Stuart Hall

Ahmad S. Mulla

Media Theory II

University of Oregon

Mar 23, 2017

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 Biography

Stuart Hall was born in middle class Jamaican family in 1932 (Hall, 1990). Many articles

when they speak about Hall, they start from the immigration to United Kingdom in 1951.

However, there were several incidents in his early life had shaped his thinking and knowledge.

At age 14, the Jamaican government opened a public library for young people. Hall was going to

this library every Saturday morning. At that time, he was interested in reading literature and art

books (Media Education Foundation, 2009). On Saturdays afternoon, he was going to watch

movies. At least he was watching one movie each week and sometimes he watched more than

three (Media Education Foundation, 2009). Hall studied in Jamaica College in Kingston, an elite

secondary colonial school with British system. Hall’s information about literature and art, and

his information from Jamaica College helped him to get a scholarship in Merton College at

University of Oxford (Farred, 1996; Media Education Foundation, 2009).

Hall earned his BA and MS at University of Oxford, but he stopped his Ph.D. in 1957

because many political events emerged, so he decided to focus on political work (Media

Education Foundation, 2009). For instance, Suez Crisis in 1956 when England, France, and

Israel fought Egypt, and Soviet innovation of Hungary in 1956 which thousands of members left

the Communist Party of Great Britain because of supporting the innovation.

Between 1957 and 1960 Hall and other Colleagues at University of Oxford established

Universities and left Review, at that time there was another new left journal which was The New

Reasoner, Hall Joined E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and others in The New Reasoner,

Launching New Left Review in 1960 Stuart Hall became founding editor for the new journal

(Bircall, 1980). Hall left the journal in 1961 (Media Education Foundation, 2009).

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 Between 1958 and 1960 Hall also taught at several secondary schools in Southern

London, where there were many black students, Hall taught literature and films & culture to

students focusing on how to understand films and media (Media Education Foundation, 2009).

The murder of Kelson Cochrane, a black migrant to Britain in 1959 through stabbing him

by group of white people was a major incident in Britain. For first time, black people participated

in a big demonstration, establishing new anti-racism movement. Hall as an immigrant person and

political critiques had influenced by the incident. The predominantly of white New Left could

neither participate nor provide a political vocabulary for Hall’s activism in black society.

(Farred, 1980). Later, he expressed his ideas in many publications.

The first book was written by Stuart Hall was The Popular Arts in 1964 with Paddy

Whannel ‘the British Film Institution’s first head of education’, the book was one of the first

books to make the case of the serious study of film as entertainment (Paterson & Gerhardt 2014).

As a direct result after reading the book, Richard Hoggart was tasked by The University

of Birmingham to establish a cultural studies center and asked Hall if he interested in joining the

centre. Hall accepted the request and joined the centre in March 1964. Both scholars named it

‘Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ and they received the first post-graduate students in

October 1964 (Media Education Foundation, 2009). Hall became the president of the centre in

1968 until 1979. Under his leadership, the centre added advanced weekly seminars with more

theoretical and conceptual direction (Media Education Foundation, 2009).

In 1979, Hall moved to Open University as a professor of sociology, where he remains

for the next 18 years; However, Hall retained connections with the Centre for Contemporary

Cultural Studies until it closed in 2002, a victim of restricting by the university’s management

(Williamson, 2014).

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 Hall retired from formal academic life in 1997 and became the chair of two foundations

of visual arts, INIVA, the Institute of International Visual Arts, and Autograph ABP, which

seeks to promote photographers from varies ethnicities and backgrounds (Sage, 2017).

Projects and activities

Academic Journals

Universities and Left Review

In 1957, Stuart Hall with Cabriel Pearson, Ralph Samuel, and Charles Tyler, colleagues

at University of Oxford established Universities and Left Review (Hall, Pearson, Samuel, &

Tyler, 1957). All were in their twenties. In the first volume, the four editors clarified the goal of

the journal: “this journal has expanded outrageously! A journal for socialist theory; a journal for

left art criticism; a journal for university opinion; a journal for left-wingers of the post-war

generations” (Hall et al, 1957, 4). Universities and Left Review played a significant role to

organize the first march and campaign for nuclear disarmament to Aldermaston in 1958 (Bircall,

1980).

New Left Review

Universities and Left Review collaborated with another left journal “The New Reasoner”

in 1957 to write a pamphlet ‘a socialist wages plan’ suggesting that the labour government and

the unions should come together to plan a redistribution of incomes (Bircall, 1980). Later,

Hall and his colleagues mixed with “The New Reasoner” in 1960, establishing New Left Review

and Hall became the founding editor (Bircall, 1980).

Soundings

In 1995, Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin established Soundings. The

three founding editors had all at one time or another been associate with Marxism Today, which

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ceased in 1991, and Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin had been on the editorial board in New

Left Review until they withdrew in 1993 (Soundings, 2017). The journal had a tradition of

working with the Gramscian tradition of conjunctival analysis as a way of understanding the

plaiting of complex forces in any given political moment and this approach was pioneered by

Stuart Hall in his analysis of Thatcherism (Soundings, 2017; Hall, 1980).

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1964-2002)

The center for contemporary cultural studies was a post-graduate research center aimed to

inaugurate research in the area of contemporary culture and society، cultural forms, practices and

institutions, their relation to society and social change. (Hall, Hobson, Lowe, & Willis, 1980).

Stuart Hall was the director between 1968 and 1979.

In the early days, Ritchard Hoggart, the first director of the centre, and Stuart Hall wanted

to study mass cultures such as magazines, Hollywood movies, and popular television

programmes, but this subject was often looked down on by academics (Hall, 2014). There was

no pre-existing program for the research of the kind of things that normal people listen to,

watched and read in their daily life, so they decided to something that today has become widely

known as “cultural studies” (Hall, 2014).

Since the early 1960’s, cultural studies has become an international movements with

journals, conferences, professional associations, in addition to many degree programs in colleges

and universities like The Centre for Television Research at the University of Leeds, the Centre

for Mass communication Research at the University of Leister, the Open University’s program in

popular culture, and others (Schulman, 1993). Cultural studies had gained momentum in a lot of

countries, most notably in the France, United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa-- often

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through the efforts of scholars who taught or studied at the Center for Contemporary Cultural

Studies (Schulman, 1993).

Institute of International Visual Arts

Few years before retirement from academic life, Hall founded the Institute of

International Visual Arts in 1994, a non-profit organization based in East London to work

predominantly with British-porn and British-based visual artists of African and Asian descent

supporting them in their career and offering residencies, commission new work and promote

existing practices enabling artistic ambition and development (Institute of International Visual

Arts, 2017).

Major theories and ideas

Encoding/Decoding

Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model offered theoretical approach of how media messages

are produced and interpreted. The model suggested that there are fore stages of the

communication process within media: 1-production: when the construction of a message begins.

2-circulation: how audiences receive a message and how it influences them. 3-: distribution/

consumption: a message has been adapted and realized. 4-reproduction: the encoder produces a

new message according to the effects on audiences (Hall, 1973).

Hall argued that there are three positions when people decode a message. First,

dominant/hegemonic position: when the receiver accepts the code of the producer. Second,

negotiated position: this notion is mixture between accepting and rejecting a message. Third,

oppositional position: when the receiver understands the message, but rejects the code. (Hall,

1973).

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The reception of the audience will occur in various circumstances and will be a subject of

different criteria, in this case the audience will not generally be looking at the production proses

but the content (Helen, 2004)

Hall made a conclusive break with the dominant American model of communication with

the notion of the audience as passive consumers of mass culture, to installing a new vocabulary

of analysis and a new theory of cultural production and reception (Turner, 2003).

Cultural Identity and Diaspora

As an immigrant person, Stuart Hall talked a lot in his books and articles about the

migration into United Kingdom in general and Caribbean migration in particular. One of his

most cited article is cultural identity and diaspora (1990).

Hall discussed the emerging of Caribbean cinema known as third cinema, which was a

new form of cinema represented the identity of Afro-Caribbean subjects “Black people” of the

diaspora of the west. Hall clarified two ways of cultural identity: the first identity is collective,

people with shared history, stable, and continues, the second identity is the Caribbean identity

which was related to the colonial experience, unstable, and metamorphic (Hall, 1990).

Hall used three presences African, European, and American to traces Caribbean identity.

The cultural identity of the Africans was considered as site of the repressed. The cultural identity

of the Europeans was the site of the colonialist. The cultural identity of the Americans which was

a new world and a site of cultural confrontation. Hall defined the Caribbean identity as diaspora

identity (Hall, 1990).

Hall’s work on identity (Hall, 1990; Hall, 1992; Hall, 1996a; Hall, 1996b; and others) clarified

that identity belong to the future as much as to the past, so cultural identity come from history

but everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation (Ang, 2000). Our role in

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the making of history rely on how we conceive ourselves as active. Hall rescued the possibility

of ‘identity’ that is, the way we represent and signify ourselves to ourselves and to the others

(Ang, 2000).

Policing the Crisis

In another similar work, Policing The Crisis: Mugging, The State, and Law and Order

(Hall, Critcher, Jeferson, & Roberts, 1978) stands as a clear enunciation of Hall’s political

alteration from an intellectual of the new left into a new left theorist who afforded a political

primacy to the situation of the black diaspora in Britain (Farred, 1980).

Hall et al. (1978) investigated a murder of three people, then they expanded their

investigation to all the country. The scholars examined all the institutions that related to crimes:

court, police, media, and law. The book contains a theoretical concept of criminology focusing

on how media covered the crimes.

In this coauthored work, it was the experience of radical discrimination in its numerous

manifestations against black immigration in the metropolis that compels the resettled Jamaican to

join seriously to the problematic of the post-war deracination, also Hall’s adoption of the

autobiographical status and accentuated the process of re-engagement with the Caribbean first so

reflectively adopted in policing the crisis (Farred, 1980).

The book affected and influenced the British society in the 1970’s, and takes as its focal

point the phenomenon of mugging, which appeared and disappeared from British public

consciousness at the period when law and order issues were starting to dominate the political

agenda (Helen, 2004). The book also rose the public awareness of media practices to cover such

events encouraging British institutions to cooperate with each other to tackle such crimes (Helen,

2004).

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Representation

The most cited book for Stuart Hall is Representation: Cultural representations and

signifying practices (1997) which has been cited more than 8000 times according to Google

Scholar. In this book, Hall clarified the connection between culture and representation as follow:

culture is about shared meaning, people share meaning by language, in language we use signs

and symbols, those symbols can be sounds, written words, images, musical notes, even objects,

finally composition the ideas and feelings.

One of the major subjects in the book is examining stereotyping and how this practice

was used to construct negative representations of people and groups. Hall highlighted racial and

ethical difference and how black represented in the media. For example, Hall examined the cover

of Sunday Times in Oct 9, 1988 of the Black winners of 100 meters finals, the title of the

magazine was “Heroes and Villains”. Additionally, Hall represented several images from slavery

period in the West to explain the difference between whites and blacks in those images. Then,

questions have been asked to the readers to think and analyze those images such as What is this

picture saying? What its underlying message? Why is ‘otherness’ so compelling and object of

representation?

In similar context, Hall also participated in several documentary films to explain his ideas

about representation. Hall’s most watched video on YouTube is representation & the media

which produced in (2002) by Media Education foundation. Hall spoke about how media

represent the various events in negative way focusing on passive side of representing black

people in films and newspapers.

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 Criticism

Stuart Hall received some critiques in his works. In Encoding/decoding, the model is

frequently signified as a thing of symmetry, decoding being seen as the mirror image of

encoding, “meaning structurers 1” and “meaning structures 2” might not be the same thing

(Lewis, 1983).

Hall identified the process of communication in terms of circuit “production, circulation,

disruption/consumption, reproduction”. Each of the moments exerts its determinacy upon the

next, but there is no required correspondence between any two moments. The moments are

comparatively independent to each other. This implies that to a certain way, each moment is

autonomous, exerts its own determinacy, but non can fully determine another (Pillai, 1992).

In addition, Hall did not state anywhere in Encoding/Decoding model that there is a

necessary correlation between the viewer’s social status, the codes available to him or her, and

the meaning constituted (Pillai, 1992).

Regarding cultural studies, Stuart Hall was a professor of sociology at Open University

for 18 years. Cultural studies at first it grew steadily then sharply but throughout so persistently

that it has become a major academic institute, according to many of its 1990’s books, this

advance has involved a radical departure from the sociology of culture, and in Hall’s work, a

number of key publications he produced in the 1980’s lack a sustained sociological dimension

(Wood, 1998).

In policing the Crisis: Mugging, the state, and law and order, the book addressed the

complex outcome of the exercise hegemonic power. Hall et al. (1978) theoretical discussion,

however, is framed by some sort of Althusserian functionalism that effectively decreases the

media to servants of established political powers. The book distinguished between the state and a

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more extended hegemonic field but failed to explain their relation. This lack of explanation

jeopardized the book’s main argument which highlights a diffuse social crisis that eventually

overruns Britain’s central political institutes. (Wood, 1998).

Concerning the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, between mid of 1960’s and

1979 the centre was productive in raising the status of working class culture in academic study,

but the centre typically functioned with an elusive and forbidding lexicon (Rojek, 2003). Main

concepts like ‘hegemony’, ‘conjunction’ and ‘articulation’ were often used in contradictory, not

to say, incomprehensive ways (Rojek, 2007).

Also, in similar criticism, the centre was dealing with many fields. For instance, in the

major book for the centre, working papers in cultural studies 1972-79 (1980), there were

sections in the book named as “introduction to ethnography at the centre”, “introduction to media

studies at the centre”, “introduction to language studies at the centre”. This suggesting that

cultural studies is a general field.

Moreover, feminists were also highly critical of the Birmingham Center, the women’s

study groups in the center condemned the atmosphere of masculine domination of both

intellectual work and the environment in which it was being carried out (Rojek, 2007). This issue

was one of reasons that Stuart Hall left the Centre to in 1979 (Media Education Foundation,

2009).

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 References

Ang, I. (2000). Identity blues. In P. Gilroy, L. Grossberg, & A. McRobbie (Eds.), without

Guaranties: In Honor of Stuart Hall. London: Verso.

Birchall, I. (1980). The autonomy of theory: A short history of New Left Review. International

Socialism, 2, 10, pp. 51,91.

Farred, G. (1996). You can go home again, you can’t stay: Stuart Hall and the Caribbean

Diaspora. Research in African Literatures, 27, 4, pp. 28-48.

Hall, S., Pearson, G., Samuel, R., & Taylor, H. (1957). About this journal. Universities and Left

Review, 1(1), 1-5 Retrieved from

http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/ulr/index_frame.htm

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clark, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing The Crisis:

Mugging, The State, And Law And Order. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A., & Willis, P. (1980). Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers

in Cultural Studies 1972-79. London and New York: Routledge.

Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community,

Culture, Difference (pp. 222-237). London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Hall, S. (1992). The question of cultural identity. In S, Hall, D. Held & T. McGrew (Eds.),

Modernity and its futures. Cambridge: Polity/Open University.

Hall, S. (1996a). Introduction: who needs identity?. In S. Hall & P. Du Gay (Eds.), Questions of

Cultural Identity (pp. 1-17). London: Sage.

Hall, S. (1996b). New ethnicities. In D. Morley & K. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogue

in Cultural Studies (pp. 442-451). London and New York: Routledge.

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Hall, S. (2014, January). Stuart Hall on 50 years of pop culture, politics and power. The

guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/20/stuart-

hall-50-years-pop-culture

Helen, D. (2004). Understanding Stuart Hall. London: Sage.

Lewis, J. (1983). The encoding/decoding model: Criticism and redevelopment for research on

decoding. Media, Culture and Society, 5, 179-197

Institute of International Visual Arts. (2017, March). Who we are. Retrieved from

http://www.iniva.org/about_us/about_iniva/who_we_are

Media Education Foundation. (2002). Stuart Hall: Representation & the media [DVD]. United

States, MA.

Media Education Foundation. (2009). Personally Speaking: A Long Conversation with Stuart

Hall [DVD]. United States, MA.

Paterson, R., & Gerhardt, P. (2014, February 11). Stuart Hall (1932-2014): The influential

theorist and pioneer in the British cultural studies movement has died aged 82. British

Film Institute. Retrieved from http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-

bfi/features/stuart-hall-1932-2014

Pillai, P. (1992). Rereading Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model. Communication Theory,

2(30, 221-233.

Rojek, C. (2007). Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School. In T. Edwards (Ed.), Cultural Theory.

London: Sage.

Sage publishing (2017, March). Stuart Hall. Retrieved from https://us.sagepub.com/en-

us/nam/author/stuart-hall

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Schulman, N. (1993). Conditions of their own making: An intellectual history of the Centre for

Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Canadian Journal of

Communication, 18(1), doi:10.22230/cjc.1993v18n1a717

Soundings. (2017, March). About Soundings. Retrieved from

https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/soundings/about-soundings

Turner, G. (2003). British Cultural Studies: An introduction (3rd ed.). London: Routledge.

Williamson, M. (2014, February 11). Professor Stuart Hall: Sociologist and pioneer in the field

of cultural studies whose work explored the concept of Britishness. Independent.

Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-stuart-hall-

sociologist-and-pioneer-in-the-field-of-cultural-studies-whose-work-explored-

9120126.html

Wood, B. (1998). Stuart Hall’s cultural studies and the problem of hegemony. The British

Journal of Sociology, 49(3), 399-414.

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 Stuart Hall’s major publications which have been cited more than 1000 times

Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community,

Culture, Difference (pp. 222-237). London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and signifying practices. London:

Sage.

Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decoding in television discourse. Culture, Media, Language:

Working papers in Cultural Studies 1972-79 (pp. 128-138). London: Hutchinson.

Hall, S. Critcher, C. Jefferson, T. Clark, J. & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing The Crisis: Mugging,

The State, And Law And Order. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Hall, S. (1996). Introduction: who needs identity?. In S. Hall & P. Du Gay (Eds.), Questions of

Cultural Identity (pp. 1-17). London: Sage.

Hall, S. (1996). New ethnicities. In D. Morley & K. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogue

in Cultural Studies (pp. 442-451). London and New York: Routledge.

Hall, S. & Jefferson, T. (1975). Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subculture in Post-War

Britain. London: Hutchinson.

Hall, S. (1992). The question of cultural identity. In S, Hall, D. Held & T. McGrew (Eds.),

Modernity and its futures. Cambridge: Polity/Open University.

Hall, S. (1992). The local and the global: globalization and ethnicity. In A. McClintock, A. Mufti

& E. Shohat (Eds.), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives

(pp. 173-187). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hall, S. (2006). Old and new identities. In P. Rothenberg (Ed.), Beyond Borders: Thinking

Critically About Global Issues (pp. 220-224). New York: Worth.

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Hall, S. (1998). Notes on deconstructing the popular. In J. Storey (Ed.), cultural theory and

popular culture (pp. 442-453). London: Prentice Hall.

Du Gay, P. Hall, S. Janes, L. Mackay, H. (1997). Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony

Walkman. London: Sage.

Hall, S. (2001). The spectacle of the other. In M. Wetherell, S. Taylor & S. Yates (Eds.),

Discourse Theory and Practice, 424-444. London: Sage.

Hall, S. (1982). The rediscovery of ideology: Return to the repressed in media studies. In T.

Bennett & J. Curran (Eds.), Culture, Media and Society (pp. 59-90). London: Routledge.

Hall, S. (1992). The west and rest: Discourse and power. In S. Hall & B. Gieben (Eds.),

formations of modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hall, S. (1996). Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. In D. Morley & K. Chen (Eds.),

Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogue in Cultural Studies (pp. 261-274). London and New York:

Routledge.

Hall, S. (1980). Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture and Society, 2, 57-72.

Hall, S. (1986). The problem of ideology-Marxism without guarantees. Journal of

Communication Inquiry, 28-44

Hall, S. (1988). The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Lef. London and

New York: Verso.

Hall, S. (1996). When was ‘the post-colonial’? Thinking at the limit. In I. Chambers & L. Curti

(Eds,). The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (pp. 242-260).

London and New York: Routledge.

Hall, S. (1986). Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity. Journal of

Communication Inquiry, 5-27. doi:10.1177/019685998601000202

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Hall, S. (2000). Racist ideology and the media. In P. Marris & S. Thornham (Eds,). Media

Studies: A Reader (pp. 271-282). New York: New York University Press.

Hall, S. (1993). What is this “black” in black popular culture?. Social Justice, 20, 104-114.

Hall, S. (1996). Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance. In H. Baker, J. Diawara

& R. Lindeborg (Eds,). Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (pp. 16-60). Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press.

Hall, S. (1985). Signification, representation, ideology: Althusser and the post-structuralist

debates. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2, 2, 91-114.

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