Stuart Hall Quotes

Yesterday's deconstructions are often tomorrow's orthodox clichés.

culture comes into play at precisely the point where biological individuals become subjects, and that what lies between the two is not some automatically constituted ‘natural’ process of socialization but much more complex processes of formation

Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.

There is no understanding Englishness without understanding its imperial and colonial dimensions.

I have never worked on race and ethnicity as a kind of subcategory; I have always worked on the whole social formation which is racialised

From this I came to understand that identity is not a set of fixed attributed, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a never-completed process of becoming - a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being.

Race is the modality in which class is lived.

If you mean Charles Stuart,' Frances's voice rang out clearly in the hall, 'then calling him "he of whom you were speaking" is hardly a brilliant disguise. And if that is your idea of deep concealment then I don't anticipate great success, on the day of which you have spoken, or any other day, actually.

The right of the labour movement, to be honest, has no ideas of any compelling quality, except the instinct for short-term political survival. It would not know an ideological struggle if it stumbled across one in the dark. The only ‘struggle’ it engages in with any trace of conviction is the one against the left.

In practice, race was a sliding signifier in Jamaica. The social slippage – the sliding of the signifier – was extensive, constitutive of social life itself. There were wide skin colour variations even within the same family, as was the case in my own. Jamaican society gossiped, monitored intensely and speculated riotously about this perpetual, confusing fluidity of the body. When I was a child it’s what Jamaica was. Such

Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture - already fully formed - might be simply "expressed". But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why "popular culture" matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about it.

The very notion of Great Britain's "greatness" is bound up with Empire,' the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, once wrote: 'Euro-scepticism and littel Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood , and rotted English teeth.

Music has been called 'the most noise conveying the least information

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who has written about the philosophical dimension of indigenous thought, reports on a symposium in Manchester, England, where an audience member (who turned out to be Stuart Hall) remarked somewhat skeptically about his talk on “Indian philosophy” that “your Indians seem to have studied in Paris.” By his own account, Viveiros de Castro responded to Hall’s boutade with a boutade of his own: “No, in fact exactly the opposite occurred: Parisians went to study with the Indians.” 138

Consensual' views of society represent society as if there are no major cultural or economic breaks, no major conflicts of interests between classes and groups. Whatever disagreements exist, it is said, there are legitimate and institutionalised means for expressing and reconciling them.

The autumn months are my domain: Mirrored in pools my castles dream Of wars long past and out of mind From towers with ivy garlands twined Weak and with regret the sun Drowns itself in the sluggish green Water that marble fountains weep; Trees open their nests to the wings of sleep. The wind like a phantom seems to roar, Returned to die of love once more At the false meeting of the ways Where a temple rounds its dome in the haze. Sometimes a child is heard to laugh In the house of the priest, far off; His lamp on the ledge of the window gleams Much as the Holy Spirit flames. Then nothing. Only a plane tree sways Its crown of leaves in the dark that graze Slowly and with a sound so alight They barely ripple the silent night. I am the lord of this domain. Through halls of hollow, echoing Armor, I haul the heavy shame Of not being able to be king.

hooks, bell (1990), Yearning, Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, South End Press, Boston. 13 Hall, Stuart (1992), ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Modernity and its Future, eds H. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 274–316. 14 See Denzin, N. and Yvonna S. Lincoln (2000), ‘The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research’, in Handbook of Qualitative Research, second edition, eds N. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln, Sage Publications,

Gramsci used to say 'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'. What he meant is: understand how the bloody system works. What confronts you? The fact that the terrain is not favourable to your project. Understand that, even if it disillusions you, even if it makes you awake at night. Understand it. Then you're in a position to say 'Well what is.... what can change? Where are the emergent forces? Where are the cracks and the contradictions? What are the elements in popular consciousness one could mobilise for a different political program?

So, my dear…” She faced him with thudding heart, the crystal piece clutched desperately in her hand, but she was hardly aware that she even held it. “… You say I have let another man into my bed.” Erienne opened her mouth to speak. Her first impulse was to chatter some inanity that could magically take the edge from his callous half statement, half question. No great enlightenment dawned, however, and her dry, parched throat issued no sound of its own. She inspected the stopper closely, turning it slowly in her hand rather than meet the accusing stare. From behind the mask, Lord Saxton observed his wife closely, well aware that the next moments would form the basis for the rest of his life or leave it an empty husk. After this, there could be no turning back. “I think, my dear,” his words made her start, “that whatever the cost, ’tis time you met the beast of Saxton Hall.” Erienne swallowed hard and clasped the stopper with whitened knuckles, as if to draw some bit of courage from the crystal piece. As she watched, Lord Saxton doffed his coat, waistcoat, and stock, and she wondered if it was a trick of her imagination that he seemed somewhat lighter of frame. After their removal, he caught the heel of his right boot over the toe of the left and slowly drew the heavy, misshapen encumbrance from his foot. She frowned in open bemusement, unable to detect a flaw. He flexed the leg a moment before slipping off the other boot. His movements seemed pained as he shed the gloves, and Erienne’s eyes fastened on the long, tan, unscarred hands that rose to the mask and, with deliberate movements, flipped the lacings loose. She half turned, dropping the stopper and colliding with the desk as he reached to the other side of the leather helm and lifted it away with a single motion. She braved a quick glance and gasped in astonishment when she found translucent eyes calmly smiling at her. “Christopher! What…?” She could not form a question, though her mind raced in a frantic search for logic. He rose from the chair with an effort. “Christopher Stuart Saxton, lord of Saxton Hall.” His voice no longer bore a hint of a rasp. “Your servant, my lady.” “But… but where is…?” The truth was only just beginning to dawn on her, and the name she spoke sounded small and thin. “… Stuart?” “One and the same, madam.” He stepped near, and those translucent eyes commanded her attention. “Look at me, Erienne. Look very closely.” He towered over her, and his lean, hard face bore no hint of humor. “And tell me again if you think I would ever allow another man in your bed while I yet breathe.” -Christopher & Erienne

what was good for survival and reproduction in the African savannah a million years ago does not necessarily make for responsible behavior on twenty-first-century motorways. Distracted, angry, and anxious human drivers kill more than a million people in traffic accidents every year. We can send all our philosophers, prophets, and priests to preach ethics to these drivers, but on the road, mammalian emotions and savannah instincts will still take over. Consequently, seminarians in a rush will ignore people in distress, and drivers in a crisis will run over hapless pedestrians. This disjunction between the seminary and the road is one of the biggest practical problems in ethics. Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls can sit in some cozy university hall and discuss theoretical ethical problems for days—but would their conclusions actually be implemented by stressed-out drivers caught in a split-second emergency? Perhaps Michael Schumacher—the Formula One champion who is sometimes hailed as the best driver in history—had the ability to think about philosophy while racing a car, but most of us aren’t Schumacher. Computer algorithms, however, have not been shaped by natural selection, and they have neither emotions nor gut instincts. Therefore in moments of crisis they could follow ethical guidelines much better than humans—provided we find a way to code ethics in precise numbers and statistics. If we could teach Kant, Mill, and Rawls to write code, they would be able to program the self-driving car in their cozy laboratory and be certain that the car would follow their commandments on the highway. In effect, every car would be driven by Michael Schumacher and Immanuel Kant rolled into one.

Indeed, it’s a virtue for a scientist to change their mind. The biologist Richard Dawkins recounts his experience of ‘a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford’ who for years had: passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artefact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said – with passion – “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red … In practice, not all scientists would [say that]. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal – unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.25 This is what people mean when they talk about science being ‘self-correcting’. Eventually, even if it takes many years or decades, older, incorrect ideas are overturned by data (or sometimes, as was rather morbidly noted by the physicist Max Planck, by all their stubborn proponents dying and leaving science to the next generation). Again, that’s the theory. In practice, though, the publication system described earlier in this chapter sits awkwardly with the Mertonian Norms, in many ways obstructing the process of self-correction. The specifics of this contradiction – between the competition for grants and clamour for prestigious publications on the one hand, and the open, dispassionate, sceptical appraisal of science on the other – will become increasingly clear as we progress through the book. 25. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Books, 2006): pp. 320–21.

The word ‘steward’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘stig’, meaning a hall, and ‘weard’, which is ward, guardian or keeper.

But, above all, the way we understand a message also depends on how we want to understand it. An example is the cult 1960s TV series Star Trek. Many fans interpreted the series as a classic science fiction adventure in space. But the gay community saw the close-knit relationships between the men and the rainbow crew (black African, Asian, Russian, Vulcan) as an allusion to the fact that some of the characters were gay. It is irrelevant that Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry, denied this, because, according to Stuart hall, the message can be changed once it has been received.

There are cots everywhere. They fill the echoey, wooden-floored hall and from each one a small child peers, all eyes. There's not hope, the tiny infants aren't old enough for that, but there's a sort of longing that reaches deep into me and tugs, not on my heartstrings but deeper than that - right into my womb

Our cool factor went off the charts with Stu roaming the halls and performing “Rapper’s Delight” on karaoke nights. He brought a spirit and a style that had never been seen, never been felt before, at ESPN.

The works of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx had been forbidden. Students’ libraries and clubs had been closed; and informers had been planted in the lecture halls. Entry fees had been raised fivefold to bar academic education to children of poor parents.

At the far end of the hall she could make out the raised dais where a throne of black oak stood. Its arms had been carved to represent the forelegs of a bear, and its feet into those of a dragon. And above it hung the battle standard of the Icemark: a standing polar bear, lips drawn back in a vicious snarl and claws outstretched.

Sometimes people say to me that cultural studies thinks culture is everything, but I don’t think that at all. I think culture is very important, more than important ­­ it’s absolutely constitutive. But it’s also one among other things ­­ how could you not be also interested in capital, or war, and be alive today? Of course culture isn’t everything. But culture is a dimension of everything. Every practice exists in the material world and simultaneously signifies, is the bearer of meaning and value. Everything both exists and is imagined. And if you want to play in the area where deep feelings are involved, which people hardly understand, you have to look at culture.

Sometimes people say to me that cultural studies thinks culture is everything, but I don’t think that at all. I think culture is very important, more than important ­­ it’s absolutely constitutive. But it’s also one among other things ­­ how could you not be also interested in capital, or war, and be alive today? Of course culture isn’t everything. But culture is a dimension of everything. Every practice exists in the material world and simultaneously signifies, is the bearer of meaning and value. Everything both exists and is imagined. And if you want to play in the area where deep feelings are involved, which people hardly understand, you have to look at culture.

(The academy had stopped using real swords a few years earlier, after a student had been literally disarmed in class.) I did my best to defend myself, but it was only twenty seconds before I was sprawled on the floor with Professor Simon standing over me, sword raised, ready to shish kabob my spleen. Which was all the more embarrassing, as it happened in front of the entire class. ASP took place in a large lecture hall. My fellow classmates were seated in tiers around me, watching me get my butt kicked by a woman four times my age.

The principal wasn’t using his normal office because I’d blown it up by firing a mortar round into it. (It was an accident.) The damage had been extensive, and since the government was in charge of the repairs, they were taking a very long time. The official completion date was set for three years in the future, but even that was probably optimistic; my dormitory had been waiting to have its septic system replaced since before the Berlin Wall fell. In the meantime, the principal had been moved down the hall. Into a closet.

You’re not expecting us to jump to that?” I asked, worried. “I’m not expecting anything. We’re doing it.” With that, Erica sprang over the railing onto the whale skeleton. She sailed through the air and landed perfectly atop the skull with an agility and finesse I knew I didn’t have in the slightest. I looked around for another way out. The only other exit was blocked by the government agent, who was digging himself out of the dinosaur toys. He had a livid glare in his eye and a plesiosaur jammed in his ear. The SPYDER agents appeared to have lost us, but the government agent was threatening enough. I jumped over the railing. To my surprise, I landed deftly atop the whale skull. Only, the perfect balance thing was completely beyond me. I pitched forward and nearly took a header into the piranha display below. Erica caught me at the last instant and steadied me, but my weight had thrown her off balance too. She now pitched forward herself and had no choice but to leap from the skull and catch onto the lip of the model humpback whale. The cables supporting it strained under the sudden jolt. One snapped free from the ceiling and the whale shifted wildly. Erica swung from the whale’s lip, launched herself into a backflip, and stuck the landing in the middle of the hall. The tourists gathered there all applauded, impressed. As though they figured the Smithsonian had started hiring circus performers to spice things up. Erica looked to me expectantly. So did all the tourists. Now I had potential death and performance anxiety to deal with. Knowing I couldn’t possibly do what Erica had just done, I carefully shimmied down the metal framework that supported the whale skeleton—and still biffed the dismount. I fell backward and landed on my butt atop a large sea turtle. The tourists groaned, like I had let them down.

Buck slipped past his security men and Summer’s bodyguards and dashed for the hall. . . . . . . When Large Marge stepped into his path and punched him in the nose. There was a loud crack, a small spurt of blood, and then Buck dropped flat on his back, unconscious. Marge cracked her knuckles and looked J.J. McCracken square in the eyes. “Who’re you calling incompetent?” she asked.

Boyer, Paul S., and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cross, Tom Peete. Witchcraft in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1919. Davies, Owen. Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gibson, Marion. Witchcraft Myths in American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2007. Godbeer, Richard. The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Goss, K. David. Daily Life During the Salem Witch Trials. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012. Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Knopf, 1989. Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: G. Braziller, 1969. Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987. Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Harlow, England, New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1991. Matossian, Mary K. “Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair.” American Scientist 70 (1970): 355–57. Mixon Jr., Franklin G. “Weather and the Salem Witch Trials.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (2005): 241–42. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Parke, Francis Neal. Witchcraft in Maryland. Baltimore: 1937.

the narratives that become hegemonic are those that reflect the world as seen from the vantage point of the rulers rather than the ruled typically” (2016). We’ll come back to this. Again from Stuart Hall: “First, hegemony is a very particular historically specific and temporary moment in the life of a society. It’s rare for this degree of unity to be achieved, enabling a society to set itself a quite new historical agenda under the leadership of a specific formation or constellation of social forces [with a critical part here]. Such periods of settlement are unlikely to persist forever.” There’s nothing automatic about them. They have to be actively constructed and positively maintained. Otherwise, such hegemonies risk falling apart. We can see this when we see schisms even within the ruling class,

the narratives that become hegemonic are those that reflect the world as seen from the vantage point of the rulers rather than the ruled typically” (2016). We’ll come back to this. Again from Stuart Hall: “First, hegemony is a very particular historically specific and temporary moment in the life of a society. It’s rare for this degree of unity to be achieved, enabling a society to set itself a quite new historical agenda under the leadership of a specific formation or constellation of social forces [with a critical part here]. Such periods of settlement are unlikely to persist forever.

There was no personal bathroom. Instead, there was a communal restroom at the far end of the hall with three ancient toilets that made disturbing noises when you flushed them and four showers that appeared to be a breeding ground for rare foot fungi.

To borrow a formulation from Stuart Hall, race and gender are modalities through which class is lived. In the case of the tech worker movement, they are modalities through which tech workers of the middle layers live the proletarian elements of their contradictory class location.

Stuart Hall (1932–2014), was of the same opinion. In fact, he took the idea further. He believed not only that we are capable of misunderstanding, but that we play an active role in understanding, per se. We interpret, or “decode,” the same message differently, depending on our social class, our level of knowledge, and our cultural background. But, above all, the way we understand a message also depends on how we want to understand it.

Despite Cyrus’s insistence that we be locked up, Tuckernuck didn’t have a prison, or any sort of holding cell at all. The closest thing to a crime that had ever occurred there was when a porcupine had got into the mess hall and eaten all the Doritos.

But deep as this glorious truth (that of the Lord's Supper) may be, it is not the bottom of the cup. Our vicarious burial into Christ's death is deeper still, plunging us ever deeper and deeper into the Savior's precious wounds. Our vicarious participation in Christ's death, our drinking of His cup, is no mere abstract and distant imputation of our sins to Him at the cross. Do we not believe that the cup which Jesus drank, and which we by grace drink with Him, is a cup filled with “wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation” against our sins? Do we not believe in that eye for eye, tooth for tooth, stripe for stripe, and blood for blood, God perfectly measured His unbearable wrath with exactitude, precisely meted out hell's fury against us, and poured the full measure of His indignation into the cup of our Savior's suffering? Do we not believe that the sufferings of Christ transcend His mere physical sufferings in Pilate's hall or upon Golgotha's hill? Do we not believe that in the hour and power of darkness, when the moon turned to blood and the sun to blackness as sackcloth of hair, that there beneath the ebony sun and crimson moon, a great transaction between the Godhead, a holy transaction too terrible for human eyes to gaze upon, and too wonderful for the minds of men and angels to comprehend? And it is in this moment of Christ's submersion into the dark and scarlet billows of Divine wrath that we see deeply, not only to the bottom of the cup, but also into the deepest meaning of immersion as the only accurate symbolic representation of Christ's horrific burial in the sea of God's wrath.

confrontation of two ideas of society and they deal with it according to the innermost essence of the drama-the two societies confront one another within the mind of a single person."" James focused on the human personality of Toussaint. As Stuart Hall notes, "James imagined Toussaint as a Shakespearean figure with the tragic form built in" and "had classical Greek tragedy and Shakespeare at the very forefront of his mind at every turn."56

As Mary’s veil and black outer garments were removed, stifled cries of shock and astonishment reverberated around the hall.

Yes, you have survived, but it is bittersweet; some of the best minds of your generation have been wasted, the children that grew up with the safety blankets of money and whiteness have gotten twice as far working half as hard, they are still having the same cocaine parties that they were having twenty years ago and they still have not ever been searched by the police once, let alone had their parties raided or been choke-slammed to death. They have just bought a flat in Brixton; they go to one of the new white bars there. They pop up to the new reggae club in Ladbroke Grove, the one that serves Caribbean food but also gets nervous when more than two black guys turn up. They have no idea that the building used to be a multi-storey crack house. By twenty-five, even if you don’t read Stuart Hall, if you grew up both black and poor in the UK you will have come to know more about the inner workings of British society, about the dynamics of race, class and empire than a slew of PhDs ever will. In fact, PhDs and scriptwriters will come to the hood to drain your wisdom for their ethnographic research, as will journalists next time there is a riot. They will have careers, you will get a job. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Unfortunately for Jemma, all of this prevented me from doing what she probably wanted most: simply closing the bathroom door. It now swung all the way open, so that Jemma was still fully visible on the toilet when three more Secret Service agents came charging up the stairs. All of them had their weapons drawn, ready for action. Jemma screamed again, then kicked the bathroom door shut in their faces. The agents now shifted their attention to me, yanking me off the floor and shoving me up against the wall. Several pairs of hands roughly frisked me at once. I tried to explain what had happened, but the first Secret Service agent had knocked the wind out of me when she’d tackled me. All that came out was a wheeze of air. “Miss Stern?” the biggest of the agents called through the bathroom door. “Miss, is everything all right in there?” “No, everything isn’t all right!” Jemma yelled back. “That little pervert walked in on me!” “It was an accident,” I gasped. “She hadn’t locked the door.” “I shouldn’t have to lock the door in my own house!” Jemma cried. “This is the most secure building in the country! I wasn’t expecting a pervert to be on the loose here!” The Secret Service agents all looked at me accusingly. “I’m not a pervert,” I said quickly. “I’m a friend of Jason’s, here to hang out.” This didn’t seem to convince the agents of anything. “I wasn’t informed of any playdate today,” the big agent said. “It’s not a playdate,” I said quickly. “And it was kind of last-minute. Maybe they forgot to tell you.” “Or maybe you’re a pervert who snuck in here to see Jemma Stern on the toilet,” the agent replied suspiciously. The agent who’d tackled me was massaging her back where she’d been gouged by the stuffed eagle. She pounded on Jason’s door and said, “Jason, could you please come out here?” “I’m busy!” Jason shouted back. I figured he had certainly heard all the commotion in the hall but was willfully ignoring it. “It’s a matter of national security,” the wounded agent said. Jason groaned, and then the sound of his video game paused. His footsteps slowly thumped across the floor. “Could you all possibly handle this somewhere else?” Jemma asked through the bathroom door. “I could really use some privacy.” “We’re taking care of this as quickly as we can, miss,” the female agent informed her. “Feel free to go on with your business.” “You have got to be kidding me,” Jemma groaned.

On patrol in the halls outside, making sure no one catches us by surprise.” “Like we did?” I asked. “Yes,” Mike replied. “Apparently, their patrolling techniques could use some work.

So, I reject the capitalization of ‘black’. When, out of a lack of anything more suitable, we are driven to use terms that should be contested – terms that are, in the words of Stuart Hall, ‘under erasure’ – we should be seeking to destabilize them. It’s the reason that throughout this book I frequently place inverted commas around ‘black’ and ‘white’, intentionally disrupting the comfort with which we rely on that terminology. It’s for this same reason that I flinch when I hear the term ‘mixed race’, that most pernicious of racial classifications. While I completely understand why some people use the phrase to describe themselves (there are few satisfactory alternatives), any argument that insists that someone must use a term that exists to reinforce the ‘truth’ status of a system that is chaotic, nonsensical and violent, a term that further perpetuates the idea that race is a biological reality, is really not the neutral, commonsense position it might claim to be.

In the second half of the twentieth century, however, such seemingly self-evident or logical claims to identity have been problematised radically on a number of fronts by such theorists as Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Collectively, their work has made possible certain advances in social theory and the human sciences which, in the words of Stuart Hall (1994:120), have effected 'the final de-centring of the Cartesian subject' (cf. Chris Weedon, 1987; Diana Fuss, 1989; Barbara Creed, 1994). Consequendy, identity has been reconceptualised as a sustaining and persistent cultural fantasy or myth. To think of identity as a 'mythological' construction is not to say that categories of identity have no material effect. Rather it is to realise—as Roland Barthes does in his Mythologies (1978)—that our understanding of ourselves as coherent, unified, and self-determining subjects is an effect of those representational codes commonly used to describe the self and through which, consequendy, identity comes to be understood.

The audience as community has come to depend on the performer’s skills, and on the force of a personal style, to articulate its common values and interpret its experiences.

By noon, three climbers from our group descended toward me: Stuart Hutchison, Lou Kasischke and John Taske (Frank Fischbeck already had turned back). They said there was a slowdown at the uppermost part of the mountain at Hillary Step, a natural obstacle on the ridge leading directly to the summit. Because of the bottleneck of climbers, the three of them realized there was no way they could make the summit by two. So Stuart, Lou and John decided to come down, and as they came by me, standing alone, getting colder and colder on the Balcony, they said, “Well, come on down with us.” “Uh, I’ve really put myself in a box here,” I answered. “I’ve promised Hall I will stay put. We have no radio, so I have no way to tell him that I’m leaving. It would be as if I never honored that commitment at all. I just don’t think I can do that now.” They said good-bye and continued on down. Three wise men. In retrospect I clearly should have joined them. But I didn’t then sense I was in any imminent danger. It was a perfect day. Also, even though I knew that I was not going to climb the mountain that day, I still hated to give up. To go down with them would be to absolutely concede I’d failed.

The storm relented on the morning of the eleventh. The winds dropped to about thirty knots. Stuart Hutchison and three Sherpas went in search of Yasuko and me. They found us lying next to each other, largely buried in snow and ice. First to Yasuko. Hutchison reached down and pulled her up by her coat. She had a three-inch-thick layer of ice across her face, a mask that he peeled back. Her skin was porcelain. Her eyes were dilated. But she was still breathing. He moved to me, pulled me up, and cleaned the ice out of my eyes and off my beard so he could look into my face. I, like Yasuko, was barely clinging to life. Hutchison would later say he had never seen a human being so close to death and still breathing. Coming from a cardiologist, I’ll accept that at face value. What do you do? The superstitious Sherpas, uneasy around the dead and dying, were hesitant to approach us. But Hutchison didn’t really need a second opinion here. The answer was, you leave them. Every mountaineer knows that once you go into hypothermic coma in the high mountains, you never, ever wake up. Yasuko and I were going to die anyway. It would only endanger more lives to bring us back. I don’t begrudge that decision for my own sake. But how much strain would be entailed in carrying Yasuko back? She was so tiny. At least she could have died in the tent, surrounded by people, and not alone on that ice. Hutchison and the Sherpas got back to camp and told everyone that we were dead. They called down to Base Camp, which notified Rob’s office in Christchurch, which relayed the news to Dallas. On a warm, sunny Saturday morning the phone rang in our house. Peach answered and was told by Madeleine David, office manager for Hall’s company, Adventure Consultants, that I had been killed descending from the summit ridge. “Is there any hope?” Peach asked. “No,” David replied. “There’s been a positive body identification. I’m sorry.

conditions, but in the social and cultural aspects of working-class life in that period, a certain pattern of culture, a certain set of values, a certain set of relationships between people. He sees how people who didn’t have access to a great deal of the material goods made a life for themselves, how they created and constructed a culture which sustained them. Of course, it sustained them in positions of subordination. They weren’t the masters and mistresses of the world. They weren’t people who were going to

lead anything, but they were able to survive. And they survived with dignity. Their lives constituted a pattern of culture: not the authenticated, valorised, or dominant pattern of culture, not the literate and “cultured” pattern of culture, but something he wants to call “a culture” nevertheless. He evokes that early traditional working class—which the leader of the Labour Party has said is disappearing forever—and he tries to “read it” in the same way he would read a piece of prose. He describes the kind of working-class home in which he was raised; he looks at how they arrange their living rooms, at the fact that even if the house is going to rack and ruin, there is always one place in it for visitors. Nobody else in the house ever goes into it. They may

Indeed his methodology is exactly that of an ethnographer, listening first of all to the language, to the actual practical speech which people use, to the ways they sustain relationships through language, and to the ways they categorise things.

But while there were economic and political questions about the nature of this socioeconomic system, which looked so different from British societies in the past, it was also perfectly clear that the major transformations were not so much political and economic as cultural and social. But that raised yet another fundamental question: Namely, what are the tools with which one tries to understand the nature of subtle and often contradictory cultural change? And it also assumed, very importantly,

that if you can understand the changes that are taking place in the culture of the society, you will have a very important strategic clue to understanding broader changes in society’s nature and how it is working. I have begun

The New Left recognised the importance of cultural change in this period, but found little help in the existing Marxist bag of tricks; for the most part, the concept simply didn’t appear. I will return shortly to the question of the early forms of Marxist thinking about the problem of culture. My point, however,

This is the “American phase” in British life. Until

then, people, especially Marxists, thought—knew—that Britain was the first paradigm industrial society, that everything, from expansion to the tendential decline in the rate of profit, happens first in Britain. But in the postwar period they have to confront the fact that the paradigm case, for all of Western Europe, suddenly

changes which can be identified with American culture’s taking the historical lead in a global context: the diminishing sharpness of class relations; the drifting and incorporation of sectors of the working and lower-middle classes into the professional and nonprofessional commercial classes; the beginnings of mass cultures; the massive penetration of the mass media and the beginnings of a television age; the rapid expansion of a consciousness led by consumer advertising, et cetera. Consequently, British intellectuals and politicians alike had to confront questions about the nature of mass culture and mass society, about the changes taking place in an affluent, capitalist, developed, industrial society, and those questions

questions had to be seen in American terms for the first time. When the Labour Party lost for the second time in the 1959 election, people were predicting that the Conservatives would be in power for a hundred years (thankfully they weren’t, but it looked endless). The leader of the Labour Party, trying to explain what had gone wrong to the 1959 Labour conference, reached into his analytic tool bag and blamed the telly, and the fridge, and the secondhand motorcar, and the women’s magazines, and the disappearance of the working-class cloth cap, and the fact that people didn’t go to the whippets anymore. The breakdown of cultural life explained what had gone wrong! Consequently, the next question that had to be faced was

War quite frequently disrupts the chain of normal relations, including class, in a society. And while it doesn’t create new trends

from nothing, ab initio and ex nihilo, it does provide the circumstances in which trends already lying deep within the society can, as it were, move at an accelerated pace, enabling them to appear and break through the resistances of normal life more easily and rapidly than under normal conditions. It is clear that significant changes began

of English culture. That personal experience

Cambridge didn’t know it existed and, if it had known, it wouldn’t have known how to talk about it because it had no language for it. How could it? Cambridge is addicted to notions of culture which depend upon that which is written down in books, and the Welsh valleys have no books. They have an oral culture; they have a traditional culture;

the basis for a (cultural) community lies in the sharedness of those definitions of historical experiences. People locate themselves as belonging to a community because within it, some experiences are common

and some of the ways in which they have been defined and understood are shared. How are they shared? Through the interactive communication between the members of that community. Consequently, all the means of communication—language and media in their broadest senses and not just the narrow sense of communication as the transmission of information (in which Williams is not interested)—provide the ways through which the individuals within a community, culture, or society exchange and refine their shared meanings and in which they collectively and socially define what it is they are going through. Culture, for

Consequently, social order is dependent on constraint. Those who are not within the normative order are subject to control, preferably being induced back into the structure. It is within this conception of social order that Durkheim talks about crime as more than an infringement of the social or normative order, for it takes on a symbolic importance within every society by creating the opportunity for the ritual act of punishing those who are the exception to the rule. Only through punishment does a society reaffirm its normative integration and the power of its normative

Thus, while Williams demonstrated that the existing literary canon can itself be reread in historical and cultural terms, he was unable to reflect on the degree of selectivity implicit within it, on the ways in which it is determined by the circumstances of its production, and on the ways it too easily ignores the languages and voices which have been excluded from the traditional culture. A dominant and traditional culture

But of course it is not in their accents, not with the same measure and impact of experience as in the language of those who speak for themselves. That is why it is important in reconstituting

The contrast between these two cultural experiences and their inevitable impact on one another is not unlike the experience of migration—from one class to another, from one town to another, from the country to the city, or from the periphery to the center. It makes you instantly alive to the forms and patterns which have shaped you and which you have left behind, intellectually at the very least, for good. I say “intellectually at the very least” for it is almost as inevitable that you will try, symbolically at least, to return to it. Williams wrote a number of rather undisguised autobiographical

Then it is clear that the dominant culture is working effectively, and in a hegemonic way. Hegemony here is evidenced by the fact that the dominant culture need not destroy the apparent resistance. It simply needs to include it within its own spaces, along with all the other alternatives and possibilities. In fact, the more of them that are allowed in, and the more diverse they are, the more they contribute to the sense of the rich open-ended variety of life, of mutual tolerance and respect, and of apparent freedom. The notion of incorporation

incorporation points to the extremely important idea that the dominant ideology often responds to opposition, not by attempting to stamp it out, but rather by allowing it to exist within the places that it assigns, by slowly allowing it to be recognised, but only within the terms of a process which deprives it of any real or effective oppositional force.

of an interest in and a theory of subcultures rests upon a clear transposition from deviance theory, although its questions are often presented in a more social interactionist framework: What is the definition of the situation of a particular group? How does it differ from the dominant definitions? How are those whose definitions differ brought, invited, urged, or constrained back into the mainstream? What is the process by which the deviant is labeled? What is the importance of the excluded for the maintenance of the dominant collective representations? Thus, despite their perfectly straightforward lineage from mainstream sociological

homologous with those of other practices in the same social formation. One may

[Cultural] identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.