by SHONALEEKA KAUL
Cultural Studies 1983 by Stuart Hall
The book is a cogent summation of the most influential modern theories that have grappled with and tried to explain the dynamics of unequal societies and the cultures they produced.
CulturalL Studies 1983 is a slim but power-packed book. Its curious title derives from the fact that the volume brings together a set of seminal lectures that Stuart Hall, the pre-eminent British public intellectual from Birmingham, delivered during a summer school at the University of Illinois (United States) in 1983. While the lectures are, therefore, nearly three decades old, they have appeared in print posthumously; Hall passed away in 2014.
The field of theory, however, is evergreen: the rigour and dialectics of a piece of genuine philosophical cogitation or criticism remain alive and appealing for centuries, a continuing source of intellectual edification and instruction. So, while Hall may not have been a Plato or an Abhinavagupta, his mastery over some of the iconic theoretical formulations of the 20th century Marxism, structuralism, semiotics, deconstructionism—and, more importantly, his ability to engage with them, and indeed better them, with perfect lucidity makes him memorable and relevant even in the 21st century. As the book description claims, here was a thinker and a discipline—cultural studies—that perhaps changed the course of critical scholarship and of political imagination and strategy.
At this juncture, a rewind is called for. What is this discipline called cultural studies and what does it have to do with all these politically charged schools of thought? The term culture is itself notoriously hard to define in any one way. Among the meanings associated with it is a way of life or the shared values and practices that any given social group hold in common. In popular usage, it is understood to refer to such things as literature, music, art, ritual beliefs and festivals.
However, a closer look may reveal the truth of Hall’s sardonic observation that “extremely slippery, vague, amorphous, and multifarious”, culture “is one of those concepts which, unlike the State, tends to wither away and disappear the more you work on it… [it is] a displaced field because so much of what one requires to understand cultural relations is not, in any obvious sense, cultural” (page 4).
So while a seemingly innocuous field of scholarship, cultural studies as it developed in the United Kingdom, especially at Birmingham University in the 1950s and 1960s where Hall headed a new, dedicated centre, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, turned out to be a study not so much of culture as of the politics it presupposes or the structures of power that may underwrite it. Uncovering such structures or making visible the subterraneous workings of power has given rise to much theorising. Cultural Studies 1983 is a cogent summation of the most influential modern theories that have grappled with and tried to explain the dynamics of unequal societies and the cultures they produced.
Marx and culture
Of all those theories, it is explicitly Marxism that predominates in the eight lectures collected in this book. More specifically, Marxism’s contribution to the interpretation of culture. In classical Marxism, however, that would have been something of a contradiction in terms. For, Marx originally was understood as dismissing culture or certainly subordinating and reducing it to economics. This was captured in that metaphor central to Marxist thought, namely, the base determining the superstructure.
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