While Stuart Hall was not a sociologist his work has a clear and lasting relevance to practitioners of the discipline, especially to those interested in culture. Along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams he was a founder of a school of thought known as ‘British Cultural Studies; he was a founder too of the New Left Review in the 1950s. One of the central themes of his considerable body of work was that language-use operates within a framework of power through an assembly of institutions and political and economic relations. People simultaneously produce and consume culture. Culture, in short, is a ‘critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled.’
According to Hall, a statement or communication must be perceived as meaningful discourse and meaningfully ‘decoded’ before it has an effect, a use, or satisfies a need. Michelle Barrett dwells on the idea of ‘cultural circuity’ here: ‘there is a circuit that is completed between the production and consumption of culture.’ Four codes in the context of Hall’s ‘encoding/decoding model’ of communication. The first manner of encoding is the dominant or ‘hegemonic’ code. This is the paramount prevailing code that the encoder normally expects the decoder to recognise and decode. The second way of encoding is the professional code, which operates in tandem with the dominant code: ‘it serves to reproduce the dominant definitions precisely by bracketing the hegemonic quality and operating with professional coding.’ The third way of encoding is the negotiated code. Whilst acknowledging the dominant code the focus here is more on the situational and local and therefore on the potential for and likelihood of ‘exceptions to the rule’. The fourth manner of encoding involves the oppositional or globally contrary code. In this case the hearer/viewer is pre-prepared to decode the communication in a deliberative and non-literal – or oppositional – fashion.
Hall explores the relevance of this type of analysis for grasping the socio-cultural salience of communication via television programmes. Boundaries of meaning are set by the institutional relations at play in its production: there exists a technical infrastructure, for example, and there are frameworks of knowledge within which it is situated. We are not talking determinism here, but these ‘boundaries’ circumscribe the meanings that can be produced, or encoded, into the broadcast. As Michelle Barrett argues, ‘all the factors affecting the moment of encoding can be seen to be related to power’ (ie the ‘preferred reading’ of the dominant or hegemonic encoding). As we have seen, however, this does not necessarily mean that other ways of decoding are ruled out (eg see the negotiated or oppositional codes above). To labour the point, the programme might be constructed – encoded – in line with the dominant code, but this biases rather than determines people’s decoding. The encoding/decoding model both emphasises the salience of power and offers a critique of what were at the time Hall was writing orthodox sociological ‘media studies’ and theories of mass communication.
Culture for Hall was a critical element of power. But he ventures an alternative to both the mechanistic descriptiveness of media studies and the unambitious and reductive nature of the sociology of art and literature. In relation to Marx and Marxists, he puts a distance between himself and those who see cultural processes as essentially driven by economic interests, persisting in the view that they are superficial in comparison with the deep social structures of class. Gramsci was a key influence for Hall. This is perhaps most obvious in his analysis of Thatcherism (see his ‘The Great Moving Right Show’). He saw Thatcher as instigating a distinct and significant move to the right. Controversially, he argued that Thatcher drew her strength and based her programme on an ideological force, not vice versa. What Thatcher did so successfully was translate a theoretical ideology into a popular ‘idiom’, deploying in particular the language of moralism. In Hall’s words, she combined ‘the resonant themes of organic Toryism – nation, family, duty, authority, standards, traditionalism – with the aggressive themes of a revived neoliberalism – self-interest, competitive individualism, anti-statism’. These comprised the building blocks of a ‘new’ hegemonic project. The route to understand Thatcherism, Hall insisted, is to grasp the deep nature of the shift towards authoritarianism at a popular level. Blair’s rationale, best seen as a ‘free-market Christian populism’, should be seen against this background. Events, Barratt contends, have shown Hall’s prescience.
Hall is known too for his writings on race. He saw the history of colonialism as not only about the impact of imperialism on colonised people, but in terms of how the character of Western modernity was constituted through its difference from the colonial ‘other’. He examined European representations of their encounters with indigenous peoples, focusing on their constructions of barbarism, cannibalism, and so on. This, he averred, was a discourse predicated on European power. As Barrett writes: ‘they ‘had outsailed, outshot and outwitted peoples who had no wish to be ‘explored’, no need to be ‘discovered’ and no desire to be ‘exploited.’ This power influence what they saw, how they saw it, and also what they did not see.
‘Cultural identity’, Hall initially argued, is ‘a sort of collective ‘one true self’ … which many people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common.’ Accordingly, cultural identity affords stability via an historically continuous frame of reference. Black people living in the diaspora need therefore only to ‘unearth’ their African past to gain access to their true identity. But Hall went on to recognise that there exist points of profound and critical points of ‘difference’. Cultural identity, he elaborated, is not a fixed essence rooted in the past. Rather, it is ‘subject to the continuing play of history, culture and power.’ Cultural identities, he wrote, ‘are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.’
Focusing on Caribbean identity, Hall discerned three phases. The first is the ‘African presence’, which, although characterised by the repression of slavery and colonialism, is ‘hiding in plain sight’ in all facets of Caribbean culture and society. Indeed for many black people living in the diaspora Africa represents an ‘imagined community’ which they associate with a sense of belonging. The second phase in that of the ‘European presence’. Like it or not, this presence has become an inextricable part of people’s own identities. The third and final phase is the ‘American presence’. This is where, in Halls words, ‘the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West’, and it is where the displacement of the natives occurred. Given that the Caribbean identity is a mix of this trio of presences, Hall suggests it is characterised by hybridity. These theses figure eloquently in Hall’s autobiography, entitled Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands.
Stuart Hall’s corpus can be seen as part and parcel of what is often termed the ‘cultural turn’, its focus being making good the neglect of culture in classical sociology. Moreover, his personal contributions on the problematics of ‘representation’ have stood the test of time. If his early work can easily be placed in the Marxist camp, what about the later writings? They are frequently viewed as ‘post-Marxist’, not least because of the attention he paid to thinkers like Foucault and Derrida. But he never came to abandon the role and causal input of the economic sector. For him, the concept of the cultural circuit introduced above encompassed production as well as consumption. And it was from the vantage point of socialism that he criticised the ‘third way’ of Blairism. For Hall, though, the (cultural) superstructure mattered as well as the (economic) infrastructure.
Reference
Michelle Barrett (2017) Stuart Hall. In Ed Rob Stones: Key Sociological Thinkers (3rd Edition). London; Palgrave McMillan.