Stuart Hall > Quotes

“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.”
― Stuart Hall

“Yesterday's deconstructions are often tomorrow's orthodox clichés.”
― Stuart Hall

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Visual Culture: The Reader

“There is no understanding Englishness without understanding its imperial and colonial dimensions.”
― Stuart Hall

“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.”
― Stuart Hall

“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.”
― Stuart Hall, People's History and Socialist Theory

“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.”
― Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left

“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”
― Stuart Hall

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands

“Race is the modality in which class is lived.”
― Stuart Hall

“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.”
― Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“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?”
― Stuart Hall

“Music has been called 'the most noise conveying the least information”
― Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices

“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.”
― Stuart Hall, The Popular Arts

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“This is the “American phase” in British life. Until”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“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;”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“War quite frequently disrupts the chain of normal relations, including class, in a society. And while it doesn’t create new trends”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“of English culture. That personal experience”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“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.”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“Larger historical shifts, questions of political process and formation before and beyond the ballot-box, issues of social and political power, of social structure and economic relations were simply absent, not by chance, but because they were theoretically outside the frame of reference. [...] It should have asked, 'does pluralism work?' and 'how does pluralism work?'. Instead, it asserted, 'pluralism works' - and then went on to measure, precisely and empirically, just how well it was doing. The mixture of prophecy and hope, with a brutal, hard-headed, behaviouristic positivism provided a heady theoretical concoction which, for a long time, passed itself off as 'pure science'.”
― Stuart Hall

“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”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History