March 21, 2025 • 33 mins
🎓 Christoph Burgmer im Gespräch mit Stuart Hall (1932-2014). Der Kulturtheoretiker, Soziologe und Marxist Stuart Hall ist einer der bedeutensten Denker am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts. Er gilt als Erfinder des Begriffs ”Thacherismus” und als Begründer der ”Cultural Studies”. Er erforschte Zusammenhänge von Kultur, Macht und Identitäten. Stuart Hall hat zwar 17 Ehrendoktortitel, selbst jedoch nie promoviert. Er war 1960 Gründungsmitglied und Herausgeber der New Left Review, von 1969 bis 1978 Direktor des ”Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies” an der Unversität Birmingham und unterrichtete später an der 1969 gegründeten Open Univercity mit Sitz in Milton Keynes nördlich von London, der größten Universität Großbritanniens. Seine Arbeit fand zumeist im Kollektiv mit anderen statt. / 🎓 Christoph Burgmer talks to Stuart Hall (1932-2014). A cultural theorist, sociologist and Marxist, Stuart Hall is one of the most important thinkers of the early 21st century. He is considered to be the inventor of the term ‘Thacherism’ and, as the founder of ‘cultural studies’, has examined questions of culture, power and identity. Stuart Hall holds 17 honorary doctorates, but has never been awarded a doctorate. He was a founding member and editor of the New Left Review in 1960, director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham from 1969 to 1978 and then taught at the Open University, founded in 1969 and located in Milton Keynes, north London, Britain's largest university. Most of his work was carried out in groups with others. /🎓 Christoph Burgmer s’entretient avec Stuart Hall (1932-2014). Théoricien de la culture, sociologue et marxiste, Stuart Hall est l’un des penseurs les plus importants du début du 21e siècle. Il est considéré comme l’inventeur du terme « thachérisme » et, en tant que fondateur des « cultural studies », il s’est penché sur les questions de culture, de pouvoir et d’identités. Stuart Hall est titulaire de 17 doctorats honorifiques, mais n’a jamais obtenu de doctorat. Il a été membre fondateur et éditeur de la New Left Review en 1960, directeur du « Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies » à l’université de Birmingham de 1969 à 1978 et a ensuite enseigné à l’Open Univercity, fondée en 1969 et située à Milton Keynes au nord de Londres, la plus grande université de Grande-Bretagne. Son travail se déroulait le plus souvent en collectif avec d’autres. /🎓 Кристоф Бургмер в беседе со Стюарт Холл (1932-2014). Теоретик культуры, социолог и марксист Стюарт Холл - один из самых важных мыслителей начала XXI века. Он считается изобретателем термина «тахеризм» и основателем «Культурологии», занимаясь вопросами культуры, власти и идентичности. Хотя Стюарт Холл имеет 17 почетных докторских степеней, сам он так и не защитил докторскую диссертацию. Он был одним из основателей и редактором журнала New Left Review в 1960 году, директором Центра современных культурных исследований при Бирмингемском университете с 1969 по 1978 год, а затем преподавал в Открытом университете, основанном в 1969 году и расположенном в Милтон-Кейнсе к северу от Лондона, крупнейшем университете Великобритании. Его работа в основном проходила в коллективном сотрудничестве с другими людьми.
📚 Veröffentlichungen u.a. / publication o.a./ Publications, entre autres / منشورات من بين منشورات أخرى: - Stuart Hall auf Deutsch im Argument Verlag Hamburg mit zahlreichen Veröffentlichungen. - Stuart Hall en francais: - Stuart Hall: ”Race, ethnicité, nation. Le triangle fatal.”, trad. Jérôme Vidal, Paris, Editions Amsterdam, 2019. -Stuart Hall in Englisc
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Audioarchiv Team (00:08):
Welcome to Audio Archive, the channel for historical interviews with female writers, philosophers,
activists, and intellectuals from around the world.
Stuart Hall (00:35):
Hello.
anmod (00:35):
We met Stuart Hall in his flat in 2002 and had a conversation lasting over an hour and a half.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932 and passing away in London in 2014, Stuart Hall is arguably
the most significant thinker and philosopher at the beginning of the 21st. Century.
(00:56):
As one of the founders of the so-called Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall's theories not only overcame
the centuries-old Eurocentrism in philosophical and political discourses, making him undoubtedly
one of the most significant figures in global discourse.
(01:19):
Stuart Hall himself also ventured into intellectual territory, a discoverer who emancipated
himself from over 500 years of European categories of thought, becoming increasingly radical.
From Stuart Hall's perspective, current political and philosophical discourses appear as fear-laden
retreats into past, supposedly national certainties, as first initiated by Thatcherism in Europe.
(01:46):
Racism and modern class societies, fuelled by nationalist ideologies and embedded in historical
distortions, have been reshaping global realities of impoverishment and exploitation for decades.
While the world struggles with death, the elites representing it refuse to address it.
Such nationalist esoteric policies seem, in the face of climate change, to stem from the horror
(02:12):
cabinet of the nineteenth century and, as before at the beginning of the 20th.
Century, inevitably leading to a new global war.
Stuart Halls anti-imperialist and anti-racist epistemology can thus also be understood as a concrete
counterpoint to the current denial of reality.
Burgmer (02:33):
Identities are never uniform. In late modernity, they appear increasingly fragmented and torn, never clear-cut.
Identities are constructed from different, opposing, antagonistic discourses, practices, and positions. Mr.
Hall, in our conversation, the question of the construction of identity, specifically cultural
(02:56):
identity in its relation to racist structures, should be addressed.
However, first we should clarify a conceptual question.
What do you mean when you speak of identity?
More precisely, to what extent does this concept differ from terms like personality or individuality?
Stuart Hall (03:26):
Doesn't stand still. I mean, in this respect, I'm a sort of Deridian.
In the sense that Derrida says, many of the modern terms of modern philosophy are what he calls
under erasure, they have a sort of line drawn through them.
That means we can no longer use them as we've been accustomed to use them in the classical discourses of philosophy and analysis.
(03:52):
But we can't do without them either, because we don't have any terms to replace them.
So we have to use them remembering that they have lost something from the way in which they
were embedded in discourses in the past, and they haven't assumed another fully formed conceptual status.
And I think that is what has happened to identity.
(04:14):
Currently, and I think it's still in many disciplines, identity is exactly what is unified about
us is the inner sense that we have of ourselves.
The one true identity really the thing that is left over after we strip away our socially learned habits.
And so on there's the core of ourselves and that is our true identity.
(04:36):
So when you begin your question by referring to something which I've said extensively in my
own writing recently, which is that identities have never been unified, and now they are even
less unified than they used to be.
This is running right against our common sense, way of understanding what identities mean.
So I have to preface by saying that we can't any longer rest on our definitions in a way we
(05:00):
have to define the terms we are using as we use them. All right?
Well, so the notion of identity is surrounded by a number of other cognate terms, individual subject subjectivity.
And so on I use the term identity to mark or to refer to those positions which we have taken up in discourses.
(05:25):
So for me, identity is already as if we're a public or social positioning of the self, it doesn't refer.
Therefore, to our true inner selves, sort of as it were outside of society, it's not a psychological term.
It has to do with the fact that all practices have subjects take political practices and the
(05:47):
political agent, well, how do we, as individuals, find ourselves summoned into place in a certain
discourse, so that we can speak that discourse and practice it in the world now.
I mean, if you think about identity in that way, it has elements of subjectivity in it.
Because subjectivity for me has very much to do with the formation of the inner subjective and,
(06:12):
indeed, psychic and unconscious self.
And every position that we take up in discourse has emotional and psychic investments in it.
That's to say it has identification.
If we don't identify with the positions, we don't take them up.
I mean, it's a very important finding in relation to our understanding of politics.
(06:32):
You can have a class politics out there and you can have an individual who does not feel identified
with the subject of that class discourse.
He may be a working class man.
But it just doesn't feel that he doesn't identify with the position held open for the working
class subject in the way in which working class politics is being practiced at that moment without
(06:55):
identification, he doesn't show up historically in that space at all he's somewhere else.
And this goes back to a very profound problem, especially a problem for the left and a problem
for Marxists who imagined that so long as you have a discourse that summons people into place,
they will always show up in it.
And then Marxism was terribly surprised to find that the proletariat kept refusing to show up where they were summoned.
(07:22):
They kept being summoned into place and they just weren't there or weren't there in the way
in which they were expected to be. By the predictable discourse.
So identity is for me positional and by the virtue of that it does mean that our identities
within different discourses are slightly different.
So my identity as a father in the discourse of the family doesn't exactly correspond with my
(07:46):
identity as a professor in a department or my identity as a political activist in the community politics.
These are three different positionalities.
Now, of course, it's true that unless I'm completely schizophrenic, I have to make some sense
of these different positions that I find myself in so I think identities, if they acquire any
(08:07):
stability, have to have what I call the narrative.
That's to say they have to have a storyline, which says you are somewhat different in the family,
from how you are at work, from how you are in politics.
But this is the way in which I can make sense of connecting those positionalities together.
So the narrative hitches one position to another and broadly speaking, our cultural identities
(08:32):
are the sum of the different positionalities which we have taken up through the course of our lives.
Burgmer (08:38):
Why do we need a discussion, another discussion after the Enlightenment, after Foucault, after
the postmodernists, after Derrida, about cultural identity at all?
Stuart Hall (08:54):
My conception does draw from a great deal from Foucault, importantly from Derrida, though I'm
not a Deridian, I'm not a philosopher, but importantly from Derrida.
In the sense that I think Derrida's conception, concept of difference, is extremely important
in understanding questions of race.
So I'll come back to that later on postmodernism is a tricky one.
(09:17):
I draw less on postmodernism.
And for this reason, because postmodernism's conception of identity is absolutely free floating, yes, that's to say.
It suggests identities are completely unfixed from their historical social location. They are discursive.
And so you can take up any position that you like.
(09:38):
It's what I call the smorgasbord conception of identity.
You'd have sausages today and vegetarianism tomorrow and a bit of this and a bit of that now.
I think identities are not fixed, but that doesn't mean that they're free floating.
They're tethered in historical conditions, which have a long tendential securing effect on identities.
Audioarchiv Team (10:01):
Now the interview continues. Like us, if you like it.
Stuart Hall (10:05):
You take up another position, but you carry the baggage of the positionalities that you've been in.
You have to make sense of your new position in terms of the positions you've held before.
So of course the story isn't just made up the story is an evolving story and continually has
to make sense retrospectively of where it's been.
I say in this sense, identity is.
Burgmer (10:25):
Not the concept of Benjamin.
Stuart Hall (10:27):
Yes, of course, it's very much a conception of Benjamin.
Yes, which each time, each present rereads history in the light of the present needs.
And each identity rereads the identity's past in the light of the needs of that identity in
relation to a current and future practice.
In that sense, those positionalities, they're not fixed by nature, they're not fixed in some
(10:50):
economic determinism or psychoanalytic determinism, but they are secured by historical look.
So a slogan might be that identity is not, as we used to imagine it, a question of roots, r
o o t s, but it is a question of roots, r o u t e s, the roots, the paths, the journeys by which
(11:10):
we have come to the present, which leave their traces on our speech, on our action, on our sense
of our subjective selves and our sense of the world, which we can't do without.
So we're building up all the time this kind of mindset towards the world.
And though we can take different positions, we can't forget or ignore or just slough off the
(11:32):
past in a kind of postmodernist amnesia.
So postmodernism doesn't contribute a great deal to me, but Foucault does, although Foucault
doesn't like the term identity, he never uses it.
So I think I have a more kind of social positional sense of the importance of the subject.
I don't think the subject is quite so fully constituted exclusively by the discourse, I think
(11:58):
there is some residue for instance.
I think you do have to ask something about the psychic processes.
Well, Foucault doesn't want to ask about psychic processes, because he has a particular view
of what psychoanalysis is about.
So, in Foucault, the subject doesn't carry any residues in itself.
It can be historically relocated after the next historical break.
(12:18):
I don't quite think that's so.
I think there are long term tendential, psychic and locational.
We've paid our dues somehow, and therefore I'm not quite a Foucault in that sense.
Though, of course, I've been tremendously influenced by Foucault.
And Derrida is a different kind of case.
I don't know, Derrida wouldn't use the term identity, but it's not.
(12:42):
I think his position is not a social analysis.
Berth Mayan is interested in how individuals get located or positioned in social discourses
and begin to speak the discourses into which they're interpreted and can then become agents
or actors within conditions, of course within that discourse in a practice.
(13:07):
And I think that is a kind of Gramsci conception.
Although Gramsci is not thought to be a philosopher of the subject.
In any sense, Gramsci does understand that the subject is partly historically formed.
As he says, it's full of the traces of the past, the archaic layers of the past, which you can't get rid of.
(13:27):
On the other hand, it is capable of shifting because it is also oriented towards the future.
Burgmer (13:33):
Towards future action we have exactly, when we now come to Gramsci, the difference between concepts
like subjectivity and the new concept of identity?
Stuart Hall (13:45):
Oh yes, there are big differences.
You know, when I quote when I refer to a theorist like that.
I don't mean that I believe or subscribe to everything they say.
And I'm not at all unaware of the differences of historical conditions in which we operate.
Yes, so I'm quoting talking about Gramsci.
Insofar, as my thinking about the present has been influenced by things that Gramsci thought in his moment.
(14:10):
And of course, subject and subjectivity have been transformed in the intervening period, principally
by, for me, by a theoretical source we haven't mentioned yet, principally by feminism.
It's the combination of feminism and psychoanalysis, which has transformed our understanding
of subjectivity long before Foucault and the subject could.
Burgmer (14:32):
Could you elaborate on that a bit more?
Stuart Hall (14:34):
You know, feminism, with its slogan 'the personal is political', broke down, destroyed those
artificial distinctions between the public and the private and opened, as it were, the domain
of the subjective into the public.
It says the public is saturated by what we normally think of as subjective feelings, subjective
(14:56):
emotions, etcetera, it's partly a kind of gender structuring, gendered theoretical construct
of the public and so emotion, subjective feeling, identification, all of that is thought of
as a feminine thing and men are actors in the world, etcetera, etc. Etc.
When feminism began to question this artificial boundary, I think those old subject-object,
(15:19):
subjective-objective distinctions, which are deeply large, especially in versions of Marxism,
were just untenable as an understanding of the political world.
Well, I don't want to say, you know, I don't want now to rehearse all that follows, that enormous
number of things follow that.
But one of the things that follows it is of course not just the subjectification or the subjectivising
(15:41):
of the public world, but the politicising of the subjective world.
So personal feelings, the family, sexuality become political questions.
And there Foucault is extremely important because he says yes, there is power everywhere.
So there's a kind of, in my mind, there's a kind of convergence between these interests in the subject and the subjective.
(16:02):
Even although they're not theoretically consistent with one another, and they don't like one
another, they oppose one another.
Nevertheless, for my purposes in rethinking questions of identity, I can draw on what feminism
has done about introducing the subjective, on what psychoanalysis has done about teaching us
about the importance of the psychic dimensions of identification and what Foucault has done
(16:24):
in showing us that the subject is always a historical construct.
Burgmer (16:28):
You suggest considering the concept of cultural identity as strategic and positioning.
What does that mean for the political subject?
Stuart Hall (16:40):
Well, there are two questions there, and I would prefer to take the question separately, okay,
so let me address the question.
First of all, what does this conception of identity do in relation to race?
And that's a theoretical question.
How that theory then translates into politics is, of course, a very important issue, but a separate one. Let's talk about theoretical.
(17:02):
Now, race is one of the deepest, most persistent and unchanging structures.
It looks like an atavistic structure.
Sociologically, it should have disappeared.
Long ago, the very definition of modernity is to rise above those attachments to locality and
(17:22):
kinship and to become more cosmopolitan.
So the joke, the terrible joke at the heart of modernity is that in spite of our advanced technological
sophistication, our mobility, the multiplication of social distinctions underneath the archaic
structures of race continue to map out some of our most profound responses to other people,
(17:48):
people who are different from us and to the world.
This is one of the most important elements in the dark side of modernity.
And in a way, it's surprising to me that Adorno, who philosophically saw that modernity has
its dark side, didn't quite understand how profound.
If he had introduced the question of race and colonialism and the non-European other into his
(18:13):
paradigm, you know, it would have exploded that discourse of the Enlightenment long ago, but
he stayed in, but he stayed within a more European framework. Nevertheless, he's absolutely right.
Yes, that we now have to think of the Enlightenment as always carrying its progressive and its dark side along simultaneously. Okay?
So race has this kind of fixed structure.
(18:35):
And its fixed structure, in my terms, arises precisely from what I was talking about before.
It arises from the fact that race is organised around essentially its genetic and biological features.
It is thought to be a deep structure, so deep that it is unchanging, which is why it's very difficult to shift.
(18:56):
Now, in fact, as a social practice, the most obvious manifestation of race is not general or biological.
It is where the biological features of different peoples, of different origins are taken as the signifiers of difference.
So colour operates as a way of connecting the genetic structures which we can't see to the visible world.
(19:19):
So we sort of read what we think the differences which are racial and genetic from how people
look, the shape of their noses, the colour of their skin, the quality of their hair, etcetera;
you can tell the Chinese from the Africans, etcetera.
And we think that each of these refers to a deep, unseen structure which gives all the differences,
(19:39):
generates all the differences, what makes them sly and devious and criminal and unintelligent and primitive.
So now, what does an unfixed, non-essentialist conception of identity have to do with race?
In my view, what it does is challenge this notion of the fixture of racial structures and racial
(20:04):
practices and suggest that what we see here is not that race is in fact a naturally, biologically,
genetically grounded structure, but that it is a social structure which naturalises itself in the genetic.
Because once the discourse naturalises itself in the genetic, you can't argue with it.
(20:26):
You can argue with class.
Because obviously you can do something about class, you can redistribute the wealth; you can't
argue with race once you've grounded it in the genes because you can't redistribute the genes.
So it's a beautifully logical structure, but in my view, it isn't a structure of that kind at all.
Actually, we know that there is nothing biologically or genetically that grounds the differences
(20:49):
in that way, that the differences within a so-called racially defined population are as great
as the differences between them.
So the biological reach of race is, in my terms, the Form of its legitimacy.
In that sense, I think all identities remain unfixed, including racial ones.
(21:12):
So you cannot predict the political position of a black person simply from the fact that they are black.
Well, you might say yes, but most of them are anti-racist. Yes, but they're anti-racist.
For historical reasons, not anti-racist because of their genes.
They're anti-racist because people who look like them have been discriminated against century after century after century.
(21:35):
So they've looked, learned something historically.
Which is that if you look like this, you're going to be discriminated against.
You're going to fight against it, but it's not because there is some genetic tick which, you
know, somebody in New York or MIT will discover, which is the kind of anti-racist gene.
Any more than there's a good baseball gene or a good basketball gene.
In African Americans, they've learned to play basketball because they weren't allowed to play football or baseball.
(22:01):
When they're allowed to play baseball, they're good at it.
So these are historical structures which have sort of legitimacy in nature, in biology.
And the problem is that anti-racism has not contested that biological routing.
It has tended to accept the biological routing, but simply to counter the argument.
(22:23):
It says yes, we are black because we are genetically so, but we are good, not bad. Now, you know.
The problem about this is that it is founded on an incorrect philosophical principle.
The fact is that we are bad or good but it doesn't have anything to do with what our genetic structure is.
We just happen to look different from one another, and that is socially very important.
(22:45):
I'm not denying this at all.
Racism is a social discourse which uses physical biological characteristics of difference in
order to construct relationships of power.
If I were designing a racial society, I could design it around blue eyes. It doesn't matter.
What provided you have a difference.
(23:06):
Powell can use the difference to say that's what makes this group that has it better and that
group that doesn't have it worse in that sense.
Race is just an extreme form of many of the discourses of dispossession, of the exercise, of
power, of colonization, of marginalization that we see elsewhere.
(23:27):
But it is a particularly deep and rooted structure because unlike class differences but rather like gender differences.
Audioarchiv Team (23:41):
Now the interview continues. Like us if you like it.
Stuart Hall (23:46):
And that's why there are many rather more similarities between racism and discrimination around
gender than there are around class.
I'm not suggesting class is unimportant, but I think its dynamic is different, because people
can clearly see that class relates to how wealth was distributed to a history which you could do differently.
But gender and race seem to be something.
Burgmer (24:11):
Edwards' time has identified the construction of the other historically as a European colonial
project, with the aim of not only making the differences clear physically but also ideologically
convincing the colonised people that the whites, the Europeans are superior, thereby legitimising the rule as necessary.
(24:36):
What consequences does this concept, this evolved concept of the West still have on the perception
of Western people in relation to others in the present?
Stuart Hall (24:48):
I think that said is essentially correct.
I think his book on orientalism is one of the most important and profound post-war texts, and
it has generated enormous work.
Its impact is profound in shifting people's understanding.
Understanding, it is quite a subtle thesis, because as you say, it's not just about economic
(25:11):
and political colonisation which we know about, but it is also about ideological colonisation.
It's also ideology doesn't quite catch it any longer.
It's also about the construction of knowledge of the other, far away from the colonial project
as an imperial or economic process in the secluded halls of scholarship.
(25:35):
The knowledge of what we know about otherness, what we know about difference etcetera, is constructed
around that relationship between colonised and coloniser.
My own view is that the reason why we are coming to this rather late is that the history of
colonisation has been written as if it's the kind of sub-history of a relatively small but powerful number of European societies.
(26:04):
I don't see colonisation like that.
I see colonisation as part of the process which begins at the end of the fifteenth century of Europe's move out.
So it's part of exploration, conquest then colonisation, then imperialism, then neo-imperialism,
(26:24):
then the new international order.
This is globalisation, this is the process of modernism, and colonisation is central to it.
Now I keep going back, because much of my formation has been in a sort of quarrel or argument with Marxism.
But western Marxism has always treated colonisation as a subordinate story.
(26:48):
Capitalism evolved out of the heart of Europe.
Europe, kind of, did it to itself organically.
It forgets that capitalism in the rest of the world marched at the head of the missionaries
and the troops and the navy and the merchants.
The rest of the world entered modernity through violence, not through the peaceful transformation
(27:08):
of feudal society into a market society.
And over a long period of time, it happened at once, it happened through the imposition, the arrival.
You know, that picture of Columbus's ship sailing into this other world is where the modern story begins, begins then.
So I think colonisation as a general process, and I mean by that not only where the Europeans
(27:30):
actually occupied the country, but where European ideas took over, or where European markets
and products led, I think that process of colonisation is absolutely central to the history
of capitalism, which is the history of modernity.
So what we have learned in recent times is that the post-colonial question does not only relate
(27:54):
to ex-metropolitan powers that had some colonies.
It has to do with the whole historical relation between Europe and its others.
The whole history of Europe and its others is a history inscribed in the process of colonisation.
So the idea that because governors pull down flags in Hong Kong and African states run up their
(28:16):
own flags etcetera, that this political transformation of independence and national independence,
important as it is as a process in the post-war world, the idea that that unlocks and unpacks
what Fanon calls the colonisation of the mind is, you know just it does not, is not.
(28:38):
It seems to misunderstand how historical processes work.
This is a long-running process, and of course, racism is at the centre of this process.
Because as I described earlier on, it was always a process driven by forms of power, which took
difference as its mode of operation because they are uncivilised and we are civilised because
(28:59):
we have the boats and they don't because we have the guns, they don't because we have the science
and they don't because we have the printing presses and they don't always around.
Difference, which is a difference of culture, a difference of look, a difference of religious
beliefs, a difference of governmentality, doesn't matter what the line of difference is always
(29:21):
articulated around Europe and its others.
So this is what is being reworked now.
This is what this new phase of globalisation, the process I've been describing is what globalisation is.
It begins in fourteen ninety-two.
But these new forms of globalisation, what is being worked out is some the beginning of the
(29:42):
reordering reorganisation of the deep historical balance between Europe and its others and by Europe.
I mean, of course, North America, because I'm talking culturally now.
Yes, I don't just mean the European societies.
I mean, the European societies that were involved in this process that Marx correctly described here.
Marx is right, that it begins with the story of the global now.
(30:07):
The global has taken six centuries to become what it is today.
But we are still in the process of globalising the world.
I did say, the process by which every corner of the globe in very uneven and disjunctive ways
become as it were related to modernity, it cannot stand outside of modernity may stand very
(30:30):
far to its edges, may not have very much of it.
But what happens to it is in somehow related globally.
And that is the, you know, that's the profound shift which is going on now.
So colonisation is sort of deeply part of that much bigger historical story which the historians,
(30:51):
I'm afraid, have told us in a rather marginal way.
You learn the history of Britain and then, if you want to do it, you can take a special paper
in the empire as if it's outside there, as if it has nothing to do with the inside.
What is happening here and said is one of the people who helped us to understand this is the
(31:11):
breakdown of the Derridian destruction between inside and outside.
The story of colonisation is inside the heads of every Englishman to be English is to be different from those others.
That is how its identity is constructed.
Now we know that identity depends on difference.
(31:31):
That identity is always constructed against the constitutive outside.
We know how important it has been for Englishness that it is not France, not Germany, not Spain,
not those southern Mediterranean hotheads, certainly not North Africa, and so on.
The world is mapped out psychically in concentric circles from the centre, which is us, to them at the periphery.
(31:57):
And that is going to take the most enormous effort.
That's what the twenty-first century is about (32:01):
the most enormous upheavals for people whose
identities, cultural identities, and Englishness have been constructed exactly on those historical experiences.
Layer after layer after layer, for five centuries, have to somehow learn to position themselves
(32:21):
differently in relation to the other, and have to understand that they are other to the other.
They are as different from the point of view of the other as the other is to them; who they
are depends on who they are not, and so on.
What this is really like for Europe, which has been the centre until now, we don't know.
(32:44):
And it's not an optimistic story.
I'm telling you, the question mark is still there as to whether Europe can become other to itself
in this profound historical, psychological, and philosophical way.
Audioarchiv Team (32:59):
Thank you for being with Audioarchiv.
Follow us, so you won't miss an episode.
And don't forget the like button. See you next week. Your Audioarchiv Team.
Welcome to Audio Archive, the channel for historical interviews with female writers, philosophers,
activists, and intellectuals from around the world.
Stuart Hall (00:35):
Hello.
anmod (00:35):
We met Stuart Hall in his flat in 2002 and had a conversation lasting over an hour and a half.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932 and passing away in London in 2014, Stuart Hall is arguably
the most significant thinker and philosopher at the beginning of the 21st. Century.
(00:56):
As one of the founders of the so-called Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall's theories not only overcame
the centuries-old Eurocentrism in philosophical and political discourses, making him undoubtedly
one of the most significant figures in global discourse.
(01:19):
Stuart Hall himself also ventured into intellectual territory, a discoverer who emancipated
himself from over 500 years of European categories of thought, becoming increasingly radical.
From Stuart Hall's perspective, current political and philosophical discourses appear as fear-laden
retreats into past, supposedly national certainties, as first initiated by Thatcherism in Europe.
(01:46):
Racism and modern class societies, fuelled by nationalist ideologies and embedded in historical
distortions, have been reshaping global realities of impoverishment and exploitation for decades.
While the world struggles with death, the elites representing it refuse to address it.
Such nationalist esoteric policies seem, in the face of climate change, to stem from the horror
(02:12):
cabinet of the nineteenth century and, as before at the beginning of the 20th.
Century, inevitably leading to a new global war.
Stuart Halls anti-imperialist and anti-racist epistemology can thus also be understood as a concrete
counterpoint to the current denial of reality.
Burgmer (02:33):
Identities are never uniform. In late modernity, they appear increasingly fragmented and torn, never clear-cut.
Identities are constructed from different, opposing, antagonistic discourses, practices, and positions. Mr.
Hall, in our conversation, the question of the construction of identity, specifically cultural
(02:56):
identity in its relation to racist structures, should be addressed.
However, first we should clarify a conceptual question.
What do you mean when you speak of identity?
More precisely, to what extent does this concept differ from terms like personality or individuality?
Stuart Hall (03:26):
Doesn't stand still. I mean, in this respect, I'm a sort of Deridian.
In the sense that Derrida says, many of the modern terms of modern philosophy are what he calls
under erasure, they have a sort of line drawn through them.
That means we can no longer use them as we've been accustomed to use them in the classical discourses of philosophy and analysis.
(03:52):
But we can't do without them either, because we don't have any terms to replace them.
So we have to use them remembering that they have lost something from the way in which they
were embedded in discourses in the past, and they haven't assumed another fully formed conceptual status.
And I think that is what has happened to identity.
(04:14):
Currently, and I think it's still in many disciplines, identity is exactly what is unified about
us is the inner sense that we have of ourselves.
The one true identity really the thing that is left over after we strip away our socially learned habits.
And so on there's the core of ourselves and that is our true identity.
(04:36):
So when you begin your question by referring to something which I've said extensively in my
own writing recently, which is that identities have never been unified, and now they are even
less unified than they used to be.
This is running right against our common sense, way of understanding what identities mean.
So I have to preface by saying that we can't any longer rest on our definitions in a way we
(05:00):
have to define the terms we are using as we use them. All right?
Well, so the notion of identity is surrounded by a number of other cognate terms, individual subject subjectivity.
And so on I use the term identity to mark or to refer to those positions which we have taken up in discourses.
(05:25):
So for me, identity is already as if we're a public or social positioning of the self, it doesn't refer.
Therefore, to our true inner selves, sort of as it were outside of society, it's not a psychological term.
It has to do with the fact that all practices have subjects take political practices and the
(05:47):
political agent, well, how do we, as individuals, find ourselves summoned into place in a certain
discourse, so that we can speak that discourse and practice it in the world now.
I mean, if you think about identity in that way, it has elements of subjectivity in it.
Because subjectivity for me has very much to do with the formation of the inner subjective and,
(06:12):
indeed, psychic and unconscious self.
And every position that we take up in discourse has emotional and psychic investments in it.
That's to say it has identification.
If we don't identify with the positions, we don't take them up.
I mean, it's a very important finding in relation to our understanding of politics.
(06:32):
You can have a class politics out there and you can have an individual who does not feel identified
with the subject of that class discourse.
He may be a working class man.
But it just doesn't feel that he doesn't identify with the position held open for the working
class subject in the way in which working class politics is being practiced at that moment without
(06:55):
identification, he doesn't show up historically in that space at all he's somewhere else.
And this goes back to a very profound problem, especially a problem for the left and a problem
for Marxists who imagined that so long as you have a discourse that summons people into place,
they will always show up in it.
And then Marxism was terribly surprised to find that the proletariat kept refusing to show up where they were summoned.
(07:22):
They kept being summoned into place and they just weren't there or weren't there in the way
in which they were expected to be. By the predictable discourse.
So identity is for me positional and by the virtue of that it does mean that our identities
within different discourses are slightly different.
So my identity as a father in the discourse of the family doesn't exactly correspond with my
(07:46):
identity as a professor in a department or my identity as a political activist in the community politics.
These are three different positionalities.
Now, of course, it's true that unless I'm completely schizophrenic, I have to make some sense
of these different positions that I find myself in so I think identities, if they acquire any
(08:07):
stability, have to have what I call the narrative.
That's to say they have to have a storyline, which says you are somewhat different in the family,
from how you are at work, from how you are in politics.
But this is the way in which I can make sense of connecting those positionalities together.
So the narrative hitches one position to another and broadly speaking, our cultural identities
(08:32):
are the sum of the different positionalities which we have taken up through the course of our lives.
Burgmer (08:38):
Why do we need a discussion, another discussion after the Enlightenment, after Foucault, after
the postmodernists, after Derrida, about cultural identity at all?
Stuart Hall (08:54):
My conception does draw from a great deal from Foucault, importantly from Derrida, though I'm
not a Deridian, I'm not a philosopher, but importantly from Derrida.
In the sense that I think Derrida's conception, concept of difference, is extremely important
in understanding questions of race.
So I'll come back to that later on postmodernism is a tricky one.
(09:17):
I draw less on postmodernism.
And for this reason, because postmodernism's conception of identity is absolutely free floating, yes, that's to say.
It suggests identities are completely unfixed from their historical social location. They are discursive.
And so you can take up any position that you like.
(09:38):
It's what I call the smorgasbord conception of identity.
You'd have sausages today and vegetarianism tomorrow and a bit of this and a bit of that now.
I think identities are not fixed, but that doesn't mean that they're free floating.
They're tethered in historical conditions, which have a long tendential securing effect on identities.
Audioarchiv Team (10:01):
Now the interview continues. Like us, if you like it.
Stuart Hall (10:05):
You take up another position, but you carry the baggage of the positionalities that you've been in.
You have to make sense of your new position in terms of the positions you've held before.
So of course the story isn't just made up the story is an evolving story and continually has
to make sense retrospectively of where it's been.
I say in this sense, identity is.
Burgmer (10:25):
Not the concept of Benjamin.
Stuart Hall (10:27):
Yes, of course, it's very much a conception of Benjamin.
Yes, which each time, each present rereads history in the light of the present needs.
And each identity rereads the identity's past in the light of the needs of that identity in
relation to a current and future practice.
In that sense, those positionalities, they're not fixed by nature, they're not fixed in some
(10:50):
economic determinism or psychoanalytic determinism, but they are secured by historical look.
So a slogan might be that identity is not, as we used to imagine it, a question of roots, r
o o t s, but it is a question of roots, r o u t e s, the roots, the paths, the journeys by which
(11:10):
we have come to the present, which leave their traces on our speech, on our action, on our sense
of our subjective selves and our sense of the world, which we can't do without.
So we're building up all the time this kind of mindset towards the world.
And though we can take different positions, we can't forget or ignore or just slough off the
(11:32):
past in a kind of postmodernist amnesia.
So postmodernism doesn't contribute a great deal to me, but Foucault does, although Foucault
doesn't like the term identity, he never uses it.
So I think I have a more kind of social positional sense of the importance of the subject.
I don't think the subject is quite so fully constituted exclusively by the discourse, I think
(11:58):
there is some residue for instance.
I think you do have to ask something about the psychic processes.
Well, Foucault doesn't want to ask about psychic processes, because he has a particular view
of what psychoanalysis is about.
So, in Foucault, the subject doesn't carry any residues in itself.
It can be historically relocated after the next historical break.
(12:18):
I don't quite think that's so.
I think there are long term tendential, psychic and locational.
We've paid our dues somehow, and therefore I'm not quite a Foucault in that sense.
Though, of course, I've been tremendously influenced by Foucault.
And Derrida is a different kind of case.
I don't know, Derrida wouldn't use the term identity, but it's not.
(12:42):
I think his position is not a social analysis.
Berth Mayan is interested in how individuals get located or positioned in social discourses
and begin to speak the discourses into which they're interpreted and can then become agents
or actors within conditions, of course within that discourse in a practice.
(13:07):
And I think that is a kind of Gramsci conception.
Although Gramsci is not thought to be a philosopher of the subject.
In any sense, Gramsci does understand that the subject is partly historically formed.
As he says, it's full of the traces of the past, the archaic layers of the past, which you can't get rid of.
(13:27):
On the other hand, it is capable of shifting because it is also oriented towards the future.
Burgmer (13:33):
Towards future action we have exactly, when we now come to Gramsci, the difference between concepts
like subjectivity and the new concept of identity?
Stuart Hall (13:45):
Oh yes, there are big differences.
You know, when I quote when I refer to a theorist like that.
I don't mean that I believe or subscribe to everything they say.
And I'm not at all unaware of the differences of historical conditions in which we operate.
Yes, so I'm quoting talking about Gramsci.
Insofar, as my thinking about the present has been influenced by things that Gramsci thought in his moment.
(14:10):
And of course, subject and subjectivity have been transformed in the intervening period, principally
by, for me, by a theoretical source we haven't mentioned yet, principally by feminism.
It's the combination of feminism and psychoanalysis, which has transformed our understanding
of subjectivity long before Foucault and the subject could.
Burgmer (14:32):
Could you elaborate on that a bit more?
Stuart Hall (14:34):
You know, feminism, with its slogan 'the personal is political', broke down, destroyed those
artificial distinctions between the public and the private and opened, as it were, the domain
of the subjective into the public.
It says the public is saturated by what we normally think of as subjective feelings, subjective
(14:56):
emotions, etcetera, it's partly a kind of gender structuring, gendered theoretical construct
of the public and so emotion, subjective feeling, identification, all of that is thought of
as a feminine thing and men are actors in the world, etcetera, etc. Etc.
When feminism began to question this artificial boundary, I think those old subject-object,
(15:19):
subjective-objective distinctions, which are deeply large, especially in versions of Marxism,
were just untenable as an understanding of the political world.
Well, I don't want to say, you know, I don't want now to rehearse all that follows, that enormous
number of things follow that.
But one of the things that follows it is of course not just the subjectification or the subjectivising
(15:41):
of the public world, but the politicising of the subjective world.
So personal feelings, the family, sexuality become political questions.
And there Foucault is extremely important because he says yes, there is power everywhere.
So there's a kind of, in my mind, there's a kind of convergence between these interests in the subject and the subjective.
(16:02):
Even although they're not theoretically consistent with one another, and they don't like one
another, they oppose one another.
Nevertheless, for my purposes in rethinking questions of identity, I can draw on what feminism
has done about introducing the subjective, on what psychoanalysis has done about teaching us
about the importance of the psychic dimensions of identification and what Foucault has done
(16:24):
in showing us that the subject is always a historical construct.
Burgmer (16:28):
You suggest considering the concept of cultural identity as strategic and positioning.
What does that mean for the political subject?
Stuart Hall (16:40):
Well, there are two questions there, and I would prefer to take the question separately, okay,
so let me address the question.
First of all, what does this conception of identity do in relation to race?
And that's a theoretical question.
How that theory then translates into politics is, of course, a very important issue, but a separate one. Let's talk about theoretical.
(17:02):
Now, race is one of the deepest, most persistent and unchanging structures.
It looks like an atavistic structure.
Sociologically, it should have disappeared.
Long ago, the very definition of modernity is to rise above those attachments to locality and
(17:22):
kinship and to become more cosmopolitan.
So the joke, the terrible joke at the heart of modernity is that in spite of our advanced technological
sophistication, our mobility, the multiplication of social distinctions underneath the archaic
structures of race continue to map out some of our most profound responses to other people,
(17:48):
people who are different from us and to the world.
This is one of the most important elements in the dark side of modernity.
And in a way, it's surprising to me that Adorno, who philosophically saw that modernity has
its dark side, didn't quite understand how profound.
If he had introduced the question of race and colonialism and the non-European other into his
(18:13):
paradigm, you know, it would have exploded that discourse of the Enlightenment long ago, but
he stayed in, but he stayed within a more European framework. Nevertheless, he's absolutely right.
Yes, that we now have to think of the Enlightenment as always carrying its progressive and its dark side along simultaneously. Okay?
So race has this kind of fixed structure.
(18:35):
And its fixed structure, in my terms, arises precisely from what I was talking about before.
It arises from the fact that race is organised around essentially its genetic and biological features.
It is thought to be a deep structure, so deep that it is unchanging, which is why it's very difficult to shift.
(18:56):
Now, in fact, as a social practice, the most obvious manifestation of race is not general or biological.
It is where the biological features of different peoples, of different origins are taken as the signifiers of difference.
So colour operates as a way of connecting the genetic structures which we can't see to the visible world.
(19:19):
So we sort of read what we think the differences which are racial and genetic from how people
look, the shape of their noses, the colour of their skin, the quality of their hair, etcetera;
you can tell the Chinese from the Africans, etcetera.
And we think that each of these refers to a deep, unseen structure which gives all the differences,
(19:39):
generates all the differences, what makes them sly and devious and criminal and unintelligent and primitive.
So now, what does an unfixed, non-essentialist conception of identity have to do with race?
In my view, what it does is challenge this notion of the fixture of racial structures and racial
(20:04):
practices and suggest that what we see here is not that race is in fact a naturally, biologically,
genetically grounded structure, but that it is a social structure which naturalises itself in the genetic.
Because once the discourse naturalises itself in the genetic, you can't argue with it.
(20:26):
You can argue with class.
Because obviously you can do something about class, you can redistribute the wealth; you can't
argue with race once you've grounded it in the genes because you can't redistribute the genes.
So it's a beautifully logical structure, but in my view, it isn't a structure of that kind at all.
Actually, we know that there is nothing biologically or genetically that grounds the differences
(20:49):
in that way, that the differences within a so-called racially defined population are as great
as the differences between them.
So the biological reach of race is, in my terms, the Form of its legitimacy.
In that sense, I think all identities remain unfixed, including racial ones.
(21:12):
So you cannot predict the political position of a black person simply from the fact that they are black.
Well, you might say yes, but most of them are anti-racist. Yes, but they're anti-racist.
For historical reasons, not anti-racist because of their genes.
They're anti-racist because people who look like them have been discriminated against century after century after century.
(21:35):
So they've looked, learned something historically.
Which is that if you look like this, you're going to be discriminated against.
You're going to fight against it, but it's not because there is some genetic tick which, you
know, somebody in New York or MIT will discover, which is the kind of anti-racist gene.
Any more than there's a good baseball gene or a good basketball gene.
In African Americans, they've learned to play basketball because they weren't allowed to play football or baseball.
(22:01):
When they're allowed to play baseball, they're good at it.
So these are historical structures which have sort of legitimacy in nature, in biology.
And the problem is that anti-racism has not contested that biological routing.
It has tended to accept the biological routing, but simply to counter the argument.
(22:23):
It says yes, we are black because we are genetically so, but we are good, not bad. Now, you know.
The problem about this is that it is founded on an incorrect philosophical principle.
The fact is that we are bad or good but it doesn't have anything to do with what our genetic structure is.
We just happen to look different from one another, and that is socially very important.
(22:45):
I'm not denying this at all.
Racism is a social discourse which uses physical biological characteristics of difference in
order to construct relationships of power.
If I were designing a racial society, I could design it around blue eyes. It doesn't matter.
What provided you have a difference.
(23:06):
Powell can use the difference to say that's what makes this group that has it better and that
group that doesn't have it worse in that sense.
Race is just an extreme form of many of the discourses of dispossession, of the exercise, of
power, of colonization, of marginalization that we see elsewhere.
(23:27):
But it is a particularly deep and rooted structure because unlike class differences but rather like gender differences.
Audioarchiv Team (23:41):
Now the interview continues. Like us if you like it.
Stuart Hall (23:46):
And that's why there are many rather more similarities between racism and discrimination around
gender than there are around class.
I'm not suggesting class is unimportant, but I think its dynamic is different, because people
can clearly see that class relates to how wealth was distributed to a history which you could do differently.
But gender and race seem to be something.
Burgmer (24:11):
Edwards' time has identified the construction of the other historically as a European colonial
project, with the aim of not only making the differences clear physically but also ideologically
convincing the colonised people that the whites, the Europeans are superior, thereby legitimising the rule as necessary.
(24:36):
What consequences does this concept, this evolved concept of the West still have on the perception
of Western people in relation to others in the present?
Stuart Hall (24:48):
I think that said is essentially correct.
I think his book on orientalism is one of the most important and profound post-war texts, and
it has generated enormous work.
Its impact is profound in shifting people's understanding.
Understanding, it is quite a subtle thesis, because as you say, it's not just about economic
(25:11):
and political colonisation which we know about, but it is also about ideological colonisation.
It's also ideology doesn't quite catch it any longer.
It's also about the construction of knowledge of the other, far away from the colonial project
as an imperial or economic process in the secluded halls of scholarship.
(25:35):
The knowledge of what we know about otherness, what we know about difference etcetera, is constructed
around that relationship between colonised and coloniser.
My own view is that the reason why we are coming to this rather late is that the history of
colonisation has been written as if it's the kind of sub-history of a relatively small but powerful number of European societies.
(26:04):
I don't see colonisation like that.
I see colonisation as part of the process which begins at the end of the fifteenth century of Europe's move out.
So it's part of exploration, conquest then colonisation, then imperialism, then neo-imperialism,
(26:24):
then the new international order.
This is globalisation, this is the process of modernism, and colonisation is central to it.
Now I keep going back, because much of my formation has been in a sort of quarrel or argument with Marxism.
But western Marxism has always treated colonisation as a subordinate story.
(26:48):
Capitalism evolved out of the heart of Europe.
Europe, kind of, did it to itself organically.
It forgets that capitalism in the rest of the world marched at the head of the missionaries
and the troops and the navy and the merchants.
The rest of the world entered modernity through violence, not through the peaceful transformation
(27:08):
of feudal society into a market society.
And over a long period of time, it happened at once, it happened through the imposition, the arrival.
You know, that picture of Columbus's ship sailing into this other world is where the modern story begins, begins then.
So I think colonisation as a general process, and I mean by that not only where the Europeans
(27:30):
actually occupied the country, but where European ideas took over, or where European markets
and products led, I think that process of colonisation is absolutely central to the history
of capitalism, which is the history of modernity.
So what we have learned in recent times is that the post-colonial question does not only relate
(27:54):
to ex-metropolitan powers that had some colonies.
It has to do with the whole historical relation between Europe and its others.
The whole history of Europe and its others is a history inscribed in the process of colonisation.
So the idea that because governors pull down flags in Hong Kong and African states run up their
(28:16):
own flags etcetera, that this political transformation of independence and national independence,
important as it is as a process in the post-war world, the idea that that unlocks and unpacks
what Fanon calls the colonisation of the mind is, you know just it does not, is not.
(28:38):
It seems to misunderstand how historical processes work.
This is a long-running process, and of course, racism is at the centre of this process.
Because as I described earlier on, it was always a process driven by forms of power, which took
difference as its mode of operation because they are uncivilised and we are civilised because
(28:59):
we have the boats and they don't because we have the guns, they don't because we have the science
and they don't because we have the printing presses and they don't always around.
Difference, which is a difference of culture, a difference of look, a difference of religious
beliefs, a difference of governmentality, doesn't matter what the line of difference is always
(29:21):
articulated around Europe and its others.
So this is what is being reworked now.
This is what this new phase of globalisation, the process I've been describing is what globalisation is.
It begins in fourteen ninety-two.
But these new forms of globalisation, what is being worked out is some the beginning of the
(29:42):
reordering reorganisation of the deep historical balance between Europe and its others and by Europe.
I mean, of course, North America, because I'm talking culturally now.
Yes, I don't just mean the European societies.
I mean, the European societies that were involved in this process that Marx correctly described here.
Marx is right, that it begins with the story of the global now.
(30:07):
The global has taken six centuries to become what it is today.
But we are still in the process of globalising the world.
I did say, the process by which every corner of the globe in very uneven and disjunctive ways
become as it were related to modernity, it cannot stand outside of modernity may stand very
(30:30):
far to its edges, may not have very much of it.
But what happens to it is in somehow related globally.
And that is the, you know, that's the profound shift which is going on now.
So colonisation is sort of deeply part of that much bigger historical story which the historians,
(30:51):
I'm afraid, have told us in a rather marginal way.
You learn the history of Britain and then, if you want to do it, you can take a special paper
in the empire as if it's outside there, as if it has nothing to do with the inside.
What is happening here and said is one of the people who helped us to understand this is the
(31:11):
breakdown of the Derridian destruction between inside and outside.
The story of colonisation is inside the heads of every Englishman to be English is to be different from those others.
That is how its identity is constructed.
Now we know that identity depends on difference.
(31:31):
That identity is always constructed against the constitutive outside.
We know how important it has been for Englishness that it is not France, not Germany, not Spain,
not those southern Mediterranean hotheads, certainly not North Africa, and so on.
The world is mapped out psychically in concentric circles from the centre, which is us, to them at the periphery.
(31:57):
And that is going to take the most enormous effort.
That's what the twenty-first century is about (32:01):
the most enormous upheavals for people whose
identities, cultural identities, and Englishness have been constructed exactly on those historical experiences.
Layer after layer after layer, for five centuries, have to somehow learn to position themselves
(32:21):
differently in relation to the other, and have to understand that they are other to the other.
They are as different from the point of view of the other as the other is to them; who they
are depends on who they are not, and so on.
What this is really like for Europe, which has been the centre until now, we don't know.
(32:44):
And it's not an optimistic story.
I'm telling you, the question mark is still there as to whether Europe can become other to itself
in this profound historical, psychological, and philosophical way.
Audioarchiv Team (32:59):
Thank you for being with Audioarchiv.
Follow us, so you won't miss an episode.
And don't forget the like button. See you next week. Your Audioarchiv Team.
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!