Table Of ContentCULTURAL STUDIES 1983
Stuart Hall: Selected Writings
A series edited by Catherine Hall and Bill Schwarz
A Theoretical
CULTURAL STUDIES 1983
History
Edited and with an introduction by
Stuart Hall
Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS | DURHAM AND LONDON | 2016
© 2016 Stuart Hall Estate
Introduction © 2016, Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
on acid- free paper ∞
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Minion Pro and Meta
by Westchester Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Hall, Stuart, [date], author. | Slack, Jennifer Daryl,
editor. | Grossberg, Lawrence, editor. | Hall, Stuart, [date].
Works. Se lections. 2016.
Title: Cultural studies 1983 : a theoretical history / Stuart
Hall ; edited and with an introduction by Jennifer Daryl
Slack and Lawrence Grossberg.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Series:
Stuart Hall, selected writings | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016020794 (print)
lccn 2016022037 (ebook)
isbn 9780822362487 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822362630 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822373650 (e- book)
Subjects: lcsh: Culture— Study and teaching. | Critical
theory. | Social sciences— Philosophy.
Classification: lcc hm623.h365 2016 (print) |
lcc hm623 (ebook) | ddc 306— dc23
lc rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2016020794
Cover art: Photo of Stuart Hall by Dharmachari
Mahasiddhi.
contents
vii Editors’ Introduction
Lawrence Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack
1 Preface to the Lectures by Stuart Hall, 1988
5 lecture 1 The Formation of Cultural Studies
25 lecture 2 C ulturalism
54 lecture 3 S tructuralism
74 lecture 4 Rethinking the Base and Superstructure
97 lecture 5 M arxist Structuralism
127 lecture 6 Ideology and Ideological Strug gle
155 lecture 7 Domination and Hegemony
180 lecture 8 C ulture, Re sis tance, and Strug gle
207 References
211 Index
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editors’ introduction
Lawrence Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack
The lectures in this volume were delivered by Stuart Hall in the summer
of 1983 at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign as part of the
teaching institute (which was followed by a conference) called “Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture: Limits, Frontiers, Bound aries,” or ga-
nized by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Both the teaching insti-
tute, June 8–J uly 8, and the conference, July 8–12, have been extremely
influential in shaping the development of cultural theory in and across
a variety of disciplines, including Cultural Studies, Communication, Lit-
erary Theory, Film Studies, Anthropology, and Education. The teaching
institute consisted of seminars taught by Perry Anderson, Stuart Hall,
Fredric Jameson, Julia Lesage, Gajo Petrovi, Gayatri Spivak, and Uni-
versity of Illinois faculty A. Belden Fields, Lawrence Grossberg, and
Richard Schacht. Participants w ere students and faculty from across
the U.S. as well as from several other countries. The conference, with an
audience of over five hundred students and faculty, resulted in a book
of essays and exchanges (Nelson and Grossberg 1988) that reflects the
event’s many interdisciplinary exchanges and includes Hall’s “The Toad
in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists” (35–73). The shape of
cultural theory— its interpretation, directions, scholarship, and teach-
ing—in the U.S. today can be credited in part to the events of that sum-
mer and the book, the extensive interaction of established and young
scholars in the seminars and conference, and the cultivation of a col-
lective sense of the vitality and diversity of Marxist contributions to cul-
tural theory at the time.
These events have been hailed as a particularly significant moment
in the history of Cultural Studies, for although a few people were writ-
ing about and practicing Cultural Studies in the U.S. (and other places
outside of Britain) at the time, and although Hall had given occasional
lectures in the U.S., the teaching institute provided the first sustained
exposure for many intellectuals to both Hall and British Cultural Stud-
ies. At the seminar’s beginning, only a few p eople knew of Hall’s work
and the work of the Centre for Con temporary Cultural Studies, but very
quickly, as news of the exceptional nature of t hese lectures spread, Hall
attracted hundreds of students and faculty, many driving for hours to
attend. The lectures were riveting, and the mood during the lectures was
electric. We had the sense of being part of theory being developed, of
Cultural Studies being made. The lectures were contributing to invigo-
rating Cultural Studies in the U.S. in both subtle and dramatic ways.
Hall had been the first person Richard Hoggart hired at the Centre for
Con temporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. When Hog-
gart left to take up a high-l evel position at unesco in 1969, Hall became
the new director, where he remained u ntil 1980, when he was appointed
Professor of Sociology at the Open University. By the summer of 1983, the
work of the Centre and Hall’s impor tant contributions were gaining vis-
ibility in what were largely minor disciplines (e.g., Communication Stud-
ies and Education) at a number of respected public universities rather
than elite private schools. The Centre’s early work on working- class cul-
ture, media, news and popu lar culture, subcultures, ideology, and semiot-
ics, as well as the now classic study of racism and the new conservatism
(notably a book that predicted the rise of Thatcherism, Policing the Crisis
[Hall et al. 1978]), was neither well known nor widely available outside
the U.K. But while Hall had already become the leading figure and the
most articulate spokesperson for the proj ect of Cultural Studies, few
people outside the U.K. knew of either Hall or the proj ect.
What Hall presented in this series of eight lectures was a personally
guided tour of the emergence and development of British Cultural Stud-
ies as seen from his own perspective. Th ese lectures are, in fact, the first
serious attempt to tell a story about the emergence and development
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viii editors’ introduction
of Cultural Studies at the Centre. Yet they are both less and more than
this, as the 1988 preface he wrote some years a fter the lectures makes
clear. They are not in any sense a history of the Centre. They underplay
the crucial empirical studies and contributions of the vari ous research
groups that formed the heart of the Centre in the 1970s. They largely
bypass the Centre as a space of administrative and orga nizational experi-
mentation that provided the condition of possibility of its intellectual
experimentation. They put aside the crucial and often heated po liti cal
debates and diversity that constituted a vital part of the everyday life of
the Centre and often connected it with po liti cal and artistic activities in
Birmingham (and to a lesser extent, in London and elsewhere).
The lectures offer instead a history of theory. Even then, however, they
could not possibly be a comprehensive account of the rich theoretical
sources, confrontations, negotiations, and paths taken up and rejected,
as well as advances that constituted the formation and history of British
Cultural Studies. For example, it is difficult to miss the lacunae of women’s
voices in this story, when by 1983 there had been significant theoretical
challenges to the influence of patriarchy on subcultural theory and sig-
nificant contributions by feminists to theorizing articulation. The reali ty
of even Cultural Studies’ theoretical history was already then too messy,
uneven, and contested at any and every moment—p aths were taken up
and rejected, some coexisted, and o thers confronted each other with open
hostility— for one person to tell the story adequately, even when that one
person was Stuart Hall. In addition, t hese lectures were further inflected
no doubt by the challenge to contribute to the overall theme of the teach-
ing institute and conference: Marxism’s contribution to the interpreta-
tion of culture.
This collection is also a history of what John Clarke once called “the
diversity that won” and in that sense, it is a history of what had already
become the dominant trajectory of British Cultural Studies. It is the be-
ginning of a story that has Hall’s own development at its center, and, at
least up to the point at which this version of the story ends, it is a story
not so much about Marxism as about the Centre’s history, to use Hall’s
description of theoretical work, of “wrestling with the angels” of Marxist
theory. But it is an encounter with Marxism avant la lettre in a double
sense. On the one hand, Cultural Studies’ roots— both intellectually and
po liti cally (in the New Left)—w ere explici tly defined by a rejection of the
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lawrence GrossberG and Jennifer daryl slack ix
