Stuart Hall
Culture and media are battlegrounds of power: audiences can read messages against the grain, and identities are always being made, never simply inherited.
Placement
Co-founder of British cultural studies: media messages are encoded and decoded, and cultural identities are not fixed origins but positions, made in history and power.
Key ideas
- Encoding/decoding
- Hegemony and “Thatcherism”
- Identity as positioning
- Diaspora and new ethnicities
Students: Paul Gilroy
Influence
Influenced by 7
Karl Marx
influenced by ✓
In a close reading of Marx’s 1857 Introduction (1974) Hall derived a non-reductive method of articulation; later he sought a ‘Marxism without guarantees’ (‘The Problem of Ideology’, 1983). S. Hall, “Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘Reading’ of the ‘1857 Introduction’”, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 6 (1974); “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees” (1983)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Antonio Gramsci
influenced by
Hall used Gramsci’s hegemony to read Thatcherism, an ‘authoritarian populism’, as a struggle for consent, and stressed his relevance to race and ethnicity (1986, 1988). S. Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity”, Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986); The Hard Road to Renewal (1988); SEP “Antonio Gramsci”
Evidence: AI draft
Antonio Gramsci › 1891–1937
Roland Barthes
influenced by
Hall used Barthes’s denotation and connotation, and his analysis of myth, to show how television encodes preferred meanings (‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, 1973). S. Hall, “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse”, CCCS Stencilled Occasional Paper 7 (1973); R. Barthes, Mythologies (1957); Éléments de sémiologie (1964)
Evidence: AI draft
Roland Barthes › 1915–1980
Raymond Williams
influenced by
Hall counted Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) among the founding texts of the ‘culturalist’ paradigm of cultural studies (‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms’, 1980). S. Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms”, Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980); R. Williams, Culture and Society (1958); The Long Revolution (1961)
Evidence: AI draft
Raymond Williams › 1921–1988
Frantz Fanon
influenced by
Hall reread Black Skin, White Masks (1952) for Fanon’s account of racism lived through the gaze and the body (‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon’, 1996). S. Hall, “The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?”, in A. Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness (1996); SEP “Frantz Fanon”
Evidence: AI draft
Frantz Fanon › 1925–1961
Michel Foucault
influenced by
Hall adopted Foucault’s concept of discourse to study representation as the production of knowledge and power, not the mere reflection of meaning (‘The Work of Representation’, 1997). S. Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997), “The Work of Representation”; SEP “Michel Foucault”
Evidence: AI draft
Michel Foucault › 1926–1984
Nicos Poulantzas
influenced by
Hall read Poulantzas’s State, Power, Socialism as moving beyond the structuralism of his early work, towards the state as a condensation of class forces (1980). S. Hall, “Nicos Poulantzas: State, Power, Socialism”, New Left Review 119 (1980); N. Poulantzas, L’État, le pouvoir, le socialisme (1978)
Evidence: AI draft
Nicos Poulantzas › 1936–1979
Influenced 1
Paul Gilroy taught
taught
Gilroy wrote his doctoral thesis (1986) at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which Hall had directed until 1979; the Holberg Prize biography names Hall and Richard Johnson as his supervisors. Holberg Prize, laureate biography of P. Gilroy (2019)
Evidence: AI draft
Paul Gilroy › b. 1956
Criticism
Criticizes 1
Louis Althusser influenced by
influenced by
Hall took from Althusser the relative autonomy of ideology and overdetermination, and counted structuralism, beside culturalism, as one of the two paradigms of cultural studies (1980). S. Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms”, Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980); L. Althusser, Pour Marx (1965); SEP “Louis Althusser”
Evidence: AI draft
criticised
Hall valued Althusser’s theory of ideology but objected that it explains reproduction too functionally, leaving no room for contradiction and struggle (‘Signification, Representation, Ideology’, 1985). S. Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates”, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (1985), 91–114
Evidence: AI draft
Louis Althusser › 1918–1990
Works
Media messages are encoded with a preferred meaning, but audiences may decode them in dominant, negotiated or oppositional ways.
Position
Hall helped turn the study of culture – television, youth subcultures, popular music, the press – into a serious field of social analysis. Against the idea that audiences simply absorb what the media transmit, his “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (1973) argued that messages are encoded within dominant codes but may be decoded in a dominant, a negotiated or an oppositional way. Drawing on Gramsci, he analysed hegemony as a never-finished struggle for consent. Policing the Crisis (1978, with colleagues) showed how a moral panic about “mugging” in the early 1970s linked race and crime and prepared the ground for authoritarian politics; in January 1979, months before Margaret Thatcher’s election, he coined the term “Thatcherism” for this new “authoritarian populism”. In his later work on race, ethnicity and diaspora Hall argued that cultural identities are not an essence rooted in a fixed past but “positionings” produced within history, language and power; Black British and Caribbean identities are made through movement and mixture. His non-reductive Marxism, open to Althusser, Foucault and Fanon but critical of every determinism, shaped cultural studies worldwide.
Life & context
Stuart Hall was born in 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica, into a colour-conscious middle-class family. In 1951 he went to Merton College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar to study English, and never returned to live in Jamaica. He was a central figure of the British New Left and in 1960 became the founding editor of New Left Review. In 1964 Richard Hoggart brought him to the new Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, which he led from 1968 – at first as acting director – until 1979. He was then professor of sociology at the Open University until 1997, reaching a wide audience through its broadcast teaching. He died in London in 2014.
Further main works
- “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (1973)
- Resistance Through Rituals (co-ed., 1975)
- Policing the Crisis (with others, 1978)
- “The Great Moving Right Show” (1979)
- “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990)
- Familiar Stranger (with Bill Schwarz, posthumous, 2017)
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