The death of Stuart Hall (cultural theorist and political philosopher), much like his life and work, has got me thinking.We live in an age where to look beyond the appearance of things is to be Marxist…
I have not written for sometime. I am busy with life and working and when not playing GTA5, I am scribbling notes and reading about the political economy of post-capitalism in order to fulfil a promise to write an article that is becoming a book….Then something happens. An event occurs that pulls my attention from the day to day, from Marx’s critique of political economy, from the mean streets of Los Santos and reawakens old lines of thought.
Stuart Hall died today…No! Not that one
I have long been an admirer of Hall’s thought. His work has influenced my academic trajectory and helped form many of my stances both politically and methodologically. Many of my friends and peers studied the course he founded at the University of Birmingham. I find myself surprisingly saddened by his passing. Although I never met Hall personally, I feel we have lost something important. Britain is left with a Hall shape void where our prominent public intellectuals should be. This is a void that cannot be filled by Nigel Farage – no matter how much the Daily Mail may wish it to be, nor can it be filled by Russell Brand – no matter how much the Daily Mail would hate it to be.
Hall, a Jamaican immigrant, arrived on these shores at the beginning of the 1950s and became one of our greatest intellectuals. His position as a ‘familiar stranger’ gave him piercing insight into British culture and politics. Nobody has written as eloquently and intelligently about the political discourse of Thatcherism (a word he is credited with coining) and it’s New Labour legacy as Hall.
The Labour election victory in 1997 took place at a moment of great political opportunity. Thatcherism had been rejected by the electorate. But 18 years of Thatcherite rule had radically altered the social, economic and political terrain in British society….The historic opportunities for the left required imaginative thinking and decisive action in the early stages of taking power, signalling a new direction. The other choice was, of course, to adapt to Thatcherite, neo-liberal terrain. There were plenty of indications that this would be New Labour’s preferred direction. And so it turned out
Interestingly, the death of perhaps our greatest living (until today) public intellectual comes at a time when intellectuals have never been so vilified and hated in British culture. Not only do we live in an age where the tabloid media stages fierce character assassinations against our great thinkers such as Eric Hobsbawn and Ralph Miliband, but we also live in a time when style is elevated over substance – where the appearance of the thing holds more value than what the thing is or how it really works. We are more likely, today, to listen to the musings of Miley Cirus or Amy Willerton on the nature of being, political economy or political discourse than anyone who has actually studied these things. We are encouraged not to look at deeper causes or develop any kind of understanding of phenomena. It is as if Marx’s methodological drive to look past appearances – that he noted to be highly deceptive – and understand the true workings of things has been taken to mean that anything other than a superficial or ‘common sense’ explanation is Marxist. There are endless examples –
- The August 2011 riots were simply caused by weak minded looters – seeking any other explanation is to be an apologist .
- The 2008 global financial crash was caused by too much public spending by a Labour Government in the UK. No matter if the data show that Labour was not spending very much before the crash, nor the fact that the crisis clearly did not start in Britain. The data is Marxist.
- Austerity is needed because we have over spent and a nation’s economy works exactly like a household budget
- The plight of the working poor is caused by scroungers living on hundreds of thousands of pounds in hand outs. If there are ‘Marxist’ statistics to dispute this the Government will come along with their handy made up but ideologically sound ones to counter the ‘Marxist Bias” that apparently exists in all data and evidence
It appears that intellectuals and their data are all Marxist – which has become another word for evil. We would appear to despise “Marxist” intellectuals with their “Marxist” evidence. Why do we need these crazy Marxists when we have common sense? Do not think, dear reader, that this viewpoint only exists in the tabloid press and is the preserve solely of those on the Right. Indeed when debating on forums I have noticed how even those (who claim to be) on the Left dismiss intellectual arguments in favour of ‘common sense’. In political debate – on TV or on politics forums – to move beyond the ‘obvious’ appearance of phenomena and understand their workings is treated with suspicion or dismissed as pretentious (this is a major reason why I debate less often than I used to).
The old skool Marxist response to this anti-intellectualism and the fetishisation of appearance over substance, is to dismiss it as ‘false conciousness’. In this view most Daily Mail readers (along with my ‘friends of the left’ who inhabit debating forums) have been brainwashed by bourgeois discourse. Bombarded by the media, these passive receivers of tabloid nonsense have been indoctrinated to support the Iraq war, hate the EU and despise the most vulnerable in society. This argument is clearly bollocks (that’s the technical term). However if we cannot rely on false conciousness, how do we explain this anti-intellectualism, the elevation of appearance over substance and vast swathes of the working classes backing policies that harm them directly whilst advancing the interests of those who are exploiting them. To answer this question we need look little further than to the work of Stuart Hall.
I have addressed this question myself, in this parish and elsewhere. However I make the grievous sin of deploying the word HEGEMONY to do so. By doing this I am exposing myself (apparently) as a pretentious intellectual who is ‘hiding behind big words’ that nobody can be bothered to look up. However hegemony is too useful a concept in this discussion not to use. It is a concept that Hall borrows from Gramsci (who borrowed it from Lenin) and in each iteration its meaning has shifted. When I use hegemony, I use it to mean the expansion of common sense (an idea I got from Hall). The irony here has not escaped me. I am criticised for using a term that describes the expansion of common sense because it does not fit into people’s basic vocabulary of common sense!
Hall’s greatest contribution to our understanding of politics is not his musings on Thatcher and New Labour but rather the way he systematically deals with the issue of common sense and how it is transmitted by the media and received by us. For Hall we are not passive receivers of the tabloid media’s views and prejudices, nor does the media simply reflect our views and prejudices. Rather there is a complex interaction inherent within any interpretation. Discourse is articulated socially and this is informed by our identities and the various cultural baggage we bring to any interpretation of the text/ TV report or whatever. There is no objective meaning in the text itself. Meaning is given by the reader whose interpretation is partially structured by their identity and experiences. As Wikipedia succinctly puts it:
[A] “text”—be it a book, movie, or other creative work—is not simply passively accepted by the audience, but that the reader / viewer interprets the meanings of the text based on their individual cultural background and life experiences. In essence, the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader.
The ability of a newspaper to persuade us is related to how we interpret it and how well it sits with our own framework for how we make sense of the world (through the lens of our identify and prejudice and values etc) – in other words – our common sense. Contesting common sense thus becomes the most important battle for the Left. Unlike Miliband’s Bourgeois Dinner Party (the term “Labour” Party no longer seems appropriate to me) we must not accept the terms of the debate. We must not continue to allow appearance to trump the data. We must say – “NO! the 2008 crisis was NOT caused by too much spending” , ” Unemployed people make up 3% of the benefit bill; they cannot be responsible for your low pay”. The government are being forced to make up statistics time and again – as all the evidence – on the economy, on welfare and on public spending – appears to be Marxist. This should be a huge problem for this government but it isn’t. This is because although all the data and evidence are “Marxist”, the government have (the increasingly neo-liberal) common sense on their side and couple that with a few dodgy stats and it is more powerful than any evidence or Marxist demystification.
Stuart Hall on Media and Representation (Link)
Now I could never advance this argument more eloquently than Stuart Hall and so I will finish by quoting at length from one of his last (if not the last) published texts (written with Alan O’Shea).
When politicians try to win consent or mobilise support for their policies, they frequently assert that these are endorsed by ‘hard-working families up and down the country’. Their policies cannot be impractical, unreasonable or extreme, they imply, because they are solidly in the groove of popular thinking – ‘what everybody knows’, takes-for-granted and agrees with – the folk wisdom of the age. This claim by the politicians, if correct, confers on their
policies popular legitimacy.In fact, what they are really doing is not just invoking popular opinion but shaping and influencing it so they can harness it in their favour. By asserting that popular opinion already agrees, they hope to produce agreement as an effect. This is the circular strategy of the self-fulfilling prophecy. But what exactly is common sense? It is a form of ‘everyday thinking’ which offers us frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the world. It is a form of popular, easily-available knowledge which contains no complicated ideas, requires no sophisticated argument and does not depend on deep thought or wide reading. It works intuitively, without forethought or reflection
[…]
It is not the property of the rich, the well-educated or the powerful, but is shared to some extent by everybody, regardless of class, status, creed, income or wealth. Typically, it expresses itself in the vernacular, the familiar language of the street, the home, the pub, the workplace and the terraces. The popularity and influence of the tabloid press – one of its main repositories – depends on how well it imitates, or better, ventriloquises the language and gnomic speech patterns of ‘ordinary folk’. In the now-famous example, it must say not ‘British Navy Sinks Argentinean Cruiser’ but, simply, ‘Gotcha’.
[…]
Slowly but surely, neoliberal ideas have permeated society and are transforming what passes as common sense. The broadly egalitarian and collectivist attitudes that underpinnedthe welfare state era are giving way to a more competitive, individualistic market-driven, entrepreneurial, profit-oriented outlook…after forty years of a concerted neoliberal ideological assault, this new version of common sense is fast becoming the dominant one.
One common-sense assertion that has become widely acceptable is: ‘You can’t solve a problem just by throwing money at it’ – often aimed at Labour’s ‘tax and spend’ policies. True, perhaps. But there are very few problems which would not be considerably alleviated by being better funded rather than having their budgets savagely cut. The right’s use of this slogan is of course highly selective: they have no qualms about money being ‘thrown’ at the banks or at the economy via quantitative easing.
