’ or ‘massive neglect’ �/ whatever�/ that allows ‘modishness’ to operate. Unless, of course, as Rojek explainselsewhere, this comes about as a result of the very nature of political-intellectual work? On ‘modishness’, though, there is nothing interesting to say.Rojek himself jams together theorists of different intellectual and conceptualpersuasions, who may or may not be regarded as ‘modish’. On the cover of aprevious monograph his publishers boast that: ‘Chris Rojek brings together theinsights of Marxism, feminism, Weber, Elias, Simmel, Nietzsche andBaudrillard’. The issue is the kind of work produced, as the end result �/

that’s all. For Rojek to feel compelled to call upon Terry Eagleton in order toestablish Hall’s ‘modishness’ may tell us all that we need to know about thematter.

Rojek makes the claim that Hall’s paper (1972) on ‘Encoding andDecoding’ stands (‘arguably’) as ‘his most important methodologicalcontribution to Cultural Studies’ (p. 14). He then back-tracks with thecounter-claim that perhaps this isn’t about methodology after all, butrepresents rather ‘a contribution to Marxisant semiotics’ �/ and is presumablyvulnerable to the overall charge of ‘undertheorization’ (p. 14). On ‘nuts andbolts methodology’, and on such questions as ‘how to conduct interviews’,Hall ‘remains relatively silent’ (p. 14). While this latter observation must betrue, there are powerful objections to the larger point.

First, Rojek subscribes to a narrow, technical conception of methodology,drawn from the conventions of mainstream sociology, as if this is all there is tosay. All Hall has argued is that in order to get to grips with the symbolicdimensions of social life, it is legitimate in addition to draw from other, less-disciplinary-bound, traditions �/ including what Rojek cites here as ‘Marxisantsemiotics’.

Second, there has been no ‘massive neglect’. Rojek himself drawsattention to Stuart Hall’s own course at the Birmingham Cultural StudiesCentre, ‘Theory and Method in Cultural Studies’, which codified the methods-work of the Centre over the previous decade or more, and which offeredstudents an explicit encounter with cultural methodologies. Indeed, Rojekhimself reproduces the course outline (pp. 70�/2). Historically, the intellectualwork of cultural studies had been built around these core issues, and thiscontinued through the 1970s.

Third, far from Hall’s work on methods being ‘undertheorized’ it is �/ onthe contrary �/ his most fully theorized contribution to the field. Rojek refersto Hall’s article on Marx’s ‘1857 Introduction’ (pp. 104�/8). According toRojek, Hall was ‘drawn to this work (of Marx’s) as a means of rebutting the

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economic reductionism of the base-superstructure reading of Marxism’(p. 104). This is only weakly the case �/ in the sense, only, that the samecould be said of all Hall’s conceptual work since before the time he had everarrived at Birmingham. More to the point, Hall’s essay sought to provideprecisely the epistemological and methodological categories which he believedcultural analysis required. It is about ‘the epistemological foundations ofmethod’ (Hall 1974, p. 155). And it was based on the conviction that thesefoundational categories couldn’t simply be borrowed, untransformed, from thesociologists. In the evolution of cultural studies ‘the search for a method’, inSartre’s words, loomed large.

The first version of Hall’s article appeared in 1973; an abbreviated versionappeared in Working Papers in Cultural Studies the following year, though this isnot cited in Rojek’s bibliography; and then more recently �/ after Rojek’s bookwas published �/ it was reprinted again in 2003, in the journal Cultural Studies .In a prefatory note to these reprinted versions, Hall makes the methodologicaldimensions of his analysis explicit. He refers to Marx’s ‘Introduction’ as his(Marx’s) ‘most substantial text on ‘method’’, and goes on:

The positions taken by Marx in the Introduction run counter to manyreceived ideas as to his ‘method’. Properly grasped and imaginativelyapplied . . . they seem to me to offer quite striking, original and seminalpoints of departure for the ‘problems of method’ which beset our field ofstudy, though I have not been able to establish this connection within thelimits of the paper. I see the paper, however, as contributing to this on-going work of theoretical and methodological clarification, rather than assimply a piece of textual explication. I hope this conjuncture will not belost in the detail of the exposition.

(Hall 1974, p. 132)

So far as Rojek is concerned, it seems as if this sustained work ofmethodological exploration never occurred. It has indeed become forgotten,repressed or ‘lost’. In the 1974 reprint, just twelve months after it firstappeared, Hall added to the title: ‘Marx’s notes on method’, and for the past30 years this has remained its title.

This important essay addresses the question of determination in the humansciences. This concerns not so much the degree to which the social relations ofproduction, within the marxist imagination, determine, but more broadly themeans by which categories of thought themselves �/ concepts, modes of criticalthinking �/ can be determinate, as opposed to their being haphazard, randomor indeterminate. Or to put this another way, the essay represents a formalattempt to elaborate a methodology which counters ‘slippage’. This is oneof the most philosophically elaborate of Hall’s writings, written at a high levelof abstraction. Paradoxically, it is a philosophical, abstract attempt to

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demonstrate that philosophy and abstraction can only work fruitfully if thecategories on which they are founded have a determinate relation to the real,to the concrete and to the historical. It mounts an epistemological defence ofthe necessary connections between the historical-concrete and the concrete-in-thought, ‘abstractly’ revealing the limits of formal abstraction. ‘As if’, Hallquotes from Marx, ‘the tasks were the dialectical balancing of concepts and notthe grasping of real relations’ (Hall 1974, p. 141). Hall is endeavouring toimagine a method which ‘retains the concrete empirical reference as aprivileged and undissolved ‘‘moment’’ within a theoretical analysis’ (Hall 1974,p. 147; emphasis added). If this anticipates a way of working in which conceptscounter indeterminacy, it also marks a commitment to conceptual categorieswhich are sufficiently mobile, complex and concrete that they can indeed graspthe real. This produces theories of a very particular complexion (‘the concreteanalysis of concrete situations’, Hall 1974, p. 147) �/ which may not look like,or work like, more formal, elaborated, conventional ‘theory’.

More particularly, they may not look like conventional or mainstreamsociological theory. A sociological perspective offers one, but not the only,means to supply structure and determination to interpretative models. Adifferent sort of determination, however, can apply if one shifts from asynchronic emphasis to one which is diachronic. Indeed, what is most strikingabout Hall’s reflections on method in the essay is his centring of questions oftemporality. The categories of classical political economy worked to de-historicize relations of capitalist production; Marx insisted on starting withhistorical specification. In this reading, social relations necessarily exist inspecific durations �/ in, in other words, historical time. They exist inmovement. Historical time lies at the very heart of Hall’s method (seeespecially Hall 1974, pp. 143�/5, 152�/3): ‘History . . . articulates itself as theepistemological premise [,] the starting point, of theoretical labour’ (Hall 1974,p. 157). ‘We are dealing here neither with a disguised variant of positivism norwith a rigorous a-historicism but with that most difficult of theoretical models,especially to the modern spirit: a historical epistemology ’ (Hall 1974, p. 152).

Hall on method may be wrong: but method is neither ‘absent’, nor‘neglected’, nor ‘undertheorized’. My own view is that Stuart Hall is more ofa historical thinker than is customarily appreciated. This is not to say heproduces histories in the image of professional historians. But his determina-tion to understand social relations as constituted by their durations, and inperpetual movement, does testify to the centrality in his work of a historicalmethod. He outlined some of the key intellectual components of thisdimension of his thinking in the later essay on ‘The hinterland of science:ideology and the ‘‘sociology of knowledge’’’ (Hall 1978). Here he made itclear that his commitment to what Levi-Strauss described as the ‘forgotten’sociological tradition of Durkheim and Mauss not only brought back into thefield of vision the question of mentalities, but took him onto the same territory

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as Maurice Halbwachs and Annales . This marked an appropriation of a traditionof social theory peculiarly alive to the question of historical time.

Or, to look at this from the other way around, distinctive in his concretepolitical analysis is his repeated emphasis on the movement of political forces.To catch the interplay of determination and contingency, in their actualmovements through time, requires a conceptual approach that is also, in somerespects, mobile: capable of grasping the movements of historical time whichcompose a conjuncture, and which underwrite the shifting balance of forces.Hall’s tracking of the evolutions of Thatcherism can be seen in this light (Hall1988). Rojek admits as much, though does no more than state that this is so(p. 17). For some, this quality of his thinking was what made Hall’s insightsinto Thatcherism possible; for others, it was exactly this mobility ‘in thought’which proved to be most troubling. His identification of authoritarianpopulism, for example, came in for particular censure, on the grounds thathis organizing concepts kept on moving around �/ or, to continue with Rojek’spreferred term, slipping (Jessop et al . 1984) Much of the ensuing debateturned on what theory could do in ‘the concrete analysis of concretesituations’. More specifically, it highlighted the problem of differing levels oftheorization. Hall put it like this:

I do not believe that all concepts operate at the same level of abstraction�/ indeed, I think one of the principal things which separates me from thefundamentalist Marxist revival is precisely that they believe that theconcepts which Marx advanced at the highest level of abstraction (i.e.mode of production, capitalist epoch) can be transferred directly into theanalysis of concrete historical conjunctures. My own view is that conceptslike that of ‘hegemony’ (the family or level of abstraction to which AP[authoritarian populism] also belongs) are of necessity somewhat‘descriptive’, historically more specific, time-bound, concrete in theirreference �/ because they attempt to conceptualize what Marx himselfsaid of ‘the concrete’: that it is the ‘product of many determinations’. So Ihave to confess that it was not an error or oversight which determined thelevel of concreteness at which AP operates. It was quite deliberately andself-consciously not pitched at that level of ‘pure’ theoretical-analyticaloperation at which Jessop et al seem to assume all concepts must beproduced. The costs of operating at this level of abstraction are clear. Butto me �/ in the wake of the academicizing of Marxism and the theoreticistdeluge of the 1970s �/ so are the gains.

(Hall 1985, pp. 118�/9)

From a rather different angle, this too is a critique of high formalism.Not all of Stuart Hall’s writing works at this level of abstraction, but much

of it does, with its attendant gains and costs. If one turns to the opening

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sentence of the first (signed) article he ever published in Britain, in thefounding issue of Universities and Left Review , we read this: ‘The disorderlythrust of political events disturbs the symmetry of political analysis’(Hall 1957, p. 21). Conceptually, this anticipates much of his later writingson politics, and conforms too to his later reading of the ‘1857 Introduction’.Hall had arrived in Britain in 1951, when Churchill had once more becomeprime minister. The rotation between the two parties was back in business,and on the most pressing foreign and domestic matters a deepening consensuswas cohering between the two front-benches. Ivy League political scientistsbegan the transatlantic pilgrimage to come and wonder at the harmoniousworkings of British institutions. A figure like Harvard’s Samuel Beer, forexample, formed deep in Parsonian functionalism, was representative in hisunderstanding of what British politics was, and influential as well. And whatwas British politics, if not order and symmetry? However, the destruction ofAnthony Eden in the closing months of 1956, as a consequence of the war withEgypt, was an occasion of dramatic dysfunction and disturbance in the system.From it, a new politics was made possible. Instability and ‘disequilibrium’followed in its wake, caught in all the turbulence of ‘irrational forces’ and ‘theold neuroses’ (Hall 1957, p. 21). But imagining politics in this waywas not merely the response to the immediate, conjunctural political crisis.As we can see from Hall’s subsequent writings, it runs deeper than that. In thisview, politics essentially is ‘disorderly’, disturbing and asymmetrical. Theunpredictable and the contingent are always around the corner, ‘disequili-brium’ the name of the game. The objects of study outpace the conceptsformed to comprehend them. To this degree, concepts too �/ necessarily �/

will move.Movement, though, may take different forms. The concept of authoritar-

ian populism, Hall notes, emerged as ‘a sort of footnote to Gramsci’s ‘‘ModernPrince’’ and ‘‘State and Civil Society’’’ (Hall 1985, p. 119). In terms of thequestions raised above �/ method, temporality, level of abstraction �/

Gramsci’s commitments to the concrete, as a conceptual and methodologicalcategory, are striking. This is particularly evident in his discussion ofintellectuals, which opens the English translation of the Selections from thePrison Notebooks . Gramsci’s insistence on extending the classic Marxist readingof ideology to ideologues, and thence to the more expansive notion of theintellectual, exemplifies this determination to grasp the concrete. Thefrequency of this term, ‘concrete’, is conspicuous throughout these openingpages, serving to remind us both of the operations internal to the mind whichallow thought itself to be properly determinate, and of the means by which, inthe social world, ‘philosophies’ come to work as integral components ofvaried, competing political forces. It is in these terms that Gramsci locatesMachiavelli. The first paragraph of ‘The Modern Prince’ reads:

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The basic thing about The Prince is that it is not a systematic treatment,but a ‘live’ work, in which political ideology and political science arefused in the dramatic form of a ‘myth’. Before Machiavelli, politicalscience had taken the form either of the Utopia or of the scholarlytreatise. Machiavelli, combining the two, gave imaginative and artisticform to his conception by embodying the doctrinal, rational element inthe person of a condottiere , who represents plastically and ‘anthropomor-phically’ the symbol of the ‘collective will’. In order to represent theprocess whereby a given collective will, directed toward a given politicalobjective, is formed, Machiavelli did not have recourse to long-windedarguments, or pedantic classifications of principles and criteria for amethod of action. Instead he represented this process in terms of thequalities, characteristics, duties and requirements of a concrete individual.Such a procedure stimulates the artistic imagination of those who have tobe convinced, and gives political passions a more concrete form.

(Gramsci 1971, p. 125)

These are arresting, if condensed, sentences. From them we can see that, forGramsci, the concrete represents not merely social reality, imagined at aparticular level of abstraction; nor only social relations in movement. For whatGramsci designates as the domain of the political is also a ‘live’, dysfunctionaldomain, composed by myths and passions as much as by rational doctrines.From this perspective, the genius of Machiavelli lay in his capacity to craft aformal philosophy able to grasp these dimensions of political reality. His was apolitical philosophy that ‘stimulates the artistic imagination’ and ‘gives politicalpassions a more concrete form’. It is neither formally systematized, nor madeup of ‘pedantic classification’. In this conception, politics is not only aboutrational calculation, but about the making of what Gramsci called a ‘concretephantasy ’ (1971, p. 126, emphasis added). To think in these terms adds afurther layer of meaning to the idea of ‘the concrete’, for it alerts us to thesubjective identifications in which political objectives take shape, becomeembodied, and generate human passion.2 Writing about the crisis withinBritish Conservatism in 1957, Hall was keen to unearth these ‘interior’manifestations of political life, just as he was, a quarter of a century later,when he presented his commentaries on the authoritarian-populist drive of theThatcherites. Patently, this isn’t all that politics is. But it provides a criticaldimension, making the concrete more complex, more intangible in itssubterranean movements, and harder to reach analytically. To close downdebate, though, by dismissing all this as ‘slippage’ can only serve to reinvent anold functionalism.

Stuart Hall’s ‘method’, I am suggesting, cannot be divorced from hisinsistence on thinking historically, both in his understanding of historical timeand in his privileging of the historically concrete. Inevitably, as Hall affirms,

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this is a way of working which entails losses as well as gains. However if wewere to switch perspective, we can see what can occur if a sense of historicallocation is absent. In assessing Hall’s intellectual output, it would be possibleto move from one piece of writing to the next, in chronological sequence, andto construct a story of his theoretical evolution. But this would miss theoccasion for each of his articles or books. Hall characteristically is a dialogicthinker, in conversation with often unnamed interlocutors, and customarilywriting specifically for the moment. To an unusual degree each paper of hisrepresents an engagement with adversaries, on one flank or the other. This istrue not only of his directly political interventions, but also of his theoreticalreflection. Put simply, the context for each paper needs to be known.Sometimes this is easily discerned from the text itself; often it is not. But if theshifts in the political-intellectual context (conjuncture) are not acknowledged,it may well indeed seem as if there were unwarranted movement in histheoretical positions. I know this is elementary. I know, equally, that attentionto historical context cannot resolve the issue of ‘slippage’. But if it is absent, asit regularly is in Rojek’s commentary, then it is difficult to see what connectsone text of Hall’s, ‘concretely’, to the next. Why, for instance, does Rojekmake no attempt to draw out the shared conceptual provenance of Hall’sanalysis of Marx’s ‘1857 Introduction’ and his paper exploring ‘Encoding andDecoding’? Without these connections all we have is an unilluminating cut andpaste. It can prove no surprise that from this vantage, in which one text afteranother is levered from the conditions in which it was produced, a cardinalfeature of Hall’s work turns out to be ‘slippage’.

Rojek’s final charge is that Hall’s intellectual positions are marred by the‘limitations’ of their ‘Englishness’. This is the most baffling aspect of the book.The charge is announced in the introduction, under the sub-head: ‘Theproblem of ‘‘Englishness’’’ (p. 29). Rojek opens by drawing upon the view ofanother critic. ‘John Hartley’, he says, ‘argues that a preoccupation withBritish questions is a central defect of what he calls Hallism’ (p. 29). Thisrecourse to Hartley’s condemnation is repeated twice (p. 37, p. 45). As ithappens, Hartley says nothing of the sort. He has critical things to say aboutPolicing The Crisis. (Hall et al . 1978) But these criticisms derive in no wayfrom anything to do with either ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’.3 For Hartleyneither constitutes a ‘central defect’ in Hall’s work (Hartley 1996, p. 233,pp. 235�/40). No matter. Rojek proceeds by reminding us that Hall himself‘has gone on record’ to declare that he is not, nor ever will be, ‘English’ �/

conceding that Hall’s ‘relation to Britain is complex’ (p. 29). In the remainingpage and a half he devotes to the matter in his introduction, he says one or twothings about the New Left, introduces the Marxism Today New Times debate,and concludes by taking issue with Hall’s ‘critique of capitalism’ which �/

though ‘obviously still relevant’ �/ fails, in Hall’s case, ‘to go beyond thelevel of critique’ (pp. 30�/1). Thus after the first misinformed sentences, the

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sub-head notwithstanding, there is nothing more in this section about eitherEnglishness or Britishness. He promises that the accusation of ‘the limitationsof Englishness’ will be ‘substantiated’ later in the book. And that is the last wehear of it.

This really is very peculiar, and I can’t pretend to understand what is goingon. But all is not lost. Although Rojek chooses not to inform the reader, he haswritten on Hall and Englishness before. In an article published in 1998 he setout to demonstrate that Hall’s intellectual world had been formed by the oldantinomian traditions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.

Antinomianism, briefly, emerged amongst the radical sects of the CivilWar, its proponents dedicated to an extreme version of the belief that all lawswere internal to the individual self, and that external laws, codified by church,state or society, could only be followed to the degree that they wereconfirmed by the inner moral conviction of the individual. These ideas wereformed deep in the crucible of the social collapse of the 1640s, familiar to mostpeople today from Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (1972).Some historians, pre-eminent amongst them Edward Thompson (1993), haveargued that after the Restoration antinomianism and its associated traditionscontinued to be espoused by later generations, reproduced from parent tochild in a symbolic underground of small sects in provincial England, incorners of London, and also in free-thinking communities in the Americancolonies, where sectarian passions of this kind could more easily flourishunmolested. These same historians are persuaded that these undergroundtraditions then resurface again, or become visible to the historian again, in thedemocratic turmoil of the 1790s �/ and that evidence for this can be foundmost of all in the highly charged visionary perception of the world active in theaesthetic imagination of William Blake.6 Thus rather than Blake beingunderstood as a singularly eccentric figure, he is �/ in this interpretation �/

placed in a long tradition of plebeian iconoclasm stretching back to therevolutionary moment of the seventeenth century. This reading has obviousattractions. But it is also contentious. It is part of a complex, wide-ranging andspecialized historiographical debate that delves deep into seventeenth- andeighteenth-century popular mentalities. The quality of this scholarship �/ whatit can and can’t demonstrate; its basis in the sources and so on �/ is recognizedwell enough by the historians who contribute to it, whatever their ultimateconclusions.

But this does not concern Rojek. He introduces antinomianism. Then,from nowhere, he announces: ‘At this point, I want to insist particularly on theliving presence of antinomianism in contemporary culture’. He lists some ofthese contemporary manifestations: ‘anti-road protests, poll tax riots, new agegroups and the demonstrations against the Criminal Justice and Public OrderAct (1994), the emergence of ‘‘rave cultures’’ which celebrate lawlessness andclasslessness . . . and the ‘‘Eco-warriors’’ of tunnel-makers and tree-dwellers’

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(1998, p. 49) On the basis of no evidence, antinomianism comes to beamplified into a fully-fledged ‘tradition in English political life’ (1998, p. 60).The connection between the ideas of the arcane antinomian sects �/

‘Calvinism’s lower-class alter ego’, in Hills words (1972, p. 130) �/ andcontemporary protest is, for him, easily achieved. ‘These dissenting groupsstand for a different Britain that contrasts with established configurations of thenation-state. Their cultural significance is that they practise different ways ofbeing which refuse the ordinance of existing nation-state axioms and rules’(1998, p. 62). That is it. And thus by extension, this is a ‘tradition’ that comesto touch Stuart Hall, as indeed it could �/ on these terms �/ touch almostanyone. Rojek reassures us that he does not believe Hall to be ‘a covertantinomian’. But he offers a reading that he himself champions as being ‘ratherbold’: ‘I propose that antinomianism is a crucial and neglected influence in thecontent and trajectory of Stuart Hall’s thought. It reveals him to be a more‘English’ thinker than he or his circle have allowed’ (1998, p. 60).

He produces not a single piece of evidence to substantiate this. This is sorandom �/ so indeterminate �/ that Hall might as well be designated a Lollard,Owenite or Chartist. Rojek makes no attempt to establish homologies betweenantinomian thought and Hall’s writings at the textual level, nor a demonstra-tion of any extra-textual, historical connection. The reader has to rely on oneill-judged and uninformed assertion: ‘The whole spirit of Hall’s writing is‘‘against the law’’’ (1998, p. 61). This is not just wrong-headed interpretation.It raises again the question of methodology. How can we take Rojek’sestimation of Hall’s methodology seriously when his own practice does himsuch disservice? In Popperian mood, Rojek implies that Hall’s theorizationsaren’t adequately falsifiable (p. 115). His own prove too easily to be so.

In familiar refrain, Rojek opens this 1998 article by asking: ‘How are we toexplain the ‘‘slippage’’ in the writings of Stuart Hall on culture?’. He claimsthat this is a defect which is ‘widely alleged’, citing two authors as evidence,Jim McGuigan (1992) and Kuan-Hsing Chen (1996). As Chen doesn’t makethe allegation, or any like it, its ‘wideness’ remains open to doubt, resting as itdoes on the word of a single writer. Nonetheless, readers of Rojek’smonograph might assume they know what is in store �/ such dogged repetitionof the criticism of ‘slippage’ that it takes on the aura of incantation. But this isnot to be. Instead, confounding expectation, we discover that the antinomianperspective sheds a new light on Hall such that the problem of ‘slippage’ isresolved. It transpires �/ or it did in 1998 �/ that there is a unity and continuityto his work, supplied by the overarching influence of antinomian thought.‘Slippage’ ceases to be the issue. Thus, ‘Instead of seeing a ‘‘break’’ or‘‘slippage’’ in Hall’s work, it is possible to see an important continuity’ (1998,p. 46). In 1998, the great ‘slippage’ question has been resolved; five yearslater, it is back with force. Which is it to be?

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It may be, of course, that by the time Rojek came to write the book hisline on antinomianism no longer seemed to him persuasive. It had to bedropped because it just couldn’t work. If this is right, at least this wouldexplain the absence of any reference to antinomianism �/ so powerful aninterpretation a short while before �/ in the monograph, or any reference tothe article in which the original proposition was made. In terms even of hisown protocols, the abandonment of the antinomian thesis, though, leaves himwith nothing of substance to say about Hall’s supposed Englishness. This mayin turn explain why the charge of Englishness is left suspended in the book,hanging around at the end of the introduction with nowhere to go.

There is in any case plenty of confusion in Rojek’s presentation about theconsequences of this supposed antinomian influence, and more generally �/ inboth the article and the book �/ about the effects of Englishness itself. It isnever clear whether Hall is being criticized for writing mostly about Englishsubjects; for not heeding sufficiently the impact of globalization; or whetherthere is meant to be something deeply English in his manner of thinking, withdeleterious effects. These variant readings pop up on different occasions. Thefirst of these is of no possible interest; the second represents a retrospective,and partial, response to Hall’s earlier work, written at a time when it’s tooeasy to be more knowing about globalization; and the third is so abstract,arbitrary and subjective in its criteria that it can deliver nothing of significance.Not only this. Rojek proceeds as if Hall had never himself considered thequestion of English civilization. Yet, from early on he was understandablypreoccupied �/ explicitly so �/ by the issue, and has continued to be so since(Hall 1958).

But what of the fact that this putative English intellectual is a blackJamaican? What of the fact that he describes himself as a ‘diasporic ’ intellectual?(Hall 1996, emphasis added).

Rojek is having nothing to do, he insists, with this latter identification. Onthis his reasoning is luminous. To accept Hall as diasporic ‘exaggerates (his)marginality to pre-Marxist English traditions of cultural criticism’ (1998,p. 58). In other words, to see him as diasporic would mean that he could notalso be designated antinomian �/ a corollary that wouldn’t do at all. Or atleast, it wouldn’t do in 1998. Here we can witness what happens when aconcept proves incapable of movement, and when stasis rules. What is this,methodologically, if not an exemplification of ‘the balancing of concepts’ at theexpense of ‘grasping . . . real relations’?

On Hall’s Jamaican past, Rojek is less quick to judge. For this, though, weneed to return �/ after the antinomian hiatus �/ to his book. With all thebombast of a pantomime magistrate, he reveals that:

In researching Hall’s published writings and trying to trace through themany complex threads of the shifts of emphasis in his intellectual position

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over the years, I have reached the conclusion that Hall’s background inJamaica must be confronted.

(p. 47)

Indeed. Rojek spends half a dozen pages, drawing from the old, influential �/

and hugely debated �/ social analysis of M. G. Smith (1965), whose emphasisfell on the lack of cohesion in Caribbean societies.4 Rojek gives this his ownparticular spin, by placing his emphasis on the centrality of internal racialhierarchies in the ordering of Jamaican society. He plausibly suggests thatStuart Hall’s deep-seated interest in the generation of social difference mayhave originated in his Jamaican formation (p. 55). He posits the likelihood of alink between ‘Hall’s later antipathy to the monetarist and nationalist rhetoricdeployed by Thatcher in the 1980s’ and his memories of Jamaica’s first generalelection in December 1944, though acceptance of this demands a higherdegree of latitude (pp. 56�/7). Less plausibly still �/ ‘unquestionably’, inRojek’s mind �/ the ‘strictness’ of his parents ‘prefigured’ (sic) (‘but not ofcourse determined’) his later theorizations of authoritarian populism (p. 56).And with no plausibility at all, Hall’s Jamaican background is perceived byRojek to account for his purported tendency ‘to romanticize black streetcrime’; ‘or at least’ �/ Rojek goes on �/ for his refusal ‘to accept police andpopulist accounts on a priori grounds’ (as if these were conceivably the samethings) (p. 55). And there discussion of Hall’s connections to the Caribbeanstops.5

For all the portentousness of the announcement �/ ‘Jamaica must beconfronted’ �/ it is apparent that this is an interpretation that remainsenclosed, set apart from the rest of the book. The findings he does present arenot only external and mechanistic. They are also organized through anexclusively British optic. Hall’s writings of the seventies and eighties on Britainfunction as the starting-point, his Jamaican past serving only to provideconfirmation of a pre-given, British-centred, teleology. Why not, for example,explore how Hall’s experiences of Birmingham and London inform hisreadings of Jamaica? But Rojek can’t allow himself to reflect upon the complexmovements back and forth between the Caribbean and Britain, for this wouldgive credence to the centrality of the diasporic experience �/ which he hasalready ruled out of order. As we can see, understanding Stuart Hall’sintellectual world without grasping its continuing locations in a diasporicexperience proves �/ for Rojek not least �/ to be tricky.

Rojek presents Hall as a figure who enters intellectual life in the middle1950s as a ready-made inspiration for the New Left, who thence movedseamlessly to become the progenitor of what has subsequently come to beknown as British cultural studies. Not only does this ignore the Caribbeanelements in Hall’s intellectual life in the fifties; it ignores his continuinginvolvement with Caribbean organizations in Britain through the 1960s and

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beyond; and it ignores too the complicated but important role he has played inCaribbean intellectual life itself, in Jamaica and further afield. As none of this isdiscussed, maybe Rojek believes it unimportant. My own view, to thecontrary, is that it is of great importance. But it is not easily put intoperspective.

The intellectual labour of decolonization in the Caribbean produced a richconceptual legacy, of significance not only for the Caribbean but moregenerally. Theoretically, this is most evident in the case of Fanon. But the samepertains �/ or should do so, if it were better known �/ for the AnglophoneWest Indies. The experience of decolonization in the British Caribbean canproperly be understood to have been overdetermined. This is so on twocounts. First, in language, religion, literary culture, schooling and sport, theformal institutions of West Indian culture were peculiarly proximate �/ inform �/ to those of the metropolis. As we know, when West Indian migrantsarrived in Britain in the middle decades of the twentieth century, they werecoming to a civilization with which they were already intimate, for to anunusual degree it was already (formally) theirs. Second, much of theintellectual work of decolonization was conducted not in the Caribbean butin the metropolis. Location, in this respect, matters. Those West Indianthinkers in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, attempting to imagine the co-ordinates of a sovereign Caribbean, were at the same time having to contendwith the actually-existing metropolitan British civilization, in its mostproximate, most immediate, lived manifestations. These circumstancesdemanded a peculiarly far-reaching critique of the precepts of Britishcivilization, for in the Caribbean most of all it was apparent that the transferof political power �/ ‘independence’ �/ would only obliquely address thedeeper cultural and subjective legacies of colonialism.

This impulse for decolonization was manifest in many different formations,some highly codified intellectually, some not. It was present in conceptualcritique (‘theory’), and it was present too in ska and calypso, in cricket and ina myriad other popular forms of expression. Indeed, it was the purpose ofmuch of C. L. R. James’s writings in the late fifties and early sixties, forexample, to show that this was so. His Beyond a Boundary endeavoured not onlyto demonstrate this, but itself stands as a formidable decolonizing text,working through with great intricacy his own inner formation as a colonizedand racially subordinate subject of the British system (James 1963). Todiffering degrees, formally accredited intellectuals schooled in the institutionsof British colonialism increasingly perceived the need to divest themselvesof something of the cultural inheritance of empire. In so doing, theynecessarily found themselves confronting more directly their own, and theirrespective nation’s, Creolization. This was necessarily a collective historicaltransformation. Indeed, we can witness the protracted and uneven recomposi-tion of Caribbean thought as it strove to incorporate within itself the

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vernacular forms of the West Indian nations in the process of their seekingsovereignty. At every point, the formal legacies of colonialism vied with thevernacular, blacker, more fluid cultures which constituted the traces ofslavery, of other diasporas, and of a long history of racial mixing. If popular lifein the Caribbean represented the stratum of a cultural order in which thenorms of the colonizers were least internalized, one can appreciate why at thismoment �/ on the threshold of independence and after �/ it assumed a newvalency. In such circumstances, thought could lose its purity, become moreprofane, and new things happen.7

How Hall’s intellectual evolution connected to these movements inthought is not easily reconstructed. My own sense is that certain emergentemphases of Caribbean intellectual life created in this struggle for sovereignty�/ the developing critique of racial systems; the concern with the displacementof political authority in ‘other’ symbolic and cultural forms; the implacablecommitments to maximize and cherish the power of innovative vernacularforms; the expansive conception of what comprised the civilization of theBritish; and the consequent understanding that future emancipation requiredcultural work on the widest front �/ are not merely close to the heart of StuartHall. He gave them voice in Britain, in a peculiarly diasporic idiom (Schwarz2003). As Hall’s work has developed, the diasporic qualities of his thoughthave become more pronounced, not least because he has made them bothincreasingly explicit and increasingly central to his theorizations of the culturesof late modernity. Yet, at the same time, they have represented a continuous�/ and a continuously defining �/ element in his thinking.

In drawing from Smith’s anthropology of Jamaican society, Rojekemphasizes the fact that Hall’s social background was in the brown middleclass. He is able to make less of the fact that Hall himself believes hesubsequently came to be black in London (Hall 1991, 1998). Although Rojekconcedes that this act of becoming black might work for Britain, it cannot �/ hesays �/ work for Jamaica, and results in ‘a muddled message’ (p. 55). Yet, byarguing in this way, Hall is able grasp the mobility of ethnicity and, in thisinstance, the mobility as well of a specifically diasporic identity. To imagine atransformation in ethnic identity in these terms (from brown to black) clearlyrequires of Hall that he employ a concept of race in which mental operations �/

the mind, the imagination, fantasy, culture itself �/ prevail in the categorizationof racial difference. Necessarily, this distances him theoretically from a moreprofoundly empiricist interpretation of race in which, for example, thecategory of brown or black can only work as the pre-given function ofepidermal disposition (Tiens! Un negre!). Yet, for all Rojek’s enthusiasm forMarx, Nietzsche, Baudrillard and the rest, this is how he chooses to proceed,as if race is determined by observable epidermal characteristics. (Otherwise,we must suppose, all is indeed, for Rojek, ‘a muddle’.) How else could he bepersuaded by the ‘power’ of David Cannadine’s arguments about race and

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empire which exactly exemplify this unapologetically reductionist approachtoward ethnic identification (p. 169, p. 45, Cannadine 2001)? Divesting raceof its imaginative properties, in a bid to make it less mobile and thus readierfor synchronic analysis, cuts out too much. It becomes, in effect, a sociologicalformality. In Rojek’s rendition, ‘the fact of blackness’ comes to be subsumedby a matter-of-factness about blackness. It isn’t only the Caribbean that fallsbeyond Rojek’s field of vision; it is his subject’s blackness too.

Rojek’s determination to establish Hall’s English credentials serves totrivialize his blackness. Is this also what the anecdote about his appearance onDesert Island Discs was attempting to convey? To demonstrate that Hall wasn’tan outsider at all, but ‘honoured and accepted’ at the centre, and complicitwith the ethnic codes of the English past? If one listens, though, contrary thingscan be heard which seem not to touch Rojek. Alongside Hall’s expression ofadmiration for Henry James, and for Bach and Puccini, one could also hearBillie Holiday, Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, Wynton Marsalis playing Ellington,and above all, Miles Davis. Rojek knows this, because he lists them �/ or mostof them. But he gives no indication of hearing. These are musics that testify tothe historical experience of servitude in the making of the modern world. Theyare black, both in the sense of the particularity of the history they articulateand more directly in terms of their authorship. They are not, though,exclusively, racially black �/ black in the blood. They possess a greater reachand mobility than that. These are musics that have shaped Hall’s imagination,as he himself explained. Of Miles Davis, he said, ‘he put his finger on my soul’;over the years his compositions ‘matched my own feelings’. The consequencesof this are part of a longer argument. Let me say here, in closing, that these arenot expressions of human life which are disconnected from the creative,critical thinking we associate with Stuart Hall. To grasp these connections,though, we are compelled to think in more imaginative, expansive terms about‘theory’ and ‘politics’, and what each might do. In Hall’s words, the music ofMiles Davis represents ‘the sound of what cannot be’. And what is his ownintellectual practice but the striving, against all odds, to make ‘what cannot be’alive in the imagination? And perhaps in the future . . . be?

Notes

1 Published shortly after Rojek are two student-friendly exegeses of Hall’swork by Helen Davis (2004) and James Procter (2004). The latter textespecially provides a stimulating, persuasive introduction. Hall also appearsas one of a quartet in Grant Farred’s (2003) study, alongside MuhammadAli, C. L. R. James and Bob Marley.

2 There is a further argument here that, given the current dispositions ofcritical theory in Britain, needs to be tracked. This concerns the connections(via Sorel) between Bergson and Gramsci. In part, this has to do with thequestion of duration and temporality. In part it’s to do with the problem of

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method �/ in which Bergson’s reflections on the relation between ‘fixedconcepts’ and ‘mobile reality’ are of the first importance. (Bergson 1999,p. 51) And it is also a matter of the ‘vitalism’ that so deeply touchedGramsci, in which ‘theory’ has to adopt ‘the very life of things’, and inwhich the vocabulary of social myth, poetry and passion are sustained(Bergson 1999, p. 53).

3 Rojek makes no distinction between Englishness and Britishness.4 Thompson draws from Erdman’s great study of Blake (1954) at this point,

though Erdman himself uses the category of antinomianism itself sparingly.5 He misses the opportunity, however, to evaluate Hall’s (1977) contribution

to this debate.6 Earlier he refers to Hall’s television series on the Caribbean, Redemption Song

(BBC, tx 1991), claiming it was about Caribbean migration to the UK(p. 42). It wasn’t.

7 This is having to put a complex historical argument abstractly. It is clearfrom Walmsley (1992) and from James (2003) that, in the political-aestheticfield, these issues dominated debate in the Caribbean Artists Movement,evident especially in two electrifying lectures, subsequently published asBrathwaite (1967�/68) and Goveia (1970).

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46, pp. 275�/284, pp. 39�/51, pp. 115�/124.Cannadine, D. (2001) Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire , Penguin,

London.Chen, K.-S. (1996) ‘Post-Marxism: between/beyond critical postmodernism and

cultural studies’, in Stuart Hall. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies , edsD. Morley & K.-S. Chen, Routledge, London.

Davis, H. (2004) Understanding Stuart Hall , Sage, London.Erdman, D. (1954) Blake. Prophet Against Empire: a Poet’s Interpretation of the History

of His Own Times , Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.Farred, G. (2003) What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals , University of

Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.Gilroy, P., Grossberg, L. & McRobbie, A. (eds) (2000) Without Guarantees. In

Honour of Stuart Hall , Verso, London.Goveia, E. (1970) ‘The social framework’, Savacou , vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 7�/15.Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. & trans. Q. Hoare &

G. Nowell Smith, Lawrence and Wishart, London.Hall, S. (1957) ‘The new conservatism and the old’, Universities and Left Review ,

vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 21�/24.Hall, S. (1958) ‘The deep sleep of England’, Universities and Left Review, vol. 3, pp.

86�/87.Hall, S. (1970) ‘A world at one with itself’, New Society , 18 June.

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Hall, S. (1972) ‘Encoding and decoding in the television discourse’, CCCSOccasional Paper, Birmingham.

Hall, S. (1973) ‘A ‘‘reading’’ of Marx’s ‘‘1857 Introduction’’ to the ‘‘Grun-drisse’’’, CCCS Occasional Paper, Birmingham.

Hall, S. (1974) ‘Marx’s notes on method. A ‘‘reading’’ of the ‘‘1857Introduction’’’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies , vol. 6, pp. 132�/170.

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Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. & Roberts, B. (1978) Policing TheCrisis: ‘Mugging’, the State and Law and Order , Macmillan, London.

Hartley, J. (1996) Popular Reality. Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture , EdwardArnold, London.

Hill, C. (1972) The World Turned Upside Down. Radical Ideas During the EnglishRevolution , Viking, New York.

James, C. (1963) Beyond a Boundary , Hutchinson, London.James, L. (2003) ‘The Caribbean Artists Movement’, in West Indian Intellectuals in

Britain , ed. B Schwarz, Manchester University Press, Manchester.Jessop, B., Bonnett, K., Bromley, S. & Ling, T. (1984) ‘Authoritarian populism,

two nations and Thatcherism’, New Left Review , vol. 147, pp. 32�/60.McGuigan, J. (1992) Cultural Populism , Routledge, London.Morley, D. & Chen, K.-S. (eds) (1996) Stuart Hall. Critical Dialogues in Cultural

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